http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=3/4/01&id=112240
Appalling equation
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, Op Ed, 4 March 2001
The Palestinians' cemeteries will be filled with visitors tomorrow.
Every year the Palestinians visit the graves of their loved ones on
the morning of the Feast of the Sacrifice, Id al Adha; tomorrow they
will be visiting more than 300 fresh graves, of which 87 hold the
remains of children. Then they will return to their homes for the
festive meals.This year, though, few families will be partaking of
sheep's meat, the traditional food of this holiday, but will be eating
chicken instead, because of the price. And many children will not be
wearing new holiday clothes, as is the custom, because their parents
don't have the money to buy them. There will also be fewer than the
usual number of guests - some relatives won't be able to attend
because of the closure imposed in the territories.
It has been a long time - since their calamity in 1948 - that the
Palestinians have endured such a hard Feast of the Sacrifice. Just an
hour's drive from Jerusalem, a cruel drama has been under way for the
past five months the likes of which have not been seen since the early
period of the Israeli occupation, but the majority of Israelis are
taking absolutely no interest in it. The iron grip of the closure in
its new format is increasingly strangling a population of 2.8 million
people, yet no one is saying a word, not around the cabinet table of
the outgoing government - the peace government - not among those who
are going to serve in the new government, and not in the opposition of
the Zionist left.
It has to be said starkly and simply: There has never been a closure
like this there, in the land of the barriers and the closures. In the
worst of the times of the previous Intifada, when the IDF was in every
corner and curfew reigned supreme, there was not a situation in which
a whole people was jailed without a trial and without the right of
appeal. Appeal? If in the past the fate of a woman about to give
birth, or of a sick person who was about to die, depended on the
humanity of the young soldier who was manning the roadblock, and who
either let them pass or not, now the Palestinians can only dream about
a good soldier who once might perhaps have raised the barrier: Israel
has split the West Bank by means of hundreds of trenches, dirt
ramparts and concrete cubes which have been placed at the entrance to
most of the towns and villages.
No one enters and no one leaves, not those who are pregnant and not
those who are dying. There isn't even a soldier with whom one can
plead and beg. The village, the refugee camp or the town are besieged
and their residents are imprisoned. A schoolchild cannot get safely to
his school, or a student to her college, or an adult to his work.
A network of bizarre Burma roads that break through the encirclement
are sending an entire people along muddy, rocky routes, with the
situation aggravated by a substantial risk of getting caught or
getting shot by soldiers who often open fire on the desperate
travelers trying, somehow, to cling to the routine of their lives.
Only those who travel on the roads of the West Bank can grasp the full
extent of the atrocity.
This mass jailing of an entire people, with its monstrously inhumane
dimension, entails also a mortal economic blow. According to data of
the United Nations envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, the credibility of which
there is no reason to doubt, the Palestinians are losing $6.8 million
a day because of the present closure, and to date their losses total
more than a billion dollars. For an economy that was shaky to begin
with, that is a death blow. A quarter of a million unemployed, a
million people living beneath the Palestinian poverty line - $2.10 a
day - and a 50 percent decline in the gross national product: These
are nightmarish statistics not only for the Palestinians but for the
Israelis as well.
Never before has there been distress and suffering on this scale among
the Palestinians in the territories. They will engender unprecedented
despair and ultimately they will spark violence more cruel and painful
than anything seen so far. Already now, 84 percent of the
Palestinians, who are generally steeled against adversity, say that
they are suffering from "psychological hardship," according to an
up-to-date survey conducted by Bir Zeit University. The number
increases day by day.
Their hardship will be transformed into more and more terrorist
attacks. This is the point: the horrific distress of the Palestinians
because of the present closure will quickly turn into the distress of
the Israelis. If their Feast of the Sacrifice looks the way it does,
then our Purim will not bring with it much happiness either. Simple as
it is, no one is taking into account the gravity of this appalling
equation. Even those who have in their hearts considerations based on
a humanitarian or moral approach, should have long since calculated
the profit and loss balance for Israel.
The present closure is totally unrelated to security considerations.
Anyone who doubts this is invited to go to the barriers and roadblocks
and see thousands of pedestrians and vehicles managing, despite
everything, to sneak into Israel under the nose of the soldiers. Those
who are willing to take the risk of doing this in order to work, will
certainly also do it in order to perpetrate a terrorist attack. The
true purpose of the closure is to please the frightened settlers and
perhaps also, the suspicion arises, to destroy the Palestinian
Authority, for reasons which are difficult to comprehend.
The current siege, a shamefully appalling operation, must be lifted
quickly. This must not be made conditional on the cessation of the
violence, because the siege itself is the most effective spur of
violence. We are not even talking any longer about entering Israel,
but about free entry to Nablus.
There is no measure that the prime minister-elect, Ariel Sharon, can
take that would contribute more to effecting a dramatic change in the
situation than to remove, immediately and unconditionally, the
trenches and the earth ramparts from the already difficult life of the
Palestinians. That will be not only a humane action but an intelligent
one.
