(MintPress) – Recently released documents show Israel calculated the number of calories citizens of Gaza needed in order to avoid starvation, according to internal notes released by the Ministry of Defense. Gaza, a small coastal strip run internally by Hamas, has been under a strict Israeli blockade since 2006. While Israelis long claimed the blockade was designed to prevent militants from smuggling weapons, the control of civilian food consumption, “a daily humanitarian portion,” was capped at 2,279 calories for each person. Although this is only slightly lower than the 2,500 calorie diet recommended by most doctors, reports by the U.N. and other humanitarian organizations show that 10 percent of children in Gaza are chronically malnourished.
The collective punishment against Gaza’s 1.5 million residents has come under increased scrutiny in recent years as various activist flotillas have tried, unsuccessfully to break the blockade by delivering much needed humanitarian aid to the the besieged enclave.
The evolving policies of the blockade and occupation
Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, petitioned the Israeli government for years to release the 2008 document. The ministry of defense acquiesced to the demand, releasing the document titled, “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines,” earlier this week.
While many within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have tried to defend the policies as legitimate, others have conceded that the limitations harmed the Gazan population.
While the minimum nutritional requirements were met according to the prescribed caloric intake, the U.N. World Health Organization (WHO) found in 2009, that 10 percent of children are chronically malnourished. Additionally, 50 percent of citizens, two-thirds of whom are under the age of 18, are considered “food insecure,” according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
Arbitrary limitations on the types of food allowed into the strip were revealed in the recent report. For example, cinnamon was allowed to enter Gaza while coriander was inexplicably forbidden. «We never understood why the Ministry of Defence actually forbade coriander to enter Gaza,» Israeli Foreign Ministry Yigal Palmor said in an interview with the BBC.
Israel has monitored and controlled the flow of goods in the occupied territories both as a matter of national security and as a means to inflict a collective punishment against the civilian populations in the Gaza strip and the West Bank.
During the early years of the Israeli occupation, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) leadership tried to “normalize” the occupation in the minds of Israelis and Palestinians. By trying to erase the internationally recognized green line designating legal Israel from occupied Palestinian territory, Israeli leadership attempted to establish a network to control Palestinian movement without giving the impression that there was a clear military occupation.
As Israeli scholar Neve Gordon wrote in his 2008 book, “Israel’s Occupation,” “The change in Palestinian lifestyle becomes apparent in reports published by the Bank of Israel, which also monitored the standard of living in both regions, showing that parallel to the swift economic growth there was a rapid increase in private consumption: an annual average rate of 13 percent in the West Bank and 15 percent in Gaza.”
This “consumption” Gordon references is not just an increase in the material consumption of refrigerators and television sets, but also “a continuous improvement in nutritional standards.” This, Gordon believes, led to an increase in the Palestinian population’s consumption of commodities and a change for the better in “the Palestinian food basket.”
Using these standards, many Israeli lawmakers have made the case for occupation both as a security imperative and as a means to improve nutrition and overall quality of life in the West Bank. However, the matrix of control, namely checkpoints, walls and blockades erected since 1967, have been viewed increasingly as a collective punishment against an innocent population when Hamas or other stateless actors use violence against the Israeli state and its population.
The apartheidization of Israel
While many within the international community decry Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza strip as apartheid, the gradual acceptance and outright endorsement of these repressive state policies has become ever more palatable in the Jewish-Israeli public.
The ownership of apartheid as a reality, and a favorable policy, became clear in a recent opinion poll conducted last month by the New Israel Fund, an advocacy group based in the U.S. and Israel. The results, based upon 503 interviews, found that 59 percent would prefer Jews be favored over Arab citizens in admission to jobs in government ministries.
Seventy-four percent favored separate roads for Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, while 69 percent said that Israel should not grant the 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank voting rights should Israel annex the territory. This system of discrimination and duality was openly acknowledged by a majority of the respondents. Fifty-eight percent of Israeli Jews now believe that their government uses apartheid policies against the Palestinians.
While the two-state solution has been accepted by a majority of the international community as a just way to partition the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean sea, Israel has chosen to expand West Bank settlements after gaining control of the territory in the 1967 war.
Currently, more than 500,000 settlers live in illegal settlements on land expropriated through land confiscation, a policy that is in violation of international law and at odds with the major current of international opinion.
Part of the reason for this opinion stems from the rise of right-wing nationalist parties like Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Bitenu “Israel is our home” party. Lieberman serves in the current Netanyahu government as the Minister of Foreign Affairs and has previously called Jordan the rightful home for Palestinians.
Now opinions once relegated to the right-wing fringe of Israeli politics have become much more mainstream as a majority of Israelis see the occupation as permanent with the possibility of full annexation of the West Bank, the land Palestinians believe rightfully constitutes their future state.
Breaking the blockade
Proponents of human rights have confronted the rise of apartheid policies by attempting to break the blockade of Gaza. Aid ships, organized by a bevy of international activists in dozens of countries, have tried to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza since 2008.
The most notable attempt came in 2009 when the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” was stopped and boarded by Israeli commandos. Israeli paratroopers clashed with activists killing nine, including a Turkish-American national.
Israeli officials have claimed that the raid was legitimate, while others including the U.N. found that Israel had used excessive force when boarding the aid ship in international waters.
An aid ship to Gaza was stopped by the Israeli navy earlier this week trying to deliver humanitarian cargo to the citizens of Gaza. However, the ship carrying 17 passengers, including five European parliamentarians and a former Canadian lawmaker, was intercepted. There were no incidents of violence reported.