Keeping medics from attending a Gaza conference is about punishment, not security.
By LARRY DERFNERlarry derfner 88(photo credit: )
I thought we ended the occupation of Gaza. I thought we were only against the terrorists there, not the civilians. Seems I was misinformed.
This week Israel refused to allow some 120 Western doctors, psychiatrists and nurses to cross into Gaza at Erez for a conference on how the siege is affecting Gazans' mental health. Israel also threatened to block a boat carrying 27 activists from docking at the Strip and delivering medical supplies - but relented yesterday and allowed the boat in.
You may not like these people. I'm sure I would have a lot of disagreements with them. But if Israel is no longer occupying Gaza, and if Israel has nothing against Gaza's civilians, why does it want to blockade Gaza by land and sea to keep these foreigners from going about their business. Because they're going to protest, because they're going to make us look bad? I thought we were the only democracy in the Middle East. I thought we believed in freedom of speech. Seems I was misinformed.
It's stunts like these that give credence to the claim that Israel has turned Gaza into the world's biggest prison. We don't let Gazans have a seaport, we don't let them have an airport and we even demand that Egypt close its border to them.
We say it's for security, to keep terrorists and weaponry from reaching the Strip. But medicine? Doctors from Harvard Medical School? Mairead Corrigan McGuire, who won the Nobel Peace Prize? Keeping them out of Gaza has nothing to do with security and everything to do with punishment - punishment of Gazan society as a whole. Not just the terrorists, not just Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but every man, woman and child.
We insist that there's no humanitarian crisis in Gaza, that we allow enough trucks through to deliver all the food, medicine and fuel the civilian population needs. Yes, they have enough food, medicine and fuel to stave off mass starvation and epidemic - but I wonder what Israelis would say if they had to live on the rations that this country obliges Gazans to live on. "Humanitarian crisis" wouldn't begin to describe it.
IN ANSWER to all the protests about blockading Gaza and making life there unlivable, Israelis always offer the same reply: It's Hamas that's making them suffer. It's Hamas that's forcing us to take these measures. The people in Gaza have only themselves to blame. If they hadn't voted Hamas into power, they wouldn't be so miserable now. If they want to make their lives easier, why don't they tell Hamas to change its ways - or, better yet, why don't they get a new, better leadership?
This is a good argument when Gazan civilians are accidentally killed in IDF assaults on Kassam-firing terrorists. It doesn't hold much water, though, when we're banning foreign doctors and activists from bringing medicine and mental health expertise into the Strip.
To read the justifications for this policy is depressing. Defending the closure of Erez to the mental health conferees, Civil Administration spokesman Peter Lerner told The Jerusalem Post that "everything is influenced by the fact that an IDF soldier, Gilad Schalit, has been held in Gaza for over two years, with no one here knowing his whereabouts or anybody being able to visit him." Therefore, any London shrink who wants to come tell his colleagues in Gaza City how they might help the boys and girls in Jabalya refugee camp stop wetting their beds - he can forget it. Somebody has to pay for Gilad Schalit, and it might as well be the little bed-wetting children.
But, you say, the children of Sderot wet their beds too. That's right - and nobody stops psychiatrists from going to Sderot to help them.
By the way, isn't there a cease-fire between Israel and Gaza? Banning a mental health conference and threatening to stop a boat carrying medical supplies - real confidence-building measures, aren't they? I don't expect Israelis not to be antagonistic toward Palestinians; as a nation, I'm not crazy about them either. But while we're justified in disliking Palestinians as a whole, we have no right to inflict harm on them all, down to the infants among them, because of what they think or how they vote or what they say about us.
We have a right to kill Gazan terrorists who try to kill us, and if Palestinian civilians are killed accidentally in the process, and Israel has taken all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian casualties, then Israel is in the right.
But when Israel prevents the delivery of humanitarian aid and peaceful political protest - then it has lost its moral bearings. Then it's making war not only on terrorists in Gaza, but on everyone in Gaza.
This policy isn't only immoral, it's stupid, of course. It's self-defeating. It's not winning us any hearts and minds. This has been a terrible week for Israel's reputation in the West. And I wonder who's to blame.
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