Gaza’s self-inflicted health crisis shows why peace remains a fantasy

By Evelyn Gordon, jns

Gaza’s health system is on the verge of collapse, Israeli defense officials warned last week. Their report echoed an international aid agency’s findings that Gaza hospitals are severely short of doctors, especially specialists, and lack 60 percent of necessary medications, including basics like painkillers and antibiotics. Entire hospital departments have closed due to the inability to offer treatment, and patients with cancer, diabetes or renal failure are simply being sent home.

You might think this situation would prompt at least one of the Palestinians’ two rival governments to take action. But you’d be wrong.

The Palestinian Authority, which repeatedly proclaims itself the sole legitimate government of both the West Bank and Gaza and is recognized as such internationally, receives billions in international aid to provide for humanitarian needs in both places. It ostensibly budgets 150 million shekels a year ($41.3 million) for medical supplies for Gaza. But it hasn’t paid this money in months.

Yet this same P.A. has no trouble finding $330 million a year to pay salaries to jailed terrorists. Evidently, paying terrorists is more important to it than its people’s health.

Nevertheless, the P.A.’s behavior pales beside that of Gaza’s real governing authority, Hamas. Two weeks ago, Hamas discussed the humanitarian problem with foreign officials, who then presented its ideas to Israeli officials. The organization proposed three possible scenarios, Haaretz reported. But none of them involved Hamas lifting a finger to help the people it governs.

Indeed, Hamas leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar “made clear that under any of these scenarios, Hamas would not disarm,” wrote reporter Yaniv Kubovich. In other words, it won’t divert any of the hundreds of millions of dollars a year it spends on its own military to ease Gazans’ humanitarian plight.

And it’s not as if the organization couldn’t afford to do so. As Haaretz reported this week, aside from about 130 million shekels a year that Hamas raises through taxes in Gaza, Qatar alone has given Gaza $1 billion over the last seven years, including $200 million last year. And unlike the billions Gaza receives from other international donors, part of the Qatari money—16 percent, or $160 million—has gone directly to Hamas for its own use and that of other terrorist groups in Gaza.

That’s almost four times what the P.A. spent annually on medical supplies for Gaza back when it was still financing Gaza’s health system. Thus the Qatari money alone could have solved the entire medical crisis had Hamas so chosen.

So what did Hamas propose instead? That someone else solve the problem. Responsibility for Gaza could be handed over to the P.A., the United Nations or Egypt, it suggested. And if none of them is willing, Hamas’s backup plan is to launch a war against Israel “that would end with an international force occupying the Strip,” Kubovich wrote—that is, another way of trying to shift responsibility to someone else.

Of course, all these plans are nonstarters as long as Hamas refuses to disarm because nobody wants responsibility for Gaza while an armed group inside it is repeatedly attacking Israel. That’s why neither Egypt or the United Nations, nor any other international player offered to take responsibility for Gaza after its three previous wars with Israel, and they wouldn’t do so after another war either. As for the P.A., it has said explicitly that it won’t assume responsibility for Gaza unless Hamas disarms.

Hamas knows all this. But being able to continue attacking Israel is more important to it than enabling a solution to its people’s medical crisis.

Yet not content with merely refusing to solve the crisis, Hamas is actively making it worse. Indeed, a major factor in the crisis has been the overload of patients caused by Hamas’s insistence on holding violent mass protests near the Israeli border every week for almost a year now. During these protests, many Palestinians have been shot while trying to break through the border fence or clashing with Israeli soldiers.

According to Haaretz, a whopping 6,000 people with gunshot wounds still await operations, and about one-quarter of them have developed infections that will lead to amputations if not treated soon. Gazan hospitals have closed other departments to focus on treating the weekly influx of new wounded. Yet rather than stop the demonstrations to ease the pressure on its overloaded medical system, Hamas insists on staging new ones every week.

You might think the fact that both Palestinian governments prioritize anti-Israel terror over their own people’s urgent health needs would make them unpopular. But while some Palestinians are indeed fed up, many share their governments’ priorities.

