Oxfam on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict

Actress Scarlett Johansson’s decision to end her relationship with Oxfam, the British charity, generated a lot of publicity. Most people, however, have little awareness of Oxfam’s distorted portrayal of Israel.

Oxfam currently (Feb. 7, 2014) has on its web site a report by the Association of International Development Agencies, Dream On. It opens with the following statement:

Everyone in the world wishes they had done more with their lives over the years, but not everyone has a blockade standing in their way.

It continues:

Gaza’s blockade is also about wasted time, loss and longing, and aspirations unfulfilled, which are universal themes that speak to the human emotions in us all. In order for people in Gaza to live with dignity and self sufficiency, the blockade must end.

The four page report recites story after story with the same theme:

All I need is a dignified life for me and my family, but the blockade has destroyed my hope.

Gazans are held blameless for their predicament. Gazans elected a terrorist organization that diverts desperately needed international aid to build mile long tunnels into Israel laden with explosives; that launches thousands of rockets into Israel while ignoring the critical needs of its own population; that alienates its powerful Arab neighbor, Egypt, by supporting terrorism there. None of that matters to the Oxfam moralizers, who can’t be bothered to provide a substantive explanation of why the blockade was put into place.

Nor do they mention that the West Bank and Gaza rank above average for all Arab states in the United Nations Human Development Index, higher than neighbor Egypt.

But so what when you can blame Israel’s blockade for shortcomings in Gaza’s pediatric care. The report quotes a Gazan mother who “has found that the kind of care her daughter needs is just not available in Gaza.”

There is no mention of the traffic of thousands of Gazans, including infants, treated in Israeli hospitals for serious conditions, despite the fact that Israel and the Hamas government running Gaza are in a state of war. Even an incident where Wafa al Bis, a Gazan woman treated by Israel for serious burns in a domestic accident, tried to murder her Israeli caregivers with a concealed bomb, did not stop the flow of patients from Gaza.

As far as offering an explanation as to why Israel has imposed the blockade, a footnote at the bottom of page one states, “Citing security concerns, the government of Israel imposed a blockade on Gaza, which officially started on 14 June 2007.” That’s it. Nothing about suicide bombers, nothing about incessant rockets targeting Jewish communities, nothing about Hamas tunnelers kidnapping an Israeli soldier and killing several others. The key to ending the blockade is for the Hamas government to end its terrorism and threats against Israelis. But Oxfam can’t admit that self-evident truth.

While Oxfam moralists wax poetic with moral indignation from their London offices, Israeli doctors and nurses actually provide crucial life-saving services to Gazans.

Here is an another example, an information brochure linked to on the Oxfam site for Gaza. It is completely one-sided.