The Cancer Cells
by Uri Avnery

The Palestinians, of course, suffer more than anyone else. Any who come near the settlement are shot. Anything that was standing or growing nearby, or along the road, has been destroyed or uprooted long ago. This week, the army demolished two Palestinian high-rise apartment blocks, each 12 floors high, some hundreds of meters from the settlement, because from there the goings on in the settlement could be "observed". This is typical: like a cancer in the body that gradually extends its malign influence, every settlement slowly destroys its surroundings in an ever-widening circle.

The process can be outlined as follows:
(1) On a hilltop, an "outpost" consisting of one or two mobile homes is set up without government permission.
(2) The government declares that it will not tolerate such illegal actions and talks about removing it.
(3) The army sends soldiers to defend the outpost, saying that it cannot leave Jews in a hostile region without protection as long as they are there, even illegally.
(4) For the same reason, the outpost is connected to the water, electricity and telephone networks.
(5) The discussion in the cabinet is postponed, and in the meantime the settlement expands.
(6) The cabinet decides to accept the accomplished fact and the outpost becomes a legal settlement.
(7) The Military Governor expropriates large stretches of cultivated land for the development of the settlement.
(8) A bypass road is build to allow for the safe movement of the settlers and soldiers. For this purpose, the army expropriates more stretches of cultivated land from the neighboring Palestinian villages. The road with its "security area" is 60-80 meters wide.
(9) Palestinians try to attack the settlement that stands on their land.
(10) To prevent attacks on the settlement, an area 400 meters wide around the settlement is declared a "security zone" closed to Palestinians. The olive groves and fields in this area are lost to their owners.
(11) This provides the motivation for more attacks.
(12) For security reasons, the army uproots all trees that might afford cover for an attack on the settlement or the road leading to it. The army has even invented a new Hebrew word for it, something like "exposuring".
(13) The army destroys all buildings from which the settlement or the road could be attacked.
(14) For good measure, all buildings from which the settlement can be observed are demolished, too.
(15) Anyone who comes near the settlement is shot, on suspicion that he has come to spy or attack.

This way the settlement sows death and destruction in a ever-widening circle. The life of the Palestinian villages in the neighborhood becomes hellish. They lose the sources of their livelihood. Hundreds of such villages find themselves trapped between two or more settlements, which close in on all sides, sometimes right up to their courtyards. Their lives and their property are at the mercy of gangs of settlers.

This process has already been going on for decades all over the occupied territories. It is a slow, continuous, day-to-day offensive, unseen by Israeli eyes. Last year, the "separation fence" was added, a monster that snakes its way deep into the West Bank in order to "defend" the settlements. It makes the life of hundreds of thousand of Palestinians well-nigh impossible.
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Death of a town
With ruthless efficiency, the Israeli army has been crushing and rocketing the Palestinian refugee town of Rafah in a manner which rivals the destruction of Jenin last year. But it is all in the name of stopping terrorism so the international community has remained silent.

For two weeks now, the Israeli army has been grinding its way through Rafah refugee camp in the southern tip of the Gaza strip. "Operation Root Canal" is ostensibly aimed at destroying some of the dozens of tunnels the military says are used for smuggling weapons under the border with Egypt.

As about 65 tanks, armoured vehicles and mammoth armour-plated bulldozers rolled into Rafah, the Israeli army said it had intelligence that surface-to-air missiles were being hauled through the tunnels. But there was no sign of them as dozens of Palestinians attempted to exact some kind of price for the attack with pistols, AK-47s and homemade hand grenades. By the time the Israelis withdrew to the fringes of the camp where the tanks and bulldozers are perpetually at work, 18 Palestinians were dead, including three children under 15 years old, and more than 120 were wounded.

Just three tunnels were found, and no weapons. But in the process, the military crushed or rocketed nearly 200 homes, throwing about 1,700 people onto the street. The army claimed it never happened, that just 10 homes were wrecked, and then sent back the bulldozers to grind the evidence that the houses ever existed into the dirt.
[...]

For the governor of Rafah, Majid Ghal, the claims about tunnels and resistance are all nonsense. He says the demolitions are yet another grab for Palestinian land. "What they are doing is to carve out a buffer zone between Rafah and the border. The Israelis have always said they do not want Palestine to control its borders or to have borders with other countries. They are trying to drive people out," he says.

The army denies any such motive. But a clue to Israeli intent can be found in comments made on Israel radio a year ago by the then head of the military's southern command, which has responsibility for Gaza. Colonel Yom Tov Samya said house demolition was a policy and an end in itself, not a by-product of a search for tunnels. "The IDF (Israeli Defence Force) has to knock down all the houses along a strip of 300 to 400 metres. It doesn't matter what the future settlement will be, this will be the border with Egypt," he said. "Arafat has to be punished, and after every terrorist attack another two or three rows or houses on the Palestinian side of the border have to be knocked down ... This is a long-term policy. We simply have to take a very extreme step. It is do-able and I am happy it is being done, but it's being carried out in doses that are too small, I regret to say. It has to be done in one big operation."
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  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog

Captives Behind Sharon's Wall
Silence in the Face of Israeli Apatheid

As the government of the Jewish state forces the Palestinians in ghettos, history must be turning in its grave. Qalqiliya, a city of 45,000, has been surrounded by a concrete wall and only those who are granted permits by the Civil Administration can enter and exit the city's single gate.
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A disastrous dead end: the Geneva Accord

Because of the Oslo process, the basis for a viable and minimally fair two-state solution has been completely destroyed. The Israeli "peace camp" and the Palestinian leadership ought to have learned from the calamities they helped bring about and changed their ways. The so-called "Geneva Accord," an informal agreement prepared by Israelis, led by former Labor Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and other Oslo-era luminaries, and Palestinians close to Yasser Arafat, demonstrates a determination to repeat the tragic errors of the past.
[more]

  thanks to Aron's Israel Peace Weblog