[Marxism] Gaza 'disengagement,' hypocrisy, usw.

[Anna Fierling <anna_fierling@xxxxxxxxx>]

There's obviously been alot written in recent days about Gaza, but I thought 
this was a particularly effective article, both for its analysis of Israel's 
motives in booting out the Gaza settlers and for exposing the hypocrisy of 
mainstream media coverage:

www.counterpunch.com

August 17, 2005
Watching the Gazan Fiasco
The Shame of it all
by Jennifer Loewens

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 visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at 
Oxford University beginning this fall. She can be reached: 
amadea311@xxxxxxxxxxxxx



Anna Fierling
Otto-Suhr-Institut
FU-Berlin

"Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden."
                
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