Sara Roy - Dispossessing Palestine (2013)

Sara Roy: The title of my talk is called Dispossessing Palestine. In a letter to Mohandas Gandhi, written in February of 1939, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber reflected on the Jewish people's need for a homeland. The terms he used have surprising relevance to the Palestinian people as their dreams of a sovereign homeland collapse under the reality of territorial dismemberment, isolation, and economic ruin. Buber wrote, Dispersion is bearable. It can even be purposeful if somewhere there is ingathering, a growing home center, a piece of earth wherein one is in the midst of an ingathering. When there is this, there is also a striving, common life, the life of a community which dares to live today because it hopes to live tomorrow. But when this growing center, this increasing process of ingathering is lacking, dispersion becomes dismemberment. Today there can be no doubt that Palestinian society, economy, and polity are being dismembered in the way that Buber meant. The place of Palestinians in the country is being eroded in a manner arguably not seen since 1948. The political and economic failures of the past two decades, in particular, are astounding. Yet any attempt to assess these failures will find that traditional measures of decline are not only inadequate but inappropriate, serving to mask reality rather than clarify it. This altered reality has, in recent years especially, been shaped and defined by critical paradigm shifts in the way that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is conceptualized and addressed. These shifts, these paradigm shifts, which I'll examine in some detail, cannot be understood outside a political framework that historically and consistently has aimed at diminishing and negating a Palestinian presence and the rights that naturally attend it. So let me define this framework for you briefly. Since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the various peace settlements that have emerged have all been based on three key assumptions. The first is that the Palestinian refugees of 1948 would not be an issue or primary factor in negotiations. The second is that the Arab minority in Israel, those Arabs who remained within the newly created state of Israel, would not be part of any comprehensive settlement. And three, that the only Palestinian territory subject to negotiation would be the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, the 22% of pre-'48 Palestine occupied in 1967. Thus, according to the post-67 settlement formula, 78% of pre-48 Palestine, which later became the State of Israel, and at least 50% of the Palestinian people were to be excluded from any peacemaking process. This formula also involved the US-Israeli interpretation of 242, which in fact was the position of the UN, the return of lands, but not all lands occupied, and the rejection of Palestinian national rights. These parameters were incorporated into subsequent peace initiatives, including the 1991 Madrid peace talks, the 1993 Oslo agreements, the 2002 American roadmap, and among others. If the last decade has made anything clear in Israel's relations with the Gaza Strip and West Bank, it is the need to reinstate the reality of occupation now more than two-thirds of Israel's entire history as the primary factor defining and delimiting those relations. The Asil process made it possible for Israel to argue that it was mitigating, if not ending, the occupation while it was doing the exact opposite, deepening its control through a variety of policies, notably territorial fragmentation and separation, and the expropriation of Arab land and other resources. This was meant to ensure Israel's continued presence and preclude the establishment of a Palestinian state. In this way, the historical contest over territory was replaced by a policy of separation, isolation, and containment that in fact goes well beyond occupation and must now include annexation. The political and economic illusions created by the Oslo process and negotiation framework, and supported by a compliant Palestinian authority and donor community, led to a range of economic programs and initiatives, all of which predictably failed, that promoted economic peace under occupation. By conflating freedom with free trade, economic peace argues that economic change must precede political change, that the economic returns of cooperation will outweigh the benefits of resistance. And this would create a context conducive to future political compromise. Yet this approach was fundamentally no different from those Israeli policies articulated in the early years of occupation. Those policies aimed to extinguish Palestinian political demands and aspirations through limited economic gains under an ongoing occupation that continued to extract Palestinian resources and deplete Palestinians of their political, economic, and social rights, an approach that continues to this day. The Oslo process was simply a more sophisticated expression of this deception as seen in projects which promised and sometimes delivered limited change in transient periods of economic growth but within a structural context that was decidedly unchanged and committed to negating sustainable growth and development