Fuel-shortage blackouts in Gaza

I took this photo in Gaza almost 2 years ago now. Blackouts in Gaza have been a regular occurence since before then and until now. It obviously has a humanitarian impact - fridges don't work so (already scarce) food goes off quickly in the hot weather, hospitals need to rely on generators to keep vital medical machines and fridges storing medication going. It also affects almost everyone broadly in their day-to-day lives. You can;t use anything electrical during a blackout, when the current comes back on suddenly it can damage electrical appliances etc. It's incredibly disruptive.

So what's it all about? Israel first knocked out the power plant after one of its soldiers was kidnapped in summer 2006. The official line was that Israel was hitting "terrorist infrastructure" - I think it;s pretty obvious to all but the most partisan that Israel was punishing the Gaza Strip as a whole for the incident. Now - as the article says - it is cutting fuel to "put pressure on militants", which broadly means that Israel and Hamas are playing a game of chicken trying to leverage the suffering of average Gazans to their advantage. There are lots of opinions flying about, but by turning the screw like this Israel is perhaps hoping that Gazans will get fed up with how crap their lives are under Hamas and work up some internal pressure on the group. It;s probably also true that it's a response to pressure to hammer Gaza from within Israel, where Israelis are really fed up with the rockets from the Strip.

Finally, I imagine it's also part of a broader Israeli strategy for Egypt to take more and more responsibility for Gaza, something Egypt absolutely doesn;t want. Egypt ran Gaza from 1949 until the 6 Day War in 1967. The Palestinians don;t want to be run by Egypt either, for it would imply a split with the West Bank (which used to be run by Jordan) and thus the division of what they hope to be their country. Under agreements recognised by Israel, the Palestinian Territories as a political entity are comprised of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip is broadly seen as being more anti-Israel in the sense of wanting to destroy Israel than the West Bank: this is probably because the vast majority of Gazans are from refugee families who were booted out of their homes during the various fighting. In the West Bank, about 25% of the population are registered refugees - the rest are still more or less in their home villages and towns, which is where they would like to be able to stay. Israel completely controls the West Bank via its military occupation and continues to build and expand settlements there. It would not be difficult for it to come to an advantageous (to Israel) arrangement with the West Bank alone.

It looks like things won't get better for Gazans in the short-term - nothing much is going to happen before there's a new US president and depending upon who that is, there may also be little prospect for real change. My feeling is that Israelis don;t mind too much if Palestinians have to pay a nasty price for Israelis to live in comfort and relative security. In the West Bank that means military occupation and exploitation of resources such as water. In Gaza it more or less means closing it off into a kind of prison. If the inmates make trouble then bomb them, switch off their power, experiment in all kinds of ways to make them finally shut up. The rest of the world basically gives them a free hand to do so, saying (as the civilian death toll mounts) "Israel has the right to defend herself" ad nauseam, until most of the world's reasonable population, including loads of reasonable Israelis, is sick of hearing about it.

As for the medium term future - I don't think anyone has a clue. Israel just wishes Gaza would go away and allows itself a freer and freer hand in working towards that emotional aim. My view is that Gazans themselves are really very weary and battered now and would like a peace deal. But at the same time many of them feel very strongly that an injustice has been done to them in terms of their being refugees and they want recognition of that. The Hamas idea of  truce lasting a generation more or less caters to that feeling - but it is of course not acceptable to Israel or the rest of the world.

Beyond that - questions of how a fast-growing population can continue to be contained inside Gaza's closed borders in an increasingly heavily degraded environment with no prospects of actually being able to make a living for themselves haven;t even begun to be thought about. There's no question that it's shameful on some level that such an easily solvable humanitarian situation, entirely human-created, is allowed to persist like this. But this is the kind of dysfunction that results from conflict.