COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT
There's no other way to describe the Israeli Army's massive sweep through the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza. You know it's bad when even the U.S. issues one of its all too rare criticisms of Israeli policy.
Thomas Friedman in yesterday's New York Times:
On May 2, the Jewish settlers mobilized enough members of the right-wing Likud Party to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and all its Jewish settlements (7,500 Israelis live on 35 percent of Gaza, while 1.3 million Palestinians are squeezed into the other 65 percent). Polls in Israel consistently show a large majority of Israelis want to get out of Gaza. Nevertheless, Mr. Sharon, for now, has submitted to the Likud Party vote — even though Likud is only one faction in his ruling coalition and his coalition represents only a little over half the country.
The ability of the settler minority to impose its will on the Israeli majority means that Israel is not staying in Gaza to defend itself anymore — its own defense minister says it would be safer to leave. It is now staying in Gaza to preserve a settler fantasy — that Israel can and must keep every settlement everywhere.
As Ari Shavit, the Haaretz essayist, wrote on Friday: "The current war has been redefined since the events of May 2. On that day, the current war ceased to be a war on terror. It ceased to be a war for Israel's existence. May 2, 2004, the war became a war of not-a-single-settlement [is to be given up]. The young guys of Givati [an Israeli army unit] who were blown up with their armored personnel carrier on Tuesday in Gaza differ from all of their comrades who have been killed there since September 2000. They differ, because they are no longer the victims of extremist Islam. They are no longer the victims of Arafat's insanity. They are the victims of the settlement enterprise. The attempt of the organized settlement movement to force on the citizens of Israel a war that is not their war is unforgivable."
Shivat makes an excellent point, but I'd suggest that he has his dates wrong. Israel lost the "security" justification for occupying Gaza the moment it made peace with Egypt in 1978, just as it lost the "security" justification for occupying the West Bank when it made peace with Jordan in 1994. Since 1994 there has been no justification for the occupation other than outright Israeli expansionism, the "settler fantasy." To make things even more absurd, Israel is demolishing homes in Gaza apparently as part of an attempt to secure land from which Israeli Prime Minister Sharon has already signalled his intention to withdraw. That is, Palestinians are being driven from their homes and their children shot through the head in order to achieve a political, rather than military, objective.
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