The beginning of the end?

Gaza Strip - Something Paul Gascoigne used to wear when he played football.
- Two Cheers, BBC

Merkavas loaded with flechette rounds which are used against civilians, an organisation which convinces young men and women into blowing themselves up in sidewalk cafes and in buses full of civilians. Neighbours that have publicly declared they wanted to annihilate me, neighbours who routinely blow up suspected terrorists using Longbows, never mind if they got a few bystanders too. No white or black here, it's all shades of grey.

Midnight of 17 August 2005 marked the deadline set by the government of Ariel Sharon for Israeli settlers to voluntarily leave the Gaza Strip. Named after the main city in the area, it is home to approximately 1,300,000 Palestinians and 8,000 Israeli settlers, all snuggled up nice and warm on a piece of land 360 km². Well, it's not home to the Israelis anymore. Under a unilateral disengagement plan, all settlements in the Gaza Strip and 4 in the West Bank are to be closed down in addition to the military installations and personnel built to protect the settlements.

55,000 Israeli soldiers and police yesterday moved in on foot to remove the more hardcore of the 8,000 who had refused to leave voluntarily. Strengthened in numbers by people sympathetic to their cause, the settlers were still no match for the IDF. I had expected some violence and possibly gunplay but happily the latter did not materialize. The IDF clearly did it's homework and applied overwhelming numbers in order to encourage, cajole, order and finally physically carry out those who did not want to leave.

Of course, being called Nazis by your fellow Jews was probably something that didn't occur everyday to the soldiers and police involved in the operation. The BBC showed a clip of a group of girls wearing paper Star of Davids on their chest as they walked out of their settlement crying and wailing, a terribly low and cheap shot in my book. Playing around with the Holocaust like that just insults the memory of the event and is an all too common trump card used by too many Jews when painted into a corner (but that's another story). Other shots of men yelling at impassive soldiers were commonplace. And of course, there's that nutjob who dangled his baby boy out a window Jackson style. You'd have to be inhuman not to let it get to you and several men and women in uniform did break down. Soldiers who disobeyed orders to do their duty were promised court martials, damned if you do, damned if you don't. Still, it seems that by and large, the men and women of the IDF and police did a sterling job of getting it done. Of course, the cynic might ask where were the cameras and reporters when Palestinian homes were razed eh? It's not as if the IDF came in behind armoured bulldozers and shot first and asked questions later.

Symbolically, the withdrawal from the Strip by the Israelis is a milestone. The Israelis don't give up anything easy, especially land they grabbed way back in '67. Doing it unilaterally gives Sharon a lot of brownie points. Sacrificing the homes of 8,000 or so settlers is a small price to pay for gaining the moral upper ground, sort of, "there, now I've done my part, you (Palestinian Authority) do yours and stop all those terrorists running around your backyard". Which gives him all the more reason to blast them back past the Stone Age if the Hezbollah and company decide to start up again. Tack on to that, the money saved from maintaining all those military installations and the spare manpower that can be redeployed elsewhere, we got us a winner here.

What would be interesting would be to see what develops from here on. The West Bank is home to 230,000 Israeli settlers and that's a whole new ballgame from 8,000 baby. I can't remember the last time the Hezbollah blew up something or shot at someone, so someone somewhere must be doing something right, but what happens the next time they do? Too much blood has been spilled for things to go on as smooth as they have for this long a time. Witness the shooting to death of 3 Palestinians by a settler in the West Bank, what happens to people like him anyway?