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