One Shrimp at a Time

Publisher: The Economist
Date of publication: October 12, 2006

A blocked border crossing...
“YOU can't manage a border crossing unilaterally,” says Yoni Dotan, the Israeli director of the Karni crossing on the Israeli-Gazan border. The Palestinians feel that Israel does just that. Between narrow lanes of concrete blocks, put there after Palestinian militants drove a car bomb up to the border wall two years ago and killed six Israelis, a forklift loads pallets of seafood onto conveyor belts, which feed them through the wall into giant X-ray scanners. As the Gazan exporter watches, the invisible Israeli operator shifts the belt backwards, and a pallet of jumbo shrimps falls off the end, spilling them into the dust.

The forklift operator—the only one allowed into the lane under Israeli security rules—sighs, bends down and begins shovelling shrimps and dirt back into the boxes. The problem is that everything is interconnected. The shrimps should be in sealed containers, says Mr Dotan, because leaking fluids can damage the scanners. But the exporter, who cannot afford a refrigerated truck, has to keep his produce fresh in the heat as it waits to be scanned, so he leaves the boxes open and stands at the ready with bags of crushed ice—itself hard enough to get since Israel destroyed Gaza's power plant in June.

The exporter risks losing the whole stock because of Karni's erratic opening hours, which are partly because Mr Dotan will not open the gates unless Palestinian security men show up, and they are sometimes on strike and sometimes lack even the bus fare to get to work, because the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority (PA) is not paying them, because Israel and the world have suspended funds to the PA, because Hamas will not recognise Israel, and so on into ancient history.

Karni handles most of the imported goods and humanitarian supplies that keep Gaza running, and, most crucially for its struggling farmers and businesses, their exports to Israel, the West Bank and the rest of the world. As part of an accord last November, Israel and the PA agreed to raise the export rate through Karni to 150 truckloads a day by the end of 2005 and to 400 by the end of 2006. Yet at the height of last winter's harvest season the rate reached only 70, and since Hamas took power in March, the average has been just seven. On over 120 working days this year, Karni has been closed for exports. Continue reading here>>



DECONSTRUCTION:
In the Economist column, “One Shrimp at a Time,” one can observe the quintessential Palestinian sympathy op-ed which employs one-sided anecdotes to draw general conclusions about the conflict. The article makes an attempt at addressing the wider conflict by applying the cycle of violence cliché, thus conceptually expressing moral equivalence within the Arab-Israeli struggle. The sympathy piece’s sole goal is to skew the wider conflict, evoking only the suffering and tragedies of one side at the expense of the others. This begs the question of the objective of such articles which produce emotions within the reader rather than provide relevant facts and information. In this way, the journalist is misleading the reader by couching facts in a biased context. This failure to provide an accurate context when reporting on the Middle East is at best irresponsible and at worst unethical.