Jon Elmer - The Gaza Pullout, After Effects ('05-'06)

Chris: There has been considerable talk in the mainstream media about Israel's planned disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Some see this as an important step in the peace process, allowing the Palestinians some limited form of autonomy over the area. Others think Israel is just posturing to appease the United States and draw attention away from the right of return and what Palestinians are calling the apartheid wall. During the last several weeks, right-wing Israelis have vehemently protested the disengagement, blocking soldiers and creating a good degree of melee. To talk about the disengagement and how it's playing out on the ground in Gaza and in the annals of policy, we've reached journalist John Elmer. Elmer runs the website www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org and is a core contributor to the New Standard. His writings have appeared in the Progressive, Z Magazine, the Journal of Palestinian Studies, and other publications. John Elmer, welcome to the program.

Jon Elmer: Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris: First off, where are you and what is the situation like on the ground?

Jon Elmer: I'm actually not in Gaza. The Israeli press office is barring journalists from the Palestinian areas of the Gaza Strip right now. I'm in Ramallah in occupied Palestine in the West Bank. But I've been down around Gaza, and I was at the settler demonstration just outside of Gaza the other day. And there's definitely no – there's no avoiding the situation here on the ground. There's a campaign going on within Israel itself where people are flying orange flags, orange being the color of the anti-disengagement element within society. And it's got a significant presence, although it must be said that average Israelis definitely don't see the Gaza Strip as an important strategic position where 7,000 Jewish settlers live amongst a million and a half Palestinians.

Chris: It's not a popular position for the Israelis. They don't think it's tenable to hold the Gaza Strip with only 7,000 settlers and a million and a half Palestinians.

Jon Elmer: As we've seen in the news today, a far-right activist wearing an Israeli Defense Forces uniform carrying an Israeli-issued M-16 opened fire on a bus in a Palestinian-Israeli village in northern Israel, killing four Palestinian-Israelis before he was beaten to death by a mob.

Chris: So there is significant radical elements within Israel that are fighting this disengagement, but generally the population supports it. Well, what sort of tactics have these more radical Zionists been taking on? We've seen in the mainstream, John, that busloads of these people have been barred from actually entering Gaza. So can you talk a little bit about the tactics they've taken on, the rhetoric that they're putting out, and what the Israeli government's doing to deal with them?

Jon Elmer: Well, the tactics that they're using actually are pretty interesting because they...

Chris: They've been mimicking left-wing tactics of the anti-globalization movement.

Jon Elmer: They studied at length previously the tactics used in anti-globalization demonstrations across the world. They're doing sit-ins and protests, blocking streets, blocking access for people, trying to slow traffic, trying to make business as usual difficult on the roads. and that uh... and they've been dealing with uh... with people of you could say but there's an army that deals with the palestinians palestinian children with live ammunition uh... more than six hundred palestinian children under the age of sixteen have been killed in the last five years alone by israeli army uh... nothing like that is being directed towards the settlers uh... their their protests are are are large and vocal but

Chris: They represent a tiny minority, I think, within Israeli society.

Jon Elmer: There's one thing people have to remember, that Israel has a people's army. Every single man, woman, and child in the Israeli society is ultimately going to serve in the military. And so people are very worried about having, like they are in North America, and they are in America in particular in the war in Iraq, they're worried about their son's their sons dying. They're not too concerned about the Palestinian population, but with a people's army, they don't want their sons from Tel Aviv fighting to protect 7,000 settlers living a good life in the Gaza Strip. And so there is some opposition to what's going on. The rhetoric that the settlers are using is incendiary, to say the least. Connections between the Nazis are common. at the demonstration that i was at slogans uh... jews don't expel jews uh... was a common one of course it's no problem for jews to expel palestinians uh... but jews don't expel jews is a very common line uh... amongst the disengagement protesters uh... there's been many statements uh... uh... according to many sources here uh... in israel in israeli papers which by the way are much more liberal and much more democratic than any press in north america

Chris: They're very open, although they have the same corporate constraints as North American press. They're very open with their discussions and their debates, surprisingly open, actually. And there's been many articles about the parallels being made to the Holocaust. Many demonstrators are calling Sharon a war criminal, saying that he's committing crimes against humanity for displacing this Jewish population in the Gaza Strip. which, of course, in and of itself is correct. Sharon is a war criminal, and he should be charged with crimes against humanity, but not for the reason these settlers are saying.

