In February 2004, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon surprised all of Israel, and perhaps the world, when he announced his readiness to dismantle -- under the veil of his “disengagement” plan -- 17 Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. Another surprise was that he actually put his words into action over the course of two weeks in August 2005. All of Israel’s soldiers and settlers left the Gaza strip. Four more West Bank settlements were dismantled later.
Sharon -- the man who declared that “the fate of the Gaza Strip settlements will be no different than the fate of Tel-Aviv,” and who knew every settlement personally. Paradoxically, he became the first Israeli prime minister in more than 20 years to dismantle settlements. This happened at a time when Israel and Palestine are engaged in a costly war, which had already taken the lives of more than 4,000 Israelis and Palestinians.
Disengagement and ending the Occupation
With all of Israel’s 8,000 settlers and, in addition, its soldiers withdrawn from Gaza, Sharon was able to declare that “the occupation of the Gaza Strip is over,” and publicly wash his hands of any Israeli responsibility Israel had for the lives of the Palestinians living there.
Sharon’s statements are not entirely false. Gaza Strip Palestinians will no longer have to live with 17 settlements stuck like thorns between their cities, preventing them safe passage from place to place, and they will no longer have settlers constantly demanding that Palestinian plantations be uprooted—and thousands of their homes destroyed—all for the sake of the “settler’s safety.” Nor will they have to endure nighttime patrols of Israeli soldiers in their streets, or gunfire from Israeli military guard towers aimed towards children and the elderly.
All this is gone, but the story does not end there: With no naval or aerial port, and with Israel controlling and limiting access to the area, Gaza remains besieged. Even the border passage between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, which was completely open for the first few days following the disengagement, was closed by the Egyptians, following Israeli demands.
Palestinians from the Gaza Strip still cannot pass through Israel to the West Bank to visit their relatives and friends, or to work and study there. Nor can they go to Israel looking for jobs, though Gaza’s unemployment rate is at 30 percent. Gaza also lacks sufficient medical facilities, but Palestinian patients have to endure long waits before being allowed to go to Israel or abroad for medical treatment. Most overlooked is the fact that there is no such thing as Palestinian sovereignty. The Israeli army did not hand over the control of Gaza to anyone. After years of Israeli domination, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is not yet strong enough to effectively control Gaza, and today there is complete chaos.
Different armed groups fight each other over the control of the streets, and even the PA’s security forces are divided among themselves. Naturally, there isn’t a single force in Gaza today that assumes responsibility for employment, schools or hospitals. As of now the only hope for the Palestinians—70 percent of who are below the poverty line—is to continue to depend on help from UN relief agencies.
Disengagement and the Separation Wall
Even before the disengagement, one question was constantly posed: “Will there be a continuation of the disengagement plan?” Sharon delivered vague clues to the media, and then finally announced that there will be no more disengagement.
The disengagement plan, as formalized by the government and by the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), has another inseparable part to it—the Separation Wall.
The Separation Wall is a giant project which will construct 373 miles of cement walls to separate Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. The wall isn’t built on the so-called “Green Line” (the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank). Instead, it is well inside Palestinian territory. Many settlements, as well as substantial portions of land, are to the west of the wall, in areas on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Because of the winding path of the wall, Palestinians are losing the little freedom of movement that they had managed to retain. The city of Qalqylia, for example, is completely surrounded by the wall, with only one gate at the east connecting it to the rest of the world. The wall also separates many Palestinian farmers from their land.
Palestinians living in villages and neighborhoods near the wall have launched a popular non-violent campaign against it, and won the support of many Israeli peace activists. Demonstrations in villages such as Billin have been taking place almost on a daily basis for over a year, with hundreds of Palestinian and Israeli participants, including members of the Young Communist League of Israel. The army routinely disperses the demonstrations by violent force; firing tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and even live ammunition at the demonstrators. Among those wounded in a recent demonstration was Muhammad Barake, a member of the Knesset and a Communist Party of Israel Political Bureau member.
Israeli officials say that the wall is constructed for security reasons, and that it will protect citizens from terrorist attacks. However, several large West Bank settlements will remain forever under Israeli control because these are the same settlements around which the Wall is constructed. In a deal with the US administration Sharon withdraws 8,000 settlers from Gaza, and in return, he gets US assurance that tens of thousands of settlers in the West Bank will not be withdrawn because of any future peace talks.