through increasingly oppressive Israeli control, restrictions, and assault. Furthermore, Israel's occupation remained unchallenged and was actively supported by the US, the EU, the European Union, and by a weak compliant and increasingly corrupt Palestinian authority. Indeed, the strategy of supplanting national rights with limited prosperity has been embraced in a somewhat different form by the PA itself, locking it into a subcontracting role for a continuing and cost-effective occupation regime. Throughout the Second Intifada, successive Israeli governments made it increasingly clear that what they sought was an encircled, non-contiguous Palestinian entity on about half of the West Bank, controlled by Israel, with the other half effectively annexed to Israel. A critical feature of Israeli policy was the isolation, encirclement, and debilitation of the Gaza Strip, which would remain under Israeli control. This diminished and internally fragmented entity would eliminate Palestinian control over the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and sever most ties to Gaza. In order to implement this reality, Israel needed to attenuate Palestinian demands, which it attempted to do largely through economic deprivation, especially in Gaza with its closure and intensified closure and other restrictions. Also through physical and institutional destruction and demographic isolation. And it sought to create a malleable leadership that would accept a highly compromised outcome. Thus, the last decade has brought an impoverished and de-developed Palestinian entity in the Gaza Strip that is almost completely severed from the West Bank. Large areas of the West Bank are integrated into and effectively annexed to Israel through the expansion of settlements and their infrastructure and the building of the separation barrier or wall. and a near majority of West Bank lands are inaccessible to Palestinians for either residential or economic use. A recent article appearing in Haaretz stated that, quote, over the past 33 years, the civil administration has allocated less than 1% of state land in the West Bank to Palestinians compared to 38% to settlers, according to the agency's own documents, end quote. In a, in its 2011 report on poverty in the West Bank and Gaza, the World Bank echoed the degradation of Palestine's reality. And I quote, Following the Second Intifada of 2000, the Palestinian economy began to resemble no other in the world. Limited say over economic policies and trade, the extent of dependence on Israel and international aid, and a regime of internal and external closures has created an economy characterized by extreme fluctuations in growth and employment and an increasing divergence between the two territories. The West Bank, a fragmented archipelago, and Gaza, an increasingly isolated island. End quote. In other words, the U.S.-Israeli peacemaking formula has now reached, or is certainly approaching, its maximal interpretation. Now, I'd like to turn my attention to some of the key paradigm shifts. that I see in the way this conflict is conceptualized, understood, and addressed. The Palestinian reality shaped by the processes, some of which I've just described, forms the context for several critical paradigmatic shifts, which have reduced, redefined, excuse me, the way the world views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps the most critical of these shifts, proceeding almost imperceptibly in recent years, is the acceptance by key members of the international community, particularly the Western community, of the territorial and demographic fragmentation of the occupied territories. From the beginning of occupation in 67, the international community regarded the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit. This consensus was made explicit in the 1993 Oslo Accords and in US policy, and theoretically obtained until Israel's unilateral disengagement from Gaza in September of 2005. The denial of territorial contiguity which came to define the status quo after Oslo remained unchallenged by the international community. Acceptance of the new reality was facilitated by the isolation of the West Bank and Gaza, which was largely completed by 1998. By then, Israel had refused to register address changes from Gaza to the West Bank and required Gazans to obtain a permit to enter the West Bank via the Allenby Bridge, among other changes. Indeed, the separation of the two territories had long been an Israeli policy goal, especially during the Oslo period. According to the Israeli journalist Amira Haas, quote, the total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings, and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority. Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation, not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories, and between Gazans and West Bankers and Jerusalemites." End quote. In 1995, Amira asked a woman, in the Israeli security establishment, why the growing mobility restrictions imposed on Gazans weren't eased, if not to Israel, then to the West Bank. The woman answered her by saying, because they, the Gazans, have no reason to leave. The Israeli economist, Shir Haver, revealed on the 20th of April that Brigadier General Yair Golan, who was then commander of Israeli forces in the West Bank, stated in a lecture delivered at the Van Leer Institute that, quote, separation and not security is the main reason for building the wall of separation, and that security could have been achieved more effectively and more cheaply through other means, end quote. Surprisingly, the New York Times captured the essence of the problem in a 2006 editorial. Quote, imagine a map of Manhattan. The West Bank would be very roughly East Harlem and the Upper East Side. Gaza would be Battery Park City, far to the southwest. Now imagine trying to create a fully functioning city Um, with its own economy and of, and out of these pieces, while an entirely independent antagonistic city remained in between. There is no doubt that the internal separation and isolation of the West Bank and Gaza strip and the disunity it has created is the single most critical problem facing the Palestinian people at present. A related paradigm shift concerns the way in which the occupation itself is perceived. From its beginning, there had been an implicit and often explicit belief among Palestinians, many Israelis, and members of the international community that the occupation could and would end, and that Israel's expansion into Palestine would be stopped. This was how many people understood the Oslo Process. The belief that occupation was reversible and should be reversed was largely unquestioned and was the catalyzing force behind many social, political, and economic initiatives. This belief, too, has been overturned. The changes imposed on Palestinians, especially in the near 20 years since Oslo, have shown that the occupation cannot be stopped, at least not in the short or medium term. Many, if not most, Israelis, virtually unexposed to and untouched by the everyday realities of the occupation, except even embrace the status quo, which is considered durable. If the occupation has changed over time, it is in its sheer expansion and force. The etiology and imperative of expansion remains unchallenged. Perhaps the most powerful illustration of occupation's entrenchment lies in the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements and their infrastructure. Now, the effect on Palestinians, of course, has been extremely damaging. Arab lands and the use of those lands have been lost. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli Human Rights Organization, Israeli settlements control approximately 42% of the West Bank, with 21% of settlements' built-up area lying on private Palestinian land. Furthermore, Arab lands are being incorporated and consolidated into a new spatial and political order that aims to eliminate any physical separation between Israel and increasingly large areas of the West Bank, diminishing the presence of Palestinians and precluding the establishment of a viable entity that could be called a Palestinian state. I seriously doubt that the occupation could now be stopped, even if the Israeli leadership wanted to stop it, which they do not. And remember, the Jewish population of Israel, including the settler population, will for a time outnumber the Palestinians, both citizens of Israel and those in the West Bank, as long as the Gaza Strip is not included in the demographic calculations. The apparent normalization of the occupation assumes a different but no less compelling form in the Gaza Strip. With its 2005 disengagement, Israel has argued that it no longer occupies Gaza, yet under international law, Israel remains an occupier through its continued control over Gaza's borders, airspace, sea, and population registry. In recent years, however, Gaza's status as an occupied territory has ceased to be a matter of undue international concern, the focus of attention having shifted to Gaza's enforced isolation and economic defeat. The progressively routine nature of the occupation points to another paradigm shift. Prior to Oslo, there was a belief among Israelis and within the international community generally that peace and occupation were incompatible. The former could not be achieved in the presence of the latter. This too has changed. In the West Bank, a vast settlement road network has been built, facilitating the lives of Israelis who regard settlements as natural outgrowth, a buffer providing protection and security, as well as convenient and familial links to Israel proper. The integration of the settlement blocks and their infrastructure into Israel, justified by the argument that the West Bank or parts of it belong to Israel, is no longer contentious among many Israelis. On the contrary, it is viewed as necessary and normal, as is the imperative of isolating and containing the Gaza Strip. Writing on the relatively cheaper cost of housing in settlements, the Haaretz columnist Eileen Prusher recently observed, and she said, quote, many Israelis don't know what to make of the settlement movement anymore, no longer seeing moving across the Green Line as a political statement, and don't see their support for peace, at least in principle, as being contrary to settlement expansion. The young people in the audience that President Obama was addressing were born into the reality of the West Bank being in Israel's hands long enough for some of them to be third-generation settlers, end quote. According to the Israeli analyst and activist Jeff Halper, quote, for Israelis, the Israeli-Arab conflict was won and forgotten years ago, somewhere around 2004, when US President George Bush informed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that the US does not expect Israel to withdraw to 67 borders, thus effectively ending the two-state solution, and when Arafat mysteriously died. End quote. According to Peace Now, in 2012, Prime Minister Netanyahu approved 6,676 settler housing units in the West Bank, compared with 1,607 in 2011, and just several hundred in 2010. Almost 40% of these housing units were in isolated settlements, not in built up settlement blocks. For many Israelis and several key international Western donors, it is no longer even a question of normalizing the occupation, but of eliminating the term altogether since it no longer applies. Especially in light of a strong and expanding Israeli economy and the virtual cessation of suicide attacks inside Israel in recent years and because of unqualified US support and protection. In a March 2010 poll, only 8% of Israeli Jews named the conflict with Palestinians as the most urgent problem facing Israel, placing it fifth after education, crime, national security, and poverty. Halper further states that in a more recent poll, security, the term he says Israelis use instead of occupation or peace, was ranked 11th among the concerns of the Israeli public, trailing well behind employment, crime, corruption, religious secular differences, housing, and other more pressing issues. In fact, silence about the occupation has become the key condition for continued international funding of the Palestinian Authority. And such funding was no doubt a factor in President Abbas's recent decision to temporarily refrain from unilateral action through UN agencies, including the ICC, against Israel to give US-brokered peace talks a chance to restart. Hence, Palestine's effective dismemberment and the permanence of territorial fragmentation, as well as Israel's policies of collective punishment in both the West Bank and Gaza, are accepted by certain members of the international community as legitimate, benign, and manageable, especially given the virtual absence of criticism from Palestinian officialdom. Israel's separation from Palestinians, whether in Bethlehem or Han Yunis, along with its determination to do whatever is necessary militarily, politically, and economically to maintain that separation has become mundane. In this regard, a well-known Israeli activist stated at the one state conference at Harvard last year, that getting the Israeli army out of the West Bank would be equivalent to regime change. Crucially, the occupation has been transformed from a political and legal issue with international legitimacy into a simple border dispute where the rules of war, not of occupation, apply. This represents another very important paradigm shift in way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is understood. This new interpretation has been made explicit in the case of Gaza where Israel affirms that its sole post-disengagement obligations to Gaza's people are those mandated by the law of armed conflict, which continues to apply so long as the violent conflict between the Israeli military and armed groups in Gaza continues." And that's a direct quote. The international community then has largely come to accept Israel's recasting of its relationship with Gaza and the West Bank from one between occupier and occupied to one between warring parties. Many Israelis and members of the international community no longer feel uncomfortable with the occupation at a time when the occupation has grown more oppressive and more unjust. The growing obsolescence of occupation as an analytical and legal framework leads to another important paradigm change. Israel's policy shift from ongoing occupation to de facto annexation and imposed sovereignty with regard to the West Bank, parts of which are claimed as de facto sovereign Israeli territory. This shift also reflects a change in Israeli policy. Whereas previous policy sought to control and dominate the Palestinian economy, shaping it to Israel's own interests, particularly as it did during the first two decades of occupation, Current policy fractures and debilitates the economy and perhaps most striking of all, transforms Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank. and Palestinians in Gaza and those parts of the West Bank slated for annexation from a people with national and political rights into a humanitarian problem for which the international community becomes largely, if not wholly responsible. And I'll return to this point in a few minutes. The change in Israeli policy from occupation to annexation, which depends in part on international acquiescence to the West Bank's Cantonization, is exemplified in many policies, including the building of the separation wall, massive Israeli settlement expansion, and the construction of a settlement road network. hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that were discussed earlier. Restricted access to major Palestinian cities. In fact, one or more of the main entrances are blocked to Palestinian traffic in 10 out of 11 major West Bank cities. And