Monday, 31 May 2010

Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about Gaza



By Special to the National Post May 25, 2010 – 9:44 am

By Tom Gross

In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mideast, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)

Indeed the BBC and other prominent Western media regularly lead their viewers and readers astray with accounts of a non-existent “mass humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.

What they won’t tell you about are the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets. Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.

Here, courtesy of the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, is a report on Gaza’s new Olympic-sized swimming pool . (Most Israeli towns don’t have Olympic-size swimming pools. One wonders how an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid builds an Olympic size swimming pool and creates a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?)

If you pop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza. And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).

And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant . In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video, I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.

In a piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, I documented the “after effects” of a previous “emergency Gaza boat flotilla,” when the arrivals were seen afterwards purchasing souvenirs in well-stocked shops. (You can also scroll down here for more pictures of Gaza’s “impoverished” shops.)

But the mainstream liberal international media won’t report on any of this. Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy: if we had their vast taxpayer funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the UK. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.

Of course there is poverty in Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. (When was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?)

But the way that many prominent Western news media are deliberately misleading global audiences and systematically creating the false impression that people are somehow starving in Gaza, and that it is all Israel’s fault, can only serve to increase hatred for the Jewish state – which one suspects was the goal of many of the editors and reporters involved in the first place.

National Post

Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.

Posted in: Full Comment, World Politics Tags: , ,



Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/25/fancy-restaurants-and-olympic-size-pools-what-the-media-won’t-report-about-gaza/#ixzz0pUA9MWoc

May 27, 2010
"The Restaurant and the Swimming Pool"
To hear certain parties tell it, the poor people of Gaza are suffering so horrendously because of the Israeli "siege" or "blockade" that they can barely live. Particularly problematic, we're told, is the refusal of Israel to let in building supplies, so that houses destroyed in the Operation cannot be repaired.
We'll get to those "certain parties" in a moment...
I have already provided information put out by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs that puts the lie to this: Since our Operation Cast Lead, which ended in January 2009, we have permitted approximately a million tons of humanitarian supplies to enter Gaza -- almost a ton per person there.
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You can see a detailing, week by week, of what goes into Gaza here:
According to the spokesman for the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) goods go into Gaza via two different avenues.

Some goods go under the auspices of humanitarian organizations -- UNRWA, World Food Plan, etc. Israel makes every effort to allow through all humanitarian supplies (food and medicines, etc. ) that these organizations seek to bring in -- although sometimes there are items that are questioned or prevented from going in.

Totally aside from the goods transported by humanitarian organizations -- which are distributed to those in greatest need -- are those permitted in commercially. The PA cooperates here in determining what the needs of local merchants are, and those goods are shipped by truck. On an average week, roughly 500 trucks will go into Gaza with such merchandise. Products allowed in include meat, fish and chicken; grains; staples such as sugar, salt, flour and yeast; spices; dairy products; legumes; fresh fruits and vegetables; cooking oil, a variety of other foodstuffs; animal feed; medicines; clothing; and hygienic supplies.

What is notable is that there are also specialty items that are permitted in:
Last November, for example, Israel permitted in 12 new transformers and other pieces of electrical equipment for the power plant in Gaza and 7,000 heads of cattle were imported for the Eid al-Adha holiday. While in December, six advanced water desalination systems were transferred to the Gaza Strip; glass was brought in for home repairs before the onset of winter; 750 tons of aggregate were transferred for maintenance of the North Gaza Wastewater Treatment plant.
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But let's move now beyond even this.
Tom Gross, writing in the National Post (Canada) on Tuesday, describes middle and upper class life in Gaza -- which the media routinely avoid mentioning.
Within this article, Gross mentions two luxury facilities that I want to call to your attention.
One is the Roots Club in Gaza, frequented, says Gross, by UN and NGO personnel, Hamas officials and journalists (who neglect to inform their readers about this place). Nor is this the only nice restaurant in Gaza. See here a promotional video in English for this place. Gross verified its legitimacy:
At about 2 and 1/2 minutes into the video you can even see Hamas's Haniyeh and Fatah's Abbas dining together, apparently unconcerned about starving people.
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And then you have the news about Gaza's first olympic-sized swimming pool, which was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club on May 18. The opening was attended by "Gaza government ministers, members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, leaders of Islamic and national governing bodies." And we know this is so, because Gross secured information on this from the Palestinian Arab news agency Maan:
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One has to ponder how this pool was possible, when the charge is that no construction material is getting into Gaza, and that water is in horribly short supply.
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And so, kol hakavod (well done!) to Gross for this excellent work.

Posted by Britannia Radio at 07:21