Originally posted at TomDispatch.
We’ve just passed the first “anniversary” — if such
a word can even be used with such a catastrophe — of Operation Protective
Edge, Israel’s third invasion of the Gaza Strip in recent years. That
small bit of land has now suffered more devastation than just about any place
on the planet. In the wake of the third war since 2008, more than 100,000
displaced Gazans remain homeless or crowded in with relatives. Whole neighborhoods,
destroyed in the conflict, have yet to be rebuilt. A year later, there is still
next to no electricity, the area’s sole power plant having been taken
out by Israeli air strikes, and the situation when it comes to sewage and
potable water, is disastrous.
Blockaded and devastated by repeated wars, Gaza’s manufacturing sector
has almost disappeared, while its economy is “on the verge of collapse,”
according
to the World Bank. In short, by any standard, Gaza is not a livable place
and yet 1.8 million people (more than half of them under 18 years old, 43%
under 15) are crammed into it with nowhere to go and in most cases nothing to
do. After all, Gaza now has what may be the highest
unemployment rate on the planet at 44%, with youth unemployment reaching
60%.
The great Israeli reporter Amira Hass, author of the classic book Drinking
the Sea at Gaza: Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege, recently put
the matter this way: “In practice, Gaza has become a huge, let me
be blunt, concentration camp… This is not a novelty… This did not start,
unlike what many people think, with the rise of Hamas… This policy of sealing
off Gaza, of making Gazans into… defacto prisoners, started [in 1991]… So
if I want to sum up the reality of Gaza: it is a huge prison… It is an Israel-meditated,
pre-meditated, pre-planned, and planned project to separate Gaza from the West
Bank.”
Max Blumenthal’s new book, The
51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, catches the nightmare
of the third war in this tiny piece of land in the last six-and-a-half years
in a uniquely gripping way. In its pages, you follow him directly into the devastation
of the Israeli invasion. (He entered Gaza during the first extended truce of
the war.) I doubt there could be a more vivid account of what it felt like,
as a Palestinian civilian, to endure those weeks of horror, massive destruction,
and killing. Today at TomDispatch, he looks back on that experience
and forward to what he doesn’t doubt will be the fourth war of its kind.
If he’s right, then sadly, in the years to come, some reporter will be
writing yet another book on a Gaza war. ~ Tom
The Fire Next Time
Before Homes Are Even Rebuilt in the Ruins of the Gaza Strip, Another
War Looms
By Max Blumenthal
“A fourth operation in the Gaza Strip is inevitable, just as a…