The connection between the disengagement and the wall teaches us also that Israel has completely discarded the idea of peace negotiations. Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who declared that “there is no Palestinian partner for peace,” and his successor, Ariel Sharon, who declared Yasser Arafat to be “irrelevant,” seem to have gotten what they wanted. From now on, Israel won’t negotiate about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the Palestinians, but rather with the US administration! This intention was voiced clearly by Dov Weisglass, a prominent advisor to Sharon, who said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “the purpose of the disengagement plan is to [prevent negotiations for the] establishment of an independent Palestinian state.” According to Weisglass, the disengagement plan was concocted so that Sharon’s government won’t have to accept the “Geneva Initiative” or the “Road map” – two proposals for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Weisglass also reflected that the growing number of refuseniks, Israeli conscientious objectors, who refuse to serve the occupation, also contributed to Sharon’s decision that some political plan had be put before the public.
The wall also doesn’t stop the terrorist attacks, which it is supposed to prevent. The last suicide attack in Israel was committed in the city of Netanya, by a Palestinian from Tul-Karam, where the wall had already been finished. It seems that the wall is capable of stopping everything – except terrorism.
The wall puts up negative implications for the future of the Palestinian economy after the disengagement. Instead of employing Palestinians illegally in Israel, without social rights, as has been the practice for the past decade, the government plans for the Palestinians to be employed in several commerce and industry zones, near the Gaza Strip and the West Bank wall. In these areas of Israeli-owned factories, they’ll produce, at a ridiculously low wages, goods for consumption in the Israeli market. This way, Israeli capitalists can continue to employ Palestinians in Third World conditions, without having to see or hear them.
The Israeli Left and the disengagement
All of this is well known to the Israeli Left, including the so-called “Zionist Left.” But the “Zionist Left,” most of whom vote and sympathize with the Labor party and with the left-liberal Meretz party, openly supports the disengagement plan. Although these two parties used to criticize Sharon’s reactionary economic policies, they resorted to supporting the extreme neo-liberal budget of Sharon (which included cut-backs in health and housing, as well as continued privatization of welfare and education services) – all for the sake of keeping his government in power—so he could carry out the disengagement plan. Their desire to see the hated Gaza Strip settlers withdrawn was more powerful than the calls made by those on the radical left (such as the Communist Party) who urged them to see the whole picture.
But what of the radical left? Here it is more complex. On the one hand, the Communist Party and other progressive and consistent peace groups voiced clearly their staunch opposition to Sharon’s disengagement plan. On the other hand, there was the question of praxis: the ultra-right forces, most notably the settlers, had a huge public campaign against the disengagement. This campaign pressured many members of Knesset, even from Sharon’s own party, to speak out against it. It wasn’t certain that Sharon’s plan would pass Knesset approval, and it was obvious that the plan’s defeat would be a huge success to the settlers, the ultra-right and the fascist forces.
Communist Party members of Knesset (2 out of 120) decided to abstain, rather than vote against the disengagement. This was not out of support for Sharon’s plan, but to block the extreme right from carrying out their own plan to prevent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. In this kind of atmosphere, the CP found it very difficult to explain its position to the Israeli public, which was divided into two major camps – the “Orange” right-wing supporters of the settlements, and the “Blue” supporters of the disengagement. While the most reactionary forces aligned behind the “Orange” campaign, Sharon’s center-right supporters joined the Zionist Left behind the “Blue” campaign.
The CP’s dialectical position supported neither of these two camps. We were against the disengagement, but not out of support for the settlers. We were against Sharon, but not because he “gave up parts of the holy land to the Arabs” (as the ultra-right fanatics screamed), but because his disengagement was just an attempt to perpetuate the occupation, rather than bring justice and peace.
The Future: After the Disengagement
The damages of the disengagement plan can still be fixed. There are voices from the Zionist Left that started demanding the same thing we in the Communist Party have been demanding for 38 years: to start negotiations for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, in all of the territories of the West bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
Israeli workers and unemployed, those who suffered the most from Sharon’s government privatizations and cut-backs, whose voices were silenced during the disengagement ordeal, can push forward their agendas. More and more Israeli youth who refuse to enlist in the army, as well as veterans who refuse to serve in the occupied territories, can continue to pressure the Israeli government to finally end the occupation. The joint non-violent struggle of Israeli and Palestinians against the wall can prove to the two peoples that there are partners for peace and reconciliation on both sides.
There is still much more to be done, and it seems the road that remains ahead keeps getting longer and longer. But we are positive that a determined struggle for an independent and sovereign Palestinian state, coexisting peacefully alongside Israel, will be able to penetrate Sharon’s walls of political deceits, and create a better tomorrow.
Yuval Shilo is a student at the University of Jerusalem, member of the Young Communist League of Israel (YCLI) and the Communist Party of Israel (CPI). All this explains why some correctly refer to the Gaza Strip as the “Gaza Strip Prison.” (For additional information, see human rights reports at http://www.btselem.org /Download/ 200503_Gaza_Prison_English.doc.)
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