The Hindu Business Line : The drama and trauma of Gaza

A great media circus is being played out in Gaza as the Israeli army evicts Jewish settlers to return the strip of land to the Palestinians, who were dispossessed in 1967. Is this going to satisfy the Palestinians, who think this is too little too late, while Israel thinks it has already done too much? Tracing the current developments and the history, Rasheeda Bhagat wonders what lies ahead.

AN ASSOCIATED PRESS account of the ongoing Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip summed it up best with one of its reports that begins: "As Israeli soldiers dragged Jewish settlers from their homes, one settler walked in front of about a dozen television cameras and wailed: `How could they do this? This the land of Israel.' When the cameras were turned off, he stopped crying and walked away. Another family invited a television crew into their homes and then insisted that soldiers drag them out... "

This is the essence of how dramatically, and effectively, the global media, particularly the electronic segment, have been used to inform the world about the great and heroic gesture of the Israeli state in vacating the Gaza Strip of Israeli settlers, which was, to begin with nothing more than illegal occupation.

To allow the media to give a ball-by-ball account of the evacuation of Israeli settlers in Gaza is definitely paying Israel rich political dividends. The drama, the tears, the struggle and even the violence, it is all a package that tells the rest of the world: "Look, if this is the resistance that Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip are putting up, imagine the mayhem, the heartbreak, the blood-bath and the misery and trauma that would result if even as much as an attempt is made to evict the settlements in the entire West Bank, ten times the size of the Gaza Strip."

The AP report adds that the Israeli army, "which sometimes limits press coverage of military operations, let more than 500 journalists — one for every three settler families — into Gaza to cover the withdrawal, even providing shuttle buses and refreshments. Journalists were in almost every settler home, embedded with military units and broadcasting live from synagogues as the army dragged settlers out of houses of worship."

Clearly, embedded journalism, a product of the US-led invasions of Iraq, has come to stay. Of course, any keen watcher of the Palestine-Israeli conflict would not have missed the kid-glove sensitivity with which the Israeli soldiers handled the eviction.

The Gaza settlers, of course, spared no effort to tell the world through the TV and still cameras, available in scores, how traumatic and painful it was for them to leave their `home', and some of them even resorted to evoking the Holocaust imagery, raising anger even among their own countrymen for trivialising that great tragedy. But sometimes the drama became a little too much to bear, such as when your television screen beamed images of Israeli soldiers bursting into tears even while evacuating the settlers.

Public memory may be short but not so short as to forget those powerful images and accounts of the brutal force the Israeli military has used on Palestinians over the years — the bulldozers, the heavy artillery fire, the threats, and the humiliation of the former PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) leader, Yasser Arafat, as he was held captive in his office for long days and nights by the Israelis even as his health deteriorated.

Finally, in a major "humanitarian gesture" the Israeli leadership allowed him to be taken to a hospital in Paris for medical treatment with the clear warning that it could not give a guarantee that he would be allowed to return.

While some of us would think the Israel step was long overdue, a section of the Western media is all praise for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon. In an editorial titled Ariel Sharon's statesmanship, on Tuesday, The New York Times pulled out all stops to compliment him for his "extraordinary accomplishment" in evicting Jewish settlers from Gaza. Marvelling at the efficiency and speed of the operation, it observed: "The history of the Jewish people made the relative ease of the Gaza evacuation all the more remarkable. For Israeli forces to force Jewish settlers off land that many consider theirs by birthright was clearly gut-wrenching."

But the devil of the entire Gaza media circus is in the detail. How did Israel come to occupy these territories in the first place in 1967? Through sheer military might and by evicting the Palestinians. But before looking at that history, let us not forget one key factor: That even as Israeli soldiers were vacating a few West Bank settlements, Mr Sharon made no secret of his intention to hold on the major West Bank areas with hundreds of settlements.

After losing their homes in 1967, the Palestinians spread out to adjoining Arab countries of Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Thus were born the Palestinian militant outfits such as Hamas and by the turn of the century the world saw an explosion of violence and suicide bombers that turned the entire Middle East into a cinder box.

The might of the Israeli army or air force could not deter the suicide bombers and innocent lives, of both Israelis and Palestinians, were lost in the suicide bombings and the brutal retaliation that inevitably followed.

The carnage continued for years while the Western powers, particularly the US, paid lip-service to resolving the Israel-Palestine imbroglio through half-hearted measures. Whether it was the violence in the Middle East or the carnage in Kashmir, the West had little interest in looking at the root causes that were fanning the flames of the jehadi brigade till 9/11.

In the Islamic world there was little doubt that the rich and politically powerful Jewish lobby in the US was, to a great extent, dictating the superpower's agenda when it came to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Even as the Israeli guns were trained on Yasser Arafat's residential compound, the rest of the world just looked the other way. That image of the helpless old man held to ransom by the Israelis certainly gave birth to many more militants and terrorists in several corners of the Islamic world. Neither arguments that he was not exactly a man of peace nor an analysis of his militant background could cool tempers in the Islamic world. So what next?

As one watched Israeli bulldozers turning Jewish settlements into rubble, the first thought that came to mind was why leave behind rubble and not actual homes that the Palestinians could occupy.

But, as a BBC report points out, this was done at the request of the Palestinian Authority because what it will need in the coming days are not "suburban-style homes... but multi-storey buildings to deal with densely populated Gaza's housing crisis," which it hopes to build with the infusion of a massive dose of international aid.

What the future is going to be like will depend on the two main protagonists. Mr Mahmoud Abbas, who was named chairman of the PLO after Yasser Arafat died in November 2004, and who won convincingly the January 2005 elections to become president of the Palestinian Authority. The 69-year-old leader is considered both a pacifist and a pragmatist and though a co-founder of the Fatah, the main political grouping within the PLO, he was more and less sidelined during Arafat's reign. What he has going for him is that the US leadership thinks that he is, more than Arafat ever was, a man with whom it can do business.

However pragmatic and pacifist a leader Mr Abbas is, the question is if the Palestinians are going to be satisfied with the tiny Gaza area that has been cleared for them. Surely this is too little too late and a far cry from the dream state that every Palestinian imagined.

On his part, Mr Ariel Sharon has made it clear that he has gone much farther than the agenda of his hardline Likud party. Both the leaders face crucial elections ahead — Mr Ariel Sharon to retain the leadership of his party and Mr Mahmoud Abbas, the municipal elections where the Hamas will be the main competitor.

Palestinians want Israel to hand over all of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem for their capital; Israel captured both along with Gaza in 1967. There is no chance of this happening; already Mr Ariel Sharon and Israel are thumping their chests that they have given away so much. Till now the Palestinians have quietly watched the eviction of Jewish settlers from Gaza, but who knows what the Hamas and its friends have up their sleeve?

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
An onerous job

Valuation to end warring

Yuan revaluation — No big advantage for India

Accounting's key role in human history is of creating institutionalised memory

Bittersweet fruits of incorporation

The drama and trauma of Gaza

Surviving change

Managers have to resolve the ethical debate and take decisions

Mumbai's makeover

Cow dung as fuel