FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
In 2006, Hamas won the first democratic elections in Palestinian history. A year later, armed Islamist militants drove out and killed activists...
It wasn't always like that. Once upon a time, some four decades ago, Israelis living in kibbutzim and villages now destroyed by Hamas would go to the Gaza coast to buy fish, have lunch at port restaurants, buy tomatoes and fruit at local markets.
The inhabitants of the fifteen or so Jewish colonies built in the Gaza Strip, after its occupation in 1967, mingled without many problems with the locals. There were no walls or barriers around the perimeter of the Strip, except for some rusty barbed wire put up by the Egyptians and Israelis in 1948.
At checkpoints, soldiers frantically checked the identity cards of about half a million travelers heading to Israeli construction sites and plantations. Indeed, many of them did not return home: they slept in their workplaces. When it is said today it seems as if we are talking about an absolutely different planet and in fact it is.
Officially, Gaza and the West Bank were occupied territories (but not East Jerusalem, which would have been annexed almost immediately) to be returned in exchange for peace with the Arabs. In fact, however, a form of creeping annexation based on the use of Arab labor in the Israeli economic system soon began. In those first years there was almost no resistance from the Arab side, the people were annihilated by the overwhelming power of the Jewish state. And in fact the battle against Israel was led for a long time by Yasser Arafat's PLO, which operated from the outside and referred to socialist decolonization movements associated with the Soviet Union.
But in December 1987 it was the outbreak of the intifada, the popular uprising of Palestinians in the occupied territories, that shattered the Israeli illusion of "open bridges" at no cost. A few months ago, David Grossman warned: “The occupation corrupts the Palestinians and it corrupts us Israelis. But it cannot last, Arab discontent will explode."
Palestinians for the first time took their destiny into their own hands with an indigenous protest movement independent of the PLO. A year later, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin announced the birth of Hamas from his home in the heart of Gaza, which denied any possibility of compromise with "the Yehud", (Jews) and rejected the secular nationalist approach of the PLO and in the name of Allah called to the sacred right of his people to control all of Palestine. Since then, the open conflict between Hamas, more entrenched in Gaza, and the PLO, less and less strong in the West Bank, runs parallel to that against Israel.
The Intifada blocked the peaceful coexistence between the two populations. A few years ago, the owner of a popular restaurant in Gaza still looked nostalgically at pictures of his room filled with customers from Ashkelon and sighed as he talked about his Jewish girlfriend from Tel Aviv.
2005 withdrawal
The 1990s lead directly to today's situation. The season of Islamic kamikaze terrorism begins. Attackers blow themselves up among people in restaurants, buses and nightclubs in the heart of Israel: every Palestinian is a suspect. Gaza becomes an open prison 48 kilometers long and 9 kilometers wide on average, inhabited by just under two and a half million people (about 40% are under 14 years old, about 22% are between 15 and 24 years old).
Things get worse after a Jewish extremist assassinates Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin accused of "betraying" Israel by shaking hands with Arafat. In 2005, Israel evacuated approximately 15,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza. The Islamists took advantage of this and accused the PLO of corruption and collusion with the enemy. In 2006, Hamas won the first democratic elections in Palestinian history. The following year, armed Islamist militants drove out and killed PLO activists. Then follow the spate of violence in recent years, each time more serious and bloodier than the last. In 1987 the Palestinians threw stones and spoke Hebrew, while the Israelis tried to use tear gas and rubber bullets: today the Islamists use the methods of the Caliphate and Israeli rockets destroy entire neighborhoods. / Corriere Della Sera
Lini një Përgjigje