A number of years ago, I was asked to meet in Jerusalem with an official from one of the world’s largest charitable organizations, after their Gaza director was arrested for having overseen the diversion (theft) of $50 million in aid to Hamas terrorist projects. The official, who was based in Cyprus, told me that she accompanied other NGO representatives on regular visits with farmers and tours of agricultural sites in Gaza to see that the aid was used as specified. When I raised the issue of how she knew that the farming was not a cover for the underground tunnel network and rocket production facilities, she said something about the honesty on their faces. Later, the NGO claimed that auditors had found no irregularities, however, no report was published, and the government involved has not resumed funding.
This incident is not exceptional. For many years, Gaza has been a major location for an army of international aid providers, with representatives from numerous UN frameworks, NGOs and humanitarian aid agencies, and diplomats. Their reports and campaigns, faithfully echoed by journalists, consistently portray an impoverished Palestinian enclave on the brink of disaster, usually blamed on Israeli policies, including a land and sea blockade. The suffering of innocent children is a frequent theme used to raise donations, which exceed $1 billion annually.
In contrast, almost no one talked about the massive arsenal of rockets and missiles deployed by Hamas and its allies over the years, and the costs involved. This arsenal now has as many as 30,000 offensive weapons, accompanied by rapid-fire reloadable launchers hidden in underground concrete tunnels, and even a collection of explosive cruise missiles powered by Chinese technology, guided by GPS satellites, and carrying 25-pound warheads. To avoid dealing with the reality, many commentators (recently echoed by entertainers John Oliver and Trevor Noah) dismissed the missiles as primitive and harmless firecrackers.
Suddenly, last Monday evening, seven of these not-so-harmless weapons missiles were launched at Jerusalem, as Hamas again saw an opportunity to expand the violence. In the eight days of warfare that have followed so far, 3,350 additional rockets and missiles have been aimed at Israeli cities, including Tel Aviv. The industry behind this arsenal, hidden in tens of miles of concrete-reinforced tunnels in the 141 square-mile Gaza strip (less than half the area of New York City), constitutes Gaza’s main economic investment. As must have been obvious to everyone who bothered to look (or listen), instead of using very limited resources for economic development and to create real jobs, Hamas diverted hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to build a vast war machine.
IN THE FLOOD of reports, press releases and social media posts published by UN agencies and NGOs, this major enterprise went unmentioned. A search of statements by the heads of UNRWA (the unique UN framework created in 1949 ostensibly to assist Palestinian refugees), the UN’s Office for the Coordinator of Humanitarian Affairs, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other NGOs highlights their silence. Most journalists writing about Gaza followed blindly.
It would be a mistake to blame this silence on the lack of information regarding the Gaza missile industry. In the past 14 years since the first rockets struck Israelis along the border and terrorized thousands, NGOs and UN officials needed to work hard to ignore the evidence and avoid connecting the dots.
Since then, these weapons have been launched with increasing frequency into Israel, under the slogan of “Palestinian resistance.” At the end of December 2008, and then again in 2012 and 2014, longer range and more deadly missile attacks from Gaza and Israeli responses added to the destruction. But the eyes of ears of UN and NGO officials filtered what they did not want to see and hear. The pseudo-investigations written by anti-Israel activists and published under the imprimatur of the UN Human Rights Council, (such as the infamous 2009 Goldstone report), continued to ignore Palestinian missiles.
Instead, when Israel attempted to destroy the network of underground tunnels along the Egyptian border used for smuggling weapons, Human Rights Watch falsely labeled this a violation of international law. The same happened when the movements of Palestinian fishing boats were restricted to prevent weapons deliveries by sea. In parallel, aid materials disappeared into the rocket assembly lines, and the concrete provided for housing and other civilian structures was used to build cross-border attack tunnels, as officials from the UN agencies and associated aid organizations again looked away.
Successive Israeli governments also failed to effectively confront the UN agencies, NGOs and diplomats. But now, for millions of citizens targeted and terrorized by these missiles, the red line has been crossed and many are demanding an end to the years of impunity for Hamas and the international organizations involved in or complicit with this ongoing assault. How the current confrontation will finish is still unclear, but the policy of “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” must not be allowed to continue.
The writer is emeritus professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, and heads the Institute for NGO Research in Jerusalem.