Gaza "Disengagement": Biggest Farce of the 21st Century

Shocking title, I know. However it may seem, any open move that the Israelis have made for "peace" always had them pulling other tricks up their already dirty sleeves. Don't take me wrong: I am all for peace, but the so-called "peace" that Israel has been giving the Palestinians.

The latest move that the Israelis have made was the Gaza "pullout" ("pullout" because they have still not left the region they messed up). The move itself was big enough to divert media attention from other things that were going on. It's funny, really, that the Israelis boast how Arafat used to talk peace in English and talk war in Arabic (not really, though), when in fact the Israelis claim they want peace but at the same time threaten atrocity.

So, what really made it a farce?

Surprisingly, many reasons. For one, the Gaza pullout was done in such a way as to divert media attention from other occurrences in Palestine that were occurring. It is unnerving and infuriating to see settlers show their grievances to the world as they were pulled out from their settlements, when in fact not much coverage has been given to the Palestinians during the three years prior to the pullout. Jennifer Loewenstein raises these questions:

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?

Striking. So when they talk of peace, they threaten with terror. This is of course nothing new: Israel has always been underhandedly hitting the Palestinians below the belt with their state sponsored terrorism, turning the lives of Gazans into a hell on Earth. What's even more hypocritical is that they show the crocodile sadness portrayed by Israeli settlers being pulled out of their settlements in the Gaza Strip, disregarding the attachment of the Palestinians to their homes and livelihoods in Palestine.

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.

That's just the beginning. The withdrawal of the Gaza Strip was a move advantageous to Israel, not to the Palestinians. So, in that sense, the withdrawal was a strategic advantage for Israel.

While the withdrawal itself was hypocritical, other things were happening at the time. What followed saw the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem. Moreover, Sharon was up to a dirty trick: surrounding East Jerusalem with illegal settlement blocs in order to isolate Jerusalem itself from the West Bank. According to the Palestine Media Center,

Smoke-screened by international praise of his “courage” for evacuating some 9,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, Sharon embarked on demarcating the radium of the illegal Jewish colony of Ma’ale Adumim on 100 square kilometers of occupied Palestinian land east of Jerusalem, 35 km deep into the West Bank and with a width of 15-25 km, and turned blind eyes to moving the Gaza settlers into the West Bank colonies.

The main goal of the construction of the Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc is to separate the northern part of the West Bank from its southern part, which would impede territorial contiguity between the southern and northern West Bank.

[...]

On Friday Israeli Interior Ministry spokesman Gilad Heiman revealed that the population of the illegal Jewish settlers in the Israeli West Bank colonies has grown in the past year by more than 12,000 (5%) to about 246,000 in June this year.

Settlements in the West Bank were already being filled with more and more settlers. This divergence of media attention has proven dangerous: the Gaza Strip is a small piece of land; however, Sharon is focusing on the West Bank, a larger piece of land.

Another occurrence was the routine "air exercises" that were in fact intimidating Palestinians. Eric Drooker was in Gaza when it all happened.

The entire Strip is a sprawling, densely populated, outdoor prison--one of the most crowded zones on the planet--with Apache helicopters and F-16s (all made in the USA) buzzing through the air like insane, metallic hornets.

Yes, metallic hornets, sounding of sonic booms that actually frightened little children. Defensetech.org has this to say about this devious tactic:

Regular Defense Tech readers know that sonic weapons are slowly starting to be used by the American and Israeli militaries to disperse crowds with defeaning noise. But here's a tactic in the sound war that I hadn't heard of before: Israeli jets, letting off sonic booms over the Gaza strip.

The removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip opened the way for the military to use air force jets to create dozens of sonic booms by breaking the sound barrier at low altitude, sending shockwaves across the territory...

Palestinians liken the sound to an earthquake or huge bomb. They describe the effect as being hit by a wall of air that is painful on the ears, sometimes causing nosebleeds and "leaving you shaking inside."

The Palestinian health ministry says the sonic booms have led to miscarriages and heart problems. The UN has demanded an end to the tactic, saying it causes panic attacks in children.

"Israel has long used sonic booms to rattle Palestinians in times of tension and violence," Ha'Aretz notes. "The booms can be mistaken for one of the frequent missile attacks aimed at militants or weapons factories."

Israeli kibutzniks living near Gaza are just as spooked by the booms as the Palestinians. “The children are scared because they don’t understand, but the adults are also afraid,” one tells Ynetnews. “We are trying to continue with the daily routine, but it is very unpleasant to live like this.”

The Guardian adds that the IDF "was forced to apologize after one of the sonic booms was unintentionally heard hundreds of kilometers inside Israel last week."

THERE'S MORE: "This has actually been a common tactic by the Israelis for a long while, mostly in the neighbouring country of Lebanon," one reader tells Xeni. "This includes mock divebombing runs, and sometimes even firing live ammo. There's also the danger of windows being blown out. And I must say, even if you're on the other end of a phone somewhere in another country, it still scares the shit out of you."

There was another danger involved in the Gaza "Disengagement": the sudden lawlessness paved the way for other things to come about. Although not much atrocity happened, the apparent lawlessness paved way for other things that might have happened. Uri Avnery, head of the Gush Shalom Peace Group, tells us,

"The General Security Service (Shabak, a.k.a. Shin Bet) has been warning for a long time that the "disengagement" from Gaza could lead to an outbreak of Jewish terrorism, aiming at preventing the evacuation of the settlements. It also outlined three possible scenarios: the murder of the Prime Minister, an outrage against the holy mosques on the Temple Mount and a massacre of Arabs.

Among these three possibilities, the massacre of Arabs is the easiest and most effective. It aims at causing riots and compelling the police to move forces away from the arena of the disengagement, thus preventing them from evacuating the settlements.

The murderous act of Eden Nathan-Zadeh does, indeed, conform to this model. He got on a bus going to an Arab town (Shefaram), killed four Israeli Arab citizens and was beaten to death by the enraged crowd. The police was compelled to move more than a thousand officers from the disengagement area in the south to Galilee in the north, making it easier for right-wing activists to infiltrate Gush Katif.

The easy questions arose at once. If the Shin Bet knew enough to warn of the danger, why did it not increase its surveillance of the extreme rightists, whose identity and haunts are known to it? After all, the murderer was staying in Tapuakh settlement, the snake-pit of the Kach militants, whose murderous character is notorious. The murderer himself was arrested several times in the course of extreme right-wing activities in the past. And why didn't the army act, in spite of the fact that the commanders of the murderer knew that he had deserted in protest against the disengagement, taking his rifle with him? Indeed, his mother, who foresaw what was coming, bombarded the army with requests to find him and take the weapon away from him.

Of course, those were just possibilities, but one could see why the Palestinians didn't trust the Israelis on this one, and rightly so. However, it's Israeli immaturity that gets in the way of everything. Why, then, do they fail to ask themselves what got those Kassams lobbed at them from behind the borders? Of course, the answers were stated above. If the Israelis want peace, they'd better stop doing things that are upsetting the Palestinians when the world is not watching. We can't be silent anymore. Pro-Israeli hawks have demanded too much from the Palestinians, but are blind to the degree that they can't see what they, the Israelis, have been doing to the Palestinians to reap what they have sown, not that I justify terrorism. It's this Israeli immaturity, blinded by Zionist nationalism, that must end should peace be achieved.

Salaam, from
Saracen