Newsletter 13th August, 2005
Tonight is erev Tisha be-Av, the evening of the ninth day of the month of Av, a fast day in the post-Torah Hebrew calendar of festivals and fasts. But unlike Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which could be described as a Shabbat (meaning a complete rest from work) dedicated to introspection and penitence, Tisha be-Av is a day of mourning on which we are permitted to work and travel.
This evening, after the public reading of the Book of Lamentations, Jeremiah’s lament for the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586BCE, participants will walk around the walls of the Old City, from Safra Square to the Dung Gate and then to the Kotel, the Western Wall itself. This will be the last of the demonstrations before the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip begins. Despite all the prediction, the demonstrations have all been peaceful.
Two weeks ago over 60,000 protesters were stopped while trying to get to the Gaza Strip. Can you picture it? Tens of thousands of people, men women and children, camped out for days with no proper facilities, surrounded by 20,000 police and hundreds of reporters from all over the world, with nothing to report. No violence. No incidents. No piles of rubbish. That’s right. When the last demonstrator had left the entire area was as clean as it was the day they arrived.
Over the coming days, as you watch the evacuation of Israelis, by Israelis, from the Gaza Strip I ask, you for a few minutes, to detach yourself from the big political picture and to consider some of the finer points which get less, or no, coverage.
1) Contrary to popular belief that the Gaza Strip was settled by Israelis in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967, in actual fact Israel established the first settlements only after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 by which time it had become abundantly clear that the Arab world, including the Palestinians, were abiding by the “three no’s” of the conference in Khartoum after the Six Day War. They continued to refuse to a) recognise Israel, b) conduct face to face negotiations with Israel or c) make peace with Israel.
2) The first settlement in the Gaza Strip was Kfar Darom, established in 1975 on the remains of a kibbutz which was destroyed by the Egyptians in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence. Netzarim, Ganei Tal and Morag were established in the latter half of the 70’s.
3) Elei Sinai, Gadid, Rafiah Yam and Naveh Dekalim in the early 80’s after Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty and Egypt refused to take back the Gaza Strip, which until 1967 had been under Egyptian military rule. Watch for those names in the news. They were all established legally by the governments of Israel, Labour and right wing alike, who encouraged people to settle there as there was still no sign that the Palestinians wanted to negotiate any kind of settlement with Israel.
4) The settlements were established on empty, barren sand dunes and, with the same hard work which has made the swamps and desert of what is today Israel bloom, those sand dunes too have blossomed and produce fruit, vegetables and flowers.
5) Over the decades, with the same effort and using the billions of dollars given to them by the world, the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip could have achieved exactly the same, if not better, results considering the endless funds at their disposal. They were not prevented from doing so by the Israeli presence – on the contrary, many of them found work with the Israelis who have always been more than willing to share their agricultural expertise. They were prevented from doing so by their own leadership which preferred to keep them in abject poverty, to be used as tools in their war against the very existence of Israel.
6) Prior to the present outbreak of violence, and during the first intifada, there were no road blocks in Gaza. Jews and Arabs traveled without hindrance and tens of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip traveled daily and freely to work in Israel. This ended only because of Palestinian violence against Israel.
7) The Israeli settlers have been told that their presence in the Gaza Strip is a hindrance to peace. But what kind of peace is it when:
a) the Palestinians continue to attack Israeli itself, within its pre 1967 borders and continue to encourage suicide bombers.
b) the Palestinian leadership proclaims daily, for all to hear, that the evacuation of the Gaza Strip is but the first step to achieving a Palestinian state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea, with its capital in Jerusalem, a statement which can only mean denial of the existence of the State of Israel.
c) the Palestinians insist that their state be Judenrein (without any Jewish citizens) despite the fact that the population of Israel includes 18% Arabs.
8) Irrespective of what you or I may think of as the ideal solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, the settlers are not the heartless fanatics described by the media. Most of them are ordinary people who are being forced to leave their homes and fields, which they established from nothing, where they have brought up their children and buried members of their family. Many of them are of an age where it will be close to impossible to start again or even to find another job.
If any of my readers have had to move from a home in which you have lived for many years, perhaps which you even built yourself, adding rooms as the family grew, you will recall the trauma, the wandering from room to room, remembering the birthdays, parties, holidays, happy events as well as sad ones. And you went by choice.
Try then for one short moment to understand what these people are suffering, as individuals. Eight thousand individuals, each with their own memories.
