Yossi Wolfson’s clear-eyed description of the hafrada regime’s policies in the siege of Gaza and the too-little mentioned exploitation of Gaza’s gas reserves: recommended read. Boldface emphasis is editorial. This article appears in the very worthwhile Challenge magazine, Issue 107, January/February 2008

Gaza City, January 8, 2008. Empty coffins symbolize 62 patients who have died since June because Israel denied them access to medical treatment outside Gaza. Photo by Wissam Nassar

Yossi Wolfson, Economic Warfare in Gaza

NO MORE LIES or twisted tongues. Israel is saying at last what, in the past, it always refused to acknowledge: its war is against the Palestinian population.Until now, in discussions about the separation wall, closures, blockades, house demolition, and other sorts of collective punishment, the State Attorney’s Office lacked the gumption to admit in court that the aim of such measures is to harm civilians. It always came up with convoluted security claims in order to present some vital military necessity for the sake of the War against Terror. Harm to the population was described as a regrettable side effect.

But now a Rubicon has been crossed. This happened after ten human-rights organizations petitioned the High Court on October 28, 2007 against cuts in the supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza. The petitioners claimed that the cuts amount to collective punishment, which is forbidden under international law. The State might have answered that the cuts are a necessary military measure aimed at stopping the production of Qassam rockets. Or it might have tried some other tongue twister. But no. In their response to the petition, Dana Briskman and Gilad Shirman from the State Attorney’s Office announced openly, without blinking an eye, that the cuts’ main purpose is to exert pressure on the economy as a way of influencing Hamas.

Thus the State clamps the arteries of life for 1.5 million Gazans and describes its action as an economic war. Here it infringes a basic principle of the international laws concerning warfare, which distinguish between the civilian population and the armed forces. Read the rest of this entry »

Will central Australia be the new site for world nuclear waste storage, mostly from the US, and serve to displace Aboriginal Australian communities in the Northern Territory outback? An interesting piece from my teaching colleague Alison Broinowski, published in NewMatilda in two parts, speculates about such a possibility.

Recently extended, the north-south railway that cuts vertically through the Australian continent may also be related to the sudden federal government intervention into indigenous communities, Alison writes. The rail link happens to run past remote Aboriginal communities in which Native Title has been suspended by the federal government (ostensibly on welfare grounds which have long existed), and seen as a land-grab.

The strategic significance of the railway extension—built by Halliburton subsidiary KBR—is that it passes between the largest uranium deposits in the world. The vertical rail link across the Australian landmass has long been considered economically unviable, but its construction for transporting loads of radioactive uranium—to as yet unannounced nuclear waste dumps along this axis—would explain its sudden commercial and/ or strategic viability.

In part one, Alison writes:

Always considered uneconomic, the rail link from Alice Springs to Darwin was suddenly found to be viable in 1999. A government/business partnership undertook to build it for $1.3 billion. FreightLink, a consortium of foreign and local investors that owns the railway, with a 50 year contract to run its freight operations, is a joint venture between 11 participants including Kellogg Brown Root (KBR, 36.2 per cent), Barclay Mowlem (13.9 per cent), and John Holland (11.4 per cent). Read the rest of this entry »