Was Gaza in urgent need of food aid in the first place?

Stephanie Gutmann
Telegraph.co.uk
02 June '10

(In the midst of everything else happening, this one slipped by. Y)

While we try to figure out who did what to whom aboard the Mavi Mara “Freedom Flotilla” ship there is another part of the narrative that remains inviolate, unchallenged. This is the idea that Gazans are in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, in urgent need of the 10,000 tonnes of food aid being rushed to them. I don’t buy that part of the canon anymore than I’m ready to call the guys aboard the top deck of the Mavi “peace activists”. (NB: I do make a distinction between the ambush brigade on the top deck and the Birkenstock ladies who cowered below. )

I let this belief slip in my last post by putting the qualifier “unneeded” before “food aid”, and a few Telegraph Blogs readers went ballistic. I can’t blame them too much – they’re only parroting what they’ve heard from the international aid brigade. What I’d like these folks to consider is that aid workers have jobs which are dependent on there being a crisis in Gaza. Take away the crisis, no more photos to put on the stationary, no more NGO. The oldest of these poverty pimps, is, of course, UNWRA, the arm of the UN created in 1948 to supply homes, food, medical care, even education to the Arab Palestinians (prior to 1948 Jews were referred to as “Palestinians” as well) who fled Palestine during the ‘48 Israel/Arab Legion war. Like many aid programs UNWRA was originally supposed to be temporary but because it had so much largesse to distribute and because its programs are eligible to those defining themselves as descendants of 1948 refugees, its rolls increase exponentially every year and the initiative shows no signs of ever shutting down.

Certain politicians also huff and puff about “Warsaw Ghetto-like” conditions in the Strip. Apparently they get a good deal of satisfaction out of having discovered this supposed moral equivalency. But these are politicians who have generally been whisked down for a few hours between EU conferences and and taken on sort of reverse Potemkin Village-style tours. (If the original Potemkin Village was meant to show happy villagers, these are meant to prove misery.) In my experience reporting in the region, visiting politicians generally ask few questions about the their tour guides. So, almost without exception, they end up trailing sheep-like and agog after officials of which ever oligarchy is in charge at the moment, whether it is Hamas or Fatah.

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