Homeless in Gaza

Meanwhile, are you wondering why Ariel Sharon, his tanks, his D-9 armored Caterpillar bulldozers, and his helicopter gunships seem to be going quite insanely beserk with their violence in Gaza? 12,000 Palestinians rendered homeless thru demolitions, and counting…
Well, number one, perhaps, because they can. Who’s going to stop ’em? Colin Powell? The Pope? Right, I can just see Sharon quaking in his shoes at the prospect…
Also, don’t under-estimate the pique of this Israeli leadership after the IDF lost two APC’s full of soldiers to IEDs last week, in two consecutive days. I think a total of eleven Israeli soldiers lost their lives? … Looks like the militants in Gaza have been picking up some tips from Lebanon’s Hizbollah on how to really make a difference in Israeli thinking: hit at soldiers carrying out missions that are controversial inside Israel, rather than hitting at civilians. (Nearly all of Hizbollah’s lethal actions were aimed against soldiers.)
And then, of course, there’s the additional pique factor, for Sharon, that these tactics seem to be having a good political effect: they’ve been reviving the activism of the Israeli peace movement which staged a rally in Tel Aviv over the weekend of proportions not seen since…. the first intifada?


So pique, yes, quite likely. But also, a certain amount of quasi-“strategic” planning… With or without the vote of the Likud Party, Sharon is most likely, imho, headed toward implementing something close to misleadingly named “Disengagement Plan” that he announced last December… But IDF Chief of Staff Ya’alon and many others have warned publicly that for the IDF to seem to be withdrawing “under fire” from the Palestinian militants might “weaken the crdibility of Israel’s strategic deterrent”.
(Not sure quite why this should be so. Israel still, after all, has its handy great arsenal of nuclear weapons… You’d think those would be enough to provide as much “strategic deterrence” as Israel might need. “Strategic deterrence”, however, is not the problem between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors. The lack of good-neighborly relations most certainly is!)
Anyway, Ya’alon and others in Israel’s strategic-studies communty tend to make a big deal of this deterrent capability business, and to make these arguments with the kind of straight face that makes you think they take them seriously. So let’s take ’em seriously…
What this portends for Gaza is that if Sharon is indeed on the way to a significant pullout there, he’s going to make darn’ sure he leaves a virtual wasteland behind him. “You want Gaza? Take it!” seems to be his attitude, as he makes sure there’s just about nothing left standing in the Strip that’s worth taking.
By the way, I find the best way to keep up-to-date with the sober facts of the truly atrocious situation the people of Gaza are living through is thru the Reliefweb site. Some highlights there today:

  • Israeli helicopter gunships attack civilian targets in Gaza for the 3rd consecutive day
  • Israeli army isolates Rafah as major incursion predicted
  • Thousands of Palestinians forced to flee their homes

Anyway, check it out. Also, if you missed the piece I have in the current issue Boston Review about Gaza, Sharon’s plan, etc., etc., check that out here.

4 thoughts on “Homeless in Gaza”

  1. Aside from leaving Gaza a mess that will make it impossible for the Palestinian Governing Authority to sort, Sharon seems to have another clear strategy in his latest Gaza romps. He wishes to wipe the refugee camps off the maps, physically dispersing the refugees and leaving them in a disorderly state.
    Such action has precedence in Sharon’s history and is intended mainly to eliminate the possibility of the refugees’ return inside the 1948 borders after a comprehensive peace settlement. The strikes have two purposes in this context. First, to prevent negotiations with the Palestinian national movement; Palestinian leaders will lose credibility among their people if negotiating with Israel during its commission of such atrocities. If no negotiations occur, there is no possibility of implementing a right of return (The absence of negotitations also inspires Israeli propaganda in the form of claims such as “There is no Palestinian partner for peace,” particularly when Palestinians retaliate against Israeli civilians.). Secondly, the destruction of refugee camps and villages disperses communities that have lived together for years and formed strategies for resisting Israeli occupation. Without the surroundings of people they trust, the Palestinian refugees must move into communities where they are less familiar with others, and put themselves at risk of imprisonment due to their ignorance of who is an Israeli collaborator. Of course, starting life over again makes it difficult to resist.
    And Sharon knows this from his destruction of the Lebanon camps. In destroying and dispersing the Palestinian presence there, Sharon and his COS Eytan felt they had erased any physicial and historical trace of the Palestinian remnants of 1948. The IDF bombed hospitals, ransacked schools, and burned national research and records there–yes, partially acts of sadistic triumph following conquest, but also what seems a deliberate policy of wiping from the region any proof of Palestinian national existence, any system that could demand the return of non-Jews to the Greater Israel envisioned by Sharon and his military cohorts dominating the Israeli political arena.
    Gaza gives Israeli policy coherance when we consider this strategy. In the past, Israel expanded its borders for, among other ideological and resource concerns, the purpose of forcing a peace on the surrounding Arab states. Now, with stable relations with the dictators of the potent surrounding Arab states, Israel will abandon territory that does not fulfill its demographic goal. That is, so long as the populations of those territories will not pose a political or military threat to Jewish demographic supremacy in Israel, Jerusalem, or the heavily settled parts of the West Bank. In the West Bank towns, Sharon suffocates the population “threat” with a wall encapsulating their land (his infamous “pastrami sandwich” analogy); in Gaza, Jebaliyah, and other camps, as in Lebanon, Sharon fragments the refugee community, hoping they will become “human dust” in the Arab countries.
    But, can Israeli society tolerate much longer the retaliation that comes from its government’s genocide of these refugees, especially now that they are victims with the Palestinians of this futile colonial war?

