So the wretched settlers — all 8,500 of them who had occupied 20 percent of Gaza’s choice land to build their colonies on — have pulled out, leaving a desolate landscape of rubble and garbage behind. But whatever you do, hold the celebrations, and think not of what has changed, but what has not. The settlers may have folded their tents, as it were, and headed north — for many, to settle on expropriated Palestinian land in the West Bank — but the military occupation remains very much in place, determining the economic and social future of the strip.
The evacuation of Gaza’s settlers, a transparent sham by Ariel Sharon, has its origins in a speech the Zionist prime minister made in December 2003, when he called for “disengagement,” effectively an alternative to the road map proposed a year earlier by the international community, and a terminus to peace negotiations. The implementation of the plan was to be unilateral, with little or no consultation with the Palestinian Authority. And it is a sham because, as he proceeded with his theatrical gesture in Gaza, to show the world how magnanimous Israel is being, Sharon intended all along to perpetuate his hold on the rest of the conquered territories in Palestine, consolidating settlement blocks in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
And, yes, he was delighted at the spectacle of those fanatic settlers getting into emotional scenes at being “evicted from their homes.” (“I cried with them,” he said.) For if the evacuation of a mere 8,500 settlers was so gut-wrenching, then how could anyone, in his right mind, expect him to order the evacuation of some 250,000 others from the West Bank? All of which was designed, of course, to undermine the ability of Palestinians to build their own viable nation any time soon — if ever.
But for those who think that “independence” in Gaza is a first step, here’s the reality check.
Israel will continue to retain control not only of key checkpoints in Gaza itself, but between Gaza and the outside world as well. In other words, as Helena Cobban wrote in the Christian Science Monitor last week, “Israel would retain the same kind of controls that apartheid South Africa exercised over its Bantustans.”
This sad strip of land, which Israel has pauperized to the point destitution over almost four decades of brutal rule, with 60 percent unemployment and with two thirds of the population living at the subsistence level, will remain what it has been all these years — the biggest open-air prison in the world.
The Israeli Navy will continue to slap a naval blockade on Gazans, preventing merchant ships from docking in their port, and even local fishermen from sailing beyond eight miles off their coast.
The tiny Gaza International airport, the strip’s only outlet by air for passengers and goods and which the Israelis destroyed four years ago, will not be allowed to reopen.
But it is the checkpoints north and south of Gaza, respectively the Karmi and Philadelphi checkpoints, that are now literally the talk of the town.
These checkpoints are clearly the greatest barrier between Gaza and the world markets that Gazans had hoped might bring prosperity to their savaged economic lives. What Palestinians have been talking about in recent weeks has not been the dismantlement of settlements but the movement of goods.
“Disengagement will not solve the massive economic problems the Palestinians are facing,” said Nigel Roberts, head of the World Bank office responsible for the occupied territories. “Gaza should have much freer access to the outside world.”
Look at it this way: On a typical day, more than 300 Israeli trucks, transporting Israeli goods, move from Israel into Gaza, but only 50 trucks leave Gaza, with Palestinian goods, heading to Israel. Not only, in this case, are Palestinian goods carefully inspected by occupation soldiers, presumably looking for weapons, but they are completely unloaded at the border and then loaded again onto Israeli trucks.
In a report filed from Gaza last Sunday, which I quote liberally from here because of its cogent portrait of how economically strapped Palestinians have become by these restrictions, the Washington Post’s Karl Vicks wrote of two small Gazan businessmen, a carob bottler and a fabric manufacturer: “This back-to-back regime pushes up transport costs on a gallon of carob juice by three shekels a gallon — ‘my whole profit’ said one, who therefore operates his factory at one-fourth its capacity, saying he can’t afford to sell the sweet, brown refreshment outside Gaza. He has turned down orders from Saudi Arabia and other countries.”
Vickers continues: “In a one room factory crowded with sewing machines, Nabil Bowab said he turned down a JC Penny order for dresses because uncertainty about the Karni checkpoint kept him from guaranteeing that the clothes would arrive in the United States in time for Christmas. “The only problem is the border tie-ups,” said Bowab, whose Unipal garment business is one of the few operating at the Palestinian Industrial Estate. The sprawling complex, built seven years ago for businesses employing 15,000, has only 1,000 workers.”
That is what is at issue here. Sure, the notion of settlers being dislodged from their colonies makes for a moving spectacle, but from the half-a-million Palestinian refugees, who live in eight crowded camps in Gaza, and who were driven from their homes in Palestine in 1948, they get nothing but this: Good riddance.
After all, these refugees, robbed of their land, along with all their movable and immovable property, never received the generous compensation packages that these settlers are getting for settling on, then evacuating, land taken by force from the Palestinians.
So what is the broad design of Ariel Sharon’s strategy here? Easy to discern, my dear Watson, for there is no reason to disbelieve what one of his top advisors said last year: The Gaza pullout, he explained bluntly, is “the formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
Sure, Sharon demolished 2,000 housing units in Gaza, but his government plans to build 6,000 units in the West Bank. Couple that with that wall of hate, the so-called “security barrier,” which in effect is a land grab of 10 percent of the West Bank, resulting in the isolation of tens of thousands of Jerusalemites from their city, and you have an idea what that strategy is all about: Israel has decided, and unilaterally, on its final borders.
Who made all that possible? Ask George W. Bush, the man in the White House who wants to “introduce” Arabs to democracy. Oh, puleeeze!
