floodgates

It has been raining quite heavily here in LA, which it usually does around this time of year, but not usually with quite this intensity or duration. Despite the fact that it does rain really hard at least a couple of times every fall/winter, Los Angeles's desert-city infrastructure is woefully unprepared. After just a day of rain, the storm drain on the street behind my building, which I cross on my way to school, had completely backed up under a clot of pine needles and dead leaves, flooding the street with up to a foot of water.

Israel, it seems, has the same problem. But what an elegant solution they have found! When a dam in southern Israel came dangerously close to overflowing due to heavy rains, the Israelis simply opened the floodgates, sending a wave of water up to five meters deep pouring without warning across the central Gaza Strip into the Mediterranean Sea. People who live along the coast (and fishermen who depend on the sea for their livelihood) woke up to find the waves brown with silt. And hundreds of families in Johr al Dik and Nuseirat, already some of the poorest areas in Gaza, had to flee and watch helplessly as homes, possession and agricultural lands were swamped by rising floodwaters. Because clearly what Gaza needs is more homeless, dispossessed and economically ruined people.

The low-lying central part of Gaza used to be the main area of agricultural production, and the land that was flooded was once planted with fruit and olive trees, which, like all trees, would have slowed the flood waters and prevented soil erosion. But most of this agricultural land has been destroyed by Israel--trees uprooted, irrigation systems torn up by passing tanks, and farmers shot at when they try to replant.

The current debate in Gaza is whether the flood was a calculated move to further punish the population--reminding them, on the anniversary of the end of Operation Cast Lead, that they still live and die at the whim of the Israelis--or just a case of callous disregard for Palestinian life and property. Personally, my money's on the latter, but the former would certainly not surprise me.

Certainly the flood was intentional, in the sense that Israeli civil engineers must have known that when they opened the floodgates, the water would flow downhill into the Mediterranean, and that in between the dam and the Mediterranean was the Gaza Strip. I don't know which disturbs me more: the idea of someone consciously planning new and innovative ways to punish the Gazans, or the idea that any people who happened to live in the path of the water, because they are Palestinian, were seen as nothing more than so much dead leaves clogging Israel's storm drain.