I read this morning on Omedia, the excellent Hebrew news and opinion site, that while food prices all over the world are going up, in Gaza they are actually going down. And they are not going down because they were so high before. Prices of food staples there are not only apparently lower than in Israel, they are also lower than in the West Bank (which also gets food handouts from UNRWA, etc).

The article went on to say that food prices in Gaza are so low that there are rumors that food is actually being smuggled out of Gaza and into Egypt through the tunnels usually used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt.

Omedia’s source? The monthly humanitarian monitor of OCHA, a UN organisation. So I went to have a little peek at this month’s report, comparing it to last month’s. I’m far too lazy, and busy to read it very carefully, but a few things caught my eye.

The main thing is how totally one-sided it is. Take ‘Incidents involving Israeli settlers’ for instance. Alongside statistics of incidents leading to casualties on both sides (I think casualties means both deaths and injuries in this report), the report summarizes incidents of settlers against Palestinians, including non-casualty ones and goes as far as to give details of certain incidents. There is no such detail, not one word, about incidents of Palestinians against settlers. According to this report, there was not one case of damage done to settlers by Palestinians during the months of May or June that was found to be worthy of even a passing mention, or that was on a par to damage done by settlers to Palestinians - such as trespassing and access prevention, that were reported as having been perpetrated by settlers. Mind you, they even saw fit to mention the theft of a sheep by a settler. So, assuming no settlers were killed by Palestinians, or injured (actually the statistics showed there were some incidents, but never mind), apparently nothing else happened at all. Not even one itsy bitsy little stone was thrown from a Palestinian village at a passing settler’s car all month.

Or it wasn’t seen to be interesting. Because if an Arab steals off a Jew perhaps it really isn’t worth mentioning. But if a Jew steals off an Arab… sort of man bite dog story, huh?

I hear you. You’re saying these are under occupation and these are not. True. These are downtrodden and poverty-stricken and these the lords of the land abusing their stronger position. Er… Perhaps. But where do you, as humanitarian monitor, put the limits of what is tolerated behavior for the underdog? If one can steal or throw stones, because he is poor and stateless (and we’ll not discuss whose fault that is), without it meriting a mention in your report, can he do other things? Perhaps even kill? Where does it end? And is this not a patronizing attitude?

I was interested to see that in the May report, in the chapter referring to ‘Violent incidents affecting educational facilities’, the incidents involving IDF or settlers, mainly in the West Bank, are clearly stated as such, whereas armed Palestinians attacking Christian educational facilities in Gaza are described as “unknown assailants” and “unknown gunmen” (pg 6). It seems to me that if the settlers were so clearly identfied as (Israeli) settlers (based on what evidence exactly?), why weren’t the unknowns identified as Palestinian unknowns?

Oh, maybe they weren’t Palestinians at all. Maybe they were European humanitarian monitors from OCHA. (just kidding)

By the way, the majority of the incidents in May affecting educational facilities allegedly involving ’settlers’ (three out of four) weren’t violent incidents at all, according to their description in the report. They were clearly cases of breaking and entering. Three schools were broken into in Qalqilya on 27th May, and door locks were broken. It doesn’t say how they knew it was settlers, or why these incidents were defined as violent. This looks a bit like a case of ‘fiddling’ the statistics to further demonize the settlers. Makes you wonder about the statistics that aren’t detailed.

To give you an idea for comparison’s sake, those ‘unknown assailants and gunmen’ mentioned above detonated a bomb (!) outside a (Christian) school in Gaza (May 16th) on one occasion, and on another broke into another (Christian) school in Gaza and tied up the school-guards in what sounds like an armed robbery (May 31). This was the second attack on that particular institute since February (the first also by ‘unknown gunmen’).

Another thing that caught my interest in the June report was just how dangerous life is for a child in Gaza, and not necessarily because of anything Israel does. Most of the children killed there in June were not killed as result of Israeli actions but because of general Palestinian lawlessness.

“During June, eight Palestinian children were killed, three of whom by the IDF, two due to internal conflict, and three as a result of the reckless handling of weaponry. Of the total children killed, six were killed in the Gaza Strip; two girls (both eight years old) were killed by the IDF in the Khan Yunis governorate, one was killed when he was stabbed by a fellow student in the Gaza City, two in an internal explosion, and a six-year-old boy died when hit by a stray bullet while watching a militant’s funeral.

Twenty children were injured in direct conflict-related incidents, half of whom (ten) were injured by rubber-coated metal bullets fired by the IDF during anti-Barrier demonstrations in the West Bank. An additional ten children were injured in an explosion caused by Palestinian militants at a house in Beit Lahiya that injured thirty adults. A further four-year-old boy was injured by a stray bullet while sitting in front of his house in An Nuseirat Camp.”

(June 2008, pg 6)

Pretty awful, huh?

I assume the stray bullet that injured the four year-old was not an Israeli bullet, because if it was, the report would have hurried to point this out. Also, if there had been an Israeli military action going on, the child would not have been sitting outside (one hopes). Stray bullets seem to be just a normal part of living in Palestinian society these days, as is being blown up by stray Palestinian bombs. Here in Israel we call those “work accidents”. Terrorists will be working on a bomb, usually in a home in a residential area, when something goes wrong and the whole building goes up in smoke.

Note that all of the children injured by the IDF in June were participating in West Bank demonstrations protesting the erection of the security fence. The May report states that “The IDF has responded violently to each protest held by Palestinian, Israeli and international activists.” It doesn’t bother to point out if this violence was perhaps a reaction to violence of the demonstrators themselves, or if it was necessary crowd control to prevent the situation from escalating. These people are forcibly trying to hinder, if not prevent, the construction of this barrier, which serves us as a security fence, preventing suicide bombers from entering Israel. So children participating in these demonstrations probably knew, as did their parents, that they could get hurt. From this I assume that the majority of children injured in these demonstrations were ‘big’ children, in their late teens.

I’d like to point out that all I’ve said here does not mean I don’t think the Palestinian people are suffering. I know they are, and the Gazans most of all right now, and I am sorry for them. Nor am I belittling their suffering. To be fair, the report, however biased, gives one an inkling of an idea of just how bad things really are. I nearly scrapped this post altogether because I felt uncomfortable, even though I believe the Palestinians themselves are greatly to blame for their sorry situation, and always have been.

At least things seem to be getting better. Going back to the food chapter, the original reason I went to read this report, I discovered that there really is no shortage of food in Gaza, despite everything we’ve been hearing.

During June, all basic food commodities were available in the market in the Gaza Strip despite localised shortages of fresh meat, frozen meat and frozen fish due to import restrictions. The price of wheat flour declined by 4% compared to May 2008. All kinds of vegetables are available in the market. The price of lemons is still high, 8 NIS per 1 kg compared to 5 NIS a month earlier, which is due to limited import from Israel as well as the IDF’s destruction of land used for growing lemon trees in the Gaza Strip.

(June 2008, pg 15)

Nu, so a lemon shortage. Not so bad. The question is, of course, how many can afford to buy all this abundance of food.