Te gast: Gideon Levy

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must
know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of
Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the
Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other
word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling,
indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn’t
even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to
do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF
returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no
disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is
dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is
left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the
sublime and nonsensical talk about ’the end of the occupation’ and
‘partitioning the land? now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater
brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the
occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the
intolerable living conditions of the occupied.

In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed
the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity
supply will be cut off for at least another year. There’s hardly any
water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is
nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of
the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority,
no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike
for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink
strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta.

More than ever, Gaza is also like a prison. The Erez crossing is empty,
the Karni crossing has been open only a few days over the last two
months, and the same is true for the Rafah crossing. Some 15,000 people
waited for two months to enter Egypt, some are still waiting, including
many ailing and wounded people. Another 5,000 waited on the other side
to return to their homes. Some died during the wait. One must see the
scenes at Rafah to understand how profound a human tragedy is taking
place. A crossing that was not supposed to have an Israeli presence
continues to be Israel’s means to pressure 1.5 million inhabitants. This
is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment. The U.S. and Europe,
whose police are at the Rafah crossing, also bear responsibility for the
situation.

Gaza is also poorer and hungrier than ever before. There is nearly no
merchandise moving in and out, fishing is banned, the tens of thousands
of PA workers receive no salaries, and the possibility of working in
Israel is out of the question.

And we still haven’t mentioned the death, destruction and horror. In the
last two months, Israel killed 224 Palestinians, 62 of them children and
25 of them women. It bombed and assassinated, destroyed and shelled, and
no one stopped it. No Qassam cell or smuggling tunnel justifies such
wide-scale killing. A day doesn’t go by without deaths, most of them
innocent civilians.

Where are the days when there was still a debate inside Israel about the
assassinations? Today, Israel drops innumerable missiles, shells and
bombs on houses and kills entire families on its way to another
assassination. Hospitals are collapsing with more than 900 people
undergoing treatment. At Shifa Hospital, the only such facility in Gaza
that might be worthy of being called a hospital, I saw heartrending
scenes last week. Children who lost limbs, on respirators, paralyzed,
crippled for the rest of their lives.

Families have been killed in their sleep, while riding on donkeys or
working in fields. Frightened children, traumatized by what they have
seen, huddle in their homes with a horror in their eyes that is
difficult to describe in words. A journalist from Spain who spent time
in Gaza recently, a veteran of war and disaster zones around the world,
said he had never been exposed to scenes as horrific as the ones he saw
and documented over the last two months.

It is difficult to determine who decided on all this. It is doubtful the
ministers are aware of the reality in Gaza. They are responsible for it,
starting with the bad decision on the embargo, through the bombing of
Gaza’s bridges and power station and the mass assassinations. Israel is
responsible now once again for all that happens in Gaza.

The events in Gaza expose the great fraud of Kadima: It came to power on
the coattails of the virtual success of the disengagement, which is now
going up in flames, and it promised convergence, a promise that the
prime minister has already rescinded. Those who think Kadima is a
centrist party should now know it is nothing other than another rightist
occupation party. The same is true of Labor. Defense Minister Amir
Peretz is responsible for what is happening in Gaza no less than the
prime minister, and Peretz’s hands are as blood-soaked as Olmert’s. He
can never present himself as a ‘man of peace’ again. The ground
invasions every week, each time somewhere else, the kill and destroy
operations from the sea, air and land are all dubbed with names to
whitewash the reality, like ‘Summer Rains’ or ‘Locked Kindergarten.’ No
security excuse can explain the cycle of madness, and no civic argument
can excuse the outrageous silence of us all. Gilad Shalit will not be
released and the Qassams will not cease. On the contrary, there is a
horror taking place in Gaza, and while it might prevent a few terror
attacks in the short run, it is bound to give birth to much more
murderous terror. Israel will then say with its self-righteousness: ‘But
we returned Gaza to them.’