The UN Security Council rejected the PLO request for full membership to the wider United Nations, stating that the legal threshold to become a state had not been reached—specifically, that Palestine had not fulfilled the condition of becoming a “peace loving” entity, and lacked effective governmental control over the Gaza Strip.11
Despite the Security Council’s rejection, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly the next year to upgrade Palestine’s position in the UN from “observer entity” to “non-member observer state.”12 The change granted Palestine the ability to join international organizations and specialized UN agencies such as the World Trade Organization and the International Criminal Court. In April 2014, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas used this status to sign letters of accession to fifteen multilateral treaties and conventions, bringing Palestine closer to statehood in the eyes of international law. Yet Palestine is still without the power to vote in the UN General Assembly and its rights to use the International Criminal Court and other international bodies have barely been tested.
While full membership as a state recognized by the UN remains elusive, international recognition of Palestine as a state has progressed significantly. More than 130 countries, comprising 75 percent of the world’s population, recognize the “state of Palestine,” and have accorded it diplomatic status. Despite these political victories, the most important obstacle to full statehood remains in place—the continued Israeli military occupation of Palestine. The Israeli military has prevented the formation of borders for the Palestinian state and maintains control over Palestine’s economy, land use, utilities, use of resources, and the movement of its goods.
THE PATH TO STATEHOOD
The legal ambiguities that the Israeli occupation has brought to Palestinian statehood have also created an ambiguous situation on the ground. The borders of the Palestinian state are not under the control of the Palestinian government, and their final status has been delegated to political negotiations. The Palestinian president and the Palestine Authority cannot fully carry out their duties in the face of de facto Israeli control. Palestinian citizens’ movements are obstructed by the Israeli barrier wall, checkpoints, and Israeli-controlled crossings into and out of Palestine. These obstructions also block the 7 million Palestinian refugees—70 percent of the worldwide Palestinian population—from returning to their homes. As many as 500,000 Israeli citizens, generally referred to as settlers, have moved into illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank area of Palestine, assuming control of key land areas, thoroughfares, water, and natural resources. And the declared capital of Palestine, East Jerusalem, is not in Palestinian hands—it has been annexed by Israel, pulled within Israeli borders and behind Israeli barrier walls. These conditions on the ground demonstrates how the “statehood” of Palestine is not yet fully substantiated. While most of the basic elements that define a state under international law are present—a permanent population, a government or political authority, and a (partial) capacity to enter in relations with others states—critical factors such as “a defined territory and borders” and the full capacity to carry out the UN Charter have yet to be established.
While international law supports Palestinian statehood, and most of the international community has recognized the “state of Palestine,” not one member state of the UN, nor the UN Security Council as a whole, has taken any effective steps to end Israel’s occupation—the main obstacle to effective Palestinian statehood. Their inaction not only prevents a viable peace from being established in the Middle East but also erodes the effectiveness of international law and diplomacy as a model for justice.
Allegra Pacheco is a U.S.-born lawyer currently working in the occupied Palestinian territories. A graduate of Columbia University School of Law, she is admitted to both the New York and Israeli bars. She has litigated Palestinian human rights cases in front of the Israeli Supreme Court and has worked in the United Nations. She is also married to Abdelrahman Al-Ahmar, one of the narrators in this book. For Abdelrahman’s story, see page 75.
1 For more on the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate of Palestine, see Appendix I, page 295.
2 The United Nations General Assembly is the body of the UN comprised of all member states and its resolutions reflect the common position of the international community. It does not have enforcement powers like the UN Security Council.
3 UN Resolution 194 reaffirmed the basic international law principle of the right of every person to return to his home. See Article 13(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
4 The word “all” territories was omitted from the English version.
5 Notably, UN SC Resolution 237 (14 June 1967) called on Israel “to facilitate the return of those inhabitants who have fled the areas since the outbreak of hostilities.”
6 For more on the Six-Day War, see Appendix I, page 295.
7 The UN Security Council is often considered the highest body of the UN—it is charged with enforcing international law, and its resolutions on peacekeeping, sanctions, and the authorization of international military actions bind member nations to their international responsibilities.
8 A/RES/3236 (XXIX) 22 November 1974.
9 For more information on the PLO, see the Glossary, page 304.
10 See UNGA Res 2672 (1970), UN GA Res 3236, UN GA Res 2649.
11 See the International Court of Justice in 1948 which determined five additional criteria for states seeking full United Nations membership: A candidate must be: (1) a state; (2) peace-loving; (3) must accept the obligations of the Charter; (4) must be able to carry out these obligations; (5) must be willing to do so.
12 The vote was 138 in favor to 9 against (Canada, Czech Republic, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia (Federated States of), Nauru, Panama, Palau, and the United States), with 41 abstentions.
IV. GAZA’S TUNNEL-BASED ECONOMY
by Nicolas Pelham
This essay is adapted from “Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon: The Unintended Dynamics of Israel’s Siege,” which first appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies in 2012, and has been updated by the author to reflect developments in the time since its publication. The full version of the 2012 essay can be found on the website of the Institute for Palestine Studies, www.palestine-studies.org.
Until very recently, visitors approaching the Rafah border crossing from Gaza to Egypt could be forgiven for thinking they had stepped back in time to the 1948 Nakba.1 On the southern reaches of the town, the horizon was interrupted by hundreds of white tents flapping in the wind. The tents sheltered the mouths of hundreds of tunnels, which since 2007 have played a critical role in providing a lifeline for Gazans hit by a punishing siege.
Beneath the awnings, thousands of workers shoveled heavy materials for Gaza’s reconstruction. Front-end loaders plowed through the sands, loading juggernauts with gravel and enveloping the entire zone in dust clouds. Tanker trucks filled with gasoline from underground reservoirs; customs officials weighed trucks and issued the tax vouchers required to exit.
