Qassam rockets which landed in a street in Sderot (archive photo, 2007).
The shelling of Sderot continues. Numerous residents are in
shock while others have been physically injured. The property of Sderot
residents has been damaged, the city suffers from severe economic distress and
many have already abandoned the area.
The ongoing failure of the Israeli government to assist
Sderot does not stem from powerlessness, but from a cruel logic that mirrors
the priorities of the Israeli political leadership. The sole happiness the
government provides to Sderot in its difficult hour is schadenfreude—happiness
from the suffering of others. Instead of assisting the victims, the
government is creating new victims in Gaza: for
every Sderot resident injured by a Qassam rocket, Israel’s
military forces kill tens of Palestinians in Gaza. Does this situation provide any real
comfort to the residents under attack in Sderot?
It is no wonder that the residents of Gaza elected a Hamas leadership. To date it
is the sole body that has offered Gazans a way to resist the Israeli
occupation. Hamas succeeded in making order on the streets of Gaza while Fatah acted as something akin to
an additional arm of the Israeli government. The breaching of the border
between Gaza and Egypt
allowed the residents of Gaza
a much needed infusion of goods and a temporary sense of freedom, and the Hamas
thus gained additional points in the eyes of Gazans.
Just as Fatah disappointed the residents of Gaza,
not to mention a majority of Palestinians in the West Bank, the government of Israel is disappointing the residents of the
northwestern Negev. Capitulation to violent
urges directed toward defenseless residents of Gaza
is not a constructive response to the distress of the residents of the
northwestern Negev. In actuality, the
government does not have an answer to their distress.
Their comfort is instead derived from the distress of
others, from the additional suffering of the Gaza residents. This comfort can only be
short-lived and cannot solve the problems of Sderot and its environs. No one
should be surprised, therefore, if in light of the ongoing neglect, the
residents of the region will refuse to pay taxes, enlist in the military or
demonstrate loyalty to the state which abandoned them, and on the backs of whom
the state is waging a war of honor and ego. After the state abandoned them,
they no longer owe it anything.
Moreover, the fact that Israel kidnaps Palestinians and
holds them for extended periods of time without trial, is actually an
invitation for the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and civilians to serve as
bargaining chips to gain the freedom of Palestinian political prisoners.
The Israeli government’s lethargy in the matter of freeing Gilad Shalit only worsens the injustice that Israel inflicts
on its soldiers. The government sends them to commit immoral occupation
operations, and afterwards abandons them, as nationalistic honor and the
belligerent discourse do not permit any willingness to compromise and the
prisoner exchange continues to be postponed.
Fatah rule in the West Bank
has become a rule reliant on military force, as it has lost most of its
legitimacy in the eyes of the Palestinian public. The regime of checkpoints,
the Wall, the expansion of settlements, administrative detentions and the
unceasing killing in the West Bank has
clarified for the Palestinians that the Fatah does not offer them solutions.
Therefore, the day is likely not far off when Qassams and perhaps even Katyusha
rockets fired also from the cities of the West Bank the will begin to fall on
Israel, as a desperate act of people trying to find a way out of their life of
imprisonment imposed on them. If rockets begin to fall on Kfar Saba and West Jerusalem, it will no longer be possible to ignore
it and look away. The government possesses no plan to prevent these
aforementioned developments. On the contrary, Israeli policy continues to prove
to the Palestinians that negotiations with Israel do not result in an
improvement of their lives, and that only violent action is capable of
influencing Israeli public opinion to notice the Palestinians.
As Israel is determined to ignore international law, UN
resolutions and the demands of the Palestinians for realization of their
individual and collective rights, it is essentially pushing the Palestinian
population to the last action available to them to fight for their
rights—militancy.
As long as the government of Israel
continues to delay and prevent negotiations, continues to expand the
settlements and intentionally prevent any economic development in the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, there will be no relief
for the residents of the northwest Negev.
The alternative that must be demanded from Israel is to
prove to the Palestinians that there also exists another path open to them
towards realizing their rights. To open the safe passage from Gaza to the West
Bank, to lift the economic and military siege from the Occupied Palestinian
Territories, to take responsibility for the damages of the occupation and to
begin compensating the Palestinian population in order to rehabilitate the
infrastructures that has been damaged and destroyed by the Israeli occupation
forces.
On Saturday 26 January, a long convoy of Israelis from
throughout the country traveled to the Erez checkpoint to demand an end to the
siege and try to bring foodstuffs that are in short supply in Gaza. They were joined by residents of Sderot
who understand that shelling, starvation and darkness in Gaza do not ensure their security but only
endanger it further. These Sderot residents are still a minority, but they
represent a crack in the wall of Zionist propaganda that presents only blood
for blood as a solution. The residents of Sderot who joined the convoy
demonstrated that revenge does not satisfy them, and that they are determined
to struggle for a better future. The government, in the meantime, continues its
implementation of aggression at the expense of victims on both sides.
Shir Hever is an economist with the Alternative Information
Center
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