limited access to the very important Jordan Valley by non-resident Palestinians. It is in area C that is the object, that is the object of the state's annexationist ambitions. Area C was the last area that the Israeli defense forces was to vacate in 1999 under the terms of the Oslo Accords. Yet currently. It comprises 62% of the West Bank, including the majority, and by that I mean 87.5% of the strategic and economically important Jordan Valley and Dead Sea. And Area C is subject to full Israeli civil and military control and home to over 300,000 Israelis and about 150,000 Palestinians. Area C is the largest and the only contiguous area connecting 227 separate enclaves that are areas A and B. Area C also contains most of the West Bank's water resources and grazing and agricultural land. Another illustration of Israel's annexationist agenda is the December 26, 2011 decision by the Israeli Supreme Court affirming the legal right of Israeli companies to engage in mining and quarrying operations in the West Bank, in effect robbing Palestinians of their own economic resources. It is noteworthy that the 2011 decision, which contradicts international law, international humanitarian law, and international human rights law, reverses the High Court of Justice's 1983 decision affirming that, quote, an area held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic exploitation, end quote. The 1983 decision, reaffirmed in 2004, had guided court rulings for nearly 30 years. Ten Israeli and internationally owned companies currently operate in the West Bank, and between 75 to 94% of their output is transferred for use by the Israeli construction industry. According to the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din, The court's interpretation, in actuality, creates a license for pillage in occupied territory, while one of the central purposes of the laws of occupation contained in international humanitarian law is to prevent such exploitation of occupied territory and thus even stipulates that under certain circumstances, such exploitation will be considered a war crime, end quote. The state's annexationist aims are similarly clear in Israel Railways' plan for establishing a major railway system in the West Bank consisting of 11 new rail lines, in accordance with a legal commitment the Ministry of Transportation made to the High Court of Justice. The plan calls for 295 miles of rail lines, which can be compared with 683 miles of rail lines in Israel. Stated differently, although the West Bank is just over a quarter the size of Israel, the proposed railway network will be 43% the size of Israel's railway system. According to Aharetz, quote, an emphasis is being placed on continuity between the rail network within the Green Line and the planned network in Judea and Samaria. An important corollary to the shift to annexation and imposed sovereignty is another paradigmatic shift involving the transformation of Palestinians, in the eyes of Israelis and some members of the international community, into intruders in their own land, living in submission and dependence. Within this construct, Palestinian resistance to Israel's occupation, including attempts at economic empowerment, are now illegitimate. One example is Israel's announced plan to demolish six European Union-funded wind and solar energy projects in the West Bank, which provide electricity to 600 Palestinians living in poor villages in the South Hebron Hills. While the shift of viewing Palestinians as intruders applies to both territories, it is particularly egregious in the Gaza Strip. Following Hamas's 2006 electoral victory and 2007 takeover of Gaza, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reshaped to center on Gaza and on Israel's hostile relationship with Hamas. Israel has in fact explicitly referred to its closure policy in Gaza as a form of economic warfare, intentionally designed to undermine Gaza's economy and productive capacity as part of its policy to bring down the Hamas regime. Well before the 2008 invasion of Gaza, Karen Abu Zaid, who at the time was UNRWA's commissioner general, warned that, quote, Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution with the knowledge, acquiescence, and some would say encouragement of the international community, end quote. Indeed, the Israeli human rights organization, Gisha, reports that the massive restrictions imposed on Gaza's trade following Hamas's June 2007 takeover, which severed trade with Israel and the West Bank, Gaza's major export markets, were not justified on security grounds. Instead, the entry of goods into the Gaza Strip was limited to a humanitarian minimum that includes only those goods considered essential to the survival of the civilian population. According to Abu Zaid, humanitarian and human development work was never meant to function in an environment devoid of constructive efforts to resolve conflict or to address its underlying causes. Indeed, humanitarian work is profoundly undermined in a context where there is implicit or active complicity in creating conditions of mass suffering. This is a situation bedeviling Palestinian prospects, end quote. In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, Gaza suffered between $660 and $900 million in damage to its civilian