Gaza: The Worlds
Largest Prison
By Ghali Hassan
13 August, 2005
Countercurrents.org
Sometime
in August, Israel will configure its 38-years illegal military occupation
of the Gaza Strip by unilaterally disengaging from the territory
and evacuating the Jewish settlers there. No one knows for sure if it
really will happen. The Palestinian territory will continue to be under
Israels brutal occupation. Israels disengagement
plan is nothing but an Israeli PR over-sold by Western media as the
brutality of the Occupation continues unhindered, and Israel will continue
to guard the worlds largest open-air prison.
Gaza is the most
densely populated territory on earth, where 1.4 million defenceless
Palestinians huddle together in an area of about 360 square km. Gaza
forms the westernmost portion of original Palestine, having land borders
with Egypt on the south-west and todays Israel on the northern
and eastern borders. The territory is bounded by the Mediterranean Sea
on the west.
Furthermore, the
overcrowded territory has no significance to Israel and has always been
considered as a burden. By disengaging from Gaza and evacuating
the Jewish settlers there, Sharon will concentrate on the annexation
of important Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
It is revealed recently
that the Israeli Army (IA) is building a high tech complex to surround
the coastal territory with the world most impenetrable barrier. The
barrier will include fences with electronic sensors, watchtowers mounted
with remote control machineguns, and hundreds of videos and night vision
cameras. The complex includes new army bases and 22-foot concrete walls
around nearby Israeli settlements. Watchtowers armed with remote-controlled
machine guns are to be built every 1.2 miles. Remote-controlled, unmanned
vehicles will begin patrolling the area soon after the completion of
the barrier. The barrier will run about 35 miles and will cost about
$220 million. The barrier will be completed by mid-2006. Thus, Israel
will symbolically relinquish its control of Palestinian lives to remote-controlled
aliens. Freedom of movement will disappear completely from the life
of Palestinians.
Since the creation
of Israel in 1948 by Western powers in Palestine, Israel has been financed
and encouraged by the same powers to expand by way of dispossessing
the Palestinians with vicious form of terrorism. The US and Britain
(Israel main backers) are said to be thrilled by Israels disengagement
plan, the brainchild of the criminal Ariel Sharon. The purpose of the
disengagement plan is to: (1) remove the Palestinians as
a negotiation partners in any peaceful and just settlement; (2) provide
Israel with a cover-up to steal more Palestinian land and built more
illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem; (3) provide
Ariel Sharon with US money to continue the dispossession of Palestinians;
(4) allow Israel to continue the construction of the Apartheid Wall
declared illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)
in the West Bank and Jerusalem; (5) prevent the establishment
of a viable Palestinian state; and (6) enhance Israels image in
the US and Western capitals as a peace-loving people and
provide the necessary publicity and sympathy for its violent and illegal
Jewish settlers.
To dramatise the
situation and gain sympathy for Israels policy and the Jewish
settlers in particular, Israeli and world viewers are showing a rare
sensitivity for human suffering of the oppressors playing the role of
victims. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled
from their homes, after their homes with all of their possessions, were
crushed by Israel Army bulldozers, wrote Israeli journalist Gideon
Levy of Haaretz in Tel Aviv. Since 1967, the Israeli Army have
demolished more than 12,000 Palestinian homes. The hundreds of
families whose homes were expropriated, the farmers dispossessed of
their lands, the uprooted [olive and fruit] trees and the children who
witnessed the brutality, [all] these were never given even a fraction
of the media coverage the [illegal Jewish] settlers have received [in
Israel and in the West], added Gideon Levy. Further, during the
Palestinian Intifada of September 2000 to March 2004, the Israeli Army
murdered 2,859, including 527, children (below 18 years) and 308 in
cold-blooded extrajudicial killings.
According to Sharons
adviser, Dov Weisglass, Sharon decided to disengage from Gaza to consolidate
the illegal settlements in the West Bank and, more importantly, to prevent
any future negotiation with the Palestinians. The engagement
plan is the best pretext for the expropriation of about 58 per cent
of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Jerusalem, including all water
aquifers and fertile land, to build more illegal settlement. A criminal
policy of land theft supported and financed by the current US administration.
