Friday, May 05, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
Gaza exported about $10 million worth of goods so far this year, mostly to the West Bank but there is a fixed amount of produce that goes to Israel every month as well.
Some $30,000 of exports reached the US.
Jordan, on the other hand, has been reducing the amount of Palestinian agricultural goods that it imports.
None has gone to Egypt or other Arab countries.
(I know in the past Gaza goods have been exported to Europe, I don't know why that seems to have stopped.)
Are "pro-Palestinian" NGOs celebrating this ~200% increase in Gaza exports since last year?
No - they deliberately are ignoring it.
Gisha, the main Israeli NGO that digs deep into Gaza imports and exports, doesn't want to compare Gaza trade now with last year or the year before. It wants to make Israel look as bad as possible, so the only comparison it makes (in its "Gaza Cheat Sheet: Real Data on the Gaza Closure") is to compare exports to 2007, the year Hamas took over Gaza. The implication is that Israel has no right to impose restrictions on a territory whose leadership remains committed to its destruction.
Israel's primary function, as with any other normal state, is to provide security for its citizens. That requires maintaining a balance between ensuring that Gaza and the other territories have healthy economies and not allowing them to become more of a military threat, which in Gaza's case comes from Hamas taking advantage of its citizens and foreign aid. The pattern has been that Israel loosens restrictions - until there is a major terror wave or a war. This tightrope of trying to help ordinary Palestinians while minimizing their ability to attack Israel and Israelis is a difficult one.
But NGOs aren't interested in exploring this nuance. The reason is, as always, money.
There is plenty of money for NGOs that want to demonize Israel. There is little interest in funding any organization that actually tries to uncover the facts without bias.
Thanks to this obscure UN program that, as far as I can tell, only started to create these weekly reports this year, we have some actual data to prove that the anti-Israel NGOs will twist the facts to make it appear that Israel acts capriciously against ordinary Gazans.