infrastructure, while total losses from the destruction and disruption of economic life during the invasion were put at between $3 and $3.5 billion. In the West Bank, this punishment takes another form. There, the transformation of Palestinians into intruders is powerfully seen in the changing nature of physical destruction. Amir Haas has described a steady process of destroying many vestiges of Palestinian life in the West Bank as they've historically existed. Old roads, long used by Palestinians traveling between major towns and surrounding villages, are being eliminated, as are traditional intersections, buildings in certain commercial areas. Another more anecdotal illustration concerns certain road signs in the West Bank, which have had the Hebrew names of towns transliterated into Arabic and the Arabic names encased in parentheses. What is happening is no less than the erasure of a Palestinian presence in the West Bank. What has emerged, argues the analyst Muin Rabbani, are two political economic models. The West Bank model is characterized by restricted levels of institution building, isolated pockets of business and commercial development itself shaped by a Cantonized geographical entity and fragmented externally dependent and constrained economic base, and the professionalization of security forces. This model is devoid of political content and does nothing to confront the occupation. To the contrary, it advocates silence and represses criticism and has successfully depoliticized and demobilized Palestinians. The Gaza Strip model, on the other hand, is characterized by intensified closure, isolation, collective punishment, and economic subjugation, with a leadership strengthened by the occupation but unable to do anything to address it. Both models have failed, and their failure underlines the fact that the Palestinian state has long been a U.S.-Israeli project, not a Palestinian one. Now I'd like to look at, briefly, before I conclude, some paradigm shifts at the economic level. And I am skipping over a great deal in this section, there's a lot more, but I would like to highlight what I consider to be some pertinent points. We started with food aid and we've returned to food aid. Thus concluded a Palestinian economist, a colleague of mine, in Ramallah in 2007. Her words powerfully capture what is perhaps the most dramatic paradigm shift in how Palestinians are perceived and addressed. From a society worthy of pursuing developmental change to an impoverished community seeking relief. What the analyst Sami Abdeshafi referred to as engineering Palestinians into perpetual beggars. The resulting humanitarianization and immiseration of Palestinians has many illustrations. Between 2001 and 2008, for example, the level of donor aid to the Palestinian government increased 500%. By 2008, total foreign assistance to the government and other sectors reached 58% of GDP, having stood at 18% of GDP in 2000. with a huge percentage directed to humanitarian assistance. By 2010, furthermore, approximately 80% of families in Gaza relied on some form of humanitarian aid, and 79% of West Bankers living in Area C lacked sufficient food, figures that remain largely unchanged at present. On Thursday, this past Thursday, UNRWA headquarters in Gaza was stormed by 200 Palestinians because of a decision by UNRWA to cut a $40 annual handout to 106,000 Gaza refugees. Among the factors accounting for the shift from political to humanitarian priorities are the following. One, the total fragmentation of the geographical base of the Palestinian economy with the virtually complete separation and isolation of Gaza and the West Bank and the Cantonization of the West Bank. According to UNCTAD, for example, the economy, quote, the economy has lost access to 40% of West Bank land 82% of its groundwater, and more than two-thirds of its grazing land. And the impact on Palestinian agriculture in particular, quote, has been devastating, end quote. Two, the use of aid as a form of punishment, inflicted by Israel in the form of closure and then intensified closure, and critically by the international community, a situation of punishing the occupied. rather than the occupier. This is seen not only in international participation in the siege on Gaza, but also in continued American threats to withdraw financial support from the PA as a way to secure official Palestinian support for U.S. demands or as punishment for pursuing initiatives the United States opposes. In fact, $295.7 million was withheld by the US government last year to punish Palestinians for upgrading their status at the United Nations. And third, The growing ineffectiveness of international aid, particularly after 2006, since then assistance composed primarily of humanitarian relief, social sector infrastructure and services has been provided outside any meaningful economic framework having little if any bearing on sustainable economic development. The Palestinian elections of January 2006 were a turning point, marking the shift first unchallenged and later actively supported by the international donor community away from any commitment to Palestinian self-determination to an emphasis on relief and charity. In fact, one could argue that donors themselves have undergone a profound paradigmatic