Jewish Settlers Protest Israeli Withdrawal from Gaza

Photograph

By: Marco Di Lauro

Date: August 17, 2005

Source: Photo by Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images.

About the Photographer: Marco Di Lauro is a stringer for Getty Images, a worldwide provider of visual content materials to such communications groups as advertisers, broadcasters, designers, magazines, news media organizations, newspapers, and producers.

INTRODUCTION

The Gaza Strip is a roughly rectangular piece of land on the east coast of the Mediterranean, just south of Israel and just north of Egypt. It is about 140 square miles in size (362 square kilometers), with a population of about 1,325,000 Palestinian Arabs and, until late 2005, some 7,500–8,000 Israeli Jews living in twenty-one segregated enclaves. The settlers, about 0.6% of Gaza's population, occupied approximately 18% of the area.

From 1918 to 1948 Gaza was part of the League of Nations mandate of Palestine, administered by Great Britain. When the United Nations divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab states after World War II, seven allied Arab armies attacked the new state of Israel, triggering the 1948 Arab—Israeli war. Heavy fighting and political expulsion drove about 800,000Palestinian Arabs into Gaza both during and after the war. The strip was occupied by Egypt both during and after the war; its boundaries were drawn up during the armistice agreements of 1949. In 1967, Israel fought a second war with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and again prevailed, this time winning control of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Gaza Strip. The Sinai was returned to Egyptian control in 1979–1982. In 2005, Israel removed Jewish settlements from Gaza as part of a broad disengagement program in the region.

Soon after 1967 Israel began to build settlements in the occupied territories, hoping to establish the largest possible Israeli Jewish population there with the ultimate goal of making the territories a de facto part of Israel, facilitating eventual official annexation. Settlers were attracted by a combination of economic, religious, and nationalistic motives. The Israeli government made very low land and housing prices available; in addition, most Israeli domestic law did not apply in the Occupied Territories, so minimum-wage laws, required vacations, and benefits for workers (who are mostly Palestinian—and in Gaza, Thai nationals— and work for low wages) do not apply. Some Orthodox settlers also believe that Gaza and the West Bank are part of Eretz Israel, "the land of Israel" —which they believe was given to them by God. Such settlers believe that by living in the Occupied Territories they fulfilled a divine command.

In December 2003 Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that Israel would withdraw from the settlements in Gaza, a policy approved by the Knesset (parliament) in August 2004. Although a majority of Israelis approved the policy, it was opposed by most Orthodox and Jewish nationalist Israelis. President George W. Bush announced American support for the withdrawal in April 2004, and the removals began in August 2005, carried out by some 50,000 unarmed Israeli police and troops. Settlers at Kfar Darom settlement threw acid at the police, but there was little or no outright combat between settlers and Israeli forces during the withdrawal process.

Settlers removed from the Gaza strip were relocated to Israel. Each family received between $150,000 and $400,000 in cash compensation (depending on the size of their house, family size, and length of residence in Gaza) plus moving expenses and two years' rent in new housing. Israel asked the U.S. for an additional $2 billion in aid in 2005 to help pay for the cost of the resettlement program.

PRIMARY SOURCE

JEWISH SETTLERS PROTEST ISRAELI WITHDRAWAL FROM GAZA

See primary source image.

SIGNIFICANCE

The emotional nature of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was emphasized in much reporting on the event: "Duty Exacts Emotional Toll on Troops," read a Washington Post subheadline for August 18, 2005. Photographs dramatizing the grief and outrage of Israeli settlers forced to leave their homes, such as this primary source, were widely circulated in the media. Some Israeli Jewish critics of Israel's settlement policy, such as Uri Avnery, argued that media calls for extraordinary compassion were exaggerated. "[A]s far as simple human compassion is concerned," Avnery argued in the liberal Jewish journal Tikkun, "the settlers demand it from us, but never seem to feel it for anyone else. There is something disgusting about their inability to see the Other. It's a kind of emotional insanity: The mass expulsion of Arabs is OK. The expulsion of some thousands of Jews within the country is a 'second Holocaust.' "

Critics of Israeli government policy were also skeptical about the motives for the withdrawal. They noted that Israel would continue to exercise complete military control over Gaza's airspace, territorial waters, the Gaza/Egypt border, and the land between Gaza and the West Bank. The most common criticism of the policy was that Israel was withdrawing a relatively tiny number of settlers from Gaza while allegedly accelerating a far more massive settlement program in the West Bank, where there are a total of 187,000 Israeli settlers (plus 177,000 in East Jerusalem). While 7,500–8,000 Israeli settlers were removed from Gaza in 2005, several thousand other Jewish residents moved to settlements in the West Bank. Then-president of the Palestinian National Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, writing in the Wall Street Journal on October 20, 2005, complained that "Israel has accelerated its settlement expansion in the Palestinian heartland."

Proponents of the Israeli policy said this indicated that Israel's desire for a peaceful settlement with an independent Palestinian state was sincere. Israel withdrew from four settlements in the northern West Bank in August 2005. In May 2006, the administration of the new Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, announced a unilateral plan to withdraw 60,000 settlers from 72 Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Under the plan, up to 28% of settlers in the West Bank would be withdrawn (70,000 out of about 250,000) and a handful of the least populous settlements would be annexed to Israel. (The figure of 250,000 settlers does not include East Jerusalem.) Under the plan, about 15% of the West Bank's land area would be annexed by Israel. Olmert asserts that the plan would increase security by better defining Israel's borders. Like the withdrawal from Gaza, this plan has been criticized by some. According to the Washington Post for May 23, 2006, "many European officials fear Olmert's plan is an attempt by Israel to set permanent borders without negotiating with the Palestinians."

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Gelvin, James L. The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Periodicals

Fattah, Hassan M. "Some Arabs See Withdrawal as Hollow Victory." The New York Times. August 17, 2006.

Kessler, Glenn. "U.S. Uneasy About Israel's Plans for West Bank." The Washington Post. May 23, 2006.

Wilson, Scott. "Soldiers Use Force, Persuasion in Gaza Settler Evacuation." The Washington Post. August 18, 2005.

Web sites

Congressional Research Service. "Israel's Proposal to Withdraw from Gaza." February 2, 2005. <http://fpc.state.gov/ documents/organization/> (accessed May 23, 2006).

Congressional Research Service. "Israeli-United States Relations." April 28, 2005. <http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/47089.pdf> (accessed June 12, 2006).

Tikkun. "On Limits of Compassion for Israeli Settlers in Gaza: A Jewish Perspective (by Uri Avnery)." 2005. <http://www.tikkun.org/rabbi_lerner/Uri%20Avnery%20on%20Gush%20Settlers> (accessed May 23, 2006).