[A-List] Watching the Gazan Fiasco

["Saifedean Ammous" <saifedean@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello;

This is a very interesting and sobering article about the supposed brave
peace steps taken by the Israeli government, headed by the convicted war
criminal Ariel Sharon.

It is perhaps the most disgusting feature of the world today, that Israel's
oppression, persecution and apartheid system is allowed to continue while
being praised as steps for peace.

Saif



Watching the Gazan Fiasco

The Shame of It All


By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN



A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza
Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their
illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create
imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and
cantonization of the Palestinians.

There was never the slightest reason for Israel to send in the army to
remove these settlers. The entire operation could have been managed, without
the melodrama necessary for a media frenzy, by providing them with a fixed
date on which the IDF would withdraw from inside the Gaza Strip. A week
before, all the settlers will quietly have left ­with no TV cameras, no
weeping girls, no anguished soldiers, no commentators asking cloying
questions of how Jews could remove other Jews from their homes, and no more
trauma about their terrible suffering, the world's victims, who therefore
have to be helped to kick the Palestinians out of the West Bank.

The settlers will relocate to other parts of Israel ­ and in some cases to
other illegal settlements in the West Bank ­handsomely compensated for their
inconvenience. Indeed, each Jewish family leaving the Gaza Strip will
receive between $140,000 and $400,000 just for the cost of the home they
leave behind. But these details are rarely mentioned in the tempest of
reporting on the "great confrontation" and "historical moment" brought to us
by Sharon and the thieving, murderous settler-culture he helped create.

On ABC's Nightline Monday night, a reporter interviewed a young, sympathetic
Israeli woman from the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim - a girl with
sincerity in her voice, holding back tears. She doesn't view the soldiers as
her enemy, she says, and doesn't want violence. She will leave even though
to do so is causing her great pain. She talked about the tree she planted in
front of her home with her brother when she was three; about growing up in
the house they were now leaving, the memories, and knowing she could never
return; that even if she did, everything she knew would be gone from the
scene. The camera then panned to her elderly parents sitting somberly amid
boxed-up goods, surveying the scene, looking forlorn and resigned. Her
mother was a kindergarten teacher, we are told. She knew just about all of
the children who grew up here near the sea.

In the 5 years of Israel's brutal suppression of the Palestinian uprising
against the occupation, I never once saw or heard a segment as long and with
as much sentimental, human detail as I did here; never once remember a
reporter allowing a sympathetic young Palestinian woman, whose home was just
bulldozed and who lost everything she owned, tell of her pain and sorrow, of
her memories and her family's memories; never got to listen to her reflect
on where she would go now and how she would live. And yet in Gaza alone more
than 23,000 people have lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers and bombs
since September 2000 -- often at a moment's notice ­ on the grounds that
they "threatened Israel's security." The vast majority of the destroyed
homes were located too close to an IDF military outpost or illegal
settlement to be allowed to continue standing. The victims received no
compensation for their losses and had no place waiting for them to relocate.
Most ended up in temporary UNRWA tent-cities until they could find shelter
elsewhere in the densely overcrowded Strip, a quarter of whose best land was
inhabited by the 1% of the population that was Jewish and occupying the land
at their expense.

Where were the cameramen in May 2004 in Rafah when refugees twice over lost
their homes again in a single night's raid, able to retrieve nothing of what
they owned? Where were they when bulldozers and tanks tore up paved streets
with steel blades, wrecked the sewage and water pipes, cut electricity
lines, and demolished a park and a zoo; when snipers shot two children, a
brother and sister, feeding their pigeons on the roof of their home? When
the occupying army fired a tank shell into a group of peaceful demonstrators
killing 14 of them including two children? Where have they been for the past
five years when the summer heat of Rafah makes life so unbearable it is all
one can do to sit quietly in the shade of one's corrugated tin roof --
because s/he is forbidden to go to the sea, ten minutes' walking distance
from the city center? Or because if they ventured to the more open spaces
they became walking human targets? And when their citizens resisted, where
were the accolades and the admiring media to comment on the "pluck," the
"will" and "audacity" of these "young people"?

On Tuesday, 16 August, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that more than 900
journalists from Israel and around the world are covering the events in
Gaza, and that hundreds of others are in cities and towns in Israel to cover
local reactions. Were there ever that many journalists in one place during
the past 5 years to cover the Palestinian Intifada?

