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Negative impact of policy on humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

Article Excerpt
There are really no good reasons for the people of the Gaza Strip to be sliding towards the kind of poverty that characterizes the poorest places on earth. Palestinians are generally healthy, well-educated, and have a good work ethic. Gaza faces the Mediterranean with what could be a viable port if it were ever successfully developed, and it borders a state with a dynamic economy, Israel.

However, Gazans are poor, and the entire Gaza Strip is being sustained by international humanitarian assistance. With Gaza's border hermetically sealed by Israel since October 2007, the already fragile private sector has collapsed from want of production materials, export markets, electricity, fuel and cash. Almost the only jobs in Gaza at this point are as employees of the huge assistance effort--those who work for the United Nations, the nongovernmental organizations, or in the service sector that supports and supplies that assistance effort. Even Gaza's farmers now require assistance in order to continue producing food. CARE International, with the support of the European Commission's Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), operates a scheme that purchases produce from local farmers and redistributes the needed fresh food to Gaza's hungry. Without this kind of assistance, farmers have no place to sell their produce in Gaza's impoverished and cash-strapped market and therefore would be unable to capitalize planting in a new season, deepening Gaza's food insecurity. The Fatah Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah continues to pay salaries to its employees in Gaza, many of whom have not actually reported to work since the June 2007 outbreak of internecine violence in which Hamas expelled effective Fatah control from Gaza. The PA funds for these salaries are provided largely by the donors.

So why are Gazans poor? An estimated 70 percent live in deep poverty on less than $1.25 a day (46 percent when foreign assistance remittances are calculated as household income). (1) The numbers of Gazans dependent on international food assistance has risen from 80 percent before the December-January Israeli assault on the Strip to 88 percent now. Of course, to say there is no good reason for the poverty would be, at this point, to ignore a lot of water under the bridge--the widespread and debilitating trauma and stress afflicting 1.4 million people under terrible pressure and subjected to daily violence. It would be to ignore the degraded, overcrowded education and health systems, the crumbling water, sanitation, electricity and road networks, and the evisceration of the private sector over the past two years.

There is a lot of work to be done, expensive work, to stand the Gaza Strip up again. This work would all be in the realm of the possible and sustainable except for the web of policies that have bound the people of Gaza in virtual chains. Who are the authors and implementers of these policies, and what are the policies...