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Haaretz.com, September 6, 2006
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/757768.html
Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know
it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad
Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel
Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza - there's no other word to
describe it - killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.
Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn't even
on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it.
But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to
its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must
be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements
that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its
promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about "the
end of the occupation" and "partitioning the land" now appears. Gaza is
occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more
convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do
with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.
In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the
only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity supply will
be cut off for at least another year. There's hardly any water. Since there
is no electricity, supplying homes with water is nearly impossible. Gaza is
filthier and smellier than ever: Because of the embargo Israel and the world
have imposed on the elected authority, no salaries are being paid and the
street cleaners have been on strike for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage
and obnoxious clouds of stink strangle the coastal strip, turning it into
Calcutta.
More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. The Erez crossing is empty, the
Karni crossing has been open only a few days over the last two months, and
the same is true for the Rafah crossing. Some 15,000 people waited for two
months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including many ailing and
wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side to return to their
homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the scenes at Rafah to
understand how profound a human tragedy is taking place. A crossing that was
not supposed to have an Israeli presence continues to be Israel's means to
pressure 1.5 million inhabitants. This is disgraceful and shocking
collective punishment. The U.S. and Europe, whose police are at the Rafah
crossing, also bear responsibility for the situation.
Gaza is also poorer and hungrier than ever before. There is nearly no
merchandise moving in and out, fishing is banned, the tens of thousands of
PA workers receive no salaries, and the possibility of working in Israel is
out of the question.
And we still haven't mentioned the death, destruction and horror. In the
last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them children and 25
of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed and shelled, and no one
stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel justifies such wide-scale
killing. A day doesn't go by without deaths, most of them innocent
civilians.
Where are the days when there was still a debate inside Israel about the
assassinations? Today, Israel drops innumerable missiles, shells and bombs
on houses and kills entire families on its way to another assassination.
Hospitals are collapsing with more than 900 people undergoing treatment. At
Shifa Hospital, the only such facility in Gaza that might be worthy of being
called a hospital, I saw heartrending scenes last week. Children who lost
limbs, on respirators, paralyzed, crippled for the rest of their lives.
Families have been killed in their sleep, while riding on donkeys or working
in fields. Frightened children, traumatized by what they have seen, huddle
in their homes with a horror in their eyes that is difficult to describe in
words. A journalist from Spain who spent time in Gaza recently, a veteran of
war and disaster zones around the world, said he had never been exposed to
scenes as horrific as the ones he saw and documented over the last two
months.
It is difficult to determine who decided on all this. It is doubtful the
ministers are aware of the reality in Gaza. They are responsible for it,
starting with the bad decision on the embargo, through the bombing of Gaza's
bridges and power station and the mass assassinations. Israel is responsible
now once again for all that happens in Gaza.
The events in Gaza expose the great fraud of Kadima: It came to power on the
coattails of the virtual success of the disengagement, which is now going up
in flames, and it promised convergence, a promise that the prime minister
has already rescinded. Those who think Kadima is a centrist party should now
know it is nothing other than another rightist occupation party. The same is
true of Labor. Defense Minister Amir Peretz is responsible for what is
happening in Gaza no less than the prime minister, and Peretz's hands are as
blood-soaked as Olmert's. He can never present himself as a 'man of peace'
again. The ground invasions every week, each time somewhere else, the kill
and destroy operations from the sea, air and land are all dubbed with names
to whitewash the reality, like 'Summer Rains' or 'Locked Kindergarten.' No
security excuse can explain the cycle of madness, and no civic argument can
excuse the outrageous silence of us all. Gilad Shalit will not be released
and the Qassams will not cease. On the contrary, there is a horror taking
place in Gaza, and while it might prevent a few terror attacks in the short
run, it is bound to give birth to much more murderous terror. Israel will
then say with its self-righteousness: 'But we returned Gaza to them.' |
