Gaza Pullout

[Adebisi]

Take a look at a map of Gaza and see how overcrowded it is, and should realise that building isolated settlements there was just plain wrong. But I can understand how some settlements in the West Bank can be justified, as it is a holy land for the Jewish people too. Muslims do live in Israel after all, without being stoned on the streets. I dont think a solution where Jews cannot at all live in the West Bank would be right. But isolated settlements belonging to Israel and protected by large walls isn't any bareable solution either.

 

[G-Man]

Actually I was referring to the fact that Sharon's government has encouraged some of those it is moving from Gaza to relocate straight to the West Bank!

That's incorrect - settlers are relocated by the goverment into areas in the southern coastal plain, not far from the Gaza strip, and has helped communities to move into Northern Israel and the Negev as one group.

Israel will not gain the moral high-ground till they leave there as well.

Israel doesn't need to gain any moral high ground - as a democratic state fighting a defensive war against fanatic terrorists, we clearly already have it.

That is all the Palestinian authority want and it is all they should get.

That's all that they want. Perhaps. As to what they should get - as determined by the UN and by the Oslo peace accords (which the PA has ofcource agreed to), the west bank and Gaza should be negotiated, with neither side having any legal or moral claim for the entire area.

Let us bear in mind that only the fanatics like HAMAS want Israel to be gone altogether. One of the reasons they want this is that the Israelis bulldozed the Palestinians out of Israel when they first set the country up.

Israel fought the Palestinians who attacked it. The fact remains that most Palestinians who left Israel did so of their own free will and with the encouragement of the attacking Arab forces.

Remember that when you talk about what is fair. If Israel return to the old borders almost everyone will be happy except HAMAS and they will no longer have the occupation to bring them widespread support.

Everyone happy, Except Israel which will be deprived of territories that by any standard should be Israeli, without any barrier between it and the very terrorists who want to destroy it, with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees and with Jewish holy sites being at the mercy of the Palestinians (note the Joseph tomb incident a few years ago).
Furthermore, having an unhappy Hamas is quite a serious situation, as there's no reason to believe that the PA will take any action against them, just like they don't plan any such action in Gaza following the withdrawal, and just like their leadership refuses to fight the terrorists.

 

[Adebisi]

What about leaving them as homes for poor Palestinians?

Not a good idea:
1. As long as the houses stand, settlers can try to re-ocupy them. They can't enter demolished houses.

If this actually the primary reason (or part of the reason) then it again shows how the European press constantly tries to portray the Israelis as disobliging. Despite reading about the pullout in a handful of newspaper and watching a dozen of news broadcasts I have never heard G-Man's explanation before. I have only heard of the greedy Jew who would rather tear down homes than give them to Palestinians.

 

[G-Man]

Take a look at a map of Gaza and see how overcrowded it is, and should realise that building isolated settlements there was just plain wrong. But I can understand how some settlements in the West Bank can be justified, as it is a holy land for the Jewish people too. Muslims do live in Israel after all, without being stoned on the streets. I dont think a solution where Jews cannot at all live in the West Bank would be right. But isolated settlements belonging to Israel and protected by large walls isn't any bareable solution either.

Well, you're kinda ignoring the context in which these settlments were created, and the fact that they have served their original goal since the 70s. That goal was to create barriers within the Palestinian population, not in order to overtake Gaza, but because having a large highly populated place like Gaza left alone would make it very easy for Palestinians to create terrorists from there. It was very clear from the very start of the peace process that these isolated settlments won't exist to see the final peace agreement. That's the basic idea behind the disengagement plan (which is much larger than the Gaza pullout) - get out of these isolated, harder to defend places, while keeping the larger settlment blocks and creating clear divides between Israeli and Palestinian areas.

 

[Pontiuth Pilate]

How many settlers are there and is there enough vacant housing in Israel to support them? I was just wondering about that.

There are about 8 to 9 thousand in the Gaza Strip. They're a little more than half a percent of the total population of the Strip.

As to how easy it is for these people to find housing in Israel proper... Israel is a very crowded country. Many of the young people head out to become kibbutzim or settlers exactly because they don't want to take a tiny stuffy expensive apartment in the middle of Tel Aviv.

I really don't know what to make of the settler policy. What do our local Israelis think of it?

Can't say much about that - I left Israel shortly after learning to talk

However, again, I feel it's rather dishonest for the government to offer incentives to be settlers (almost like our own Homestead Act back in the days of Western settlement) and then take it all away from them. They need one consistent policy.