Jon Elmer: You know, Sharon has a career now 56 years old of battling the Palestinians in order to have an exclusive Jewish state from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan.

Chris: He has committed many crimes that would easily put him up in the Hague as a war criminal.

Jon Elmer: But many people at these demonstrations, it's an interesting juxtaposition because these demonstrators, many of them had posters of Sharon behind bars, and many of Sharon's cabinet ministers and pro-disengagement, as it's called, many of them behind bars and in cages at the demonstration, which was interesting to see because, as I say, it's accurate, but not for the reasons that they say. Many of the settlers, or at least some elements of the settlers, are talking about suicide packs, are talking about fighting the disengagement, but I wouldn't say that that's representative of a large majority of them. I think what you'll find is many of them will take the compensation that's being offered to them, and they'll leave and they'll move off into other settlements, into less banks. Sharon has been very clear about the reason for this disengagement, that Gaza is untenable. Keeping the Gaza Strip is impossible. And so what he's doing is, in military slang, he's shortening the line. He's reinforcing the settlements in the West Bank, where there's 250,000 settlers in the West Bank living illegally. He's reinforcing those lines and cementing those settlement blocks, as they're called, within the West Bank and sacrificing Gaza, which is, you know, amongst the million and a half Palestinians, it's not very, it's not tenable to think that the Israelis will be able to push the Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. So essentially what they're doing is creating a massive prison, and Gaza's the model for the West Bank and for the wall apparatus, and creating a massive prison where the Palestinians will be set up inside it.

Chris: These Palestinians will have no freedom of movement between the West Bank or Gaza,

Jon Elmer: and will be simply in a cage where they will have semi-autonomies. However, living within a prison where they cannot have movement to their families, and no access to their quarters, no access to their airspace, and have a Palestinian flag flying.

Chris: So that's the plan, and it's been quite successful, in fact. What are people in Palestine saying about this? It seems akin to the notion of a Bantustan that people like Hanan Ashrawi and others have talked about. Are they pretty cognizant of what's being done?

Jon Elmer: going on. And so, you know, the Palestinians aren't too concerned about this engagement, which is large, symbolic for their lives. You know, there's still 720 checkpoints and various obstacles in the West Bank alone, which block movement for Palestinians from one village to the next. People still can't visit their families in the West Bank. You know, I've sat with families, and they've pointed to their family homes only a kilometer away, and they can't visit their family in those areas.

Chris: So I don't think disengagement from Gaza is a significant element for the vast majority of Palestinians.

Jon Elmer: However, it's worth noting that the Israelis in the Gaza Strip control about 50 percent of the territory of the Gaza Strip, which is a tiny, which is essentially just refugee camps, people living in really deplorable conditions. And so there will be a finite amount of peace will be opened up The waterfront opened up. People that live in the refugee dams right along the ocean can't access the Mediterranean Sea, which is right in front of their eyes, because it's blocked by a really certain modicum of relief for the country.

Chris: But nobody's taking this very seriously. Everybody here knows that Sharon's plan is to reinforce the West Bank And that's the goal. And, you know, it's only in North America where these things are considered controversial or what have you. And here it's very simple. And, you know, one day living here is enough to show you that a lot has to change before the Palestinians are going to create a solution. Like I said, 700-plus checkpoints make freedom of movement virtually impossible in this area. And that's what people are concerned about.

Jon Elmer: Believe it or not, if you talk to Palestinians on the street, it's not the tanks and the S-16s that they're concerned about as much as it is the simple fact that they can't move from one area to the next. They can't visit their family. There's no ability to work.