shift in their role from practitioners of development to providers of relief. Economic activities then are evolving in response not only to decline and breakdown, but also to the donor government's unwillingness to meaningfully, and by that I mean politically, challenge the status quo. Addressing the impoverishment of Palestinians has become the financial responsibility of the international community, which not only acceded to this terrible reality, but strengthened and then actively supported it. Not long after the 2006 elections, for example, the U.S. government, through its development arm USAID, prohibited any direct contact with terrorists or terrorist groups, which included Hamas. USAID partners were prohibited from meeting with ministers or other officials identified as Hamas, even if a cabinet of technocrats had been formed. The U.S. stipulated that it would prosecute any American NGO working in any sector that provided material aid to the now Hamas-led PA, even in the form of in-kind medicines to a hospital run by the Ministry of Health. The humanitarian community adheres to this as the no-contact policy with Hamas, which continues to permeate every level of operational space. Donor discomfort over the Hamas authorities in Gaza has resulted in an institutionalized policy of either withholding funding from them or being so directive about how assistance can flow and to whom that it has bordered on the immoral. In this very restricted environment, those agencies actually delivering the aid adapt their programs to institutions considered acceptable, regardless of need or institutional capacity, and to areas that are easier to access, thereby excluding vulnerable populations in areas that are relatively inaccessible where project implementation would be very difficult. Hence, donor assistance, particularly from the US, has been directed in ways that deselected whole swaths of the population, regardless of their need. The European Union is similarly problematic. For example, although the EU regards Israeli settlements as illegal under international law, the EU imports approximately 15 times more from Israeli settlements in annual value than from Palestinians themselves. Given that there are over 4 million Palestinians and more than 500,000 Israeli settlers and over 200 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, this effectively means that the EU imports over 100 times more per settler than per Palestinian. According to a recent report co-authored by a group of European NGOs, quote, given that settlement expansion is making a viable Palestinian state all but impossible, the trade with settlements is undermining billions in euros in aid that Europe has invested in Palestinian state building efforts and is helping entrench the discriminatory two-tiered system in the West Bank. Instead, the international community, continues to fund the huge transactional costs the Israeli blockade imposes on assistance delivery, which decreases the effectiveness and sustainability of aid operations and often denies vital services to the most vulnerable sectors of the population. Furthermore, During 2011 and the first half of 2012, at least 62 structures funded by European donors were demolished in Area C, including water cisterns, animal shelters, and agricultural and residential structures. At least another 110 structures funded by European donors are under threat of demolition, having received demolition or stop work orders from Israeli authorities. According to a November 2010 internal donor document, quote, Donors are indirectly not following universally accepted humanitarian principles and by their inaction allow for the continuation of illegal policies to take place." According to Chris Patton, the former EU Commissioner for External Affairs, quote, "...at present, International donors meet most of the bill for the consequences of the occupation that should be met under the Geneva Convention by Israel. If Israel continues, as its prime minister says it will, to build settlements, making an agreement on a viable Palestinian state all but impossible, should the international community simply shrug its shoulders and write more checks? The money that I spent in Palestine on behalf of European voters and taxpayers over five years as a European commissioner has drained away into the blood-soaked sand. End quote. That's a pretty strong statement. Perhaps most importantly, international programs are largely directed to relief assistance and food distribution, ensuring as their principal goal that Palestinians in Gaza and certain parts of the West Bank do not starve, rather than to productive and development-oriented activities. The reduction of Palestinians to a humanitarian issue, a demographic presence in impoverished enclaves, unable to mobilize politically, and dependent on the goodwill of the international community, is a tragic waste of human and economic potential. As Gazan economist Omar Shaban remarked, quote, why do you look at me as a person who just needs food? I need books. I need software. I need toys. I can be a part of the civilization of the world. Before the new Israeli policy of easing the siege in June of 2010, we used to have five soft drinks. Now we have seven. I'm still in prison, regardless