The ground that Israel leveled in 2004 to create a barren corridor separating Gaza from Egypt was abuzz with activity on and under the surface, as Gazans operated a tunnel complex that became the driver of Gaza’s economy and the mainstay of its governing Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas.
THE FIRST WALL, THE FIRST TUNNEL
For millennia, Rafah—which sits today where Gaza meets Egypt—was the first stopping place for merchants crossing the desert from Africa to Asia. Israel’s establishment in 1948 did not sever the tie, for Gaza was administered by Egypt until Israel’s 1967 occupation. Even after, Bedouins crossed the border unimpeded, continuing to mingle and marry. Only in 1981, when Egypt and Israel demarcated their frontier along Gaza’s southern edge as part of their recent peace treaty, did separation really set in.
No sooner had the agreement’s implementation divided Rafah between Israel and Egypt than Bedouin clans straddling the ten-mile border began burrowing underneath, particularly at the midpoint where the earth is softest. To avoid detection, Gazans dug their tunnels from the basements of their houses to a depth of about fifty feet, headed south for a few hundred feet, and then resurfaced on the Egyptian side of the border, often in a relative’s house, grove, or chicken coop.
Israel’s first recorded discovery of a tunnel was in 1983. By the end of that decade, tunnel operators were importing such basics as processed cheese, subsidized in Egypt and taxed in Israel, and probably some contraband as well, including drugs, gold, and weapons.
Israel’s “soft quarantining” of Gaza—the steadily tightening restrictions on the movement of persons and goods into Israel—began with the Oslo peace process and in preparation for the establishment in the Strip of the Palestinian Authority in 1994. After Oslo’s signing, Israel built a barrier around Gaza.
Though access continued through Israel’s terminals, periodic closures led Gazans to seek alternatives. When the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out in September 2000, protesters took the perimeter barrier as one of their first targets.2 But by June 2001, Israel had replaced it with a higher, grimmer, more impenetrable upgrade. Frequent lockdowns at Israel’s terminals and the destruction of Gaza’s seaport and airport in 2001, coupled with the militarization of the intifada, intensified the drive for outlets south.
Hence the expansion and upgrading of the tunnels, which for the first time served as safety valves for wholesalers to alleviate the quarantine’s artificially created shortages.
ISRAEL’S BLOCKADE, 2006
Given their quest for weapons and the need for funds to finance operations during the Intifada, Palestinian political factions operated the longest and deepest tunnels. The cash-strapped PA sought to co-opt clans along the border, where tunneling was easiest. This fusion of security and business interests, of militia activity and private entrepreneurship, was to become a hallmark of future development.
Successive Israeli military operations aimed at defeating the Second Intifada and widening the buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt. Israel also targeted the tunnels. In the lead-up to implementing its unilateral Gaza withdrawal plan, Israel razed some 1,500 Palestinian homes within a 325-foot-wide cordon sanitaire (the Philadelphi corridor) between Rafah and the border, and reinforced it with a twenty-three-foot-high wall. Egypt’s Mubarak regime largely acquiesced in the wall’s construction, hoping it would protect his realm from a spillover of the Intifada and the suicide bombing that was threatening lucrative Egyptian tourist resorts along the Sinai Peninsula’s riviera on the Red Sea. In addition, Egypt feared that Israel’s withdrawal would leave it with responsibility for Gaza’s 1.7 million inhabitants and disconnect the territory from the West Bank, thereby ending Arab aspirations for an integral Palestinian state.
In January 2006, four months after Israel completed its Gaza pullout, Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections. Israel responded by systematically tightening its borders. On March 12, 2006, while Hamas was in negotiations to form a unity government, Israel closed Erez terminal to Gazan laborers in Israel, who once constituted 70 percent of Gaza’s workforce. In June 2006, when the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian militants (and spirited away by tunnel), Israel shut down the Karni terminal, Gaza’s primary crossing for goods (already closed for half of the previous six months). Israel also prevented the use of the Rafah terminal for passenger traffic and severely restricted access for the European monitoring mission there.
Israel’s array of restrictions on trade, coupled with the need to mitigate the threat of punitive Israeli air strikes targeting the tunnel zone, quickly spurred Palestinians to develop deeper and longer tunnels spanning the width of the Israeli-bulldozed buffer and less vulnerable to sabotage. The tunnel network continued to grow, and infrastructure improved. Even so, the tunnels were ill-prepared for the surge in traffic generated by the near-hermetic seal imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt when, in June 2007, Hamas seized control of the Strip, disbanded Fatah’s forces, and chased out its leaders.
INDUSTRIAL-SCALE BURROWING, 2007
Hamas’s summer 2007 military takeover of the Strip marked a turning point for the tunnel trade. The siege, already in place, was tightened. Egypt shut the Rafah terminal. Israel designated Gaza “a hostile entity” and, following a salvo of rocket fire on its border areas in November 2007, severed fuel imports and cut food supplies by half. In January 2008, after rockets were fired at Sderot, Israel announced a total blockade on fuel, banning all but seven categories of humanitarian supplies. As gasoline supplies dried up, Gazans abandoned cars on the roadside and bought donkeys.
Under Israeli blockade at sea and a combined Egyptian-Israeli siege on land, Gaza’s humanitarian crisis threatened Hamas’s rule. As the siege intensified, employment in Gazan manufacturing plummeted from 35,000 to 860 by mid-2008, and Gaza’s gross domestic product fell by a third in real terms from its 2005 levels (compared to a 42 percent increase in the West Bank over the same period).