Chris: Unemployment is 60% in the West Bank and virtually 100% in the Gaza Strip. It's about 9%. And when you take away people working in markets or these kind of things, you have total unemployment, lack of opportunity, lack of movement, lack of ability to see the prospects for the future. And something like the disinvestment is seen as a good step If it's followed by the 450,000 other settlers that are living in illegally occupied territory, 200,000 of them in East Jerusalem and 250,000 of them in the West. I guess what you're talking about, it was outlined pretty clearly. Dove Weissglass, Ariel Sharon's top advisor, one of them, in 2004 told Haaretz that, quote, the disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Jon Elmer: what he means, and this is the Carl Rose to Ariel Sharon. And putting it in formaldehyde means essentially making a unilateral move which the world can then applaud. Well, behind the back, what's going on is what I said, the reinforcement of the settlements in the West Bank, which are where the most important areas for the Zionist project are, not in the Gaza Strip. The key difference between disengagement and what I would call a replacement or a redeployment, what's happening is the settlers are leaving the Gaza Strip and, by and large, moving into settlements in illegally occupied territory in the West Bank. And the army, there's been no indication that the army is going to be leaving the Gaza Strip.

Chris: They surround the Gaza Strip, which is also surrounded by a massive fence with sniper towers all the way around it. uh... yeah it's a relocation of the settlers and a potential redeployment of the military but in any case the military is completely surrounding the gaza strip and uh... as we've read in little tidbits in the media there's potential that they'll be going in whenever they want and with pure impunity as they always do there's no exit point for the gaza strip into foreign territory that aren't controlled by israel the palestinians much to the contrary of how people in North America see it, have nothing that resembles a state. They're much more like a ghetto. They're just ghettos inside an Israeli state. They have no control over their borders. They have no control over movement. They have no control over their airspace. And none of that stands to change.

Jon Elmer: The court in the Gaza Strip, which would be the Palestinian access for goods and services into the Palestinian area of Gaza, is going to be completely controlled by the Israelis. The sea is controlled by the Israelis. So, yeah, it's a pretty minor move that's happening here in the Gaza Strip. And if people could know this kind of thing in North America, I think there'd be a lot different perspective on what's going on because it's filling the media here, this disengagement.

Chris: And it's exactly what Sharon intended, to have this look like a gesture of peace, make it look like Israel is a state looking for peace.

Jon Elmer: and in reality what it is is simply a well-planned move to reinforce the most important settlement, namely the 450,000 illegal settlers living in the West Bank in East Jerusalem, and sacrificing 7,000 settlers living in the Gaza Strip. The right-wing Israelis that are against this believe that this is just a crack in the dam,

Chris: that if one settler is removed, then what's to say that two or three won't be removed? And this is the idea.

Jon Elmer: They view themselves as sticking their fingers in the cracks in the dam, if you will, because they believe that once they set a precedent for withdrawing, who knows where it will end.

Chris: From Sharon's point of view, they're trying to create the chaos surrounding this disengagement, the lack of organization, the lack of planning, all these things.

Jon Elmer: Nothing has been determined yet on the ground what's going to happen once this disengagement takes place. Very few settlers, only a handful, have actually moved out of the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that it's supposed to happen in about 10 days from now.

Chris: The Strip is supposed to be empty.

Jon Elmer: They're making it confusing and difficult, and these demonstrations actually work in Sharon's favor. They give an idea of a democratic state. They give an idea that he's making painful concessions for peace. when in reality what he's doing is reinforcing the occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Chris: It's interesting. One thing that's been pretty clear and been heavily reported in the Western media is that Hamas is framing the pullout as a victory for the resistance, saying their militant tactics forced Israel out of Gaza. Is there any truth to this? And is anybody on the ground that you've talked to taking these kinds of claims from Hamas and maybe to a lesser degree Islamic Jihad with any seriousness?