Meanwhile, the reality
on the ground for Palestinians is that Israels policy of ethnic
cleansing and Israels expansion will continue and no disengagement
plan will change its brutal Zionist policy. The policy is leaving Palestinian
communities completely cut off from each other by a network of Jewish-only
roads, Israeli military checkpoints, tunnels, and the Apartheid Wall.
The Wall is being built at high speed, deep inside Palestinian
[occupied territories], while Israels main supporters looks away,
wrote Meron Rapoport, a journalist with Haaretz. The Bush-Blair
war on Iraq couldnt come at a better time for Israel. The new
Palestine envisaged by Bush and Sharon will look like a collection of
isolated ghettos dependent on the mercy of Israels terror.
The Wall is not
only imprisoned the Palestinian people, but also expropriates their
land and fractionates the entire Palestinian civil society. Israel claims
that the Wall is built to protect Israel is a fabricated lie. Its true
purpose is to expropriate Palestinian land and water sources, weaken
Palestinian identity, and at the same time consolidate Jewish ethnicity
over Palestine (Judaisation of Palestine). The aim is to create a demographically
pure Jewish state. [W]e are going to cleanse the whole area
and do the work ourselves, said Benjamin Netanyahu, Americas
favourite terrorist and former Israels Prime Minister and Finance
Minister.
It should be recognised
the policy of ethnic cleansing, land expropriation, restrictions and
violations of human rights of the Palestinians have the strong backing
of the US administration, Britain and most Western governments. The
creation of Palestinian ghettos has similarity with the myth of Western
multiculturalism, where the others are isolated,
dehumanised and subjugated to societys wrath.
On 03 August 2005,
the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) argued that the Apartheid
Wall is a violation of Israel's human rights obligations. The Commission
eight human rights experts who visited Israel to assess the impact of
the Wall on Palestinian lives called on Israel to adhere to international
law and to stop construction of the wall. UNHRC also urged
Israel to pay compensation to Palestinians for damage caused by construction
of the Apartheid Wall. The UNHRC said in a statement; The wall
violates important norms of international humanitarian law prohibiting
the annexation of occupied territory, the establishment of settlements,
and the confiscation of private land and the forcible transfer of people.
The statement also reminded all nations that they are under an
obligation not to recognize the illegal situation resulting from the
construction of the wall and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining
the situation. In addition, the evacuation of 9,000 Jewish settlers
from Gaza will turn Palestinian life in the West Bank into hell,
said former Israels Education Minister, Shulamit Aloni. The US
is said to pay about $2.2 billion for the cost of dismantling the settlements
and the evacuation of the illegal settlers. The settlements were initially
built with US money.
As for Palestinians
living in Gaza, Israel will continue to control Gaza's borders, coastline,
airspace, telecommunications, water sources, and electricity supply.
Egypt, which is well-known for its harsh treatment of Palestinians,
may be given the role of Israeli enforcer on its border with Gaza. US-made
F16 fighter planes and Apache helicopters will continue as often as
possible to rain their deadly missiles and bombs on Palestinian population
centres there. Palestinian identity will be further weakening
by Israels policy of fractionation , and Palestinians in
Gaza will be more isolated from not only the rest of the world, but
also from the rest of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
As Ur Shlonsky,
a professor of Linguistics at Geneva University in Switzerland wrote,
Israels aim is to terrorise the civilian population, assuring
maximal destruction of property and cultural resources. At the
same time, the daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered
unbearable: They should be locked up in cities and towns, prevented
from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces, schools
and hospitals, This will encourage emigration and weaken the resistance
to future expulsions similar to that of 1948.
The world
community should be too familiar with Ariel Sharon genocidal policy
not to abandon the Palestinian people to his evil ideology
of destroying the Palestinian people as an independent political and
social entity. Every nation in a civilised community has an obligation
to reject Nazism, and support the Palestinian rights of return to their
homeland and self-determination. To trust Ariel Sharon disengagement
plan is to be complicit in Sharons history of crimes against the
Palestinian people.
Ghali Hassan lives
in Perth, Western Australia.