In a 2015 poll, a plurality of Palestinians—more than 40 percent in both the West Bank and Gaza—said the “main Palestinian national goal” over the next five years should be “reclaiming all of historic Palestine from the river to the sea,” aka eradicating Israel. And the number soared when pollsters asked about longer time frames. Establishing an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel ranked a distant second.

Nor is this just empty verbiage. Many Palestinians genuinely live by those priorities, as a recent Associated Press feature about two men whose sons were wounded at the weekly protests shows. One father tried to keep his son from attending and was devastated that the boy disobeyed and got hurt. But the other intentionally brought his son to the protest and claims to have no regrets, even though the boy now has a permanent limp.

“This is the tax you have to pay to achieve the right of return,” that father said, referring to the Palestinian goal of turning Israel into a Palestinian-majority state by flooding it with millions of descendants of refugees. In other words, he was willing to have his son lamed for the sake of destroying Israel.

In sum, what motivates both Palestinian governments and many ordinary Palestinians isn’t the desire to have their own state, but the desire to eradicate the Jewish one. On that altar, they are willing to sacrifice even basic humanitarian necessities like lifesaving medical care. And as long as that’s true, peace with the Palestinians will remain a fantasy.

This article was originally syndicated by JNS.org (www.jns.org) on February 13, 2019. © 2019 JNS.org
February 18, 2019 | 3 Comments »

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  1. From BESA center on Gaza aid:

    Politics Drives European Aid
    Prof. Hillel FrischFebruary 10, 2019

    Yemeni women and children tend to a fire in an IDP camp in north Yemen. Photo by Hugh Macleod for Irin via Flickr CC

    BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,087, February 10, 2019

    EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The EU purports to deliver aid to needy communities on the basis of neutral, impartial, and independent judgments. The grossly disproportionate aid given to the Palestinians, at the direct expense of much more beleaguered populations in Yemen and sub-Saharan Africa, exposes this claim as a self-righteous lie.

    The European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations Unit (ECPHAO), the humanitarian arm of the European Commission of the European Union, is one of the largest funding sources of aid in the world. According to the organization, one billion euros on average have been disbursed since 1992 in 110 countries around the world, with over 110 million beneficiaries annually.

    The organization states its mandate in crisp, unambiguous language:

    Neutrality means that humanitarian aid must not favor any side in an armed conflict or other dispute. Impartiality means that humanitarian aid must be provided solely on the basis of need, without discrimination. Independence means the autonomy of humanitarian objectives from political, economic, military or other objectives.

    When the ECPHAO dispenses aid, it transgresses all three of these principles.

    Let’s begin with the principle of impartiality: the provision of aid solely on the basis of need. A chart (see below) plotting the organization’s 2019 budget shows that the Middle East is the overwhelming beneficiary of EU humanitarian aid – nearly 1 billion of just over 1.4 billion euros (174 million is earmarked for reserves and bureaucratic costs). The bulk of the funds go towards meeting the costs of assistance to Syrian refugees, followed by smaller sums to Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and North Africa.

    Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, receives less than one-third of that amount.

    The problem with such allocations is that the overwhelming majority of people living in dire poverty reside in sub-Saharan Africa, India, and Bangladesh, according to a map (below) drawn up by a group of concerned economists based at Oxford University. These countries have the highest percentage of populations with a household consumption of less than $2 a day. Only one country in the Middle East fits this sorry bill: Yemen. According to the map and the principle of impartiality, the bulk of EU aid should be going to these countries, yet they receive only a small percentage.

    To get a clear picture of the reality of ECPHAO “impartiality,” one need only compare the amount Palestinians receive to the amount received by the poorest 20% of the world. According to the World Bank, 732 million people live in lower income countries. The 4.8 million Palestinians, by contrast, are classified as “lower middle class” – that is to say, in the quintile above them. Yet those 4.8 million Palestinians will receive 36 million euros, while 490 million will be disbursed for the benefit of 680 million people living in 32 other countries (not including Syria and Yemen, which are funded separately). The Palestinians, who are richer on average than those living in the poorest states of the world, will thus receive over six euros per capita, while the populations of the poorest states will receive around 0.70 euro per capita – less than one-eighth that amount.

