It's an age-old dilemma we're all acutely familiar with. Do you keep giving lunch money to the kid who always has it stolen?
Placing this question in another context - the world's leaders have just pledged US$4.48 billion dollars for the reconstruction of Gaza, more than double the targeted figure. Such generosity, such nobleness of spirit must surely be welcomed and praised? The suffering of the denizens of Gaza ameliorated to some extent at last.
Surely?
Well, there's a large amount that troubles me about this. Firstly, most of the infrastructure in the Gaza strip that was destroyed by the Israeli offensive (and surely that word has never been more applicable to a military campaign) was financed in the first place by exactly this sort of foreign aid. Secondly, the Gaza strip is occupied territory annexed by Israel. Under international law the welfare and well-being of Gaza and its infrastructure is actually Israel's responsibility. With the rights of being an occupier comes a bundle of obligations - many of which are set out in the Geneva Convention, a large number of which Israel regularly flouts.
So we have a situation where from time to time, as it sees fit, Israel inflicts collective punishment on people supposedly within its protective remit by smashing their infrastructure, roads, schools and power plants. It allows its soldiers to shell, occupy, trash and often bulldoze people's houses, and these things are invariably nothing more than an exercise in projecting Israel's arbitrary tantrums on the Palestinian people - they are pure exercises in populist politics, playing to the Israeli public's periodic demands do "do something" about the fact that the Palestinians, after 60 years of Israeli occupation with still no homeland refuse to sit obediantly behind their fences and wait for it to happen.
You may pardon my cynicism about this, but it seems quite obvious that the objectives and behaviour of Israel in its occupied territories is always first and foremost governed by political concerns. In this case, somehow all of the supposedly clear objectives of Operation Cast Lead were magically achieved a handful of days before a new administration entered the White House, discounting for the fact that actually ... err ... precisely none of those objectives were achieved - Hamas is as strong as ever, the rockets still rain down on Sderot, and the smuggling tunnels are still operating. Oh yes, and 1300 people are dead. Take a guess how many of those were involved in firing the rockets in the first place, and then consider why you think the rockets are still falling. But that's a fair price to pay for the deaths of little more than a dozen Israeils over the past ten years, I guess. At least we now have a proper calculation for the relative worth of a Palestinian versus an Israeli life - approximately 1:100.
So, we saw it when Israel decided to smash Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah (built by western donor money), we've seen it in every previous military incursion anywhere in Gaza and the West Bank - where power plants have been deliberately bombed, homes, schools, police stations businesses, and orchards laid waste with absolute impugnity. Then when they decide they've had enough, Israel turns to the rest of the world and says "right, you can fix it now". The world then spends billions of dollars once more building up high value targets for Israel to pummel the next time it feels aggrieved.
And nobody says a word about it. Nobody tells the bully off. Nobody beats the bully up, hardly anyone has more than the most muted criticisms for the bully's actions. Instead they follow dutifully in the bully's wake, clearing up the mess that was made. The bully learns no lesson except his unbounded impugnity. And we know from that - don't we my readers, that means the bully will someday be back for more lunch money? Effectively ours.
PS: Oh yes, and a bunch of innocent people will die in the process. But that's just a byline here, right?
By way of an update - the UN statistics are 14,000 homes, 68 government buildings, and 31 offices of nongovernmental organizations destroyed during Operation Cast Lead.
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