Jon Elmer: There's no doubt that Hamas has a significant role in Palestinian society, particularly in the Gaza Strip. Beyond resistance, their ability to control the social infrastructure on the ground is really important. They feed children. They have hospital programs. They have school programs. All these things are very significant.

Chris: Hamas is not simply a resistance movement. However, you know, it must be said that the death of Israeli soldiers is something that really contributed to this pullout.

Jon Elmer: You know, people, like I said, don't want to have their soldiers dying to protect settlers who are living a good life in the Gaza Strip. the makeshift rockets, the Hamas fire, the persistent resistance that they've put up through the last five years of intifada is a very important element in why Israel is pulling out. However, there's other more important elements as well, and namely that the Israelis have used all the water in Gaza. There's no more water left in the Gaza Strip. The settlers who use about 400% of the water have taxed it, compared to the Palestinians, have taxed the water resources

Chris: And the situation is really untenable from an infrastructural standpoint. And so these are important elements, just as important as the resistance. But there's no doubt that Hamas has taken a significant role in this uprising.

Jon Elmer: They're not just an underground shadowy terrorist network as they're proclaimed in North America. One of the reasons why Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, has postponed elections here in Palestine is because there's a good chance that Hamas will win a democratic election in this state, statewide. And so, yeah, you know, it must be said, they play a significant role and they're not just simply, you know, a marginal fringe terrorist group that doesn't represent the Palestinian people.

Chris: Finally, John, before I let you go, do you have any hope for the situation as it stands right now?

Jon Elmer: You know, just traveling throughout the last two weeks, you know, to get from Ramallah to Jerusalem, which is about 15 kilometers, takes sometimes two hours. You know, you have to pass two and three checkpoints. The wall is ubiquitous. It's everywhere. It's unbelievable. Eight-meter-high concrete wall, completely encircling houses and areas. You know, something like Hope, it's difficult to have... There's nothing more vulgar than a false sense of hope from somebody who has a passport and who can come back to Canada anytime they want.

Chris: The Palestinians here have shifted their hope to something quite different.

Jon Elmer: I interviewed a woman yesterday in a village that's being cut off by the wall, and I asked her if she was upset by this situation, and she said, no, I'm just going to get married and forget about it. What can we do? And, you know, the Palestinians have been living under this now for 57 years. The answer for a lot of them is, what can we do? Underarmed militias have no chance against the Israeli army, which takes $3 billion in American military aid every year. They have total control over the whole area, Israel does. It's very difficult to have something like hope. That being said, the spirit of the Palestinians is really something when you live here.

Chris: You know, daily life continues.

Jon Elmer: In any war zone, daily life continues. People are going to school. People are going to university. People are carrying on their life with significant resolve. And that's the thing that can create hope for people. You know, these are not a defeated people, much like the Israelis say. Moshe Yalom said that we have to treat the Palestinians to the understanding, to fear their conscience, that they're a defeated people. But I can tell you firsthand for being here, they're not a defeated people at all. And I don't know if that's the same thing as hope, but it is significant. It's a significant thing to look upon when You're surrounded by nothing but doom and gloom here, for sure. There's not a lot of indications of hope. The wall is really unbelievable that these people are going to be living for the next 20 years. The formaldehyde that Delphi's glass speaks of is really an 8-meter-high wall that surrounds all the Palestinian areas and prevents movement from anywhere. So that really is the formaldehyde. It buys Israel another generation to figure out what they're going to do with the 3.5 million Palestinians that live amongst the Israelis here in what the Israelis call Eretz Israel, or what everybody knows as historic Palestine.

Chris: John Elmer, reporting from Ramallah. I want to thank you for being here, and we'll be following this story closely.

