Gaza Evacuation Should Be Americans' Last Straw

As I watched the extensive, plainly sympathetic coverage of Jewish settlers being evicted from their Gaza homes, I couldn't help but take note once again of the striking double standard applied by American news media as well as the U.S. government. I cannot recall any sympathetic coverage of Palestinians being evicted from their homes. No interviews with weeping mothers or fathers. No discussions of whether the evictions were right or wrong. This is obviously a deliberate policy on the part of America's television networks, for after all, they had 4,170 opportunities to report on Palestinian evictions since September 2000. That's how many homes were destroyed, and, of course, doesn't count the orchards and olive trees bulldozed by the Israeli army or Israeli settlers. Of course, Palestinians were not evicted by sympathetic soldiers or promised huge amounts of money to relocate. No, they were brutally told to get out of their houses, which were then blown up or bulldozed into rubble by decidedly unsympathetic Israeli soldiers. What little they had was destroyed, and they were offered nothing except verbal abuse by the Israelis and invisibility by the American media.

[more]

The remaining 99.5 percent
by Amira Haas

"I want to ask you as a Jew to a Jewess," the young man said a few days ago. In these days, a beginning such as this invites a dialogue of the kind in which we have been drowning for several weeks now - a dialogue in which the definition "Jew" has been appropriated to describe some type of unique entity, one that is set apart from the other human species, a superior one. Sometimes it's the Jewish boy with his arms raised from the Warsaw Ghetto; sometimes it's the young girl whose orange shirt bears the slogan, "We won't forget and we won't forgive;" and sometimes it's the soldier who refuses to evacuate a Jew. A unique entity of ties of blood, sacredness and land. "As a Jew to a Jewess," said the young man, who turned out to be a tourist from South America who has family in Israel and also understands Hebrew. It was at the Erez crossing, among the barbed-wire fencing, the locked gates, the revolving gates, the intimidating guard towers, the soldiers using special cameras to keep an eye on the handful of individuals passing through, and the booming loudspeakers through which they bark out their orders in Hebrew to women who have been waiting in the heat for five hours to go visit their sons imprisoned at the Be'er Sheva jail. "Is it possible," he continued with his question, "that the Israelis, who are so nice and good - after all, I have family here - are unaware of the injustice they have caused here?" The images of destruction left behind by Israel in Palestinian Gaza and witnessed by him in the past few days have left a look of shock in his eyes. "I am a Jew, and my father is a Holocaust survivor, and I grew up on totally different values of Judaism - social justice, equality and concern for one's fellow man."

[more]

  thanks to Antiwar.com

The Shame of It All
Watching the Gazan Fiasco

A great charade is taking place in front of the world media in the Gaza Strip. It is the staged evacuation of 8000 Jewish settlers from their illegal settlement homes, and it has been carefully designed to create imagery to support Israel's US-backed takeover of the West Bank and cantonization of the Palestinians.

[more]

"They Should All Rot in Hell - I"
The City of the Dead - Part 4
by Aron Trauring

I try to avoid as much as possible reading articles or listening to reports about the dismantlement of the settlements in Gaza. But you can't seem to avoid it. The amount of news coverage is astonishing. It is almost impossible for me to look at this event from a political perspective. For one thing, I don't think anyone, least of all the architect of the event, Arik Sharon, has a clue what the ultimate consequences will be. Will this be the beginning of the end of the settlement project? Or is this one more tactical move in a bloody game that has been going on for decades? More than that, this is an intensely personal story for me. It brings me back to my days in Hebron, the city of the dead.

[more]

"They Should All Rot in Hell - II"
The City of the Dead - Part 5
by Aron Trauring

There is one last story I want to recount. It's actually a finish to the story of the Settlers' calling my friend a Nazi so many years ago in Hebron. I was standing next to another soldier from another unit, a short Moroccan Jew who no doubt was a firm supporter of the Likud. As he listened his face got redder and redder until he burst out and said: "These Settlers should all go rot in hell." As I watch from afar the evacuation of Gaza, those are my thoughts exactly And I know exactly the perfect hell. Somewhere in another universe, there is a beach chair with the name of every settler, along the coasts of Gaza. And when their day of judgment comes, they will lie bound to those chairs, unable to move. Transfixed in horror, they will listen to the rising trance music, and watch as Gil and Mahmoud give each other a high five, and with boards in hand rush into the surf, for one last ride before the party begins.

[more]

Week's end in Israel