http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=4/15/01&id=117045
A demolished house for every bullet
By Gideon Levy
By dawn, the mission was accomplished. About 30 homes in Khan Yunis
refugee camp were "shaved" off the face of the earth. The entire first
row of houses that threatened the Neveh Dekalim industrial zone was
entirely destroyed - as an inevitable side effect two Palestinians
were killed and dozens wounded.
In the Israeli lexicon this is an "initiated defensive" operation,
strictly kosher. The fact that it is the most flagrant violation so
far of the Oslo agreements - even if the prime minister of Israel has
bragged that Israel enters Area A "almost every day" - did not halt
the operation. The question of what is the difference between an
operation like this and acts of terrorism was not even asked. The cute
duo of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Binyamin
Ben-Eliezer has begun to strike.
A few days earlier a round of missiles landed on the Beit Lahiye
police station in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. However precise
and "surgical" they may be, the missiles missed a bit, or the damages
expanded a bit, and the flimsy houses near the police station were
entirely destroyed.
So what happened? Two families of the Abu Sultan clan, with their 19
children, were left homeless. Six residents were wounded. I saw the
boy Ahmed and the baby Izzat last week distraught among the ruins of
their home. Their mother asked for the world's protection - she has no
other. This is also fine in Israel's eyes and is not considered an
"act of terror."
Why, then, is the demolishing of dozens of civilian homes not an act
of terror? Why is the causing of distress to hundreds of children
whose homes are destroyed as they sleep not terror?
Is the question of who shot first the only relevant moral and
political question, or should it also be asked how much force each
side uses and what means it employs? Within three days Israel
demolished the homes of 42 families in the Gaza Strip, most of them on
purpose and maybe a few of them just possibly by mistake. About 500
people have been left without anything, a Palestinian civilian and an
officer were killed and several dozen civilians were injured, among
them at least one child who was wounded in the head.
The red line of the Oslo agreement has been brutally crossed - and
everything is legitimate, moral and inevitable in Israel's view.
Terror belongs only to the Palestinians, and self-defense only to
Israel.
And perhaps, it must be asked honestly, the firing of mortars by the
Palestinians is an act of self-defense against the occupation that has
no end, and against the Jewish settlements beyond the 1967 borders
that are just growing larger and larger before their exhausted eyes?
The fact is that this whole drama of destruction and killing far more
Palestinians than Israelis have been killed, despite the threat of the
mortars has not changed the perception whereby when you say "security
needs" you always mean only and exclusively the security needs of
Israel and of the Jewish settlements. Allaying the anxieties of the
children whose homes have been destroyed and who do not know what will
happen to them tomorrow night is not considered a Palestinian security
need and protecting them is not legitimate self-defense.
What do we expect the world will think of Israel when it is behaving
this way? What kind of state is it whose army enters the heart of a
residential neighborhood in the middle of the night, demolishes dozens
of homes belonging to innocent civilians, and then leaves?
And this when it is signatory to an explicit agreement whereby it is
not allowed to enter there. The fact that from the narrow alleys of
the Khan Yunis refugee camp, one of the poorest camps in the Gaza
Strip, shells and bullets were fired on the nearby Jewish settlement
does not give Israel the right to use the force at its disposal
however it pleases.
A demolished home for every bullet? Who determines this chilling
index? Now, when the first row of houses in Khan Yunis has become
rubble, the Palestinians will fire from the second row. And then what?
Will Israel also shave that? And maybe we will destroy this entire
noxious refugee camp from which they fire on Neveh Dekalim?
Does anyone remember that its inhabitants, who have been living for
more than 50 years in terrible poverty, had already once been refugees
who had nothing? Israel, take note, is once again slowly and surely,
whether intentionally or not, to the days of the occupation before
Oslo. It is going back to the territories it had occupied, which it
has left only partially.
First it allowed itself to fire with rifles into the territories of
the Palestinian Authority, then came the helicopters, followed by
ground-to-ground missiles; now ground forces are entering, destroying
and departing. It will not stop there.
The Jewish settlers of Hebron are already demanding the reoccupation
of the Abu Sneineh neighborhood, and the settlers of the Katif Bloc
are not satisfied with the demolishing of the first row of houses in
Khan Yunis. The next "implementers" are already on the way, and from
them it is but a short way to leaving a permanent military presence in
the areas of friction, just like then, in Lebanon.
As in Lebanon Israel will once again sink into the bloody cesspit,
whether out of strategic planning or out of having been sucked in.
Creeping annexation is here again; an occupation that was never
properly ended is back and in a big way. And then what.