Jon Elmer: My name is John Elmer. I want to thank Pierre Loisel for bringing me in and the Underground Cafe crew for hosting this event. Thanks for that. I went to Dalhousie. I'm a Haligonian import from Upper Canada. So I've lived in the Maritimes since 1998, but I'm an Upper Canadian, I guess, still. Independent journalists reported from the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the Intifada, the Palestinian uprising, which began in September of 2000. I was there for the fall of 2003, from September to December, and went back this past summer and spent the last six months. I just returned a couple of weeks ago from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. I was freelancing and on assignment with the New Standard. If people want to read the reports that I did at that time after this talk, I won't talk a lot about those reports. The stuff that's in printed word can be found elsewhere. I'll try to focus on some other things while people are here and if you care to delve further into it, you can do that. This stuff's all online. What I'm going to do is focus six months of stories. You have to have a focus, and the focus, I think, for this round of talks is the Gaza disengagement plan, which was widely reported in the Western media, perhaps more than any international events since September 11th, actually. It was reported heavily. CNN, all the major cable news networks, all went round the clock 24 hours during the actual disengagement process itself from the Gaza Strip. Having been on the ground for the whole process, I think I'm going to show an angle that probably wasn't very familiar to people if they get their news predominantly from mainstream media sources, corporate media sources, the CBC, National Public Radio in the States. The setting of this Presentation is the Gaza Strip, which is a tiny coastal enclave right along the Mediterranean Sea, an area 42 kilometers by 7 kilometers. It's a tiny area. It's one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the planet. If you look in the north there, you can see the Jabalia refugee camp. The Jabalia refugee camp has 74,000 people per square kilometer. If you compare that to Manhattan, there's 24,000 people per square kilometer in Manhattan. So you have three times the population density of a major metropolitan center in the United States, which is characterized not by single occupancy homes, but by towering skyscrapers and apartment buildings. There's no apartments to speak of in the Gaza Strip. It's mostly what we would consider a shantytown. So how did the people of Gaza, two-thirds of whom are refugees, how did people get to Gaza? After all these years, the history often gets bulldozed under to the breaking news and common events that happen each and every day. But in 1947, two years after the Second World War ended and the British were leaving many of their colonial holdings, The British left in 1947. The areas are Jewish-owned areas in 1947, constituting about 6.6% of what is then known as historical Palestine or British Mandate Palestine. 400-odd villages, between 375 and 450, depending on how you characterize a village, were destroyed, depopulated. The Palestinian inhabitants were displaced, many of whom fled to the Gaza Strip to refugee camps. 1948, what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or the catastrophe, the depopulating of these villages is what the Israelis call the War of Independence. And it's celebrated as a national holiday for the Israelis and... catastrophe for the Palestinians. The southern Gaza Strip, this is Rafah, along the Egyptian border, the southernmost area of the Gaza Strip. And when I was describing those population statistics of 74,000 people per square kilometer, comparing it to a metropolitan area, you have something quite different than a metropolitan area. You have a shanty town. You can see corrugated metal roofing. with cinder blocks on top, uh, of the roof to literally hold the roof on top of the house. Uh, they're makeshift cinder block houses. Uh, what you see in the rubble there has been destroyed by Israeli bulldozers, making these people refugees. Anytime you're talking about houses destroyed in Gaza, you're talking about people being made refugees, uh, for a second, a third, often a fourth time. But again, you can see the population density within that area. In 1947, 1948, during the Nakba, when these villages were depopulated, people fled to the Gaza Strip and set up a tent camp administered by the International Committee of the Red Cross, a tent camp like you've seen in Southeast Asia after the earthquake, for instance, where you have row upon row of tents sharing a single tent peg with density side by side, literally. Well, this is the same thing. United Nations and International Committee of the Red Cross administered refugee camp, but you're looking at it 58 years later. Because in 2005, it's still a refugee camp. People are still living on the same tiny plots of land that their tents used to be on. but now they have makeshift cinderblock homes, uh, which began to be built once people realized that they weren't actually going home. When Palestinians fled in 1948, they locked the doors of their houses, um, they brought their, what they needed for that day, and expected by and large to be going home the next day after the fighting had subsided. Many of those people still have their keys, still have their leases and their land deeds from their land, but they never returned. I'll get to a lot of statistics about house demolitions, but suffice it to say that 30,000 Palestinians have been made homeless in the Gaza Strip just since 2004. So significant numbers of demolition, destruction, constant violence in these kids' lives. Uh, there's a million and a half Palestinians living in that area and 6,000 settlers. Those 6,000 settlers controlled roughly 50% of the territory in the Gaza Strip. So, although it's a tiny area, uh, people are packed, uh, into tiny areas, but there's lots of free land, uh, in the Gaza Strip controlled by Israeli settlers until the disengagement in August. I think the most important thing that I learned, the thing that surprised me the most going there and witnessing it myself was the constant of the violence, not that it flares up in clashes or firefights as the media characterizes them here in North America, but that it's a constant uh, violent daily in and out, uh, day in and day out violence that leaves houses looking like this. You know, this isn't from one firefight. This is from months of being, uh, being shot at consistently. Uh, demolition like this all over the place, uh, in the Gaza Strip. 4,000 houses demolished in the Gaza Strip, uh, during the Al-Aqsa Intifada of the last five years, according to the United Nations. Again, these are refugees being made refugees over again. You have unemployment rates in the Gaza Strip of 70%, uh, which is essentially means complete unemployment, because, but once you take 30% of the service workers, the hospital workers, um, you know, essential services, you know, you have essentially complete unemployment. And you have people living in, in, in situations like this after their houses are demolished, living in tents, unemployed, prospects for the future are, uh, dim if they exist at all. And this is the context for this disengagement process that was carried out by Israel. And this is a context that was rarely, uh, portrayed in the Western media, uh, as we'll get to later on as a step towards peace. And it's not just houses. This is United Nations school in Derbala in the central, uh, Gaza strip. And this is ha- just happened to, be situated across from the Kafar Deram settlement, where 135 people, Jewish Israelis, lived in a fortified settlement in the center of the Gaza Strip. They fired day and night at the school, the United Nations school, situated across the street. 50%, according to the World Food Program, 50% of Gaza residents are food insecure, meaning that on any given day they don't know where their next meal is coming from. 35% of the population are threatened with food insecurity. So you have 85% of the population that on any given day in a calendar year don't know where their meal's coming from. You have 20% of the population, one out of every five people, uh, is in what's called absolute poverty, which is an international standard of poverty, meaning that even with international aid, you don't get up to the, uh, poverty rates internationally, which is presently about $2.15 US per day per person. That's with food aid. Um, and it's a veritable prison and this isn't a platitude or a cliche or something that you throw around, uh, to make people surprised or shocked. It's a literal prison. There's no coming in or coming out of the Gaza Strip. It's difficult for journalists and international aid workers, let alone Palestinians. There's no thought of going to Jerusalem to pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. There's no thought of visiting your family in the West Bank. Uh, Gaza is completely sealed. There's no international crossing until recently. when the Rafah Crossing was open for five years, there was no international crossing, uh, for Palestinians. And what does that mean in human terms? It means that I had dinner, uh, with a family who had a, uh, the wife of the family was the same age as me, 26, and I was the first person that she had ever met that wasn't from the Gaza Strip, 42 kilometer by seven kilometer strip of land. She'd never met anybody that wasn't from there, let alone travel to the West Bank, let alone travel internationally. What do the poverty statistics mean? They mean that people will fish from the shore with makeshift nets in order to catch fish that are literally this big. It's worth it for people to fish for fish this size. I left just a couple of weeks ago and I toured the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip that have been demolished and people are still scavenging in those settlements for rebar for half cinder blocks, uh, broken bricks, things that just look like garbage to, to us, uh, but for people there, in the current conditions that they're living under, it's worth it. The World Bank did a report for, uh, the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority just before the disengagement, and they characterized the World Bank, not exactly a radical organization, characterized