THE PRO-ISRAEL crowd was anxious last month when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced that he plans to remove 17 small settlements in the Gaza Strip, effectively ending the Israeli occupation of that area. After accusing Sharon of betraying the Zionist cause of Jewish settlement over all of Palestine without regard for the native Palestinian population, the extreme right wing in the Israeli Knesset threatened to abandon his governing coalition. We should be so lucky. Although Israeli evacuation of Gaza could be a promising first step toward peace, the ruling Israeli Likud Party has other priorities -- most notably solidifying the illegal settlements in the West Bank. As the dominant power in the region, the onus is on Israel to choose peace before political posturing, blunt nationalism and land grabs in the occupied territories.
Most Israelis, especially those in the military, have mixed feelings about the Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip. They're small, lightly populated and a massive drain on Israeli national resources -- and thus Sharon risks little political capital in advocating their relocation. The reason why this latest development has provoked little enthusiasm among groups more sympathetic to the Palestinians' plight than Likud is that the government also plans to move most of the Gaza settlers to the larger -- and much more hotly contested -- West Bank.
One of the major reasons why the "roadmap to peace" failed was that the Israeli government refused to honor its promise to pause its construction of new settlements in the West Bank. In fact, it broke those promises almost immediately, and began construction of literally thousands of new settler housing units, according to non-governmental organizations writing in the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 6. According to the same article, Israel has also allocated one million dollars to the construction of yet another Jewish-only road in the West Bank. This one will connect a settlement to a Jewish extremist school run by a group, Kahane Chai, that the U.S. State Department has officially designated a terrorist organization.
The Gaza evacuation plan has been received with little cheer from the Palestinians. Under Sharon's plan, Israeli settlers from Gaza would be relocated to new settlements in the West Bank, many of which are situated behind the massive wall being built that the Israeli government nevertheless claims won't denote any de facto border, even though it already is. Palestinians have already witnessed the results of Israel solidifying its grip on the occupied territories, and aren't eager to see it continue. As occupier, Israel has cracked down on every aspect of Palestinian life. Its military has destroyed wide swaths of Palestinian agricultural land, water and electrical infrastructure and public and private properties (including 3,000 Palestinian families' homes in house demolitions). Closing or harassing primary and secondary schools, imposing discriminatory restrictions on movement, road closures and military checkpoints on those that remain open and enforced curfews -- most of which apply only to non-Israeli Jews -- are also methods by which Israel has successfully decimated the Palestinian economy. According to the World Bank, the Palestinian economy has virtually collapsed under the occupation, with 50 percent of the population now unemployed and a third living beneath the poverty line.
The widely disproportionate response of the Israeli Defense Forces to the occupation are evident. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, 2,177 Palestinian civilians have died in the three and a half years of the Intifada. This number does not include suicide bombers or armed militants assassinated (summarily, without trial) by the IDF. Almost a quarter of those fatalities were children. By contrast, 457 Israelis have died -- which includes the scores of uniformed IDF soldiers killed in the occupied territories. The Israeli military regularly uses tanks, F-16 fighters and helicopter gunships firing Hellfire missiles -- many of them paid for by American taxpayers in violation of our own "arms purity" laws -- to open fire into crowded Palestinian residential areas, which has something to do with the 18,000 Palestinian injuries, many of them debilitating, since October 2000.
Of course, comparing body counts and suffering accomplishes little but to illustrate just how incredibly unbalanced this conflict really is. Finding peace and security for both Palestine and Israel has much more to do with doing what is best for people, not ideologies. Israel is not made safer by claiming an exclusive divine right to vast stretches of lands and then boycotting peace negotiations or refusing to try to understand why Palestinians will not happily give up their own land. As long as Israel chooses to pursue Zionism before security, democracy, pluralism or peace, it cannot seriously hope for a lasting peace for anyone involved. The question is, how long will it take Ariel Sharon to realize it?
Blair Reeves's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at breeves@cavalierdaily.com.
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