Where were the 900 international journalists in April 2002 after the Jenin
refugee camp was laid to waste in the matter of a week in a show of pure
Israeli hubris and sadism? Where were the 900 international journalists last
fall when the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza lay under an Israeli siege and
more than 100 civilians were killed? Where were they for five years while
the entire physical infrastructure of the Gaza Strip was being destroyed?
Which one of them reported that every crime of the Israeli occupation ­ from
home demolitions, targeted assassinations and total closures to the murder
of civilians and the wanton destruction of commercial and public property-
increased significantly in Gaza after Sharon's "Disengagement" Plan - that
great step toward peace - was announced?

Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be covering the many
non-violent protests by Palestinians and Israelis against the Apartheid
Wall? ­Non-violent protesters met with violence and humiliation by Israeli
armed forces? Where are the hundreds of journalists who should be reporting
on the economic and geographic encirclement of Palestinian East Jerusalem
and of the bisection of the West Bank and the subdivision of each region
into dozens of isolated mini-prisons? Why aren't we being barraged by
outraged reports about the Jewish-only bypass roads? About the hundreds of
pointless internal checkpoints? About the countless untried executions and
maimings? About the torture and abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons?

Where were these hundreds of journalists when each of the 680 Palestinian
children shot to death by Israeli soldiers over the last 5 years was laid to
rest by grief-stricken family members? The shame of it all defies words.

Now instead report after report announces the "end to the 38 year old
occupation" of the Gaza Strip, a "turning point for peace" and the news that
"it is now illegal for Israelis to live in Gaza." Is this some kind of joke?

Yes, it is "illegal for Israelis to live in the Gaza Strip" as colonizers
from another land. It has been illegal for 38 years. (If they wish to move
there and live as equals with the Palestinians and not as Israeli citizens
they may do so.)

Sharon's unilateral "Disengagement" plan is not ending the occupation of
Gaza. The Israelis are not relinquishing control over the Strip. They are
retaining control of all land, air and sea borders including the Philadelphi
corridor along the Gaza/Egypt border where the Egyptians may be allowed to
patrol under Israel's watchful eye and according to Israel's strictest
terms. The 1.4 million inhabitants of Gaza remain prisoners in a giant penal
colony, despite what their partisan leaders are attempting to claim. The IDF
is merely redeploying outside the Gaza Strip, which is surrounded by
electrical and concrete fences, barbed wire, watchtowers, armed guards and
motion censors, and it will retain the authority to invade Gaza on a whim.
Eight thousand Palestinian workers working in Israel for slave wages will
soon be banned from returning to work. Another 3,200 Palestinians who worked
in the settlements for a sub-minimum-wage have been summarily dismissed
without recourse to severance pay or other forms of compensation. Still
others will lose their livelihoods when the Israelis move the Gaza
Industrial Zone from Erez to somewhere in the Negev desert.

The World Bank reported in December 2004 that both poverty and unemployment
will rise following the "Disengagement" even under the best of circumstances
because Israel will retain full control over the movement of goods in and
out of Gaza, will maintain an enforced separation of the West Bank and Gaza
preventing the residents of each from visiting one another, and will draw up
separate customs agreements with each zone severing their already shattered
economies-- and yet we are forced to listen day in and day out to news about
this historic peace initiative, this great turning point in the career of
Ariel Sharon, this story of national trauma for the brothers and sisters who
have had to carry out the painful orders of their wise and besieged leader.

What will it take to get the truth across to people? To the young woman of
Neve Dekalim who can speak her words without batting an eyelash of
embarrassment or shame? As the cameras zoom in on angry settlers poignantly
clashing with their "brothers and sisters" in the Israeli army, who will be
concerned about their other brothers and sisters in Gaza? When will the
Palestinian history of 1948 and 1967, and of each passing day under the
violence of dispossession and dehumanization, get a headline in our papers?

I am reminded of an interview I had this summer in Beirut with Hussein
Nabulsi of Hizbullah ­ an organization that has had nothing to do with the
movement for Palestinian national liberation whatsoever, but one that has
become allied with those it sees as the real victims of US and Israeli
policies and lies. I remember his tightly shut eyes and his clenched fists
as he asked how long Arabs and Muslims were supposed to accept the
accusations that they are the victimizers and the terrorists. "It hurts," he
said in a whispered ardor. "It hurts so much to watch this injustice every
day." And he went on to explain to me why the Americans and the Israelis ­
with their monstrous military arsenals ­ will never be victorious.

Jennifer Loewenstein will be a viisiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies
Centre at Oxford University beginning this fall. She can be reached:
amadea311@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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