In August 2005, the Israeli government officially withdrew from the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian coastal enclave which he had occupied continuously since 1967. In addition to withdrawing his armed forces, it was to undertake the dismantling of 21 illegal colonies sheltering 8,000 Jewish settlers.
Israeli troops have been deployed to start the process, which drew on the heart of international media like the New York Times. The newspaper reported the sobs touched by “the historic withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza Strip”, some of which were to be transported “screaming from their houses in scenes that pushed a certain number of soldiers to tears”.
Admittedly, there is nothing as tragic as illegal colonizers uprooted from a land section which does not belong to them and which has been transferred to another section of land which does not belong to them. It should be mentioned that a majority of the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip is themselves refugees from the blood conquest of Israel in Palestine in 1948, which killed 15,000 Palestinians, expelled three-quarters of more than 500 Palestinian villages.
Since 2005, the myth of a unilateral Israeli “withdrawal” of Gaza has stubbornly persisted – and has been invoked on several occasions as presumed by the noble will of Israel to play occasionally according to the rules.
And yet, objectively, what happened in August of the same year was not at all a “withdrawal”, since the Israeli army continued to control the borders of Gaza while subjecting the territory to a punitive blockage and a bombardment without periodic emanation.
Israeli officials themselves have made no effort to hide what they really did. In 2004, when the plan was still being discussed in the Knesset, Dov Weisglass, a main advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said at close range: “The disengagement is in fact formaldehyde. It provides the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary, so there will be no political processes with the Palestinians. ”
By “freezing” the political process, Weisglass then explained: “You prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and prevent a discussion on refugees, borders and Jerusalem”. Thanks to “disengagement”, the whole question of the Palestinian state had therefore been “withdrawn indefinitely from our program” – and the whole “blessing” of the President of the United States of America “and the ratification of the two chambers of the Congress”.
Given that the so-called “withdrawal” of Gaza did not involve ceasing to make life hell for the Palestinian inhabitants of the territory, Israel has always remained engaged on this front. September 28, 2005 – The month following the drama of the colonists and bloody soldiers – the late Dr. Eyad El -Sarraj, founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, wrote on the electronic website of the Intifada: “In the past few days, Gaza was awakened from her liberation dreams with horrible explosions that broke our pencils, our buildings, our horrible windows And shone the panics.
These are the effects of Israeli planes performing sound booms in the sky on Gaza, a method that El-Sarraj noted “was never used before disengagement, so as not to alarm or injure Israeli colonists and their children”. And it was only the beginning of “disengagement”.
In 2006, Israel launched Operation Summer Rains in the Gaza Strip, that the scholars Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe later would characterize the most brutal attack against Gaza since 1967 “. Of course, it was before Gaza was awakened from her liberation dreams with a complete Israeli genocide, which has now killed more than 53,000 Palestinians since October 2023.
But there was a lot of brutality between the two, of the operation of Israel, the casting of the operation – which started in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians in 22 days – in the protective operation Edge, which massacred 2,251 people over 50 days in 2014.
In addition to periodic mass murder episodes, the Israeli blocking fluctuating from the Gaza strip has posed additional existential challenges. In 2010, for example, the BBC listed some of the household items that had been prevented at different times from entering Gaza, including “bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, pencils, clothes, shoes, mattresses, sheets, covers, pasta, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts, shampoo and conditioner”.
In 2006, the Israeli government advisor Weisglass – the same character who revealed the approach to “formaldehyde” for disengagement – also took up him to charming with charming logic behind Israel restrictions on food imports in the Gaza Strip: “The idea is to put the Palestinians to a diet, but not to die of hunger”.
Now that Israel literally sets off the Palestinians to death in Gaza with the full complicity of the United States, it seems that “the idea” has undergone certain revisions. Meanwhile, recent reports citing anonymous Israeli officials indicate that Israel is also currently plotting the “conquest” and the full military occupation of the Gaza Strip.
Two decades after the withdrawal of Israel – which was not from Gaza, it is prudent to assume that “disengagement” has opened the way to conquest. And this time, there is no disengagement plan.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
