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MEIonline.com
News Analysis
The theatre of disengagement
From Graham Usher in Gaza
September 2nd, 2005 -- By and large, Palestinians have met Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza the way the Lebanese met the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — with the politics of spectacle.
There were differences. In Beirut the rallies and counter-rallies articulated genuine social and political constituencies, with the fault-line running between those opposed to Syrian hegemony and those in favour. In Gaza, so far, the demonstrations have been factional shows of strength, with each side positioning to claim the “liberation” and its spoils.
“Celebrations” in Gaza
For the Palestinian Authority and its ruling (but wounded) Fatah movement, the mobilization has been to endorse its institutions and its leader, President Mahmud Abbas, as well as Civil Affairs Minister Muhammad Dahlan, Gaza’s ever rising star, for whom a smooth transition is oil to his leadership ambitions. On 13 August, in one of Fatah’s more original displays, an armada of fishing boats set sail in Gaza harbour under a billowing tent of Palestinian flags and nationalist insignia.
In an address to his people, Abbas underscored his signature themes of unity, national reconstruction and peace through negotiations. “Today we are celebrating the liberation of Gaza and the northern West Bank,” he said. “Tomorrow we will celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem.”
For Hamas and Islamic Jihad the “celebrations” are actually military parades, testifying to their belief that it was the resistance — and only the resistance — that drove the Israelis out. On the day Fatah took over the sea, Hamas took over Gaza’s Jabaliya Refugee Camp, mustering its entire leadership to salute a graduation ceremony for 1,000 fighters, dressed in khaki and armed with rocket-propelled grenades.
There was also a rare screening of Muhammad Dayf, commander of Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, a man Israel has tried to kill at least twice, who many believed fatally maimed and whom the PA dare not imprison. He is generally seen as the tribune of Hamas’ most radical stream. He surely sounded like it.
In a video released to Associated Press on 27 August, Dayf — dressed in a black shirt with his face shrouded in shadow — claimed the Israeli withdrawal as a victory for the Palestinian resistance, vowed its continuation until the liberation of “Jerusalem, the West Bank… and the rest of Palestine”, and warned “all those who try to touch the weapons of those who liberated Gaza”.
But, he added, this was not a challenge to the PA or Abbas. “We want to use dialogue to solve any differences to protect our Palestinian blood and national interests,” he said. “The liberation of Gaza is an important lesson for us all. Let’s all draw the conclusions and keep the resistance legitimate.”
Most Palestinians have been extras in these representations of their history. Their temper was more accurately expressed in a wedding procession, wending its way through the centre of Khan Yunis. From one of the cars a boy sporting a bow-tie fired a pistol dangerously close to a PA police patrol. The patrol scattered. The family apologized. But it summed up where most Gazans are at with Israel’s first real withdrawal from their land: dressed for a wedding but ready, again, for a funeral.
Hope in Khan Yunis
And nowhere more so than Khan Yunis. Together with its sister southern city of Rafah, this city and refugee camp of 170,000 has suffered the most from Israel’s colonial project in Gaza, due to its fatal proximity to the settlements at Gush Qatif. In the last five years over 300 of its men, women and children have been killed by army fire, often from eyries in the settlement bloc. Over 900 of its homes and shelters have been destroyed, many hundreds more damaged and/or abandoned.
It has been denied access to its coastline, including the Palestinian enclave of Muwasi, 10,000 of whose farmers live in Khan Yunis. It has had only sporadic access to Gaza city and the northern part of the Strip because of lateral settler-only roads that served Gush Qatif but would also, when required, segment Gaza into three or four isolated enclaves. Very simply, Khan Yunis has had its vitality, economy and community crushed by an idea once described by Israeli Labour politician Haim Ramon as the “most insane” in the history of Zionism — that Israel could settle a strip of land that is home to 1.3 million Palestinians, three quarters of them refugees.
“We are counting the days,” says Usama al-Fara, the mayor of Khan Yunis. He has big plans for the 25% of municipal land that, when Gush Qatif finally empties, will again fall to his charge. There are PA and World Bank projects to build homes, establish tourist facilities and renew agricultural development. These, he believes, will fuel jobs, reconstruction and, above all, hope. But the vision may founder on one lingering reef — an occupier that may be withdrawing its presence from Gaza but not yet its control.
“In the months after disengagement, Sharon will go to the UN Security Council and demand that it no longer define Gaza as occupied Palestinian territory,” says Fara. “Well, that is not going to fly as long as Israel controls Gaza’s crossing into Egypt, the Palestinian sea and air ports and our passage to the West Bank. As long as that continues we will not only remain occupied. It will prevent all investment in Gaza. And nothing in the long term is going to be sustainable in Khan Yunis — or anywhere else in Gaza — without private investment.”
