Here’s a useful way to think about the Gaza Strip. It’s a bit more than twice the size of the Bronx and has a greater population. It’s a bit more than twice the size of Staten Island and has four times as many people. It has about the same population density as Chicago, more people per square mile than Los Angeles and about twice the density of St. Louis and Oakland. So, the Israeli demand that Hamas political leaders and fighters somehow isolate themselves from the population, or that government offices not be placed in “civilian” areas, is simply a physical impossibility.
Gaza is not a region, a “place”; it is a city. And just as in all cities, the ability to produce enough food on-site for its population is non-existent. It has a power plant (like Staten Island, but not the Bronx), but, just as in all cities, fuel must be brought in, as must most daily supplies. So the idea that Israel is somehow being “humanitarian” in allowing UN food trucks through its checkpoints is absurd, since the alternative is actual starvation. As we know, the Israelis this week destroyed Gaza’s power plant, giving them the ability to turn power on and off at will. Providing electricity under these circumstances is not a humanitarian gesture, unless we have so devalued the term as to make it meaningless.
Our comparison with the Bronx is useful for another reason: it is easy to imagine setting up a blockade of the borough. Close the bridges, patrol the rivers, and build an electrified fence across the border with Westchester – voila. Now, the people of the Bronx are imprisoned. (Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has usefully compared Gaza to a prison where all the jailers are on the outside.) They may not leave, except with the rare permission of their jailers. All goods coming in are subject to inspection and confiscation. Sometimes the jailers allow export of some agricultural products (the Bronx, like Gaza, has some specialty greenhouse agriculture); other times, the tomatoes rot in the trucks.
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