On July 31, 2018 the WaPo (Washington Post)
picked this column to print.
In reply the WaPo picked a letter with 'both sides do it' false equivalence of 'balance' to avoid more BDS tactics on subscriptions
and ad sales I wrote of here.
The letter repeated the false claim that tunnels entering Gaza from Egypt and Israel are only used to smuggle materiel used to make weapons.
“Mr. [Tareq] Baconi also did not mention the primary reason for Israel’s blockade: Hamas’s unrelenting squandering of its limited resources to construct tunnels under the Israeli border and manufacture and launch rockets and incendiary balloons into southern Israel, taking Israeli military and civilian lives, destroying property and crops, and spreading terror. Israel’s blockade is intended not to punish innocent Gazan civilians but to prevent the import of cement and other materials needed to build tunnels and rockets.”
The talking point in the letter by David M. Cohen of Chevy Chase, MD has been incorrect since a Nov. 2008 story re-uploaded here.
In order to defend the killing of 9 people on the Mavi Mamara for which Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to Turkish President Recep Erdogan in March 2013 at the urging of former USA President Barack Obama after a state visit to Israel, the executive director of camera .org Andrea Levin
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=37&x_article=1853
quoted an article, in the Financial Times by Tobias Buck, out of context to deny humanitarian impacts of Israel's blockade of Gaza since September 2005, worsened since June 2007. Andrea Levin simply cited how many internationally-branded products were available in stores.
Moreover, as a May 24 [2010] Financial Times story [link dead by 2018] by Tobias Buck noted, smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza have "flooded Gaza with Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese air-conditioning units..." He writes that "shops all over Gaza are bursting with goods. Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafe, Snickers and Heinz ketchup – long absent as a result of the Israeli blockade – are both cheap and widely available."
A full context reading of Andrea Levin's source, she inaccurately cited to deny a humanitarian crisis, repeated 8 years later by David M. Cohen of Chevy Chase, MD also confirmed tunnels aren't only used to smuggle materiel used to make flammable products to place on "rockets and incendiary devices."
Please bear with another long copy and paste of the full Financial Times article where the link
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4c51267a-66ca-11df-aeb1-00144feab49a.html
has died in the 8 years since publication.
Gaza looks beyond the tunnel economy
By Tobias Buck in Rafah
Published: May 24 2010 03:00 | Last updated: May 24 2010 03:00
The young tunnel worker flashes a broad smile as he tightens his grip and starts lowering himself down a narrow shaft into the sandy depths below Rafah.
Seated on a piece of wood attached to an electrical winch, he descends 18 metres and starts crawling into the narrow tunnel that continues for another 700 metres, linking this border town in the southern Gaza Strip with Egypt. Somewhere below, his colleagues are shoring up the tunnel's precarious supports, damaged by a recent explosion.
While the dangerous work proceeds below, Nasim, one of the owners of the tunnel, waits in the tent that covers the entrance. He is among a small number of Gazans who have made a fortune by undermining Israel's economic embargo of the Strip. Until recently, tunnel owners could expect to make at least $50,000 (€40,000, £35,000) in net profits every month by smuggling fuel, cigarettes and other goods from Egypt.
For close to three years, the tunnels below Rafah have offered a unique lifeline to Gazans, who are otherwise deprived of all but the most basic humanitarian supplies. They have also allowed Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the Strip, to replenish its coffers and rebuild its military arsenal, making the tunnels a target for Israel.
Today, however, Nasim is more worried about the decline in business than he is about Israeli air raids. He says Hamas, whose security officers can be seen in the tunnel area, is taking an ever greater cut of the operators' profits. Moreover, the prices of many smuggled goods have fallen in recent months, thanks to a supply glut that is on striking display across the Strip.
Some argue that Gaza's tunnel economy is becoming a victim of its own success. Hundreds of tunnels have shut down over the past year as the result of greater Egyptian efforts to stop the flow of goods - and weapons - into the Strip. But the remaining tunnels, about 200 to 300 according to most estimates, have become so efficient that shops all over Gaza are bursting with goods.
Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafé, Snickers and Heinz ketchup - long absent as a result of the Israeli blockade - are both cheap and widely available.
However, the tunnel operators have also flooded Gaza with Korean refrigerators, German food mixers and Chinese air[ ]conditioning units. Tunnel operators and traders alike complain of a saturated market - and falling prices.
"Everything I demand, I can get," says Abu Amar al-Kahlout, who sells household goods out of a warehouse big enough to accommodate a passenger jet.
Mr Kahlout regards his suppliers in Rafah with distaste. "The tunnel business is not real business. They [the tunnel operators] are not respect-able: if they were able to cut off your skin and sell it, they would do so," he says.
His criticism is echoed by other business leaders in Gaza, who insist that the smugglers are creating a false sense of economic improvement while damaging the territory's battered private sector. They concede that the tunnels are providing essential goods, yet the smugglers are also bringing in consumer items that could be manufactured in Gaza, especially if sanctions were eased.
"We are just replacing legitimate businessmen with illegitimate businessmen," says Amr Hammad, a Gaza-based entrepreneur and deputy head of the Palestinian Federation of Industries. Flush with cash, the tunnel operators will soon "govern the whole economy of the Gaza Strip", Mr Hammad predicts.
For most Gazans, the period since the end of Israel’s three-week offensive in January last year has brought little improvement. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the number of “abject poor”, who depend on food aid, trebled to 300,000 – or one in five of all Gazans – in 2009.
One western official says the tunnels act like a “humanitarian safety valve”, but cautions that they offer no solution to economic decline. As Mr Hammad says: “An economy cannot just depend on tunnels.”
Tareq Baconi has written a book about Hamas that corroborates, from a long-term perspective, an older book mentioned in the fair.org article "Nixed Signals"
Yet analysts also saw the potential for far-reaching change in Hamas’ political outlook. As early as 2000, a study by Israel’s leading academic specialists on Hamas (Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas) cautioned that the Islamist group, despite its fanatical image, “is not a prisoner of its own dogmas. It does not shut itself behind absolute truths, nor does it subordinate its activities and decisions to the officially held religious doctrine.”
about the singling out, demonization and delegitimization of Hamas by Israeli use of BDS tactics, as an elected political party with Palestine National Council PNC parliament members who were never allowed to govern.
The U.S. and Israel quickly formulated a strategy to deal with Hamas’ electoral victory. A front-page New York Times article (2/14/[20]06) sourced to Israeli and Western officials reported that the two countries were “discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again.” The plan was to “starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.”
Officially, of course, Hamas was offered a choice: If it changed its stance toward Israel by agreeing to a specific set of demands, it would be given a chance to succeed. But the specific demands included the immediate and unconditional recognition of Israel as well as acceptance of all previous agreements with Israel signed by Yassir Arafat’s PLO, including George W. Bush’s long-defunct “Road Map for Peace.” Nothing less than these moves—which would require Hamas’ leaders to immediately and publicly renounce 20 years of ideology, under a foreign ultimatum—would be accepted. And they had to be unconditional; Hamas could not demand reciprocity from Israel—a halt to the assassination of its leaders, a general cease-fire, a commitment to a viable Palestinian state or a change in Israel’s settlement policies—in exchange for concessions.
Anyone associated with the organization, whether their involvement is violent or nonviolent such as Mousa Abu Marzook,
is also singled out and demonized for prosecution and deportation, as Marzook was, as a 'material supporter of terrorism' based on guilt by association tactics with the Holy Land Foundation prosecutions of five individuals. These guilt by association tactics serve to deflect news consumer (USA population) attention from the Florida chapter of CAIR demanding harsher prosecution of Robert Goldstein in 2003.
