Adonis Diaries

“Chroniques de Gaza” by Caroline Manger (September 29, 2008)

Caroline Manger, a correspondent to weekly French magazine Paris Match, wrote “Chroniques de Gaza.  Sous les bombes, la vie”, a documentary of the lives of the Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza district.  The manuscript is of 270 pages and divided into 24 chapters spanning from February 2004 before the Israeli colonies in and around Gaza were dismantled to August 2007 after the Islamists party of Hamas displaced the security services of the Fateh authority from Gaza.

During the second Palestinian “intifada” there were frequent skirmishes between the Palestinians and the Israelis living in the colonies in and around Gaza; the security conditions on both sides became untenable. Israel tried to bring security in Gaza by military force and by target assassinations of the Palestinian faction leaders but it failed.

Before former Israel Ariel Sharon PM decided to withdraw the colonies from the Gaza strip, no more than 360 square kilometers and surrounded by Israel from all sides, there were 21 Israeli colonies in this crowded and most dense location on earth.  The colonies were established after 1967 when Israel captured Gaza from Egypt at the instigation and strong support of Arial Sharon; they claimed that practically most of the houses and makeshift residences belonged to Ariel Sharon.

The Israeli colons were ultra-extremists on two counts politically and religiously; politically they wanted to push the borders of Eretz Israel as far as they could and they were as strict religiously as the Islamist Hamas Palestinians faction. The colons prohibited the establishment of movie theaters in their colonies and the households refused to install TV on account of impure display of images; the women washed fully closed, were hidden from male visitors by a partition and the beaches were separated by gender.  The pre-fabricated apartments and houses were mostly trailers ready to move out on short notice.  The colons adored Sharon they nicknamed him Arik. All the palm and olive trees in the fields separating the colonies from the nearby Palestinian villages were cut down so that the colons could have a clear view of any Palestinian infiltration! The families were mostly freshly arrived adventurous immigrants from France and ultra US conservative Christian-Jews.  Many US billionaires contributed to building bypass bridges so that the colons would not drive through Palestinian villages.

One colony needed 600 soldiers to protect 50 families and the Palestinian inefficient homemade missiles drove the Israeli government for frequent reprisals to the angst of the European Union.  Sharon then decided to vacate the colonies from Gaza because as he declared “Gaza was anyway never mentioned as belonging to the promised land”

Israel was not serious about any peace plan after the Oslo agreement in 1993 for offering a viable and sustainable Palestinian State and continued to impoverish the Palestinian newly formed Authority in Ramallah and Gaza and endeavored to destroy whatever new facilities and infrastructure that the European Union contributed to.  In May 2004 Israel launched operation “Rainbow and cloud” and sealed off Gaza and pounded it for 5 days and demolished the infrastructure and razed houses for a corridor before the final withdrawal of the colonies in August 22, 2005. On the fifth day of the war when all the guns went silent the Israeli snipers killed many children less than 10 years old to keep the reign of terror. The author gives horrid detailed account of the Palestinian victims and the situation in these makeshift clinics, transformed into hospitals, during Israeli military incursions.

For a year when Mahmoud Abbas was elected President the Palestinians wanted to believe in a peace process but it failed and Israel resumed its targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders such as its blind and paraplegic leader Cheikh Yassine and then his successor the pediatric Al Rantissi; thus Hamas gained supporters.  In the meantime, the colons who had pledged to fight the fight against any eviction left voluntarily two days before the ultimatum; the hefty compensations were a serious factor (obviously paid for by the US tax payers).

As soon as the Israeli colons departed then the Palestinian resistance fighters ventured into Gaza City; they were hiding for over six months in their dug out and undergrounds resisting Israel frequent incursions in Gaza and then they were awestruck to discover the luxurious trend that the cronies of the Abbas’ Authority were carrying on.  These fighters were not even merged into the Authority internal security forces because President Abbas decided to hire only young people of less than 22 of age to secure their loyalty.  The fighters found out that they were out of employment and their dedication and sacrifices not appreciated.

When a democratic election that the western States insisted on carrying in Gaza took place then Hamas ended up winning the parliamentary election by a land slide.  The Abbas’ Authority refused to cooperate with Hamas in the re-shuffling of the security services that harassed, imprisoned, tortured and even killed Hamas members since 1998.  Maybe Hamas prematurely agreed to form a majority government because the Western States cut off all financial aid to the new Hamas government and the civil servants were not paid for over 4 months.  The States of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia didn’t appreciate the coming into power of a radical Islamic party and did their best to put the squeeze even more.

Finally, Hamas evicted the Fateh forces, headed by strongman Dahlan, from Gaza when it realized that the US is funding the Authority’s preventive security services with over 60 million dollars for cracking down on Hamas.  The offensive didn’t last 5 days before the Fateh forces fled Gaza; many of the high paid and corrupt officers bribed heavily to have passages through the underground tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt.  The inhabitants of Gaza are living in wretched misery on $2 a day and over 60% of the work force is out of employment because this kind of democratic outcome does not suit the western nations.

Personal note:  In the mid eighties Israel transferred Islamic Palestinians to the southern borders of Lebanon hoping that Lebanon would welcome them as refugees; this did not happen.  The transferred Palestinians lived in makeshift tents for over six months before Israel was forced by the international community to re-transfer them to Gaza.  Thus, a new Islamic fundamentalist party was instituted called Hamas.  Many claim that Israel created Hamas, as the USA administrations created the Afghan Mujahideens to face the Soviet invasion, in order to destabilize the concept of a democratic bi-partisan government with Israel.  The Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (OLP) was lead by the Palestinian secular main faction of Fateh and headed by Arafat.  Israel would not accept this political structure for fear of demographic imbalance in the near future and wanted a purely Jewish State.