Israel said the blockade was necessary to weaken Hamas. But critics say the blockade constituted collective punishment against Gaza's population of more than 1.5 million.
A US diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks last year quoted Israeli diplomats as saying they wanted to "keep Gaza's economy on the brink of collapse".
Gisha said: "The official goal of the policy was to wage 'economic warfare' which would paralyse Gaza's economy and, according to the defence ministry, create pressure on the Hamas government."
"Why didn't the Palestinians use all that time and energy to do X?" is always stated from this blind - seemingly deliberately blind - refusal to acknowledge how much of Gaza is kept running by the continued miraculous blood and sweet and genius engineering skills of Palestinian prisoners.
If not for these folks working night and day to keep their families and neighbors alive, Gaza would have succumbed to the brutality of the Israeli occupation decades ago. What Sarah is ultimately criticizing isn't Palestine's refusal to build and innovate and capitalize in the face of adversity. What she casually dismisses is their refusal to die. Their refusal not to preserver. Their refusal to surrender to the tanks and the snipers and the bulldozers.
Sarah Silverman wouldn't last five fucking days behind the fences of Gaza. She'd be starving inside of a week, while her neighbors were hustling to enact the kind of IRL prison break her washed up ass would have fucking loved to get a cameo in the epic movie retelling of. She watches Palestinians spin straw into gold and bemoans their lack of entrepreneurship? Absolutely shameless.
Every time I hear this claim about Hamas spending all of Palestine's money on... uh... jerry-rigged hang gliders and scrap rockets... all I can think of is Felix coming back again and again to Israeli's policy of counting how many calories they let into Gaza, explicitly for the purpose of gradually starving the region's residents
"Why didn't the Palestinians use all that time and energy to do X?" is always stated from this blind - seemingly deliberately blind - refusal to acknowledge how much of Gaza is kept running by the continued miraculous blood and sweet and genius engineering skills of Palestinian prisoners.
If not for these folks working night and day to keep their families and neighbors alive, Gaza would have succumbed to the brutality of the Israeli occupation decades ago. What Sarah is ultimately criticizing isn't Palestine's refusal to build and innovate and capitalize in the face of adversity. What she casually dismisses is their refusal to die. Their refusal not to preserver. Their refusal to surrender to the tanks and the snipers and the bulldozers.
Sarah Silverman wouldn't last five fucking days behind the fences of Gaza. She'd be starving inside of a week, while her neighbors were hustling to enact the kind of IRL prison break her washed up ass would have fucking loved to get a cameo in the epic movie retelling of. She watches Palestinians spin straw into gold and bemoans their lack of entrepreneurship? Absolutely shameless.