Of all the pending issues left by the withdrawal, it is the crossing into Egypt that is causing most Palestinian alarm. The PA is insisting that the border terminal remain at Rafah, under Palestinian-Egyptian control, with a “third party” on hand to assuage Israel’s security fears.
Israel has no problem with an exit for Palestinians through Rafah. But it insists that all entry of people and goods must pass through a new terminal at Kerem Shalom, a territorial corner where Gaza, Egypt and Israel meet. Needless to say, such an arrangement would perpetuate Israel’s actual control over the Strip, including the Palestinian airport at Dahaniya, which abuts Kerem Shalom.
Should the Palestinians continue with their refusal, Sharon has warned that the Rafah crossing would no longer be bound by the customs union agreed between the PA and Israel in 1994. There are some Palestinian economists who would welcome this, given the skewed economic benefits the union has afforded Israel. But it would mean Gaza having a different economic status to the West Bank, fermenting fears that Sharon’s real game plan is to establish a separate Egyptian-Palestinian regime in Gaza.
These fears have been augmented by plans leaked in the Hebrew press that Israel intends to transform Gaza’s northern Erez passage into Israel into a fully fledged border crossing, with passage requiring visas and all the other paraphernalia of “sovereignty”. Such arrangements do not operate in the West Bank — at least not yet. But Gaza may serve as a precedent once the West Bank Wall and all its terminals are built.
The West Bank
There are other intimations of the future. As the last of Israel’s 8,000 or so settlers were being evacuated from Gaza and the northern West Bank, Israel’s Interior Ministry released figures showing that 18,000 Israeli Jews had moved to West Bank settlements in the last 18 months, with most settling in the blocs of Ariel, Gush Etzion and Ma’ale Adumim.
On 16 August military orders were issued to confiscate 1,600 dunums (160 hectares) of land from Palestinian villages around East Jerusalem to begin construction of the Wall around Ma’ale Adumim, home to 30,000 settlers and 4.5km inside the occupied West Bank. Israel has already approved 2,100 new housing units for the settlement, expected to swell the population by another 10,000.
Of all the settlement enlargements now taking place in the West Bank, Ma’ale Adumim is the most dangerous. If built as routed, the Wall will cut the West Bank into two non-contiguous territories and isolate East Jerusalem from its Palestinian hinterlands. It also encloses the area marked for Israel’s so-called E1 plan: a complex of settlement, tourism and industry that would fill the last urban space Palestinians have for their putative capital.
Under US pressure, Sharon has not yet commenced construction of E1, though 3,500 housing units have been approved. But on 20 August he did authorize the transfer of Jerusalem’s district police station to E1 land. That station will require construction, roads and homes — the first piece in an urban jigsaw whose purpose is quite simply conquest by architectural means.
Israel has reverted to type in other ways too. On 24 August the Israeli army raided Tulkarm Refugee Camp, killing five Palestinians, all allegedly members of an Islamic Jihad cell responsible for recent suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Netanya.
The army said it was fired at. Palestinian eyewitnesses said the army fired first and with overwhelming power, an account subsequently supported in an army investigation revealed by Israel’s Ma’ariv newspaper. They also said that three of those slain were adolescents with only loose connections to Jihad, while another was actually supplying information on the wanted cell to the PA.
The PA’s response to the Jerusalem land confiscations was to hold a cabinet meeting in the suburb of Abu Dis (on the “Palestinian” side of the Wall, of course) and take diplomats on a tour of the endangered lands, an itinerary that has so far generated a resounding silence. The response to Tulkarm came on 28 August in the person of a suicide bomber, killing himself and wounding two in a blast by a bus station in Beersheba. No group has claimed responsibility, though Jihad is the likeliest suspect.
Netzarim
For Abu Farid, the abiding memory of Gaza’s Netzarim settlement was not its red-tiled villas but its khaki-green watchtower. It was there that army bulldozers were released after every Palestinian attack, reducing much of the Strip’s most verdant agricultural land to a scorched moonscape. That watchtower also claimed the lives of 114 Palestinians, including, in August 2002, Ruwayda al-Hajin and two of her sons, killed by flechette shells fired from tanks.
Abu Farid doubts whether a single stone of his home in the neighbouring village of Zahra has been spared a bullet either from the watchtower or Palestinian fighters trying to topple it. Like most of his compatriots, he takes a jaundiced view of the disengagement. “It’s a ploy by Israel to rid itself of the burden of Gaza while taking the fight to the West Bank,” he says. Nor is there much confidence that calm will prevail in the aftermath. “After 40 years of oppression and humiliation, you expect some kind of reaction.”
Still, on the day we meet him he is moving belongings to Zahra from his other home in Gaza city, watering the lawn and planting an evergreen tree. Why?
“So I can return to life,” he says.
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