the Palestinian economic crisis as the worst, uh, of modern history. which, of course, includes, you know, the Argentine economic collapse of 2001, 2002, where the entire middle class was essentially erased in a few days. Uh, that's worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s, uh, in the United States. Uh, this is the situation that the Palestinians are living under. And then there's the settlements, the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. And as I was describing to you before, 50%, when you look at a map like that, it's easy to see how those blue areas controlled 50% of the Gaza Strip. If you look at Netzerim, which is, if you look just south of the, right around the center, you'll see a blue patch with white all around it. That's Nizarim. That's the buffer zone. The white is the buffer zone around the settlement of Nizarim, where 29 families at disengagement, 29 families lived inside Nizarim, Um, and that whole area around them that's white, um, which could be used for the most densely populated area on earth, uh, is off limits. It's a no-go zone. Uh, Palestinians that enter that area will be shot. If you look at the concentration to the north listed Gaza, Gaza City, uh, and the neighboring refugee camp of the Shadi camp that you can see up there on the coastline, If you see the white distance between the Shadi camp and the blue in the north, to give you an idea of how big the buffer zones around the settlements were, I was walking there recently and was taking pictures by myself and was walking the entire strip of the Shadi camp from Gaza City to the Shadi camp, walking along, and I got to one area that looked like any other area along my walk, and a child came running out of an alley and grabbed me and pulled me back and said, you can't, you can't walk this way, this is a, you know, a no-go zone. He said, you know, Mohammed Ahmed, like this, you know, cut, killed, boom, dead, don't walk past this point or you'll be shot. we'll look at the distance on that map to the next Jewish area, which is the blue areas, and you get an idea of the buffer zones and the control, the control that these civilian, ostensibly civilian settlements, as they were portrayed in the media, control over the population of the Gaza Strip. And this is important to understand, that the settlements are not civilian neighborhoods that just spring up because of a particular need. These are geostrategic military installations. They're very important military installations, and they're put specifically, Ariel Sharon, Prime Minister who carried out the disengagement, who was also the leader involved in the settlement enterprise to begin with after the Six Day War in 1967, The idea of these settlements was to put Jewish civilian areas within densely populated areas of Palestinian control in order to divide the areas into strips, which can then be easier managed by an occupying army. If there's an uprising or civilian unrest of any kind, the area can be cut into strips and the military can then just deal with a small area rather than concentrated zones. The settlements are strategic. If you look down Gush Katif in the south, It blocks the whole sea line. If you look at Nitzarim, as I said, in the center, amid demolished Palestinian homes that were demolished to protect the settlement, The settlement of Nizarim, according to Sharon in the 1970s, was set up to watch over this, the only Palestinian seaport. The only access Palestinians have for importing and exporting goods is through this seaport, which is right below Nizarim. So the idea is that you get a civilian population that then needs to be defended by a military to control these particular areas of key state infrastructure, such as a port or an airport or a border crossing. This is the view from inside an Israeli settlement, Sniper Tower, because as I said, the settlements were not strictly civilian neighborhoods. They were fortified military outposts where constant barrages from soldiers and settlers were rained upon Palestinian areas. And I say this from experience, not from abstraction. This is a prison within the settlement and these prisons were all off limits. These were not International Committee of the Red Cross monitored holding areas. These are for what are called administrative detainees, which is a policy that the Canadians and Americans have instituted through Patriot Act style legislation where you can arrest somebody and hold them without charge for an indefinite period of time as long as there's some sort of security risk. People are prevented from having trials. They're prevented from accessing the information that's held against them. There's no judicial recourse. They simply hang out in these metal and concrete barricades for however long the Israelis decide within the settlements. They destroyed everything. It's hard to know why they would have left these makeshift prisons, but you can see they don't look like much. They're built right into the sand dunes, and you can see how many people have been in here etching their names. But also besides the military importance of the settlements, it's important to understand them in terms of quality of life. You're talking