Making sense of the Gaza debacle

National Catholic Reporter, June 4, 2004 by Neve Gordon

Two weeks after 60,000 Likud members voted against a pullout from the Gaza Strip, about 150,000 Israelis filled Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, calling upon the government to proceed with the withdrawal plan. The first group supports the vision of a Greater Israel, the second supports the state of Israel. The first group believes that without Gaza Israel will be destroyed; the second believes that with it Israel will be destroyed.

The contested area is a densely populated arid region. Enclosed by a security fence on three sides and the Mediterranean Sea on the fourth, Gaza has become a prison for most of the population. Within it live 1.3 million Palestinians, of which over 900,000 are refugees who moved to the region after losing their homes in 1948. There is barely any industry in the Strip, and few residents have been able to obtain permits to leave in search of work.

The unemployment rate is estimated at 50 percent, and 84 percent of the Palestinian residents live in poverty. Considering that the Gaza Strip is on the brink of a humanitarian crisis, it is not surprising that most people have become dependent on aid handouts. Practically all doors have been closed, except, of course, the mosque doors.

Some 7,500 Jewish settlers also live in this desolate region, less than 1 percent of the total population of Gaza. They believe in a Greater Israel and now control over one-third of the Strip's territory. Whereas about half of the Palestinians live in squalid refugee camps, the settlers have nice villas with green lawns and playgrounds and use about seven times more water than their occupied neighbors.

Ironically, Sharon's unilateral plan to dismantle the Gaza settlements and withdraw the troops who guard them while closing the Strip's borders--including access from air and sea--was also informed by the Greater Israel paradigm. Sharon realized that the occupied Palestinians will always have a demographic advantage in the area, and he is no longer willing to allocate outrageous amounts of resources to protect the handful of Jewish settlers living there. One senior United Nations official recently said: "Sharon intends to remove the wardens, lock up the prison, and throw the keys into the sea."

Sharon's proposal, though, is also about annexation, not only withdrawal. One clause stipulates that areas within the West Bank "will remain part of the state of Israel, among them civilian settlements, military zones and places where Israel has additional interests." The Bush administration supported this clause, legitimating Sharon's request to annex de jure what has already been annexed de facto. The idea is to provide legal standing to the 220,000 Jewish settlers living in the West Bank and the 180,000 living in East Jerusalem and reduce the possibility that they will ever need to return to Israel proper.

Paradoxically, though, the Likudniks rejected their leader's plan. The highly efficient yet extremist West Bank settler organization, the Yesha Council, managed to hijack the ruling party. Why did the West Bank settlers reject Sharon's unilateral plan? After all, in return for relocating 7,500 settlers, Bush acknowledged the legality of 400,000 settlers and thus helped cement the dream of a Greater Israel.

The answer is simple. The settlers know, better than anyone else, that in the occupied territories the rule of law matters much less than facts on the ground. The settlers learned as much from Sharon himself, who is considered the father of Israel's unruly settlement project. They accordingly care less about legalisms and more about implementation, and a withdrawal from Gaza would create a dangerous precedent: It would be the first time that Jewish settlements were dismantled within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And if it can happen in the Strip, it can happen in the West Bank as well.

Sharon no longer accepts this logic, and while he might have lost the battle, he has yet to lose the war. He is intent on moving forward with his original plan, and the military campaign launched in Gaza in many ways serves his objective.

Sharon turned Gaza into a military playground some time ago. Yet after his recent defeat at the polls he decided to transform it into a Lebanon of sorts. Whereas only 12 out of the 116 terrorist attacks perpetrated inside Israel since the eruption of the second intifada came out of the Gaza Strip, 45 percent of the Palestinians killed by the Israeli military are Gazans (about 1,000 people). The Israeli military has destroyed hundreds of houses in the Strip, thus rendering more than 17,500 people homeless. In the past few days the south part of Gaza was cut off from the north, and as scores of Palestinians were killed and more than 100 houses were demolished, thousands fled Rafah in fear of being hurt. A whole civilian area was transformed into a war zone. The Lebanonization of Gaza has succeeded.

On the one hand, Sharon has successfully convinced large segments of the Israeli public that the military campaign in Gaza, including the massive house demolitions, are carried out in order to "stop the terrorist cells' oxygen."