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Follow Us on TwitterMILIBAND: Gaza represents the ultimate failure of politics 13Oct11 October 12, 2011
by David Miliband - The Guardian - 12 October 2011
Government is all about statistics. But life is about people, and the disjunction between the two explains a lot about the cynicism and disaffection with politics. This is true for domestic policy, but also in international affairs, where the confusion and fatigue induced by distance is increased by the seemingly intractable nature of many of the problems.
The people who suffer are those who most need the attention of the world. This is notably true of the 1.5 million people crowded into the Gaza Strip, locked between Israel, Egypt and the Mediterranean sea.
The statistics say that 80% of the population are on UN food aid. The youth unemployment rate is 65%. The website of the United Nations office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs has a comprehensive database where you can see how many trucks, containing different kinds of supplies, have been allowed in by the Israeli authorities.
The situation of the people – or rather the fight about their situation – is periodically in the news, most recently when violence broke the otherwise reasonably effective ceasefire in August. But Gaza has become the land that time – and the wider international community – forgot.
It is for this reason that I took up the offer from Save the Children to visit the Gaza Strip. I had not been able to visit while in government for security reasons. Now I wanted to get a sense of life, not statistics. The purpose of the visit was not to meet politicians or decision-makers, but to get a glimpse, albeit brief, of life for the people.
And there is real life. Boys in western football shirts – mainly Lionel Messi of Barcelona. Restaurants overlooking the Mediterranean. Girls in white headscarves wherever you look coming back from school. Barbers, clothes shops, fruit stalls. And a good deal of traffic – with new cars smuggled in through tunnels underneath the Philadelphi route that runs along the Egyptian border.
But although life is real, it is traumatic and limited. We saw buildings – not just the former Hamas headquarters – still reduced to rubble. There are houses riddled with bullet holes. The electricity supply cuts out for up to eight hours a day. There are not enough schools or teachers, so there are classes of 50 or 60 and the school day is restricted to a few hours to allow for two or even three shifts.
The consequences of war are everywhere, nowhere more so than for those caught in the crossfire. We met the niece and son of a farmer caught in the “buffer zone” between the Israeli border and Gaza. She had lost an eye and he a hand to Israeli shells in the war of 2008-09.
Save the Children, obviously, is most concerned about the 53% of the Gaza population under 18. The statistics say 10% of children are “stunted” – so undernourished before the age of two that they never grow to their full potential.
We saw what Save the Children is trying to do about it, at a nutrition centre serving mothers and children in Gaza City. The needs are basic: promoting breastfeeding, health boosts for young children through food supplies, medical attention for mothers. But not all those who need help are coming to get it, so Save the Children funds outreach workers to go and encourage families to use the services.
There is remarkable work to create opportunity as well as prevent catastrophe. The Qattan Centre for the Child is a privately funded library, drama, computer and youth centre that would grace any British community. The director told me it was dedicated to a philosophy of “building people not buildings”. The centre is a true oasis.
The situation in Gaza represents the ultimate failure of politics. Nearly three years ago, after the Gaza war, the international community was preoccupied with opening up Gaza. Three years on, there is a stalemate – to match the wider stalemate in the wider search for a Palestinian state that can live alongside Israel.
The first responsibility is with Israel. The international call in the UN Gaza peace resolution, which Britain authored, on the Israeli government to open up the supply lines has been heeded only in small part. That is why the tunnels do such a roaring trade – which Hamas then taxes to fund its activities. So there is a real boomerang. In return, the Israeli government would retort that the parallel call in the resolution for the flow of arms into Gaza to be stopped has not been delivered. That’s true, too.
Yet the international pressure is muted. The focus has shifted. But the needs and the people have not moved on.
This is not a party political hit on the British government. The Department for International Development is the second biggest donor to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. The prime minister spoke up about Gaza early in his term of office. There is room for a genuine cross-party drive to make sure that the children and adults of Gaza are not forgotten.
To make the situation even more infuriating, the status quo is actually irrational. It is not in anyone’s political interest. Israel doesn’t become safer, or Hamas or Fatah more popular.
One young mother at the nutrition centre told me that she was just completing her accountancy degree – but there was no work. Yusuf, nine, working on a computer at the Qattan centre, told me he wanted to be a pilot. These people are not a threat to peace in the Middle East. They are actually its hope. But for that they need a chance to shape their own future.
David Miliband is the former UK foreign secretary.
Thank You.
Reader Comments
Another british ex-minister doing a tour to discover what Gaza is like. Why?
The following comments relate to his rather self-serving article published above.
Government is NOT about statistics, despite efforts by manipulators to make it so. Government involves the management of services aimed at the well-being of the people, services which, in a true democracy, reflect the wishes of the majority of those people.
These services include necessities such as health, education and welfare and as such they impact on the lives of every person. Thus they are about life. Not statistics. Nor any other virtual or imaginary construct.
