Stealing Gaza Piece by Piece

By Mohammed Omer

“I’D REALLY like to know what these trucks and vans are taking out of Gaza!”

The speaker was a Palestinian taxi passenger, stopped on Salah ah Deen Street, the Gaza Strip’s major north-south artery. Of course, it is not the least bit unusual for Palestinian traffic in Gaza to be halted by Israeli soldiers, for reasons ranging from the most dire to the most trivial. Hundreds of Palestinian cars and taxis can be stopped, sometimes for hours, while a car or bus passes on the “settler only” roads, and most of the time the Palestinians stuck in traffic never know why. This time, however, the middle-aged man in the taxi was perplexed.

“Every day, when I make this trip to work,” he explained, “I see these big trucks with Israeli license plates. They come from Israel empty and then seem to head back toward Israel full. Curiosity’s killing me—what are they taking from us now?”

“For your information,” the taxi driver replied, his voice heavy with sarcasm, “they are sweeping Gaza for us. Now Israel is stealing even the yellow sand!” He went on to explain that, years ago, he drove a truck for an Israeli company and made regular runs into Gaza. Based on his experiences then, he had no trouble believing now that Israel would appropriate even the Gaza sand.

Of course, according to the official reports, Sharon and his government had a successful February summit with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The international press is full of optimistic peace talk, things supposedly are calm, and preparations are underway for the evacuation of the Israeli settlements in Gaza. But throughout the Gaza Strip, Palestinian eyewitnesses report that there is no sign of settlers packing up, while convoys of Israeli trucks work day and night carrying raw materials from Gaza into Israel.

One of the most galling aspects of the occupation in Gaza has been the Israeli settlements’ monopoly on Gaza’s water. While Palestinians in the refugee camps suffer chronic shortages of potable water, the settlements have been built over or near Gaza’s underground aquifer. The settlers thus enjoy green lawns and gardens year-round, while Palestinians are thirsty.

Now, adding potential insult to injury, are the current crop of rumors and speculation that Israel will allow natural gas production to resume from Gaza’s offshore reserves. The main buyer will be Israel, which will pay Gaza not in cash but in…water. Gaza’s own water, that is.

Brief articles in the Israeli press recently reported that British Gas, which owns the drilling rights to large natural gas reserves off Gaza, has approached the Sharon government to buy Gaza’s natural gas. Talks seem to be in the preliminary stages. All the Israeli newspaper Haaretz would say was that Sharon and his Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer had not refused the offer. There is talk that CCC, a company owned by the Khouri family in Lebanon, would be part of the deal, and Isramco, an Israeli company, would probably handle gas production. All the present reports agree that Israel wants to avoid any cash transaction with the Palestinian Authority, lest the money ultimately finance Palestinian resistance factions. Of course, this is at odds with the more widely reported talk of cease-fires and renewed peace talks.

Israel is always in the market for natural resources. An agreement between Israel Electric and the Egyptian company EMB was under negotiation late in 2004. There have been reports in the Israeli press that the Russian gas producing company Gasprom is working on a deal to sell Israel an annual four million cubic meters of natural gas via a pipeline through Turkey. Locking up the much closer Palestinian natural gas production would be a bonanza for Israel. The reserves off the Gaza shore are presently estimated at around 40 million cubic meters.

“It’s funny in a terrible way,” said a 34-year-old Palestinian teacher. “They already took all our water, our sand, our gas. Now they want to sell our own water back to us for more gas. Thank God the Israelis haven’t found a way to steal the air. If they could control the air, we’d be certain to die of suffocation.” (Actually, the teacher was only partly right. Israel—so far, anyway—can’t control the air Gazans breathe, but does control Gaza’s airspace and has rendered the Gaza International Airport unusable by destroying its runways.)

The latest reports seem to indicate Israel is still determined to keep a stranglehold on all of Gaza’s natural resources. Through the last four years of intifada, bottled gas for cooking has become increasingly scarce and expensive throughout Gaza. It seems the post-summit era is not likely to bring any fast improvement.

Mohammed Omer reports from the occupied Gaza Strip, where he maintains the Web site <http://www.rafahtoday.org>.