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CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
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"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
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a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
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Israel is not content with its occupation
and total military domination of Palestine. No, Israel has proven
that it wants to assure the Palestinians continue to live in
the most dire poverty, a poverty created by a near-total lack
of affordable energy. That truth was made clear by the Israeli
military's recent bombing of the Gaza City power plant, the only
electric power station inside Palestinian territory.
By using warplanes to launch
nine missiles at the power plant a facility with no military
value -- the Israelis have assured that the Palestinians in Gaza
and the West Bank have no electric generating capacity of their
own. That's not to say the power plant was huge. It wasn't. The
plant had a rated capacity of just 140 megawatts, far less than
what the residents of Gaza need to be self-sufficient. But the
plant wasn't even operating at capacity. In fact, it had been
producing just 70 megawatts of power due to poor management by
the Palestinian authorities, who hadn't built enough power lines
to take all of the power the plant can generate.
By bombing the plant, the Israelis
cut power to 65 percent of the Gaza Strip, a region that is one
of the most impoverished in the Middle East. By destroying the
plant, the Israelis also decimated one of Palestine's most valuable
companies, the Palestine Electric Company, whose shares are traded
on the Palestine Stock Exchange. Further, the Israelis have destroyed
any chance for industry in Gaza to grow.
It is axiomatic among the world's
economies: as electricity consumption increase, so does wealth.
Gazans are impoverished, in large part, because they don't have
enough electricity. Residents in Gaza consume just 654 kilowatt
hours of electricity per year or about one-tenth of what
Israelis consume. The average Israeli consumes about 6,183 kilowatt
hours of power per year,
a rate that places Israel 27th among the world's countries in
terms of power use. By comparison the residents of Gaza rank
number 136 among the world's countries in per capita power use,
a status that places them behind residents of Peru. (For comparison,
the U.S. per capita electric consumption is about 12,406 kilowatt
hours per year.)
Further, each resident of Israel
has some 1,600 watts of installed generating capacity. Before
the bombing of the power plant, the Palestinians had just 35
watts of electric generating capacity per capita. Now, they have
zero.
By destroying the power plant,
the Israelis also destroyed any chance that Gaza will have sufficient
water supplies any time soon. One of the original objectives
of the $100 million power plant project, which was launched in
the late 1990's, thanks to encouragement from the Clinton Administration,
was to connect it to a desalination plant. That desalination
plant never got off the ground. Nor was the power plant able
to begin operation after it was completed. The Al-Aqsa Intifada
kept the plant shuttered for about two years after it was completed.
The plant finally started operations in March of 2004, due mainly
to the determination and financial commitment of the Athens-based
construction giant CCC, which was founded several decades ago
by Said Khoury, who was born in Safad, in northern Palestine.
When it comes to Gaza's water
supply, the only option is large-scale desalination. And that
process requires huge amounts of energy. As Ishai Menuchin, a
researcher for Oxfam who works in Jerusalem told me, when it
comes to Palestine and Israel, "the issues of water and
energy go hand-in-hand."
In addition to providing fresh
water, the Gaza power plant was supposed to be fired with natural
gas gas that was to come from Gaza Marine-1, a major gas
field located a few miles off the Gaza coast that was discovered
by BG in 1999. But the Israelis have prevented the Palestinians
from building a pipeline that would have allowed them to use
their own gas. Instead, the Gaza plant has had to use fuel oil
imported from where else? Israel. The gas in the
Gaza field remains untapped, making it one of the biggest stranded
gas fields in the Middle East.
While Gaza remains stuck, the
Israelis have begun operating one of the world's largest desalination
plants in Ashkelon, located on the Israelis coast just a few
miles north of Gaza. The plant has a capacity of 100 million
cubic meters (26.4 billion gallons) per year. The project, a
joint venture between French water giant Vivendi and Israeli
interests, includes a gas-fired power plant with 80 megawatts
of capacity. The plant uses gas from an offshore field located
in Israeli waters.
Last year, during a visit to Ramallah, Omar Kitanneh, the deputy
minister of energy and natural resources for the Palestinian
National Authority, told me that "Like any country, we want
to have energy independence." But the Palestinians will
never have energy independence nor will they have their
own electric power plants -- without the approval of the Israelis.
And by bombing the Gaza power plant, the Israelis have made it
clear that they intend to keep the Palestinians in the dark and
in grinding poverty for as long as they please.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
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power per year,
a rate that places Israel 27th among the world's countries in
terms of power use. By comparison the residents of Gaza rank
number 136 among the world's countries in per capita power use,
a status that places them behind residents of Peru. (For comparison,
the U.S. per capita electric consumption is about 12,406 kilowatt
hours per year.) 
