Just World News with Helena Cobban

One good place to start for a range of coverage of the experience Gaza’s 1.38 million Palestinians are living through in this time of Israeli “disengagement” from their long-occupied Strip is Electronic Intifada’s special portal to this.

Okay, yesterday I was complaining here that the US MSM hasn’t paid much attention to the 1.38 Palestinians of Gaza– or to their 6-million-plus compatriots in other places– amidst all the coverage of the “fate” of the handsomely compensated 8,500 Israeli settlers now being required to leave the Gaza Strip.
Today, Greg Myre of the NYT has a fairly well-done piece on the aspirations of the Gaza Palestinians. It is a good job, and very welcome. However, in general the amount of coverage that NYT has given over, say, the past two months to 8,500 people who’ve been enjoying a heavily subsidized lifestyle to live in colonies illegally established on land under military occupation versus that given to the territory’s 1.39 million indigenous residents has still been very disproportional.
Myre’s piece notes that,

Mr. Abbas’s Fatah movement, which dominates the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has carried out many of the deadliest attacks against Israel, are both claiming credit for the Israeli withdrawal, and they may hold rival events.

Obviously, the way that that plays out over the days ahead will be very interesting. Yesterday or the day before Hamas did come to some agreement with Abu Mazen on allowing the Israeli withdrawal to happen in as orderly a fashion as possible. I think we can surmise that this is in the joint interest of Hamas, Abu Mazen, and Ariel Sharon…
But evidently, Hamas wants to claim the Israeli withdrawal has been forced by the militant actions it has sustained against the Israelis for many years, while Abu Mazen will want to claim it is a fruit only of his diplomacy.
Expect some truly massive Palestinian street rallies in the cities and towns of Gaza– and quite likely, also of the West Bank– as the Israelis withdraw from Gaza. They will probably dwarf the gathering of some 100,000 Israeli settler activists that was held in Tel Aviv recently.
By the way, regarding the nature of media coverage, the BBC website has an interesting “diary” by a Gaza-based, 47-year-old PA employee called Hakeem Abu Samra who says, among other things,

My father and cousin have owned about 60 dunums of land [about 15 acres] close to the border between Gaza and Israel since 1936, when the whole area was still under British Mandate.
We have not been on that land since 1970, when we got a military order forbidding us from entering the area.
This land was sliced into three by streets connecting the four settlements built there, including Dugit, the one nearest to us.
It was very upsetting for our family – especially as our grandfather had died on that land, shot by Israeli soldiers on patrol in 1956, two years before I was born.
I cannot describe what it is like to see your land, to be near to it, but to be forbidden from entering it. You cannot put it into words.
Seeing settlers on our land, planting their crops, making money, it is like someone has stolen something from you.
These people hurt me and my family, they built their house on my family’s land and kept it for nearly 40 years.
My father and cousin have since died, but my brothers and my cousin’s brothers are looking forward to seeing the settlers leave and getting the land back.
Once we get the land back, we will look for compensation from the International Court of Justice.
But most importantly, once we get rid of the occupation in Gaza we hope to live just like human beings, as in any other country.
We want to be safe and free, to be left alone to take care of ourselves.
We can live as good neighbours, so Israel should stop bothering our lives.

The BBC also has a “diary” by a soon-to-depart Jewish settler, that it launched one day before Abu Samra’s. (Why?) This guy, Pesach Aceman, displays all the self-referential provincialism of pampered colonists similarly subjected to decolonization in other parts of the world over the past half century. Interesting in that regard, perhaps…
An example:

We hear that the Palestinians are preparing thousands of flags to fly from the abandoned Jewish houses, synagogues and shops. How disgusting and how painful this will be. What will it do to the kids and young teenagers to see this on the TV news?

No hint there that the category “kids and young teenagers” would actually, in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, nowaadays include more young Palestinians than young Israelis– and that just about every young Palestinian seeing Palestinian flags flying over previous Israeli settlements is going to be completely delighted at the sight. No, for Pesach Aceman and his pampered ilk, the category “kids and young teenagers” would necessarily only apply to Israelis, with the Palestinians remaining, for him, apparently quite invisible.
Oy vey.
The NYT, by the way, today has an interactive map feature that’s interesting to look at. You can click on various points and get seatellite images of what’s underneath. In this way you can get an idea of how many thousands of dunums of land within the settlements’ perimeters have been turned into greenhouses.
(I note, though, that the NYT interactive feature has zero clicking points above Palestinian population centers… Are they too insignificant to care about, I wonder?)
Re the greenhouses, Haaretz is reporting that the economic envoy to the Palestinian-Israeli talks, Jim Wolfensohn, has pulled together a deal that will reward the plantation owners of the “Gush Katif” settlement bloc with $14 million, as the “purchase price” for 75 percent of their greenhouses.
It can often really hurt the feelings of earlier victims when their victimizers get handsome payoffs simply for agreeing to stop their acts of victimization. In this case, the PA objected most strenuously to the idea that US aid funds earmarked for the Palestinians should be used to help buy out (= “reward”) the Israeli settler plantation owners.
So now, Wolfensohn has found $14 million of “private money” to fund the purchase. The greenhouses in question will be transferred to “a PA company.”
I’m not sure how necessarily desirable or how stable over the longer term this arrangement is. Many private Palestinian landowners have title to lands that were used by the settlements. Their claims need to be discussed. Also, why should we assume that PA ownership and the pursuit of a set of economic projects that met the colonists’ economic needs though not necessarily those of the Palestinians, are what is required?
Well, this is how it’ll work out for now. Those Gush Katif plantation owners will make out like bandits. They’ll pocket both the Israeli government compensation for their houses (in which they have already lived a heavily subsidized life for many years now), and now the international money being paid for their (also previously subsidized) greenhouses. The PA will get its hands on an economic project of some present viability. Jim Wolfensohn will look like a talented philanthropist.
But I imagine the real issues over the socioeconomic development of Palestinian Gaza, and the question of who gets to exercize political control over it, all still lie ahead.

