U.N.helpful in Gaza

The Secretary General has now called on UN members to contribute US$613 million towards temporary short term relief being given to Gazans. The cost of long term relief and reconstruction is going to be considerably greater.

It makes no sense to pour billions of dollars into the reconstruction of Gaza and the attempted rehabilitation of its traumatised citizens in situ with the more than likely possibility that the money spent will once again disappear down the tunnels still left untouched by Israel's bombs or into the Swiss bank accounts of corrupt officials as has occurred so often in the past.

Gaza is a hell hole - and has been so for the last 60 years - whether occupied by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, or Hamas. Its surviving residents have been subjected to inordinate suffering while political solutions have been vainly pursued during that time.

The population of Gaza is 1.5 million, of whom 750,000 are children. Offering them the chance of going to a safer haven permanently - or even temporarily - until an acceptable political solution is found seems to be a far better use of the billions of dollars that will be thrown to the wind in keeping the Gazans confined to Gaza and Hamas in control while that political solution is worked out.

The Secretary-General's escape into fantasyland in believing a political solution could be soon achieved was revealed when he went on to declare:

… we urgently need to bring back this Middle East peace process on track. We have already experienced sufferings and tragedies in 2006 in Lebanon, the situation in Gaza has been a repetition of the failure of this peace process, this is a failure of political will, at the level of people and at the level of leadership, all international community [sic], particularly the Arab countries, should fully support and encourage this peace process on track. As a member of the Quartet, I will fully participate in trying to help the Middle East peace process ...

The United Nations has been a sponsor of the Middle East process - the Roadmap - for the last six years. It has gone nowhere and is dead as a dodo.

Neither the Roadmap nor the Arab Peace Initiative first proposed in 2002 have any chance of succeeding while Arab demands for their successful conclusion require Israel to cede every square metre of the West Bank and Gaza and allow millions of Arabs the right to emigrate to Israel.

In the meantime, the Secretary-General has no better idea for ending the suffering of Gazans than letting them continue to live in Gaza, and continue to endure the tribulations that have plagued them since 1948.

On the January 6, 2009 Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace, said in an interview in the Italian online newspaper Il Sussidiario.net: