Column: It’s about time

By Todd Swiss

As the Gaza Strip is slowly being evacuated, I breathe a cautious sigh of relief. If all goes as planned, this will be a fantastic move for both Israel and Palestine. Israel will no longer have to use large numbers of troops to police a volatile area and Palestinians will be able to live autonomously for the first time in over three decades. However, there is still a long way to go before peace will be the norm.

Let’s face it. Israel setting up ultra-religious and ultra-nationalistic settlements in an area widely populated by Palestinians was a very bad idea. Hindsight may be 20/20, but come on. In the early 70’s when settlers began arriving in larger numbers, the area was dominated by Palestinians and their businesses. When the Palestinian population continued to rise in the Gaza Strip, the two very different groups began to clash. Both groups felt threatened by the radically different views held by the other.

When Sharon announced his plan to evacuate the settlements in Gaza, he was criticized by his own people for giving the land to the Palestinians. Members of his cabinet even resigned in protest of the withdrawals. Many Israelis saw this move as rewarding the terrorists or going against what the Torah says about the Jewish Promised Land. But the political and logistical move by Sharon was the correct one. There was no better solution to the multi-faceted problem of defense, stubbornness, and public opinion. The protesters will always scream louder than the people who agree with the controversial move, and Sharon will no longer have to deal with the problem of Israelis being killed by suicide bombers with nothing to lose and the resulting retaliation taken by Israeli troops.

Some settlers wore yellow stars of David as they left, attempting to gain sympathy by trying to draw lines between this evacuation and the events at the beginning of World War II and the Holocaust. While the two events do share the similarity of being forced to leave their homes, there are no other things in common. The settlers are being paid somewhere between $250,000 to $500,000 in compensation to find a new place to stay of their choice. They are allowed to keep their possessions and were not charged in any way for the move. The loss of a home and its memories is surely traumatic, but not even remotely to the extent of the Holocaust. I am sure that none of the settlers are complaining about how they will miss all the barbed wire, security checkpoints with heavily armed guards, or the increasing fear of being killed by a suicide bomber.

It is a moment of truth for Palestine and Islamic extremists. They now have a chance to prove that they can control an area of land without it becoming a hotbed for terrorism. Israeli nationalists, republicans and other right-wing factions are basically waiting for the Palestinians to mess up. Some are actually hoping for the area to fall into terrorism to prove themselves right. Palestinians must now turn the Gaza Strip into what it was before Israel had taken control of it: a peaceful area of land inhabited by regular working Palestinians. While some radical Palestinians are calling for more violence in the West Bank to try to scare Israel away from the settlements there, this is not the reasonable or intelligent option. Palestinians need to live their normal daily lives to show that they can govern themselves and that the actual cause of their violence was not natural, but an unfortunate result of the humiliation and prejudice the Palestinians were subject to during the occupation of their land.

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If the Gaza Strip becomes a peaceful region, Israel needs to continue their evacuations of settlements in the West Bank. It is the only way to ensure tenable coexistence between the Israelis and Palestinians as well as a more peaceful Middle East.