Cry Me a Rive

How much longer do we have to listen to the Drama

Queens of Disengagement?

The settlers still claim they are being

mischaracterized as the villains in this melodrama. 38

years of Occupation in a colonial enterprise should at

the very least have prepared them for the inevitable

withdrawal.

But how can you blame people when they live in a

bubble? They are like the Afrikaaners from South

Africa who did not know that their time in history had

passed.

The Israeli mainstream largely supported the

withdrawal, having subsidized the settlement

enterprise for so long that they had already

formulated the conclusion that it was unsustainable.

Most of the settlers left willingly without incident.

Like whimpering spoiled children, many did not go

gently into that quiet night. They threw temper

tantrums, they threw acid and paint at soldiers and

policemen and there were incidents of people

barricading themselves in synagogues. They left

behind burning debris and pick-up trucks on fire. One

of them even lit herself on fire.

What a performance - somebody should have given them a

baby rattle.

But here they were, like any great opera, being done

in by their own guy - Ariel Sharon. He deployed an

army of 50,000 to remove over 9,000 of them. In all,

they withdrew from 21 settlements in Gaza and 4 in the

West Bank though there were no assurances that the

Occupation itself would actually end.

Anyone who has to leave a home after decades of living

there should be shown some compassion and certainly

there is trauma associated with such events. This is

a very human response.

That is why every settler family is being given

between $200,000 and $300,000. Added to this is two

years free rent. With the Israeli cost of living,

this is akin to winning the lottery. (You could buy

120,000 falafels with that kind of money!).

For the thousands of Palestinians who have had their

homes demolished in the past five years, they are

certainly not accorded the same dignity of upheaval.

So there’s still a stark, simplicity to the narrative - the settlers get rich, the Palestinians get a kick

in the ass.

Last time this year, the settlers had their kids

stopping cars at Jerusalem street corners handing out

leaflets, bumper stickers and flowers opposing the

disengagement. They held hands from Gaza to

Jerusalem. They took on the color orange as the

symbol of their cause.

There were also grand gestures of restraint and rabbis

calling for compliance with military orders. By most

accounts, the operation largely moved ahead without

major obstructions or barriers.

Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned as Finance Minister, in a

cynical gesture to protest the Gaza withdrawal. For

that, he should receive the Drama Queen of the Month

Award.

The soldiers largely did not respond to the settler’s

provocation, unlike Operation Rainbow conducted in

Gaza last May where they demolished dozens of houses

in Rafah and left several dead - a military operation

in which the Western media largely looked the other

way.

There is now fear of violence and food shortages in

Gaza in the coming months. There will also be an on

the ground power struggle between Fatah and Hamas.

Certainly any future Qassam rocket fire or violence

from Gaza will be met with a violent Israeli response.

Without American pressure, Sharon would certainly have

backed out of his commitments. With Sharon willing to

act unilaterally, the Roadmap to Peace was irrelevant

and accepting the limits of international law were

never in the game plan.

Without the alliance between Ariel Sharon and George

W. Bush, there never would have been the mettle to

pull off the withdrawal even if the real meaning

behind it was a green light for Israel to solidify its

holdings in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

But there were casualties. At 5:50 pm on August 4th,

a settler opened fire on an

Arab bus driver and Arab passengers in Shefaram,

killing four of them.

At 4:45pm on August 17th, four Palestinian workers

were shot dead by a settler in the West Bank.

In recent years, certain Members of the Knesset have

catered to the far right by openly calling for ethnic

transfer and irresponsibly using words like "cancer"

and "demographic threat." The Attorney General has

rarely investigated incidents of hate speech.

Added to this has been the brazen settlement expansion

carried out in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The radicals in Hamas have had their own pathetic

calls for incitement. Until it matures as a political

movement to be fully part of the political system, it

too will do as much damage as good to the Palestinian

cause.

Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon have similar internal

enemies - zealots and militants fostered in certain

yeshiva schools and particular mosques that threaten

to undermine the political consensus in both their

countries.

But there remains a distinction - one is the occupier,

and one is the occupied. There is no possibility

today of a final status peace agreement since there is

such a major power imbalance between the two.

Fanaticism breeds fanaticism - it is a part of the

equation in the terror cycle. One can’t exist without

the other. And if political space is created, a

political movement will inevitably fill it. It is as

true in politics as it is in physics.

This is a legacy of the culture of Occupation. Until

it ends, this small minority in each country will

drive a counter-productive agenda in both Israel and

the Occupied Palestinian Territories to the detriment

of its citizenry.