Having recently returned from a tour of the Middle East — which included stops in Israel and the West Bank — one could assume
that
President George W Bush has developed a new interest in the region.
That being the case, one would hope that during the course of his busy day, the president might have found the time to glimpse at a television set showing news footage from the Gaza-Egyptian border. Had he done so, he would have witnessed, possibly with some sense of horror, maybe even with a hint of remorse, tens of thousands of Gazans swarming over the border into Egypt on Wednesday in search of food and other basic necessities.
If the US president had watched the chaotic scenes he would have seen the images of some 60,000 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip oozing through gaps in the border made by militants who used explosives and bulldozers to breach the security barrier erected a few years ago by the Israelis in order to prevent Palestinian militants from transporting arms and munitions into the Strip and then turning those weapons on Israel.
And had President Bush been watching, he would have caught sight of what happens when a sea of
people - make that a sea of desperate people — treated to daily doses of humiliation, threatened with starvation and severed from the rest of the world, forced to live in what basically amounts to the world’s largest prison, are finally pushed to the limits of the extreme.
The American president would have seen for himself that when it comes to hunger it matters little how tall the walls are, how wide or electrified the fences might be, how accurate are the machinegun nests, how lethal are the land mines, how vigilant and ruthless border guards might be or how sharp is the concertina wire.
I say the president might have watched with horror because the problem of hungry Gazans is not necessarily one exclusively reserved to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. It could very well happen anywhere in the world. As the former governor of a state bordering Mexico, President Bush is not unacquainted with poverty — albeit from afar.
Reading the news reports and watching the images of the mass of humans making their way across the border at Rafah, completely undeterred by man-made obstacles such as politics and frontiers, it was hard not to make the comparison with the gripping and almost-prophetic novel, The Camp of the Saints, by French author Jean Raspail.
Written some 35 years ago, Raspail depicts what happens to Europe when, pushed by poverty and deteriorating social conditions, millions of economic refugees from the Indian subcontinent in search of food commandeer an armada of ships and set sail for Southern Europe, where they storm the beaches and make their way across Europe, eating everything they could find along the way. At least, the thousands of Gazans who stormed over the border into Egypt on Wednesday paid for their purchases.
Raspail, in a book written well before its time, details how social conditions in the developing world deteriorate to the point that it forced those millions of starving people to disregard all laws, borders and regulations or face starvation. Guess which option they chose? And guess which option the besieged residents of Gaza decided to go for?
I also say that the president might have watched the images from the Rafah border crossing with some remorse because the chaotic scenes that unfolded on Wednesday are partially the result of his Middle East policies, and his - and Israel’s — decision not to recognise the legitimacy of a democratically elected government in the Palestinian territories because they disagree with that government’s political ideology.
To be fair, not all the blame for what is transpiring in Gaza today - this suffering of innocent people, the hunger and deprivation - should fall on the United States and/or Israel alone. Indeed, the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, carries more than its fair share of responsibility for the mayhem in the Strip. The continued bombing by Hamas gunmen with Qassam rockets and mortars of Israeli cities and towns bordering the Gaza strip is what brought about this latest crisis to its climax.
In the past one week, Israel has killed at least 38 Palestinians in retaliation on armed groups who have launched more than 200 rockets and mortars into Israel, slightly wounding 10 people. The Palestinians, for their part, place all the blame on Israel’s handling of the crisis:
“Israel is responsible for what has happened - this is the consequence of the blockade imposed on Gaza,” said a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
“The situation went out of control because of the strangulation caused by the blockade that has been imposed during nearly eight months on 1.5 million Palestinians,” Hamas said in a statement.
Israel, meanwhile, said it was doing what it had to do to defend itself. From the White House, where as of Wednesday the president had all of 362 days left in office, maybe the thought crossed his mind as he glanced at the images of hungry Palestinians that his Middle East policy was quite possibly as riddled with holes as the security barrier between Gaza and Egypt. A barrier now shattered and crumbling; a reflection of the administration’s Mideast policy.