This week will mark one month since the BBC’s Gaza reporter Alan Johnston was abducted.
There have been almost daily protests and rallies by journalists across the Palestinian territories demanding his release, including a 24-hour journalists’ strike on March 20.
A week ago an advert placed in the Media Guardian was signed by 300 leading journalists. The NUJ has written to the Palestinian government, which has condemned the abduction as an “unacceptable criminal act”.
As one of the few Western journalists still based in Gaza, Johnston brought much-needed attention to the deteriorating situation in the territory.
Yet he is a victim of the Western/Israeli boycott of the Hamas government, the consequences of which have been almost totally overlooked by the media.
Last year the US and the European Union imposed an economic blockade of the Hamas government, elected in January 2006, accusing it of being a “terrorist” organisation and demanding it recognise the state of Israel. Last week’s meeting of a senior British diplomat with Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh was therefore the first between Haniyeh and a western diplomat since the new government was formed.
The boycott has tipped the Palestinian territories into chaos, bringing about a wave of kidnapping and lawlessness amid appalling poverty – poverty that Johnston himself documented.
A UN human rights envoy recently said Israel is imposing a policy of “controlled strangulation” that is helping to give rise to a failed state on its doorstep. Some 75 percent of Palestinians live in poverty; there is a 65 percent unemployment rate.
Meanwhile Israel has kept up its military assaults and assassinations inside the Palestinian territories. Two Israeli offensives last summer saw four hundred Palestinians killed and some 1,500 injured; three Israeli soldiers were killed. Israel continues to hold between 8,000 and 10,000 Palestinians in its jails.
The turmoil in Gaza has to be seen in this context. The kidnapping and lawlessness are a direct result of criminal western policy to smash Palestinian independence and crush the national movement (just as Russia provoked a similar crisis in Chechnya in 1996-1999 to help justify a new invasion).
Alan Johnston must be freed to carry on his valuable work. And The Palestinian territories must be freed from the boycott, freed from Israeli attacks, and helped to rebuild after the years of occupation, repression and neglect.
Dave Crouch
