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Israel-Palestine: As year nears end, a call for a "just peace on equal footings"
Constantine S. Dabbagh, director of the Middle East Council of Churches committee for refugee work in the Gaza Strip.
Photo: Paul Jeffrey/ACT International
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By Chris Herlinger/CWS
GAZA CITY--As 2006 nears its end, Church World Service-affiliated partners continue responding to a humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip that, at best, remains unsettled and at worst, has showed signs of worsening with recent violence.
"We can't lose hope; otherwise it will be a disaster for the Palestinians," Constantine S. Dabbagh, the executive director of the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) committee for refugee work in the Gaza Strip, said in a recent interview just as violence flared anew in Gaza. MECC is a long-time Church World Service partner and a member of the global alliance Action by Churches Together (ACT) International.
Though a truce along the Israeli-Gaza border is now in place following a series of border incidents that have left dozens dead, observers like Dabbagh within Gaza are not optimistic about long-term prospects for stability or peace in the 360 square-kilometre coastal area that Palestinians have compared to the world’s largest prison--or in more cynical moments, the world’s largest mental asylum.
Though Gaza is officially under Palestinian control following an Israeli withdrawal in 2005, humanitarian and human rights organizations, both within and outside the region, say that Israel maintains effective control over Gaza. A coalition of Israeli human rights organizations said in mid-November, for example, that by controlling air space and territorial waters, as well as movement in and out of Gaza, "Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control."
The statement by such as groups as B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Rabbis for Human Rights, and the Israeli sections of Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights also noted that the population of Gaza "is extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day," and that a majority of the population remains dependant on international humanitarian food assistance.
The groups also said that in the four months ending in mid-November, the Israeli military had killed more than 300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and that more than half of those killed were unarmed civilians. Sixty-one were children--one of the reasons why Dabbagh and others contend that Gaza is still, in effect, being occupied by the Israeli military.
Israel officials, while expressing regret at the loss of civilian life, have affirmed what they say is Israel's right to defend itself against rocket attacks launched from Gaza.
To those like Dabbagh--who have spent their careers tackling the humanitarian situation within the Palestinian territories and working for a political settlement they say will address the need for justice and security for Palestinians and also guarantee security for Israel--the statements from the Israeli human rights groups are welcome.
But Dabbagh, a courtly, dignified man of 68 whose United Nations tie-clip is a sartorial reminder of his days working with the world body, cannot underline enough how he feels that the continued Israeli and Western policies and the present stalemate--exacerbated by international sanctions since the election of the militant Islamic party Hamas in Palestinian legislative elections almost a year ago--are hurting the day-to-day life of Palestinians. (Adding to tensions are recent incidents like the Dec. 11 attempted assassination of a senior member of the Fatah party in Gaza, an attempt that instead resulted in the deaths of three of the man’s young sons. Such incidents are fueling tensions between Fatah and Hamas, observers say.)
What Dabbagh calls the "continuity of the occupation" harms the ability of the MECC, for example, to get materials shipped into Gaza from sister organizations in the occupied West Bank.
That, in turn, affects the ability of the MECC to continue with such programs as a vocational training program for some 187 young people--a group strikingly idealistic and hopeful, given the massive obstacles placed in the way of humanitarian work in Gaza.
"We want to be of continued service to the people of Gaza, whose needs are not being met by the ministry of health," said Elias Abed Manneh, who works with Dabbagh as the chair of the MECC's committee for refugee work in Gaza, in reference to the problems caused by the sanctions that have drastically cut social services within the territory.
 Girls in a class at Al-Zaytoon School, located in the Jabalyia Refugee Camp in the war-torn Gaza Strip. Photo: Paul Jeffrey/ACT International |
Among the CWS and ACT-supported programs in Gaza are cash grants to some 5,072 families--some 38,042 persons--to assist with food purchases. Another program is providing 92,000 persons with various medical services, including medical treatment at its Gaza clinic, provided at a minimal fee.
Dabbagh and Manneh said they expect the MECC's medical caseload to continue increasing given social service cutbacks elsewhere--and indeed, when Dabbagh showed a visitor the MECC’s facilities recently, the waiting room for medical services was already filling up at an early morning hour.
Talk returned, as it inevitably does in the Palestinian territories, to the politics and tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.
"All we want to do is to live together in peace," Manneh said.
Dabbagh glanced at his colleague and was ever firmer, saying: "A just peace."
In a later response to queries about how the MECC community was faring amid the bout of recent violence, Dabbagh said that while "the MECC family is still OK," he reiterated a call made during the earlier interview, saying while he and others working in humanitarian efforts in Gaza "appreciate all relief assistance provided to our people, we still need to be free and recognized, and live in atmosphere of a just peace with our neighbors on equal footings."
Chris Herlinger, a communications officer for Church World Service and a freelance journalist, was recently in Gaza as a member of a delegation of journalists who won the 2006 Eileen Egan Award for Journalistic Excellence, a prize awarded by the humanitarian organization Catholic Relief Services.
Media Contact:
Lesley Crosson, CWS/New York, 212-870-2676;
Jan Dragin, 781-925-1526;
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