More on the Gaza decolonization
August 23rd, 2005 by ktula
Danny Rubinstein, one of the few lone voices in the Israeli media, reminded the readers about the uprooting of the Palestinians in 1948.
“During the course of the bloody conflicts of recent years, approximately 30,000 inhabitants of the Gaza Strip have been uprooted from their homes. Entire Palestinian neighborhoods along the Philadelphi route in Rafah, at the edges of the Khan Yunis refugee camp, along the route to Netzarim and in the north on the edges of Beit Hanun have been turned into heaps of ruins by the Israel Defense Forces.”
On average, each Gaza settler family is given $250,000 as compensation to leave their homes in the settlements. In comparison,
“Thousands of Palestinian refugees, with only a few days’ warning, and in some cases only a few hours, have had to evacuate their homes, which were demolished, and their fields and orchards, which have been razed. In at least two cases that were publicized, an Israeli bulldozer demolished a house with its tenants inside, two old people to whom no one had paid any attention, and they were buried under the ruins.”
So for a mainstream media like CNN to portray the hardships of the Gaza settlers while totally ignoring or downplaying the enormous sufferings of the Palestinians is really disingenuous, if not nauseating.
I want to be hopeful about this “unilateral” disengagement and i would like to think that this will lead to an opportunity for the Palestinians to thrive and prosper as an independent and sovereign state, but the facts that i am witnessing now are pointing me away from that optimistic view. Dov Weissglas, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said in an interview with Haaretz last October that the main purpose of the “disengagement” was actually intended to prevent a peace process, and to preclude the emergence of a Palestinian state of any kind. He said in the interview
“Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a (U.S.) presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of (the U.S.) Congress.”“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde, it supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
If there is any doubt as of what Ariel Sharon intends to do with the settlements in West Bank, his recent statements in the Jerusalem Post made it very clear that Israel will expand, not dismantle, its settlements in the West Bank.
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