I was extremely happy with the wide coverage the Western media - especially that of the US- gave to the plight of two Israeli families who were recently forced by the Israeli army to evacuate two Palestinian homes they had occupied. CNN cameras, for one, captured the human suffering of these two families who were forced from their homes for no reason other than the fact that they lie on Palestinian land and that they are owned by Palestinians. We saw how the defense forces carried the Israeli citizens by the arms and legs like sheep to remove them from the two homes. Thrown in the middle of the street, they were transformed to homeless refugees in the blink of an eye, which is an extremely inhuman an uncivilized thing to do. Their plight seems even more acute if we consider that the teachings of Israeli Rabbis affirm the right of every Jew to live in the land of Judea and Sumaria, which we now call the West Bank, and where the Palestinians have been living with no rightful claim for thousands of years now. The settlements, which have mushroomed all over the Occupied Palestinian Territories, are referred to as "colonies in French. But in Arabic, we have chosen to refer to them as "settlements to match the US-British term used to describe them. So how could the Israeli army evacuate them if we Arabs don't even regard them as colonies, but simply settlements?! Try to imagine the plight of these settlers, who know full well (like the rest of the world) that the Israeli occupying forces are the ones protecting them and that if it hadn't been for the Israeli army, which secures their borders and all the roads leading to them, these settlers would not have survived the barbaric and unwarranted attacks of Palestinians. The current issue of Time magazine reported that the Israeli army holds weekly meetings with the Jewish settlers' council in each settlement to discuss ways of protecting them from possible Palestinian attacks. In Hebron, for example, where 500 Israeli troops protect the settlers, there doesn't even seem to be a dividing line between the settlers and the army. Six of these settler families, for instance, live inside the surrounding army barracks, where officers organize lectures by the settlers to educate army personnel on the historical importance of Hebron to the Jews and the necessity of encouraging more Jews to settle there. But where else can they settle down except in the homes of Palestinians who actually live in Hebron and have been for many centuries now? In this light, the actions of the Israeli army, which forced these two families out of the two Palestinian homes, is utterly unlawful. True, that every soldier in the Israeli army has the undisputed right to refuse to participate in the evacuation of these settlements, but still there are those who must obey orders to evict Jews from settlements every now and then, in what can only be termed a savage and inhuman act. During the unilateral retreat of Israeli forces from Gaza, the Israeli press reported that the family of a soldier in the Israeli occupation army lived in one of the Gaza settlements which the army had to evacuate. The soldier's unit commander allowed him to leave his post and join his family in resisting the Israeli forces' attempt to evict them. It is, by all possible measures, a tragedy to all settlers and to any human-loving soul. If I'm happy about the attention the Western media gave to the plight of these two families, it is because it proves the humanity of Western media; it sets one's heart to rest that perhaps sometime in the future Western media may pay similar attention to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families who were thrown out of their homes more than half a century ago. Mohamed Salmawyis President of the Writer's Union of Egypt and editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo. This article is syndicated in the Arabic press.
