The health indicators are telling: about a quarter of essential drugs and a third of essential medical supplies were unavailable in the Gaza Strip in October 2007. Less than half of Gaza's food import needs are currently being met. Fuel reserves are almost at zero after punitive cuts by the Israeli government began last month. And with diesel-run water-pumps unable to function, tens of thousands of Gazans are without access to fresh drinking water. Everything considered "non-essential" has disappeared from supermarket shelves (including chocolates, as one friend half-jokingly lamented).
It is as though depriving a nation of medicines and fuel and freedom of movement and sanity will somehow make them turn against their rulers. And as though providing them with a trickle of "essential" supplies every few weeks is going to exonerate those imposing and supporting the siege. Or sustain the besieged just enough so that they don't wither and die; because somehow, the onus is on them to undo all of this, and they need all the energy they can get.
Gaza's isolation has also come full circle this year. Travelling in and out of the occupied coastal territory has always been an exercise in the impossible, but now, it's no longer an option that can even be exercised, in whatever degree of difficulty.
We Gazans stuck on the outside cannot return to our homes. The noose continues to tighten, even when we thought there was no more room to tighten it.
I was in Gaza through June. My son was with me. When I finished my work there, I left after a gruelling 48-hour journey across Rafah Crossing along with my family, who were coming to the US to visit my brothers. That was the last day Rafah opened this year.
In fact, both my family and myself have been unable to return to Gaza since that time. No, we don't carry foreign passports (and even if we did, there is no way in unless you are affiliated with a humanitarian organisation). We carry PA "passports" (Passport to where? What good is a passport that can't even get you back home?) We are residents of Gaza. And we have nowhere to return to now. The only way in to Gaza is the Rafah Crossing. And it is not controlled by Egypt or by the Palestinians, as many assume. It is, and always has been, even after disengagement, controlled by Israel.
What do rockets or tunnels or elections have to do with letting people return to their homes? Or with allowing students and the ill and even the average human being with no pressing concern, to leave and live their lives?
If one can say anything definitive about this year, it is that people's attitudes in Gaza (and the West Bank and East Jerusalem for that matter) about the future have changed. They no longer believe in the myth of two states, and very likely, the west's call for democracy. This is not to say they don't want peace. They just no longer believe "peace", as defined and promoted by, well, virtually all the major powers that have a stake in it, is possible. Is peace living in two states, three territories, fragmented and divided by Israeli colonies and encircled by an enormous barrier, all of whose borders are still ultimately controlled by Israel and for whose security you, the occupied, are responsible? Is it not being able to freely pray, think, move, live?
According to a poll by Near East Consulting more Palestinian than ever before think not. In fact, 70% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem now support a one-state solution in historic Palestine, where Muslims, Christians and Jews live together with equal rights and responsibilities.
This is not a state that prefers and attempts to sustain its Jewish population at the expense of its Palestinian ones.
What has also changed is the Israeli government's recognition of this reality and their frank discourse surrounding it. Only two days after the theatrics of Annapolis, Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, warned about the consequences of facing a struggle for one state: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished," he declared ominously in an interview with Haaretz.
It doesn't matter, then, how this Palestinian state will be fashioned, or what it will look like, so long as it is fashioned; for the sake of demographics alone.
His statement - similar to one he made in 2003 - complemented by his call for Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to recognise Israel as a purely Jewish state, as though the Muslims and Christians living there were aliens, is essentially an acknowledgment not only of the untenable nature and the inequity of the so-called two-state solution and everything it entails, but also of the increasing inevitability of a one-state solution. As some commentators have noted, it is no longer an option up for debate; it is the new reality.
Israel in 2007 continued with its attempts to create its own realities on the ground to counter this phenomenon. (It also ironically continues to render a two-state solution a practical impossibility as it impedes any future plans to divide the city.) Earlier this month, its housing ministry gave the go-ahead for a new illegal settlement to be built in occupied East Jerusalem, with the deputy mayor affirming that he sees "no problem in building all-Jewish neighbourhoods" (the housing minister has since backtracked, but plans have not been totally scrapped).
So if anything has changed in 2007, perhaps it is the global complacency and indifference towards Gaza and what is being done to its people with such purpose. And perhaps this is the most troubling aspect of it all, not that it is happening, nor even that it is happening so methodically, but rather that we, the collective world governments, mass media, and yes, Abbas, no longer seem to find it so morally troubling. After all, Gaza is now a hostile territory. So anything goes.