 

[boogaboo]

How many settlers are there and is there enough vacant housing in Israel to support them? I was just wondering about that.

I really don't know what to make of the settler policy. What do our local Israelis think of it?

Ambiguosly..
Some think they should stay as part of Israel (right-wing), and some even think to relocate/expel the Palestinians to arab nations..(right-right-wing)
Some think we souldn't have settled there in the first place (left-wing)

As we are divided on this, so was our policy.

Many of the starting settlements were quite forced on the public by people who just went and built their houses and communities there.
There were people for and against it, governments for and against it, but noone really took a stand as long as there was no trouble and not enough public pressure.

I talked to some taxi driver a week ago, and he said something quite rational -
After 67, most Arab nations still wanted to destroy Israel, and (like Arafat) were talking about Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel-Aviv.
The settlements may have come to reduce this position to a "just give us our land back!" position, which we can accept (for peace).

So, no one ever asked no one to settle there, and now we ask them to leave.
I must say this is a happy occasion both for the PA (if they do it right) and for Israeli left-wing like me, whose opinion was neglected by every government (except Rabin's one perhaps).
I feel some sorrow for these people who have to leave, but they were living there like kings, while I'm relocating every year or 2..

 

[SonicX]

One thing I don't understand is the concept of a Palestinian nation.
The Gaza strip was Egyptian and the West Bank Jordanian. The Gaza got occupied after the war with Egypt and Egypt did not want that area back ... so this makes Gaza officially Israeli territory as much as the Elzas is French.

I thought Jordan was in fact Eastern Palestine as proposed by the British, and everything west of the Jordan, would be Israel or West Palestine. If Jordan is the Arabic Palestine, why don't the Jordanians do anything or why do the "Palestinians" want another state ? They've already got one !?

 

[eyrei]

One thing I don't understand is the concept of a Palestinian nation.
The Gaza strip was Egyptian and the West Bank Jordanian. The Gaza got occupied after the war with Egypt and Egypt did not want that area back ... so this makes Gaza officially Israeli territory as much as the Elzas is French.

I thought Jordan was in fact Eastern Palestine as proposed by the British, and everything west of the Jordan, would be Israel or West Palestine. If Jordan is the Arabic Palestine, why don't the Jordanians do anything or why do the "Palestinians" want another state ? They've already got one !?

My understanding has always been that the existence of the Palestinians provided a reason for continued hatred of Israel.

 

[boogaboo]

Fact is - no one wants them.
Egypt refused to have Gaza, and Jordan did the same towards the west bank.
Israel cannot keep them because both have too many arabs, who multiply much faster than jews.

They want to cling to that land? ok! Just root out the extremists and sign some aceptable peace, and 90% of Israelis will agree to that.
Arafat refused to do so with Barak.
Now we just got tired and want to force them to accept responsibility for themselves, not unite against the "evil" conquerer (they were better off in Israel after 67 than in Jordan/Egypt before, but they lacked freedom, and some Israelis were abusing them as cheap labor.. still more than they had before).

 

[Leha]

Boogaaboo, now you are in Holon? Close....

 

[Winner]

Fact is - no one wants them.
Egypt refused to have Gaza, and Jordan did the same towards the west bank.
Israel cannot keep them because both have too many arabs, who multiply much faster than jews.

They want to cling to that land? ok! Just root out the extremists and sign some aceptable peace, and 90% of Israelis will agree to that.
Arafat refused to do so with Barak.
Now we just got tired and want to force them to accept responsibility for themselves, not unite against the "evil" conquerer (they were better off in Israel after 67 than in Jordan/Egypt before, but they lacked freedom, and some Israelis were abusing them as cheap labor.. still more than they had before).

What about the West Bank? I guess you're not about to remove those hundreds of thousands of settlers from there. The new Palestinian state would have very unloayal Jew minority...

 

[brennan]

Israel doesn't need to gain any moral high ground - as a democratic state fighting a defensive war against fanatic terrorists, we clearly already have it.

Don't make me laugh. The Jews in Palestine tried to bomb the British out, that's part of Israels sordid history, as is the bulldozing of Palestinian villages in the foundation of Israel.

Ever since Israel was founded, the response of its security forces to any threat has been disproportionate. The indiscriminate bombing and bulldozing of civilian areas any time there has been an attack is the moral high ground is it?

 

[Leha]

Don't make me laugh. The Jews in Palestine tried to bomb the British out, that's part of Israels sordid history, as is the bulldozing of Palestinian villages in the foundation of Israel.

