That I regard the following news as shocking and disgraceful is surely a reflection of my own innocence. (But innocence, naive faith, idealism–they help to drive this site.)
At the same time that it is setting forth on peace talks with the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority, Israel has for the first time publicly endorsed the policy of separating Gaza and the West Bank politically (and culturally).
This policy has been obvious to anyone who has visited the Strip and the West Bank: you are seeing two starkly-different cultures and political entities. But Noam Sheizaf has the goods, reporting that the Israeli government has described "separating Judea and Samaria [i.e. West Bank] from Gaza" as "a security and diplomatic objective."
Unbelievable. Will the U.S. say a word about this? Will Clinton or Mitchell object? Israel makes lip service to a Palestinian state living alongside it but meantime a living part of the Palestinian consciousness, the largely-refugee population of Gaza, Israel has segregated and imprisoned and surrounded with remote-control machine gun towers, obviously with an eye to one day delivering it with a ribbon to Egypt. And let’s be clear, this is a reflection of occupation. If Gaza were not occupied, as Goldstone said it is, Israel could not achieve this ghettoization, this breaking up of families, these attacks on fishing boats and lettuce-growers and scrap-metal-scroungers and humanitarian flotillas, this neverending destruction of human resources that is Gaza. Sheizaf:
An IDF Powerpoint slideshow, presented before the Turkel committee for the investigation of the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla, reveals the official goals of the Israeli policy regarding the Gaza strip….
Slide 20 deals with freedom of movement from and to the Gaza strip. Policy objectives are:
– Limiting people from entering or exiting the strip, in accordance with the government’s decision.
– Separating Judea and Samaria from Gaza.
…The Israeli policy regarding Gaza could be seen as violation of official and unofficial principles of previous agreements and negotiations with the Palestinians and other parties. Gaza and the West Bank were regarded as “one entity” – though not officially declared as such – already in the 1978 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. The Oslo Declaration of Principles, signed in September 1993 and still an abiding document, specifically states that:
The two sides view the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a single territorial unit, whose integrity will be preserved during the interim period.
This declaration was ratified in following agreements from 1994 and 1995.
The recent IDF slideshow is the first time an Israeli official document publicly declares that the current policy objective is to create two separate political entities in the Palestinian territories.
