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By Evelyn Gordon 14-6-2017
Gaza’s worsening electricity crisis provides a textbook example of
why many so-called human-rights organizations no longer deserve to be taken
seriously. The crisis stems entirely from an internal dispute between the
Palestinians’ two rival governments, and since it can’t be blamed on Israel,
most major rights groups have ignored it, preferring to focus instead on such
truly pressing issues as—this is not a joke—playing soccer in the settlements.
But the exceptions to this rule are even worse: They’re the ones so untroubled
by facts that they’ve actually found a way to blame Israel for a problem
entirely of the Palestinians’ own making.
A brief recap: Back in April, Gaza ran out of fuel for its only
power plant because neither the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority nor Gaza’s
Hamas-run government—both of which have plenty of money to spend on fomenting anti-Israel
terror—would agree to pay for it. The argument focuses specifically on a tax
the PA imposed on the fuel, which Hamas won’t pay but the PA won’t lower. The
fuel shortage slashed Gaza’s power supply to about four hours a day.
That same month, the PA announced it would stop paying for 40
percent of the electricity Israel sends Gaza via high-voltage wires, and Hamas
naturally refused to take over the payments. Israel continued providing the
power anyway for about six weeks, but this week, it finally decided to stop
giving Hamas free electricity. That will reduce Gaza’s power supply to three
hours a day or less.
The power shortage is creating a worse humanitarian crisis in Gaza
than Israel’s partial blockade ever did, yet neither Amnesty nor Human Rights
Watch—both of which issued countless statements about the blockade—has published
a single press release about the electricity crisis. Astoundingly, however, HRW
did find time to issue no fewer than three press statements in May blasting the
international soccer association’s refusal to take action against Israel over
six soccer teams in the settlements. Apparently, playing soccer in a settlement
is a much more serious humanitarian problem than being without power 20 hours a
day.
But the Israeli organization Gisha—the Legal Center for Freedom of
Movement—adopted an even more dishonest tack in an op-ed published in Haaretz last week (before Israel
decided to stop giving Gaza free electricity). Field worker Mohammed Azaizeh
provided heart-rending descriptions of the problems Rantisi Children’s Hospital
faces due to the power crisis, but was curiously reticent about the cause: He
said only that the power plant stopped operating “due to a political conflict,”
without ever identifying the parties to the conflict.
He also noted that Gaza’s hospitals are severely short of medicine
and medical equipment, but again offered no explanation, not even the lame
excuse of an unspecified “political conflict.” Yet in fact, the same political
conflict is at fault: In May, the PA stopped paying for Gaza’s medicine, and Hamas
refuses to do so itself, so Gaza’s medical stocks are rapidly being depleted.
Only toward the end did Azaizeh finger an actual villain:
Even transferring equipment from Israel that
was bought in advance especially for Rantisi is a challenge: Four months have
passed since the renovation of the oncology department, with the help of
monetary assistance from an American foundation, and they’re still waiting here
for essential parts for the air conditioning system. The entry of the parts and
equipment into Gaza is being delayed because Israel decided to label them “dual-use”
items.
Let’s ignore the fact that this particular lack is irrelevant to
Rantisi’s woes, since a hospital Azaizeh described as lacking enough power to
keep its lights on certainly doesn’t have enough to run its air conditioners,
with or without parts. The key sentence is the clever segue between the
paragraph about the lack of medical equipment and the one about the lack of air
conditioning: Not only is medical equipment lacking, but “Even transferring
equipment from Israel that was bought in advance especially for Rantisi is a
challenge.”
Thus without actually saying so, Azaizeh managed to imply that the
shortage of medical equipment also stems from Israeli restrictions. And from
there, it’s an easy step to concluding that the unspecified “political
conflict” behind the power crisis must also involve Israel. In reality, of
course, Israel has never interfered with shipments of either fuel or medicine
to Gaza, though it has barred dual-use items that aren’t humanitarian
necessities.
A human-rights organization that actually cared about Gaza’s
humanitarian crisis would name and shame the responsible parties—Fatah and
Hamas—in an effort to pressure them to compromise, or at least make clear that
the crisis stems from nonpayment and urge international donors to cover the
shortfall. Yet Azaizeh’s op-ed makes no effort to address the causes of the
crisis; its sole purpose is to smear Israel.
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