Domestic (national) and foreign (international) concerns and events also affect the lives of ordinary citizens, both those within the nation and others in other nations. Therefore they are also about life and living.
My guess is that the confusion and fatigue of distance mentioned has more to do with misreading the world and his place in it than in the reality of the world. Seeing more complexity than is actually there. I suspect that that has to do with seeing the world- and all of the people in it- as being part of “us’ or them”: seeing difference more often than seeing similarity. Seeing difference in this way- as other than- leaves one inclined to move into a defensive position, and as we know full well, that unfortunately gets translated into offensive action.
(ergo George Bush’s “pre-emptive” attacks)
When one has the world view that sees conflict and competition as the natural order of things, one sees themselves, and those others, as winners OR losers. With such a world view, many choose to attack first and ask questions later. Truly, the selfish gene epitomised.
Yet we know that this brings down suffering on everyone’s heads.
There is no better example than the tragedy that has been Palestine’s fate over the last 60 plus years.
An imperial colonialist’s arrogance permitted a theft of land to assuage the guilt of a fascist state’s genocidal murder and the denial of sanctuary for the intended victims when that was still possible, and so another genocidal dispossession and murder against an innocent victim is permitted to occur. And still occurs.
Do we need telling again?
If so, why do we need telling again?
If we are not imbeciles, then why?
The only alternative explanation, for those of us who have access to the truth, is that we choose not to know.
We choose not to remember.
And we choose to do nothing.
Mr Milliband said he could not go to Gaza when he was in Tony Blair’s/Gordon Brown’s governments. For SECURITY REASONS!
Security reasons?
That was when you should have gone.
The very time.
To see what was actually happening. So that lies could not be perpetuated about what was going on.
It would not have been a feel good trip.
It would have put your life at risk.
Just like every one of the Palestinians in Gaza at the time. That is the point. No where was safe for them.
By going, the barrier between the “us’ and “them’ would have evaporated.
We, as peoples of the world, need to fully recognise that there is no “us ” and “them’ anymore in our world. Surely we should be able to see that. Global warming. Global economic meltdown. Etc etc.
We, as peoples of the world must begin to recognise that wants are not needs. And that needs must be met first for all people.
We ought to begin considering why it is that governments still spend inordinate amounts of money on weapons and bling that we not only dont need, but that are bad for our wellbeing. Counter to living a good life.
We ought to seek alternative models to aspire to other than those that pay huge salaries to boys kicking balls up and down a paddock, and a pittance to child care workers.
We ought to seek alternative models to aspire to other than encouraging women to become hired killers so they can do all the same military jobs as men, instead of encouraging men to learn how to care more for family members!
We ought to recognise the inequity that makes women in the world do 90% of the work while the men own 90% of the wealth. And do something about it.It happens everywhere.
But if injustice against women is something to act against, so is injustice against any other group treated inhumanely. And the Palestinians are such a people.
Unlike the inequity against women I do not have to experience Gaza to know this. I do not have to see for myself. The truth is available to almost everyone on this planet. I know enough about Gaza’s suffering to know that it should be stopped.
And Gaza is not a place apart. Gaza is a warning to all of us who love justice and care about human rights. Gaza could happen to anyone. Right now, it is happening to the Palestinians.
Gaza is what happens when the governments of the world forget what they are there for:to ensure the wellbeing of the people. To reflect the wishes of the people. And to make sure that the needs of the people are met. Governments are not there to pump up the egos of those who want power and riches for themselves while others pay the cost.
We do know this.
And the fact that it is constantly denied ought to make us ashamed.
Gaza is there. We all know that. We all ought to know that it is not acceptable that it is as it is. We all know that it is as it is because those with the power to do something about it have chosen not to.
That is not only something to be ashamed of, but also something that implies complicity in crimes against humanity.
Fine sounding rhetoric doesn’t wash any more. Polite articles after self-serving junkets don’t either. Blair had the power to stop aggression. He chose not to. Milliband was part of the British government. If he had chosen to see what was happening then, and to speak about it, and then to act while he had some power to do something, that would have been a worthwhile act.
That would have been acting honourably.
Going there now and telling us what we all know already, that it wasn’t only Hamas headquarters that were bombed, and the rest, that is not an honourable act.
I do not know of any peoples who have suffered such colonial oppression at the same time as the Palestinians have. And the whole world knows this.
And yet, to paraphrase an American member of Congress “And still this chamber is silent”.
The so called “Arab spring” has been lauded in the west because it has tended to target those dictators we like not to like.
Maybe next spring it might be the women of the world. Or another oppressed and exploited people.
Maybe it will be the Palestinians.
And I bet they wont need a little gee-up session or a visit by a man called Milliband to give his approval for them to do so.
Lavinia Moore