Gaza was again in the headlines, grabbing, if only for a moment, changeable international attention. Two million Palestinians living in the 141 square-mile spit that hugs the Mediterranean don’t have that luxury. They can’t avoid suffering, made by powers bigger than themselves, it was the fate of the Gaza strip for the better part of the last generation.
Today Gaza is a prison, the border of North Israel and the South and East of Egypt, who for their own reasons conspired to continue to live in poverty and isolation. In the West, the Mediterranean sea, deceptively open, but simply impenetrable. In a far Gas time, it was just a staging post, a thriving seaport on the Mediterranean sea, linking the West with the Arab hinterland to the East. Its location along the hotly contested Mediterranean coast, where the abundance of natural gas was recently discovered, is a cruel reminder that Gaza, which the world Bank warns, will be uninhabitable by 2020 if current policy will be continued—maybe.
In recent days, 17 Palestinians were shot by Israeli troops located along 32 miles of the fortified border separating Israel from the impoverished enclave. Extraordinary 1,416 were injured in clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and the military, including 750 injured from live fire.
The UN Security Council is preparing to approve a statement in which it expressed “grave concern about the situation on the border,” Reaffirming “the right to peaceful protest” and Council expressing “sorrow over the death of innocent Palestinians.” The project is called “for the respect of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including protection of the civilian population.” The Council members “urged all parties to exercise restraint and avoid further escalation,” and endorsed “independent and transparent investigation” of this confrontation. Then, the United States blocked approval.
“With regard to the Commission of inquiry will not be there,” said security Minister Avigdor Lieberman categorically stated on Israeli army Radio”. Israeli soldiers did what was necessary. I think all our soldiers deserve a medal”.
The scale of violence not seen since the war between Israel and the Gaza strip in 2014, even muscled its way into Pope’s Easter address that called for “reconciliation for the Holy Land, is also experiencing in these days the wounds of the ongoing conflict that does not spare defenseless.”
These confrontations were the opening salvo in a planned Palestinian protests that are due to expire on 15 may in the mass peaceful March on Gaza, more than two thirds of whom are refugees or their descendants, through hard border to Israel.
These demonstrations opposite Israeli troops grandchildren of refugees immortalized in 1957, then-chief of staff Moshe Dayan as “the surging sea of hatred and vengeance, longing for the day that peace of mind dulls our vigilance…. Why should we complain about their hatred for us? Eight years they sat in refugee camps in Gaza and I saw with my own eyes how we did homeland soil and the villages where they and their ancestors once lived.”
Ten years later, Diane as security Minister, made the only right decision, to remove the border fence, blurring the line that separated the Palestinians living in the newly conquered Gaza and the West Bank from Israel. In 1982, the security Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon ordered the removal of two conscripts stationed at a remote post, which noted the all-but-invisible border between Israel and Gaza. For generations, the Palestinians went everything but smoothly on the old border, providing food for the myth of Israeli “charitable occupation.” That all collapsed in the last days of 1987, when a traffic accident in Gaza began the first intifada (uprising) against Israel.
Thus began decades of restrictions on Palestinian movement, which found its most devastating expression in the constant siege of Gaza.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon startled many when he ordered the removal of all settlements and troops from Gaza in September 2005, not least the Chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas, who never believed, until Israeli forces closed the gate to the checkpoint Carney that Sharon will carry out his promise.
Abbas and the majority still does not understand that Sharon was not to leave Gaza. It was unilaterally revising Israel’s relationship with him. Israel, despite its historic 1993 agreement with the PLO, remains the occupying power constrained by its international obligations to safeguard the welfare of the local population. After the Gaza disengagement, Israel has unilaterally revised Gaza as enemy territory, where the rules of war, not about the obligations of occupation apply. But for the retreat of Israel, draconian restrictions on Palestinian movement, production, and trade continues, “the siege” on Gaza heartlessly described as “diet” with Sharon confidante, it would be all but impossible.
For Israel in this new era, on the border with Gaza was sacred as a symbol and as a tool for Israeli sovereignty to be protected, as we have seen, no mercy for the refugees by pressing on barbed wire. The Palestinians do not need the boundaries that constrains them and gives them nothing but misery and bitter memory of their personal and national destruction. The international community is exhausted and bored with the conflict. Even when trump White house has a representation of the last conference on humanitarian aid for the Gaza strip—it has no enthusiasm for its success. In the absence of any concerted diplomatic process that can offer an alternative, the moderating of the narrative, the “March of return”—must be completed on 15 may, the fierce defense of Israel’s borders, will prevail.
Geoffrey Aronson is the Chairman and co-founder of the group, Morton and a non-resident researcher of the Institute of the Middle East.
Sourse: theamericanconservative.com
