Watching The
Gazan Fiasco
By Jennifer Loewenstein
18 August, 2005
Counterpunch
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: [email protected]