Re-defiling reality

By Graham Usher
After three days of relative quiet, and even renewed talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority on "security cooperation," for the 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza Strip it was "business as usual" again on Monday. For the sixth time in three and a half months, they were "closed" externally and internally and held hostage to the whims of the most powerful army in the region, together with its auxiliaries among Gaza's 6,000 or so Jewish settlers.
The cause this time was the killing on 15 January of a Jewish settler near the Gush Qatif settlement bloc in south-west Gaza. On news of his abduction the army re-stationed tanks on every main road in the Strip and shored up mud and rock blockades on every subsidiary one. They brought in navy gunboats off the coast and, under a scintilla of flares, scoured the area around Gaza's main southern town of Khan Younis, wounding at least one PA policeman in an armed stand-off.
On discovery of the settler's corpse, some 200 metres from his greenhouses in Gush Qatif, Israel once more sealed off Gaza's border crossings with Israel and Egypt, again shut down the PA's Dahaniya Airport and barred all commerce through the Karni crossing into Israel. In an unprecedented move it also cut all electricity and water supplies to Khan Younis, stirring absolute panic among its 120,000 inhabitants that the army may be contemplating a partial re-conquering of the city.
With Gaza thus hermetically sealed, the settlers, especially those from Gush Qatif, were free and safe to exact their revenge. In a two-hour rampage, they entered Gaza's Mawassi district (a Palestinian enclave trapped between Gush Qatif to its east and the sea to the west), torching greenhouses, destroying trees and irrigation channels and firing on Palestinian homes.
In the opinion of one resident, "it was the worst violence inflicted on us since the occupation," and Mawassi has suffered much from the settlers of Gush Qatif. Three Palestinians were injured in the raid. The army was present but, for the most part, looked away.
Yet few Palestinians were surprised by such vigilantism. It is a pattern that has repeated itself throughout the Palestinian uprising, a deadly dialectic where the settlers create new realities on the ground that the army first shields and then consolidates. Nowhere is the collusion clearer than in the vast tracts of Palestinian agricultural and wooded land the army has "swept" in Gaza since the Intifada began on 28 September.
According to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), the army razed over 1,000 acres of land in Gaza in the three months before the end of year 2000. A glance at the map reveals that the devastation is anything but random. Overwhelmingly the enclosures are concentrated beside the lateral roads that connect Gush Qatif and Netzarim settlement to Israel proper or over terrain on which new roads could be laid, such as the land between the Egyptian border and the minuscule settlement of Morag next to Rafah.
Amid a scorched landscape of uprooted trees, flattened greenhouses and destroyed homes, Palestinians are convinced that the army's real policy is not to evacuate the settlements in Gaza, the common sense view of the world enshrined in Bill Clinton's proposals. It is rather to "extend their colonies deeper into our midst," says Yahya Mutaib, whose house sat between Gush Qatif and the Kfar Darom settlement and was destroyed by the army on 28 November. Today he lives in a tent overlooking the rubble of the house, together with 45 other Palestinians whose homes suffered a like fate.
The PCHR's Jaber Wishah finds it hard to disagree. He believes the sheer scale of Israel's destruction and "cleansing" of Palestinian land goes way beyond what is required for the "security" of the settlements in Gaza or even as a typically disproportionate collective punishment for the armed Palestinian actions against them. The greater fear is that the land seizures are intended for a future policy of "unilateral separation" where the settlements serve as military bridgeheads and "defensible borders" to seal Gaza not only from without but also from within.
This scenario is hardly far-fetched, especially if there is no final agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. According to a report in Israel's Haaretz newspaper on 16 January, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's template for a "unilateral separation" from the Palestinian areas includes not only the de facto annexation of the large settlement blocs in the West Bank and a security cordon in the Jordan Valley. It also seeks Israeli "control" over all "isolated settlements," including, presumably, those in Gaza. Likud leader Ariel Sharon has also made it clear that his vision of a "long-term interim agreement" with the Palestinians will not entail the removal of a single Jewish settlement.
Such plans are spoken of in the future tense, as the vista of a post-Oslo arrangement, an interim solution of no war and no peace. But in Gaza and much of the West Bank the plans are becoming lived and present realities.
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