Factory Closings Under Israeli Siege Have Strengthened Islamist Group, Critics Say
By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 13, 2008
GAZA CITY -- Less than a year ago, Abu Hammed worked in a garment factory, sewing pants.
Now he totes a Kalashnikov assault rifle as a Hamas police officer, imposing order in this eerily desolate city on behalf of the armed Islamist movement.
Given a choice, he'd rather be back in the factory.
"If the Israelis opened the crossings again, I would leave the police and become a tailor again," said Abu Hammed, who would give only his nickname for fear of a Hamas reprisal. "The salary is better in the factory."
Yet the factory jobs are long gone. Ten months into an Israeli siege that followed the Hamas takeover of Gaza last June, 90 percent of the factories that once existed in this narrow coastal strip have closed, driving tens of thousands of people out of work. Those who lose their jobs face a stark choice: stay at home and survive on international aid, or try to work for the only employer around that's still hiring -- Hamas.
Although Israel intended for the siege to weaken Hamas, factory owners, workers and international aid officials in Gaza say the rise in unemployment and the dwindling influence of the private sector have had the opposite effect, allowing the group to consolidate its control over the lives of Gaza's 1.5 million people.
"There's no one else to give jobs but Hamas. It's crazy," said Ammar Yazegi, 25, whose family has owned a soda factory in Gaza since 1954. "Hamas is going through a golden period -- total control of Gaza without any restrictions. The siege has saved them."
The Yazegi family factory -- which started as Gaza Cola and is now the official bottler for Pepsi -- is one of the few factories in the strip still open, though probably not for much longer. Like all factories here, it can't get raw materials past the blockade and is facing a shortage of plastic.
The plant operates four hours a day, down from 24. The 30 employees who remain, out of the usual 250, will soon be out of work. Many of the laid-off workers have gone to work in Hamas's police force, Yazegi said, or joined the movement's military wing in its fight against Israel.
The factory underwent a $2 million renovation that was completed last spring, only weeks before the start of the siege. Now most of its gleaming machines sit idle. The factory floor, once a place few would venture without earplugs, is quiet and cavernous.
"At the beginning, we thought the closure would last one or two or four weeks at the most," said Mohammed T. Yazegi, the company chairman and family patriarch. "But unfortunately, we are seeing a closure like none other since the beginning of the occupation."
For this, he said, "we have to blame ourselves. We're giving the Israelis an excuse to do whatever they want."
Like many factory owners, Yazegi said he is sick of the factional fighting that has torn Palestinian society apart in recent years. Hamas won elections in 2006 and eventually entered into a unity government with its rival, the more secular Fatah party. But Hamas fighters routed Fatah in Gaza last June, taking control of the strip and prompting the Israeli embargo.
Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said the economic restrictions imposed on Gaza have been effective in undermining Hamas's power.
"More and more Palestinians understand that Hamas can't deliver," Regev said. "It can't deliver political answers, and it also can't deliver economic answers."
Regev said security considerations are also behind the embargo, because Israel can't afford to risk weaponry being shipped through the crossings: "Can anyone expect Israel to have a business-as-usual relationship with Gaza when you have rockets being fired every day and attacks like the one we had this past week?"
That attack, a raid by Palestinian gunmen at the Nahal Oz fuel depot, claimed the lives of two Israeli civilians. But it also raised questions about whether Hamas, which publicly demands that Israel open the crossings, really wants the siege to end. Although the raid was not carried out by Hamas, the organization praised the attack on Gaza's sole fuel source. Israel responded by closing Nahal Oz indefinitely, a move likely to exacerbate an already severe fuel shortage.
"Hamas and their supporters are the only ones who don't get hurt by this siege. They have jobs. They're working," said Sabari al-Naggar, a 36-year-old father of five who lost his garment factory job. "It's all the rest of us who have been destroyed."
Naggar used to make 70 shekels a day, or about $20. Now he is among the more than 80 percent of Gaza residents who live below the poverty line and rely on international aid, according to U.N. statistics. The United Nations estimated in December that 75,000 of the 110,000 workers in Gaza's private sector had lost their jobs since last June.
Naggar could receive money from Hamas in addition to the food aid he gets from the United Nations. But he refuses to accept help from a group he despises.
Without a job and without any prospects, Naggar does what many in Gaza do these days: nothing.
"We sit out in front of the house, we have lunch, we chat, we play cards, and then we go to sleep," he said.
It's not just Naggar. Without raw materials such as concrete or basic supplies like gasoline, very little gets done. Gaza City, one of the more densely populated places on earth, is marked by canyons of abandoned, partially completed construction projects. On some blocks, the silence is broken only by the braying of a donkey or the turn of a rusty bicycle wheel.
For the children who make up more than half the strip's population, there are few examples of people working -- apart from the Hamas police officers who patrol the streets.
"For a Gazan youngster, the question is what do you want to be when you grow up," said Conal Urquhart, a U.N. humanitarian affairs officer based in Gaza. "Your options are very limited."
Hassan al-Hayek started working when he was 10, sweeping the shop floor at a factory that produced paving stones. Now, 52 years later, he owns five such factories but is out of work for the first time in his life.
"If I sell all my factories and all my property, I still won't be able to repay what I owe to the banks," he said, running his fingers through thinning hair. "This is my whole life's work. And now, at the end, I'm being ruined."
Mohammed Abu Dan followed the same path, from worker to owner. His garment factory was once the largest in Gaza, churning out 4,000 pairs of pants a day -- all of which went to Israel, where customers eagerly scooped them up for relatively low prices.
The factory -- ensconced in a graceful old home with high ceilings and semicircular windows -- looks today exactly as it did in June on the day the siege began.
Pants missing a leg lie unfinished on the sewing machines. Nearby, dozens of plastic bags are stuffed with pairs ready to be sold, if Abu Dan could just get them across the border and into Israel. Until then, he comes here every day, just to look.
"I consider this factory a cemetery," he said. "Someone I loved very much is buried here."
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