of the food you provide me. I want to be free. It's not about food. End quote. Palestinians want to work and be productive. Instead, they have been made dependent on foreign aid to survive, and growing numbers are forced into poverty. By treating Palestinians in this way, international aid denies them a voice, rendering them invisible and, by implication, incapable of articulating a vision that departs from the damaging one imposed upon them. I have a section here on Gaza specifically, but I think I will skip over that unless people want to hear more facts and figures about Gaza. All right. The paradigm shift that reduces Palestinians from a political to a charitable issue is most visible in Gaza, where it is amplified by the identification with Hamas. This transformation has been accompanied by another equally dangerous shift. Since the Hamas electoral victory and takeover of the Strip, Israel's goal is no longer simply Gaza's isolation, but its disablement. Israeli policy has shifted from addressing the economy in some manner, whether positively or negatively, to dispensing with the concept of an economy altogether. That is, rather than weaken Gaza's economy through punishing closures and other restrictions, as has long been the case, the Israeli government has imposed an intensified closure, or as we call it, siege, that treats the economy as totally irrelevant, a dispensable luxury. The impact of Israel's policy shift is clear in the near total collapse of Gaza's private sector, the driver of economic growth. And prior to Operation Cast Lead, the private sector, we should remember, was already severely weakened by closure policies, which prevented the import of raw materials and the export of finished products. By September of 2008, at least 95% of Gaza's 3,750 to 3,900 factories had closed, and at least 100,000 workers, virtually the entire private sector, had lost their jobs. Now, the conditions have improved somewhat, but the damage is still very real. Gaza's economic irrelevance was also seen in a decision by some Israeli banks, including the country's largest commercial bank, Bank Hapo Alim, to refuse all direct transactions with Gaza, a decision that followed Israel's September 19th, 2007 designation of Gaza as a hostile territory. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of Gaza's economic redundancy was the Israeli Supreme Court's decision in November of 2007 to approve fuel cuts to Gaza, deemed permissible since it would not harm the population's essential humanitarian needs. This was followed in January of 2008 by the court's approval of electricity cuts, and in May 2008 by a lowering of acceptable levels for fuel and electricity. The court stated, quote, we do not accept the petitioner's argument that market forces should be allowed to play their role in Gaza with regard to fuel consumption, end quote. Hence, once the government decides how much fuel it will allow into Gaza, the economy has no role. states the analyst Daryl Lee, in place of any legal framework the state has proposed and the court has now endorsed a seemingly simple standard for policy. Once undefined essential humanitarian needs are met, all other deprivation is permissible. Thus, according to the Supreme Court, it is acceptable to harm Palestinians and create a humanitarian crisis for political reasons. All told, Israeli restrictions have cost the Palestinian economy around $6.9 billion, or 85% of total Palestinian GDP in 2010. Stated differently, if Israeli restrictions were removed, the Palestinian economy would be almost double its current size. Now to conclude. Perhaps more than anything, the adverse changes I've examined reflect the terrible failure of the near 20 year long Oslo peace process to resolve the conflict. This failure is due fundamentally to the fact that the Oslo process was driven by politics, not legality, leaving wholly unchallenged the core problem, an unbroken and deepening occupation, which from its inception has been defined by different forms and degrees of collective denial and dispossession. Oslo legitimized the asymmetries between Israel and the Palestinians and legitimized Israeli military control. This reality has been amplified by the profound and continuing failures of the Palestinian leadership, particularly as it regards the disastrous decision to split internally, and by the consistent unwillingness of the international, largely Western community, including key Arab states, to apply the rule of law by which they claim to live. President Obama's visit to Israel and Palestine made it clear that the U.S. is largely disinterested in involving itself further in the conflict, talk of restarting negotiations notwithstanding. By giving up its monopoly, hopefully, over the peace process, has the U.S. created space for more reasoned strategies by others, including Palestinians themselves, perhaps beginning with a referendum to the Palestinian people as to whether they would want a two-state or one-state solution, or seeking admission for the State of Palestine to other UN agencies such as the ICC, the ICJ, the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. In the final analysis, the absence of change poses the greatest threat of all, and it cannot be allowed to continue. Thank you very much.