  2. Is it not possible that the “withdrawing under fire” concern is traceable to the suicide bombing campaign that followed Barak’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon…Didn’t Hezbollah trumpet that withdrawal as a military victory?…Didn’t that example inspire the Intifadistas?…Even the intervening offer put forward by Barak at Clinton’s urging at Camp David (as insufficient as it may have been viewed from a Palestinian perspective) seemed to have done little to dissuade the Palestinians of the efficacy of the “Hezbollah way.”

  3. No,
    Intifadas have come about because of Israeli settlement and strangling of Palestinian land and humiliation and deprivation of its people. Israeli generals and government officials such as General Shlomo Gavit, (late) General Mattiyahu Peled, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, and several Knesset members including Shulamith Aloni and Uri Avernery have all written extensively about Israel’s colonial plans for the West Bank. From the beginning of the occupation, Israel’s plan has been to grab a maximum of land with a minimum of Arabs. When expelling the Arabs after 1967 became difficult for Israel, the military government did everything it could to encourage people to leave: Land confiscations, closures of villages, random break-ins of soldiers into homes where families are beaten, uprooting of olive and almond trees (basis for rural families’ livelihoods. All of this has been well-documented by Israeli human rights groups (Rabbis for Human Rights, Betselem) and international organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty), and parts of Washington (State Department reports, ex-CIA officials such as Graham Usher). This treatment happened far before the intifadas, far before the bombers. Even Benny Morris, an Israeli historian and outspoken advocate of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, noted in his history “Righteous Victims,’ “Israel intended to stay in the West Bank (after 1967), and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed. The only real option was armed struggle.”
    Now, I believe that armed struggle should be limited to the soldiers who are occupying the West Bank and the Israeli military leaders and politicians who send them. Killing Israeli civilians is both morally abhorrent and poor political strategy, And I have visited the West Bank and witnessed the dehumanizing conditions under which the people live. My mother, in fact, lived under the occupation from 1967-1970. My grandfather spent time in an Israeli jail, arrested because he possessed a rifle during the Israeli invasion in 1967. There, he was tortured and beaten until the blood flowed from his ears. He never killed Israeli civilians. But the Israelis beat him so senseless that he remained ill until his death in 1982.
    Each Palestinian family has a member beaten so by the IDF. Each child has grown up under an occupation where she witnesses that an Israeli Jew is a soldier who enters her home at night and beats her parents. She has no contact with civilian Jews since Israeli law, both in Israel and in the territories, ensures actual segregation of Jews and non-Jews. Therefore, she infers, tragically and mistakenly, that all Israeli Jews are soldiers. In her mind, they are legitimate targets everywhere. (This trend is very discouraging; ultimately, the Palestinians must convince Israeli Jews to turn against the militant policies of their government if occupation is to lose political support in Israel. Killing your potential ally is never helpful). Coupled with the fact that Israel has closed Palestinian schools for the greater part of the last 15 years, is less educated in the territories than its predecessor, and you have a generation that sees only military logic behind the unfolding of daily affairs.
    This is the origin of the suicidee bomber, and it can only change when tanks withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank fully. Not partially in the manner of the Oslo accords, where the Israelis built more settlements in eight years on the West Bank than it had in the previous twnety five. Not in a manner which keeps Israel in control of the entrances and exits to each Palestinian town in the West Bank (If you see the map of Barak’s so-called generous offer, published in Le Monde July? 2002, you will see the raw deal the Palestinians were presented at Camp David). A real peace can begin only with a full Israeli withdrawal from the territories. This will enable the Palestinians to elect a representative government that can negotiate freely with the Israelis. The Arafat government is a farce. As Rabin boasted, Israel brought Arafat into the negotiations because he thought the cash-strapped Arafat, in Tunis, would concede more in the final status to Israel than the Jerusalemite leaders of the Palestinian West Bank, the real leaders of the first Intifada.
    As for the Hezoballah issue, last I checked Lebanon wasn’t Israeli territory. If someone invaded my house, and the police did not come to help me, I have every legal and moral right to defend myself against the invasion. Ditto for the Lebanese. Notice also that the Katayushas have stopped falling in the Galillee since Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Instead of a cold peace in the manner of Israel-Hezoballah, the Palestinians should grant Israel a warm peace upon its full and withdrawal from the territorie, conditioned upon mutual cessation of hostilites, and the payment of reparations to the refugees of the wars.

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