I have a column in the Christian Science Monitor today on the imminent pullback of Israel’s troops and settlers from Gaza.
It was a hard column to write, for a number of reasons… Not least of which was that the calendar for doing it kind of snuck up on me this month. (I have a “regular” slot on the second Thursday of each month, plus can suggest as many additional pieces– most of which also run on Thursdays– to my editors there as I want.)
One of the basic underlying theses of this piece is that pure surface area is not, in itself, what determines the “viability” (or otherwise) of a state in modern times. Rather, it is the presence or absence of extrenally imposed constraints on the ability of that state to build economic relations with other states around the world. The two paradigms I was looking at were (1) Singapore and (2) South Africa’s Bantustans.
Singapore has a very restricted surface area (693 square kilometers). Gaza’s is even more restricted (360 sq. km.) Gaza is certainly heavily peopled, but its population density is not as high as Singapore’s. Singapore’s GDP per capita is $27,800; Gaza’s is c. $600; and Israel’s is $20,800.
The South African Bantustans were all located on economically marginal chunks of the RSA’s land… But South Africa is a huge country; so even those Bantustans had considerably more territory than Gaza’s– plus, I think, a lower general population density. But what hampered them most from registering significant social, economic, and political development was the chokehold that South Africa maintained on their borders (and also on the functioning of their security services.)
It was those South African restrictions on the Bantustans’ ability to conduct independent relations, including economic relations, with the outside world that led just about every other government in the world– with the exception of Israel!— to completely reject SA’s claims that those ten territories qualified as “independent states.”
Nowadays, Israel still seeks to maintain controls over all of Gaza’s borders. Along the short border with Egypt, it will subcontract some of the routine patrolling tasks to the Egyptian Army. But it still crucially seeks to maintain its own hand over the crossing-point between Gaza and Egypt, just as it seeks to maintain control over Gaza’s airport (once it has been rebuilt– Sharon’s armies having destroyed its EU-built runways back in 2002) as well as over the Gaza seaport, once rebuilt (ditto) and all other access along Gaza’s lengthy coastline onto the Mediterranean.
Israel also seeks to exert control over all of Gaza’s border with itself. That is its right. If Gaza had real independence none of its other borders with the outside world would be any of Israel’s damn’ business.
So why are European and other western governments lining up to laud Sharon’s “courageous” move to create a small, tightly controlled Bantustan in Gaza? Beats me. Especially since it has always been quite clear to everyone that Sharon has agreed to undertake this pullback from Gaza in place of doing anything positive to respond to those portions of the EU-US-UN-Russian-sponsored “road map” that require Israel to make non-trivial troop withdrawals in the West Bank.
It has also been quite clear to everyone who has followed Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in any depth that an Israeli “concession” regarding the territory of Gaza will never satisfy the Palestinians’ quite legitimate demands to exercize their national independence over the whole of the Palestinian territory that was occupied in 1967— that is, Gaza plus the West Bank, including East Jerusalem– with or without minor and mutually agreed territorial adjustments with Israel.
Remember, the whole land of the WB plus Gaza still only constitutes around 23 percent of the land of historic (British mandate-era) Palestine– and considerably less, too, than the area of the Palestinian Arab state envisaged in the Partition Plan adopted by the UN back in 1947. So to the Palestinians– some millions of whom are refugees from inside the Israeli lines of 1948-49– ceding their claim to exercize political control over the other 78 percent of their ancesrtal homeland was already a big deal. It was a move that was hotly contested within the Palestinian arena when it was first proposed by the PLO leadership 30-plus years ago; and has periodically been contested since then, too.
Therefore, to expect that the Palestinians will at any point be “satisfied” with just Gaza alone– which contains just 1.3% of the land of Mandate-era Palestine– has always been a completely unrealistic proposition.
Add to that the fact that some 80 percent of Gaza’s population are refugees from inside 1948 Israel, whose demand for some satisfaction of their claims to ancestral properties that they and their forebears left behind during their conflict-driven flight from them in 1948 is currently completely ignored by Israel, and you’ll see that Sharon’s Gaza pullback is not destined to provide anything like a situation of longterm or even medium term stability.
Indeed, there is a distinct possibility that the pullout of Israeli soldiers and settlers might prove to be only a prelude to the establishment of an ugly free-fire zone inside Gaza, in which the IDF can escalate its bombings and incursions as much as it wants– without, at that point, any fear of the Palestinians making life a little hard for the settlers and Israeli troops stationed until now throughout the Strip.
I hope to heck that that is not the outcome (or one hidden intention) of the imminent pullback… But it is certainly a distinct possibility.
I guess one of the other important things I refer to in my column is the degree to which the western MSM has concerned itself with the settler-driven narrative of giving huge exposure to the “battle” inside Israeli society over the fate of some 8,500 Jewish Israelis whose residence inside occupied Gaza has anyhow all along been illegal under international law— while it has given little play at all to the effects of this pullout on what I called the “fates and dashed hopes” of the eight million or so Palestinians worldwide… By that, I meant their hopes for a viable and robust independent national state.
So there you have it… The western MSM thinks that 8,500 Jewish Israelis somehow count for more than eight million Palestinians??? To me, that really is an important part of what has been going on here– and of what Sharon and his friends in the Israeli settler movement have really “achieved”.
To which, all I can say is: “Human equality now!”