Media coverage
El País · 2012-11-24
The article depicts Gaza’s return to its “strange normality” after the fighting, with a blockade that has eased somewhat but still heavily constrains the economy, even as goods reach markets through Israel and smuggling tunnels from Egypt. It says limited recovery has been driven by foreign aid and some relaxation of restrictions, while unemployment, movement constraints, and barriers to imports and exports remain severe; Omar Shaban argues the tunnels will not be closed without lifting the Egyptian and Israeli blockade.
The article depicts Gaza’s return to its “strange normality” after the fighting, with a blockade that has eased somewhat but still heavily constrains the economy, even as goods reach markets through Israel and smuggling tunnels from Egypt. It says limited recovery has been driven by foreign aid and…
Seeing torrents of children and teenagers in the street with huge multicolored backpacks on their backs is a clear sign that the war has ended in Gaza, where schoolchildren make up half the population. Schools in the enclave reopened this Saturday after a long week of clashes between the Palestinian Islamist militias and Israel. With the more than 160 Gazans killed now buried and around a thousand wounded recovering, Gaza’s inhabitants are resuming their strange normality, which includes a blockade that no longer suffocates as before but still constrains the economy enormously.
The customers of Mr. Abu Safar’s small supermarket, 55, in the city of Deir al-Balah, can choose between an Israeli Fairy detergent (labeled in Hebrew) and another lemon Fairy from Egypt (in Arabic). The price is similar. The difference is that one was imported from the northern neighbor and the other entered through smuggling via an underground tunnel—from the south, the route through which Hamas also brings in weapons. “If they tell you something is missing, they are lying. What we don’t have from one side arrives from the other,” the shopkeeper says.
The shops are stocked, but 28% of the labor force has no work, families are large, and wages are very limited. Gaza’s economy has been recovering because foreign aid has increased and the economic blockade has been eased, although the World Bank (WB) warns: “It must be borne in mind that the average Gazan lives worse today than at the end of the 1990s,” according to its report *Stagnation or Revival? Palestinian Economic Prospects*, published last March.
The border tunnel industry—some 140 of them were destroyed in the latest offensive—has been adapting to the restrictions that Israel imposed and lifted, and 50% of what Gaza buys now enters by that route (some $1.2 billion annually). “From Egypt come concrete, all construction materials for the private sector and for Hamas, cigarettes…,” economic analyst Omar Shaban, of the Palthink institute, explains at his home.
Israeli authorities now allow the import of “everything except dual-use material,” that is, anything that could also be used to manufacture weapons, explains Guy Inbar, an Israeli military spokesman. That definition includes iron pipes, fertilizers, and electronic products. The commander adds that only international organizations such as the UN can import cement, but this requires their projects to be approved by the Palestinian National Authority, based in Ramallah under the orders of President Mahmoud Abbas, and then supervised by the Israeli Army.
A tour of the Strip quickly makes the construction boom evident because scaffolding is proliferating. The activity in the sector is driving economic growth that is now large because it started from extremely low levels, the WB specifies. The ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, with Egypt as mediator and guarantor, will bring some improvement in two important sectors in the small and densely populated Mediterranean Strip: farmers were able to work their crops along the border—one day after one of them died from an Israeli gunshot—and fishermen will be able to fish six miles off the coast, double the current limit.
Left behind, although not forgotten in the Strip, is the year 2007, when almost everything, including milk, meat, school supplies, and soap, became scarce to unbearable levels. Israel, followed by Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, imposed the blockade after Hamas (winner of the elections a year earlier) forcibly expelled its Fatah rivals and assumed all power. This was the first of the blockade’s three phases, analyst Shaban explains. The second began with the partial lifting of Israeli restrictions after the criticism unleashed by the Israeli military attack on the flotilla in which it killed nine Turkish activists in 2010. A year earlier, in the 2008-2009 war, Israel, in addition to killing 1,400 people, bombed 120 SMEs and literally devastated the industrial fabric.
The third stage arrived, gradually, after the Egyptian revolution: the opening of the Rafah border crossing this summer allows people to leave abroad. But traveling out still involves major obstacles stemming from the occupation. Once out of Gaza, it is easier to travel to Paris or New York than to Ramallah because one has to go to Egypt, stop over in Jordan (which requires a permit), and then enter the West Bank. And visiting Jerusalem borders on a miracle because Israeli approval must also be added.
Maram Humaid, 21, says she has grown accustomed, and adapted, to living under the blockade imposed five years ago. What she finds hardest are the movement restrictions. “Last year I went to France and Belgium invited to a conference of young women,” says this graduate in English and French literature from Al-Azhar University. “I have seen the Eiffel Tower but I have not seen Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, or Al-Aqsa Mosque,” she concludes.
For now, only people and products hidden in suitcases pass through Rafah—this is how iPhone 4S devices arrive, on sale for 2,400 shekels (480 euros)—but for now it is impossible to import and export. Hamas would like to lift the blockade as part of the package of negotiations linked to the ceasefire, aware that this is essential to truly reactivate the economy. But they also know that U.S. President Barack Obama has asked his Egyptian counterpart, the Islamist Mohamed Morsi, in these days when they have spoken so much by phone, to take charge of the tunnel issue.
“If they close them and there is an alternative, I don’t care; if not, of course it affects us, and a lot,” said Mohamed Hasuna, 38, this morning, owner of a grocery shop in downtown Gaza City. He says that during the recent attacks his neighbors have not stockpiled food, and that he has stayed open, although he closed at sunset rather than at midnight. He says he prefers to bring in merchandise from Israel because “I know the price and they don’t haggle with you, as sometimes happens at the tunnels terminal.”
The economic analyst Shaban argues that the tunnels will not be closed without the lifting of the Egyptian and Israeli blockade. “Our leaders think that we [those in Gaza] are a bunch of poor people, but that is not so. Gaza once had a productive economy,” he declares, recalling that not so long ago, until 2006 (until the victory of the Islamist Hamas), “160 factories in Gaza sewed textiles for Israel, others exported furniture, car spare parts, cucumbers, tomatoes, citrus fruit...”
The web of rules entailed by the blockade can change, increase, or decrease from one day to the next depending on countless factors. At any moment and in any place, the trigger can go off. In Gaza they are well aware of this. While many residents are euphoric because they believe that the Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias have “shown their teeth” to the powerful Israeli army, everyone feels relief that the latest episode of violence has ended.
They are used to it. The inhabitants of Gaza, occupied by Israel in 1967, previously fought against Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, and British. And through the Strip passed Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon, as a sign at the Al Mathaf Museum recalls, created by a local builder who 25 years ago instructed his workers to recover any archaeological piece they came across. It displays more than 300.
It is impossible not to see children and sand at every moment in this enclave of beaches as vast as they are full of plastic, where 1.7 million people live, towers of more than 10 stories proliferate, there is a boutique hotel, photos of dead militiamen —“martyrs,” in local terminology— at many intersections, political graffiti on countless walls, and whose prime minister, Ismail Haniya, of Hamas, father of a dozen children and a grandfather, lives in the refugee camp where he was born 49 years ago, where it is not unusual to come across a man praying on a mat in the middle of a restaurant and where it is common to encounter on any corner remains or rubble from the latest attack, or the one before that, or the one before that...
Operation Pillar of Defense
Palestinian territories
Arab-Israeli conflict
Text © El País — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source