A state that is worthy of existence
By Tanya Reinhart
Yediot Aharonot, April 20, 2004
The only real thing in the tempest over the disengagement from Gaza is that Sharon has received Bush’s approval for the route of the fence in the West Bank. As for Gaza, according to the plan that was released, all that is supposed to take place there within the next year and a half is a declaration that the Israeli occupation is over. In every other way, the situation will remain as it is.
The Palestinians will be imprisoned from all sides, without any passage to the rest of the world except through Israel. Israel will keep its right to operate within the Gaza strip. But it will not be defined as occupied territory, and thus Israel will not be under the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions. Article 1F [of the disengagement plan] states that “the disengagement will invalidate the arguments against Israel regarding its responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” In other words, the current Israeli violations of international law will become legal. Israel is allowed to dispossess, starve, and kill whoever it wants—from a child throwing stones up to the successor of a spiritual leader who managed to serve for one month.
It is also decreed that the settlements and army installations in the strip will be evacuated. It is not so clear how this will be done if Israel still intends to keep the Gaza Strip under complete security control. It is not simple to monitor 1.3 million prisoners from the air. Indeed, Netzarim was established precisely in order to cut the strip in two, and to thereby allow control from within. Whoever wants to can believe that Sharon will dismantle Netzarim. For now, they are investing in its security.
On [the television news program] “Mabat,” on April 15, a calm settler from Netzarim said, “If Mofaz is building a new fence here, then of course they have no intention of removing us.” In any case, the position agreed to by Sharon and Netanyahu is that no settlement will be removed before the West Bank fence is completed.
For the West Bank, the novelty of the Bush-Sharon agreement is not at the level of declarations. Even in the plans of Clinton and Beilin-Abu Mazen it was clear that there would not be a return to the exact ’67 borders, and no right of return in its full sense. But these were proposals, that awaited the approval of the Palestinian people. Now the Palestinians are not consulted at all. Israel and the U.S. are the ones who decide. Israel marks the land that it wants and builds a fence around it.
In Clinton’s plan, the Palestinian lands that would be annexed by Israel constituted 5%-7% of the West Bank. When the current route of the fence was first approved in the previous Sharon government, in June of 2002, Peres complained that it robs the Paletinians of 22% of their land. Since then, the fence that is being built cuts deeper into the Palestinian side. According to the UN report of November 2003, this section, which does not yet include the Jerusalem area, already confiscates 14.5% of the Palestinians’ land. Along its path, Israel is uprooting tens of thousands of trees, dispossessing landowners, and pushing them into areas between fences and walls, until the final stage, when the wall will surround them from all sides, as in the Gaza Strip.
In 1969, Yeshayahu Leibovitz predicted that in the areas of occupation “the Israeli rulers will set up concentration camps… Israel will become a country that is not worthy of existence, and there will be no reason to sustain it.” How far from this are we with fenced-in Gaza.
In the West Bank the situation is still different. Along the route of the fence the struggle rages between redeemers of the land, for whom any amount of land will never be enough, and those who want to live in a land that is worthy of existing. There are also Israelis who are sitting on the ground with the Palestinians in the path of the bulldozers and the army.
(Translated by Daniel Breslau)
