Six and a half years ago, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel’s planned response. “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterization of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.

Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called “Red Lines” document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defense ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.

The fine print

Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.

The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to “make sure Gaza didn’t starve.”

But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition — requiring 170 trucks a day — military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.

The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.

To achieve this large reduction, officials deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in the “culture and experience” of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale never explained.

Chronic malnutrition

Gisha, the organization that fought for the document’s publication, observes that Israeli officials ignored the fact that the blockade had severely impaired Gaza’s farming industry, with a shortage of seeds and chickens that had led to a dramatic drop in food output.

UN staff too have noted that Israel failed to factor in the large quantity of food from each day’s supply of 67 trucks that never actually reached Gaza. That was because Israeli restrictions at the crossings created long delays as food was unloaded, checked and then put on to new trucks. Many items spoiled as they lay in the sun.

And on top of this, Israel further adjusted the formula so that the number of trucks carrying nutrient-poor sugar were doubled while the trucks carrying milk, fruit and vegetables were greatly reduced, sometimes by as much as a half.

Robert Turner, director of operations for the UN agency for Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip, has observed: “The facts on the ground in Gaza demonstrate that food imports consistently fell below the red lines.”

It does not need an expert to conclude that the imposition of this Weisglass-style “diet” would entail widespread malnutrition, especially among children. And that is precisely what happened, as a leaked report from the International Committee of the Red Cross found at the time. “Chronic malnutrition is on a steadily rising trend and micro-nutrient deficiencies are of great concern,” it reported in early 2008.

Collective punishment

Israel’s protests that the document was merely a “rough draft” and never implemented are barely credible — and, anyway, beside the point. If the politicians and generals were advised by health experts that Gaza needed at least 170 trucks a day, why did they oversee a policy that allowed in only 67?

There can be no doubt that the diet devised for Gaza — much like Israel’s blockade in general — was intended as a form of collective punishment, one directed at every man, woman and child. The goal, according to the Israeli defense ministry, was to wage “economic warfare” that would generate a political crisis, leading to a popular uprising against Hamas.

Earlier, when Israel carried out its 2005 disengagement, it presented the withdrawal as marking the end of Gaza’s occupation. But the “Red Lines” formula indicates quite the opposite: that, in reality, Israeli officials intensified their control, managing the lives of Gaza’s inhabitants in almost-microscopic detail.

Experiments in social engineering

Who can doubt — given the experiences of Gaza over the past few years — that there exist in the Israeli military’s archives other, still-classified documents setting out similar experiments in social engineering? Will future historians reveal that Israeli officials also pondered the fewest hours of electricity Palestinians in Gaza needed to survive, or the minimum amount of water, or the smallest living space per family, or the highest feasible levels of unemployment?

Such formulas presumably lay behind the decision to bomb Gaza’s only power station in 2006 and subsequently to block its proper repair; the refusal to approve a desalination plant, the only way to prevent over-drilling contaminating the Strip’s underground water supply; the declaration of large swaths of farmland no-go areas, forcing the rural population into the already overcrowded cities and refugee camps; and the continuing blockade on exports, decimating Gaza’s business community and ensuring the population remains dependent on aid.

It is precisely these policies by Israel that led the United Nations to warn in August that Gaza would be “uninhabitable” by 2020 (“Gaza in 2020 - A livable place?,” 27 August 2012).

Doctrines for destruction

In fact, the rationale for the Red Lines document and these other measures can be found in a military strategy that found its apotheosis in Operation Cast Lead, the savage attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09.

The Dahiya doctrine was Israel’s attempt to update its traditional military deterrence principle to cope with a changing Middle East, one in which the main challenge it faced was from asymmetrical warfare. The name Dahiya derives from a neighborhood of Beirut Israel leveled in its 2006 attack on Lebanon.

This “security concept,” as the Israeli army termed it, involves the wholesale destruction of a community’s infrastructure to immerse it so deeply in the problems of survival and reconstruction that other concerns, including fighting back or resisting occupation, are no longer practicable.

On the first day of the Gaza offensive, Yoav Galant, the commander in charge, explained the aim succinctly: it was to “send Gaza decades into the past.” Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai may have been thinking in similar terms when, months before Operation Cast Lead, he warned that Israel was preparing to inflict on Gaza a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for Holocaust.

Seen in this context, Weisglass’ “diet” can be understood as just one more refinement of the Dahiya doctrine: a whole society refashioned to accept its subjugation through a combination of violence, poverty, malnutrition and a permanent struggle over limited resources.

This experiment in the manufacture of Palestinian despair is, it goes with saying, both illegal and grossly immoral. But ultimately it is also certain to unravel — and possibly sooner rather than later. The visit this week of Qatar’s emir, there to bestow hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, was the first by a head of state since 1999.

The Gulf’s wealthy oil states need influence, allies and an improved image in a new Middle East wracked by uprisings and civil war. Gaza is a prize, it seems, they may be willing to challenge Israel to possess.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His new website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

A version of this article first appeared in The National, Abu Dhabi.

Tags

• Gaza siege
• Dov Weisglass
• Red Lines document
• child malnutrition
• closure
• movement restrictions
• Gisha
• collective punishment
• Dahiya doctrine
• Yoav Galant

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Comments

Inflicting collective punishment on Gaza

Permalink Ben Alofs replied on Thu, 10/25/2012 - 19:35

Thanks very much, Jonathan, for highlighting the disgusting experiments that Israelis are carrying out on the laboratory population of the Gaza Strip. They are testing the level of despair, humilation and punishment that people under occupation are willing to put up with, including subjecting innocent children to starvation resulting in chronic malnutrition and stunted growth.
I am a primary care physician and I know what starvation can do to the brain of a developing child. This kind of experimenting reminds me of the immoral German scientists during WWII, who subjected the inmates of concentration camps to reprehensible experiments. We must name and shame Weisglas, Galant, Vilnai and all their colleagues of various university departments in Israel who were willing to collaborate with this.

Starvation diet

Permalink Joseph Tillotson replied on Tue, 11/06/2012 - 17:54

If this policy is not subject to United Nations action, then the orfanization is shamefully useless.
The world is witnessing evil manifested by these policies which are similar to the vicious policies of the Nazis from whom the Zionist criminals have learned from.

Zionist Israel is deservedly a pariah state whose practices soil the tenets of the Torah and only adds to the prejudices against the Jewish people around the world. Such pyre evil is an insult to the human spirit.

Validation and References

Permalink SocTrap replied on Sun, 11/18/2012 - 08:00

This is a fascinating article and bits and pieces I have seen before in other blogs, but never a complete outline such as this.

However, I would not be able to reference this article because there are no external references for the numbers quoted (trucks, calories etc in the Red Lines Document.. which I can only find scant reference to but not find online, or the throttling of the trucks - again, I have seen info about the throttling on the Egyptian border but not the food trucks).

It would be an incredibly powerful piece if you put in your sources. Thanks.