Ever since Israel was founded, the response of its security forces to any threat has been disproportionate. The indiscriminate bombing and bulldozing of civilian areas any time there has been an attack is the moral high ground is it?

Now... THIS was really stupid comment. Since Israel was founded, it was attacked several times by neigbour countries and million times by islamist militant groups.

Anyway, don't drag this thread into old good "you've started it first", ok?
Israel is now performing something, that proves it's strong democracy existance. And true democracy isn't something that can be formed in one day.

 

[brennan]

I wasn't. I was trying to point out that no-one has a claim to the moral high ground here. Israel's past is decidedly grubby, as is that of it's neighbours and the Palestinian extremists.

If you read my past posts you may see that I welcome current developments and hope for a future in which both Israel and a Palestinian state coexist in Peace. I have no wish to brood over the past.

 

[Sh3kel]

I wasn't. I was trying to point out that no-one has a claim to the moral high ground here. Israel's past is decidedly grubby, as is that of it's neighbours and the Palestinian extremists.

If you read my past posts you may see that I welcome current developments and hope for a future in which both Israel and a Palestinian state coexist in Peace. I have no wish to brood over the past.

It's not a matter of who's history is more violent.
If you were to research the incident of the Altalena weapon ship, you would see that the point is that the lawful government of Israel opened fire on its own resistance groups when the state was formed, and literally forced, under pain of death, the unification of all factions and parties into a single cohesive government entity called the Israeli Defense Force, which is our military force, our only military force.

Our moral high ground comes not from what our government has dictated over the years nor from the fact we've acted on a self-defense basis for the better part of the last 57 years. Our moral high ground comes from our willingness to do everything, wether it is the 1948 meaning of literally firing upon ourselves or today's willingness to employ whatever means necessary to reach a common goal to us and what entity will soon be our neighbours.

All we have done and acted upon was the lawful command of the government of our nation. The morality of our actions was justified in the majority of our parliament. Whatever ramifications or implications it may have had on foreign policies and impressions is a miserable and deplorable situation, but one thing we can say about ourselves is something that no Palestinian can EVER claim a real hold to - when push comes to shove and the majority decides so, we would rather bulldoze ourselves than overthrow a legal government. Considering the facists we're dealing with all over, it's a hell of an improvement.

 

[Azadre]

Israelis, how is this conflict affecting you?

 

[Elrohir]

BTW, what will happen with the settler's hauses?

Hopefully they burn them to the ground before leaving. That's what I would do, burn everything to the ground and salt the land before giving it up. The Isreali's were the ones that made the land worth something, let the Palistenians try it themselves and fail. They shouldn't reap the benefits of the hard work of Isreali's.

This is quite possibly the stupidest move Isreal could have made. Unless, or course, their trying to get themseles all killed, in which case it was brilliantly done.

Needless to say, this ticks me off.

 

[boogaboo]

@Leha : Yep, I've moved to Tel-Giborim in Holon.
See, I get relocated each year or 2..

What about the West Bank? I guess you're not about to remove those hundreds of thousands of settlers from there. The new Palestinian state would have very unloayal Jew minority...

I guess we will move a small portion of settlers and exchange jewish inhabitated territories with uninhabitated ones with the PA.
This, however, will only be done in exchange for permanent peace.
Until then, these people and the wall is our guarentee for future peace (for different reasons).

This is quite possibly the stupidest move Isreal could have made

So think many right-wing people here.
I think otherwise - it opens all eyes on the PA to make peace, knowing Israel is ready for it.
It also brings 1.5 million palestinians formally out of Israel, and reduces the military costs (life and money) of being in a territory most of Israelis (or other nations) don't consider our own.
Furthermore, if any attacks come from the Gaza strip, as rockets and shells usually are each day or 2, I expect us to have full legitimacy to attack back the "poor oppressed people" who did it, without being called thus for fighting back.
After all, they can't fire from Gaza on settlers now, only towards Israel, ad with no legitimacy WHATSOEVER.
Yes, we have a larger military, but now we also have the moral right to self defend in our own borders.

They can attack on the west bank, but again, we have shown we want peace, and we are already used to those attacks.
We just removed the ugliest piece of land we had.
Thank ... Sharon!

 

[luiz]

What kind of compensations, if any, are the removed settlers receiving?

 

[Savage Discipil]

What kind of compensations, if any, are the removed settlers receiving?

I heard on Fox News $300,000.