Escape from the Gaza Submarine: Toward Ending an Avoidable Tragedy

Like many foreign visitors before and since, the American journalist A.J. Liebling was fascinated by his trip to the Gaza Strip in 1957. He was especially struck by what a "prison" the place was. He described how 200,000 refugees had fled into Gaza nine years earlier, overwhelming a previous population of around 40,000 that had depended on an agricultural hinterland from which it was now cut off by the 1949 armistice lines designating the newly named Gaza Strip. Liebling wrote that with Israel and Egypt still in a "state of belligerency"¹ after the armistice and with the coastal road from Egypt to Syria blocked with check-points at both ends, it was as "if the French refugees backed up against the Spanish frontier in 1940 had been held ever since within a coastal enclave extending from St. Jean-de-Luz to Bayonne."²

Liebling was writing at the end of Israel's four-month occupation of Gaza during the Sinai campaign in 1956–57, in which Britain, France, and Israel launched a military effort to regain control of the Suez Canal after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized it. Israel had seized Gaza, occupied by Egypt since 1948, but US president Dwight D. Eisenhower forced Israel to withdraw its forces from both the Sinai and the Gaza Strip in March 1957, both of which then reverted to Egyptian control. There are differences between then and now, not least a population more than six times as big. But Liebling would see little reason to modify his judgment that Palestinians in Gaza, both refugee and indigenous, live "like people trapped in a submarine at the bottom of the sea, with an uncertain air supply and no means of egress."³

If anything, this is truer now. After the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel gained control of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, Gazan Palestinians were allowed to enter Israel and the West Bank. Then, tens of thousands of Palestinians from Gaza worked in Israel in construction, farming, and retail. After the outbreak of the first intifada, the Palestinian uprising that started in Gaza in 1987 and spread quickly to the West Bank, Israel began to impose restrictions on Gazans entering Israel. But in 2000, the monthly average workers only entering Israel was still 500,000. By comparison, and after 12 years of blockade and closure, the monthly average of all exits from Gaza in 2018 was around 12,500. It is unlikely that Liebling would be less inclined to describe this as imprisonment than he was more than sixty years ago.

Israel has been systematically separating Gaza from Israel and the West Bank since August 2005, when Ariel Sharon's (prime minister of Israel from 2001 to 2006) government disengaged from Gaza, withdrawing over 8,000 Israeli settlers and the troops protecting them. As Giora Eiland, then the chairman of Israel's National Security Council, explained, disengagement was "meant to separate Israel from the Palestinians both politically and for security purposes, and this requires economic separation as well."⁴

Internally, disengagement benefited Gaza's Palestinians, who jubilantly celebrated the access to the sea that the settlements had so long restricted the residents of Khan Yunis and Rafah from accessing and the dismantling of the hated Abu Houli checkpoint, which bisected the Gaza Strip. Externally, though, it greatly contributed toward Gazans' future isolation, including from their markets in the West Bank and Israel, as they quickly found. The George W. Bush–appointed International Quartet (a group made up of the US, EU, UN, and Russia established to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) envoy James Wolfensohn's plan to exploit Gaza's nurseries and greenhouses left intact by the departing settlers as the nucleus for major growth in Palestinian exports, which would have greatly benefited the Gazan economy, was stillborn. Several of Wolfensohn's ideas even made it into the Access and Movement Agreement that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice negotiated with Israel in November 2005. However, Israel failed to implement key elements of the AMA's far-reaching provisions...