[Pastiche]

For those supporting the Gazan blockade: http://www.economist.com/node/16274281

The Gazan pressure-cooker

Not only Israel but America and the other Western countries which helped to isolate Gaza as a means of combating Hamas are now under pressure to rethink the blockade’s efficacy. Israel does not bear sole responsibility, the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, pointed out this week. “For years, many in the international community have been complicit in a policy that aimed at isolating Gaza in the hope of weakening Hamas. This policy is morally appalling and politically self-defeating. It has harmed the people of Gaza without loosening Hamas’s control.”


The policy began within weeks of Israel’s pull-out from Gaza in 2005. At the start, America tried to keep the gates open, brokering an Agreement on Movement and Access with Israel to allow the export from Gaza of hundreds of trucks of produce a day, regular bus convoys to and from the West Bank and the opening of a Palestinian-controlled crossing at Rafah to Egypt. But the agreement was in ink only. After just one year Gaza’s exports stood at a mere 8% of the agreed amount, Rafah was closed and the buses never came. Once the strip was under Hamas’s total control, Israel declared it a hostile entity, and prevented movement to and from the territory.


Initially Hamas and other militant groups, drunk on their self-claimed success in forcing Israel’s departure, sought to fight their way out with projectiles. The number of mostly home-made rockets hitting Israel rose from 281 in 2004 to 1,750 in 2008; and their range rose from a few kilometres to reach Tel Aviv’s outskirts. But stung by the ferocity of Israel’s reprisals, most lethally in the January 2009 war, Hamas reined in its fire and forced others to do likewise. So far this year 34 rockets have landed in Israel, none launched by Hamas. “Hamas is defending Israel,” chuckles an Israeli foreign ministry official.
Instead Hamas has turned its energies inward. With Gazans locked inside the 40km by 10km (154 square-mile) strip, the siege has given Hamas a free hand to mould the place. Its leaders liken Gaza to a ribat, a warrior monastery, and its inmates to murabitoun, or militant monks, recalling the 11th-century revivalist movement which withdrew to the Moroccan highlands before sweeping onto the Moroccan plains and Andalusia. They regale the struggle to survive with the same terminology they once used for fighting Israel. To ensure supplies they created a “resistance” economy, supervising the digging of an elaborate web of tunnels snaking under Gaza’s border with Egypt.


At first the resistance economy failed to meet people’s needs. But today, thanks to the tunnels, Gaza’s shop shelves are brimming with goods that often arrive cheaper and faster than when Israel opened the gates. Winches hoist in aggregates, allowing a spate of road repairs and housing construction. The authorities have filled in the craters in the football stadia left by Israel’s bombs and adorned the highways with cat’s eyes. Unlike post-war repairs elsewhere, the reconstruction is home-grown. Hamstrung by their own restrictions which prevent them buying smuggled goods, the UN and other international agencies have written themselves out of the repair effort. Unable to bring in cement to repair its schools, UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency which educates half of Gaza’s children, arranged to teach children in shipping containers, before Israel banned those too.



Humanitarian agencies, with an eye on external financing, bewail the lack of development. But their indices miss the point. Gaza is redeveloping, and Hamas is making society in its own image. Huge amounts now pass through the tunnel shafts each year, creating a new economy from which Hamas creams a handsome share of the profits to finance its rule. “The siege is a gift,” says a Hamas minister.



Co-ordinating the effort is a remarkably well-oiled bureaucracy. To finance its half-billion-dollar annual budget, the Hamas government has instituted an effective tax regime, raising duties on tunnel imports, including cigarettes, petrol, clothes and bread. Officials claim to have achieved self-sufficiency in melons (piled high on the roadsides) and onions; and the price of eggs has fallen to half what it is in the West Bank. With fishing in the seas restricted by Israel’s navy, Hamas is opening fish-farms in former Israeli settlements. Its institutions publish online compendia of the government’s directives, the results of civil service exams (based, they claim, on merit, not factional allegiance), and send text messages to the lucky few cleared for travel to Egypt to update them on bus and crossing times.



More damagingly for Gaza’s people, the siege has also allowed for much greater control. Manned by militants from its Ezz al-Din al-Qassam brigades hitherto deployed against Israel, Hamas’s internal security applies the brigades’ blinkered codes to harness society. This has created stability but at the price of a reign of fear. When rival Islamists decried Hamas’s rule in Rafah, the militants stormed the mosque and killed its worshippers. When leftists protested that the tax rises hit a people already burdened by siege, they were hauled to jail. The death penalty has been reinstituted. And insensitive to comparisons with Israel, Hamas’s forces have bulldozed the homes of Gazans who had moved onto former settlement land without authorisation. A thriving political culture has been culled to a one-faction state.