Reply #4: Take a closer look at the history of Gaza, and why it failed,

[Jefferson23]

Praying with Their Eyes Closed: Reflections on the Disengagement from Gaza

Sara Roy

Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 34, no. 4 (Summer 2005), p. 64

Essay


When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, we had the Bible in our hand, and they had the land. —Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya.
On 9 June 2005, the last legal hurdle to implementing Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement from Gaza was cleared when the Israeli High Court approved the plan and its removal of all the Jewish settlements there. The settlers, though angered by the decision, were not surprised and vowed to oppose their coerced departure with all means possible. Considerable media attention in the United States has been devoted to the suffering of the Jewish settlers and the personal costs for them of the disengagement. This attention has served to thaw and then humanize the often violent and zealous settler population, and in so doing, to illustrate and amplify the sacrifices Israel is making for peace.
By now a great deal has been written about the disengagement plan by both supporters and opponents. Many of the arguments in favor focus on the redeployment as an opportunity to break the near five-year-old political impasse between Palestinians and Israelis and usher in a new era of stability and peace. In April 2005, for example, President Bush stated that Israel's withdrawal will allow the establishment of "a democratic state in the Gaza" and open the door for democracy in the Middle East.<1> Tom Friedman was more explicit, arguing that "he issue for Palestinians is no longer about how they resist the Israeli occupation in Gaza, but whether they build a decent mini-state there—a Dubai on the Mediterranean. Because if they do, it will fundamentally reshape the Israeli debate about whether the Palestinians can be handed most of the West Bank."<2>
Embedded in both statements are a set of assumptions: that Palestinians will be free to build their own democracy, that Israel will eventually cede the West Bank (or even consider the possibility), that Israel's "withdrawal" will strengthen the Palestinian position in negotiations over the West Bank, that the occupation will end or become increasingly irrelevant, that the gross asymmetries between the two protagonists will be redressed. Hence, the Gaza disengagement plan—if implemented “properly”—will provide a real (perhaps the only) opportunity for resolving the conflict and creating a Palestinian state. It follows that Palestinians will be responsible for their success, and that if they fail to build a "democratic" or "decent mini-state" in Gaza, the fault will be theirs and theirs alone.

A Dubai on the Mediterranean?
It would be useful to consider what the Palestinians in Gaza have to work with to achieve success.
Today, there are over 1.4 million Palestinians living in the Strip. By 2010 this number will reach close to two million. The Gaza Strip has the highest level of fertility in the region—5.5–6.0 children per woman—and the population grows at a very high rate of 3–5 percent annually. Fifty years ago, 80 percent of the population had not yet been born. Fifty percent of Gazans are 15 years old or younger, with rapidly declining access to health care and education. The half of the territory in which the population is concentrated has one of the highest population densities in the world. In the Jabalya refugee camp alone, there are 74,000 persons per square kilometer, compared with 25,000 persons per square kilometer in Manhattan.<3>
Palestinians are currently experiencing the worst economic depression in modern history, according to the World Bank, primarily caused by long-standing Israeli restrictions (especially closure) that have dramatically reduced Gaza’s trade levels (especially exports) and virtually cut off Gaza’s labor force from their jobs inside Israel. This has resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment ranging from 35 to 40 percent. Some 65 to 75 percent of Gazans are impoverished (compared to 30 percent in 2000), and many are hungry.
In 2004, a Harvard study concluded that the increase in Gaza’s population by 2010 will require the “creation of some 250,000 new jobs . . . to maintain current employment rates at 60 percent and the establishment of an additional 2,000 classrooms and 100 primary healthcare clinics annually to bring access to education and public health services at par with the West Bank.”<4> Yet, the disengagement plan states that Israel will further reduce and eventually bar Palestinians from working in Israel. Researchers on the same Harvard study also stated that in a few years, Gaza’s labor force will be “entirely unskilled and increasingly illiterate.”<5> As for educational services, between 1997 and 2004, student-teacher ratios declined by 30 percent, with 80 students per class in government schools and 40 per class in UNRWA schools. Test scores for Palestinian children are well below passing, currently under 50 percent, and the majority of 4th graders fail to advance to the next grade.<6>
About 41 percent of Gazans are now assessed by the World Food Programme (WFP) to be “food insecure,” defined as lacking secure access to sufficient amounts of safe and nutritious food for normal growth and development; in five areas of Gaza, the figure exceeds 50 percent. An additional 30 percent of the population is “food vulnerable,” which places them under threat of becoming food insecure or malnourished.<7>
Since 2000, the economy of the Gaza Strip and West Bank has lost potential income of approximately $6.3 billion. In addition, the economy has suffered over $2.2 billion worth of physical damage by the Israeli army, which means, in effect, that the “occupied Palestinian territory has lost at least one fifth of its economic base over the last four years as a consequence of war and occupation.”<8>
Yet, despite these conditions, the plan states: “The process of disengagement will serve to dispel claims regarding Israel's responsibility for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."<9> This idea rests on another powerful assumption of the Gaza plan and the discourse surrounding it: that Gaza’s agony is a recent phenomenon borne of the last five years of intifada, and that the return of the land taken up by military installations and settlements—anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of the territory—will easily redress the situation. Under this widely held notion, the context for understanding the disengagement begins in 2000, not in 1967. Israel's primary role in creating Palestine's misery and decline over nearly four decades is quite simply expunged from the narrative.

in full: http://www.palestine-studies.org/journals.aspx?id=6525&jid=1&href=fulltext




snip* On 15 September 2005, the Israeli High Court of Justice also dismissed the ICJ's ruling. Notably, it disagreed with the ICJ on the relevance of Israeli settlements to the legality of the Wall. Whereas the ICJ unanimously held that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal, the Israeli High Court of Justice held, in a case concerning a part of the Wall surrounding an Israeli settlement, that:

The military commander is authorized to construct a separation fence in the area for the purpose of defending the lives and safety of the Israeli settlers in the area. It is not relevant whatsoever to this conclusion to examine whether this settlement activity conforms to international law.

There is a fundamental legal flaw to this argument. When a state violates international law, it is obliged to undo its illegal act, if physically possible. This means dismantling the settlements. With the settlements dismantled, there would be no conceivable reason to build the Wall on Palestinian territory in order to protect Israeli settlers.

Moreover, there is a clear link between settlements and the Wall, both of which participate in confiscation and ultimately annexation of Palestinian land. In a recent detailed study, Israeli human rights organizations B'Tselem and Bimkom showed that the route of the Wall in many instances coincides with settlement expansion plans. On 15 June 2006, the Israeli High Court of Justice issued a judgment rebuking the Israeli government for concealing such an expansion plan in a case relating to the route of the Wall. On 8 March 2006, then Israeli Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that "the course of the fence - which until now has been a security fence - will be in line with the new course of the permanent border." In November 2005, then Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said that it will serve as "the future border of the state of Israel."

http://electronicintifada.net/content/intervention-member-states-un-two-years-after-icj-advisory-opinion/561