    No one has explained why Ethiopia, which has a GDP per capita one-third that of Gaza and one-fifth that of the West Bank, should receive one-eighth the amount of aid Palestinians receive on a per capita basis. This is particularly remarkable as the ECPHAO has itself acknowledged Ethiopia’s greater plight – including a massive emergency refugee problem stemming from the 37-year-old Somali crisis.

    Discrimination in favor of the Palestinians even extends to Yemen, where a true humanitarian disaster exists. According to the EU, 79 million euros have been expended annually on average since the onset of the Yemeni crisis, compared to 36 million for the Palestinians. That is slightly more than double. Yet there are 4.8 million Palestinians, while the population of Yemen is estimated at over 28 million (of whom 22.5 million are in dire straits, according to the Commission). Yemenis thus receive less than half of what the already richer Palestinians receive.

    Even less defensible is the EU’s claim to political neutrality. Its favoritism towards the Palestinians on this score is visible as soon as one enters terms into the general search function on the Commission’s internet site. Enter “Palestine” and you get 20,737 results. Enter “Ethiopia” and you get almost the same figure, despite massive differences in a) population size (100 million versus fewer than 5 million), b) geographic expanse (Ethiopia is fifty times the size of “Palestine”), and c) degree of sheer suffering. The Syrian crisis, which is said to have led to the loss of half a million lives (though that figure is probably exaggerated), merits not many more site results than Palestine – just over 27,000.

    More damning is the content of the available material on the Palestinians. The mere titles of the reports are sufficient to reveal their obvious bias. Consider these examples: “Palestine: What if your school is demolished tomorrow?” Access denied: Newborn separated from her mother in Gaza, and “Gaza: Life among the ruins.”

    One of the foci of these reports is the plight of 35,000 Bedouin whom the EU assists, often in clear violation of the law, in Area C – the part of the West Bank under exclusive Israeli control. The hundreds of thousands of Bedouin in Sinai, however, the plight of whom is readily acknowledged even by Egyptian officials, gets no mention, even though Egypt is a recipient of EU aid. There are over thirty blog reports on Palestine compared to two for Egypt.

    The third criterion – independence of economic, military, and political considerations – is belied by the fact that Syrian refugees get at least ten times the aid Yemenis receive. Syrian refugees in Syria and surrounding areas will receive 860 billion euros in 2019. Yemen, which is burdened with no fewer internal refugees, will have to share a meagre 88 million with the Palestinians and Iraqis. Yet a reading of their relative plight, as described in the Commission’s fact sheets, suggests that at the very least, equal treatment is required to meet the challenges of the Yemeni tragedy. Unlike the Yemeni refugees, many Syrian refugees have found refuge in the relatively developed states of Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.

    Clearly, the Commission’s approach to aid allocation has nothing to do with impartiality, true social welfare needs, or humanitarian considerations.

    It has to do with political and economic considerations.

    To put it bluntly, the EU favors allocations to Syrian refugees above Yemeni refugees because of the higher probability that Syrian refugees will find their way to Europe.

    Ironically, the greater danger Syrian refugees pose to Europe stems in part from the fact that many of the Syrians have the economic wherewithal to make an attempt to reach Europe, in contrast to the poverty-stricken Yemenis. The land route is also easier and cheaper. Indeed, over a million Syrian refugees have made their way to Europe since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis, which is why the EU is so keen to stem the flow.

    The recipients of European largesse who are next in line, in relative terms, are the Palestinians. Stemming Palestinian immigration is certainly a small part of the explanation, but it can be attributed primarily to the EU’s hostility towards Israel, its rightful historical claims, and its security needs.

    The EU is neither impartial nor neutral, and it utterly fails to keep its aid decisions independent of economic, political, and military considerations.

    View PDF

    Prof. Hillel Frisch is a professor of political studies and Middle East studies at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

  3. Evelyn Gordon just doesn’t get it. The health crisis, if there is one, has nothing to do with the prospects for peace. The reason there is no peace, and no prospects for peace, is that the sacred doctrines of Islam from the Koran and the Sunnah command Moslems to make war on the Jews, not peace with the Jews. Just read the Hamas Charter which spells it all out. This is an Islamic religious war on the Jews, not a matter of health, or standard of living, or settlements, or blockade or anything else.