EXCERPT:
Everyone in Gaza finds themselves entangled in the multiple prongs of what they call the “menacing mechanism”. International aid workers, seeking to improve Gazans’ shattered lives, find their own movements more restricted and their own plans for reconstruction stalled.
“We are all strangled by the mechanism too,” says one senior figure working on aid coordination. “We are all hanging on the words of Major Elrom,” says another, referring the Or Elrom, the Israeli woman major, who implements the mechanism at Erez check point. She says the mechanism will work and is the only way to deal with a “terrorist entity’ – though like most other Israelis she has never been inside Gaza herself. The major now has more power than John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and certainly more than Tony Blair, who, as middle east peace envoy for the ‘quartet group’ (the US, UN EU and Russia) has not even been to Gaza to see the damage, for security reasons. “He has no balls,” said a senior Palestinian minister. Moreover, grand ideas of peace once dreamt up by statesmen have shrivelled into a “nasty mechanism”. “Everything has to go through the Israeli window. It’s Kafka,” says Raji Sourani, the human rights activist. “It’s the Stasi,” says Avishai Margalit, professor emeritus of philosophy at Hebrew University. “It’s all about control.”
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