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"Even during the winter agricultural season, when Israel allowed the export of agricultural produce, the quantities were economically negligible: an average of two trucks per day, compared to the 400 trucks a day agreed upon in the 2005 Agreement on Movement and Access.
"Israel has banned completely goods destined for Israel and the West Bank, even though prior to 2007, 85% of the goods leaving Gaza were sold to Israel and the West Bank." [Emphasis in original.]
In other words, the situation for Gazans remains horribly bleak, although perhaps slightly less bleak now that Egypt is looking the other way on the smuggling of concrete, steel beams and other construction material.
Under international pressure -- brought about partly by earlier challenges to the four-year-old sea blockade -- Israel also has lightened up somewhat on the land transport of some goods.
But Dershowitz's slanted argument is offensive for other reasons. Arguing that some people in the Middle East might be worse off than the Gazans is reminiscent of the claims by white South Africans that "their" blacks were better off than some blacks living in poorer parts of Africa, thus justifying apartheid.
Or the neocon musings in the United States some years back that slavery wasn't so bad because Africans who were captured by European slavers and forcibly shipped to the New World had a chance for a better life -- more so than Africans who weren't lucky enough to be put in chains, crowded into foul slave ships (where many died), sold to plantation owners in a strange land, and then be subjected to whippings, rapes, endless humiliations and lynching. Yes, the "upside" of slavery.
To tout a couple of "luxury hotels" being built in Gaza, some children at the beach and the possibility that some other Arabs might be more miserable than the Gazans -- as an excuse for the entrapment and collective punishment of 1.6 million people -- is the same kind of rationalizing on behalf of injustice.
As for Dershowitz's insults toward me and the other passengers on our Boat to Gaza, the old saying surely applies: "Names can never harm you." But we would all be well advised to keep a keen eye peeled for future sticks and stones.
We U.S. boaters have just begun; we will get to Gaza. But watch out for Israeli-sponsored provocations, which could become the prelude to even more violence in the months ahead.
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