about an area along the Mediterranean Sea. You're talking in northern desert, beautiful climate, 300 days a year of sun, Mediterranean Sea lapping up on the shoreline. You got surfboards, palm trees, horse stables, uh, greenhouses growing cherry tomatoes and high yield crops such as cherry tomatoes and, and other kind of hot house exports which fetch a lot of money. These settlements were, although the Israeli's settlers themselves were protected legally by Israeli law, the land that they lived on was not Israeli property. And so this sort of legal limbo established the fact that the settlers in the settlements in Gaza, and the West Bank as well, don't have to abide by Israeli labor codes, because although they're Israeli citizens, the land that they're on is not Israeli, and therefore the business that they run does not fall under those guidelines. Which means, in simple terms, that you don't have to pay a minimum wage, you don't have to pay any kind of benefits, you don't have to have any kind of labor standards, or follow any kind of labor code. which means you can pay your laborers next to nothing. And in fact, that's what the settlers did for high yield, high income crops, cash crops. Like I said, horse stables inside these areas. One of the final shots on Israeli TV during the disengagement in August, the night before the disengagement, they showed a woman riding her horse for the last time in her stable. Pretty good setup when you compare it to the Palestinian existence that I just described. And I'm going to, better than anything, I think Amira Haas, who's a Jewish-Israeli journalist, for Haaretz, the leading Israeli liberal daily. Uh, and she's the only Jewish reporter to live permanently in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. She lived in Gaza throughout the 1990s, uh, and knows the area probably better than anybody, uh, that's not Palestinian. And she wrote in Haaretz, uh, newspaper in an editorial on the day after the disengagement some pretty profound words that I think do a much better job describing than, uh, than I could do. She wrote, What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tanker trucks To know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you. for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super rights." That's written to the Israeli settlers who lived in Gaza, as I said, living a lavish life amid the misery of the Palestinian condition in the Gaza Strip, which can't really be underestimated. So one of the most important things that wasn't discussed about the disengagement was why. Why is the Zionist project retreating, ostensibly, for the first time since 1897, since the Basel Conference in Switzerland, when the Zionist project was, political Zionism was emphasized and moved on as a political nationalist theory for the Jewish people establishing a homeland. in what was ultimately decided to be Palestine. And you can see the significant trends that we've moved through. You can see the 1947, that was the plan for dividing a Jewish state out of historical Palestine in 1947, roughly 55 to 45, progressing through to 2003, what you have essentially three or four large ghettos, Sharon calls them cantons, within an Israeli state. The reason for the disengagement was actually widely discussed in Israel, in Europe as well, but not so much here in North America. Sharon explicitly told the Israeli people the day in February 2004 when he announced the disengagement plan, he told the Israeli people that we had a dream but it could not be implemented. The dream was greater Israel. The dream was that this whole area would become a Jewish state. The Palestinians would relocate to Jordan or elsewhere to the other 20-odd Arab and Islamic states in the area. and a Jewish state called Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, would be founded. Sharon said, we had this dream, but it couldn't be implemented. The main reason it couldn't be implemented is what the Israelis called demographic bomb, namely that the population of Palestinian Arabs between the River Jordan which is the border on the right-hand side, and the Mediterranean Sea, which is the border on the left-hand side, would be equal or surpass that of the Jewish population in the area, compromising the essence of the Jewish state, compromising the Zionist project in that way. Ariel Sharon's key aide, Dov Weisglas, who is Sharon's Karl Rove, did an interview with Haaretz magazine where he pretty much laid it out exactly why the disengagement plan was to be implemented. And this was at the beginning. He was talking to his constituents. It's the kind of thing where when you're talking to your constituents, people who are in opposition wonder why you'd give them such juicy information, such insider information. But Dov Weisglas does a much better job of explaining why Sharon did what he did than I could do, so I'll let him do it. He called it the political process. He calls what we might call the peace process. He said the political process is a bundle of concepts and commitments. It's the establishment of a Palestinian state. It's the evacuation of the Jewish settlements in occupied territory. It's the return of the Palestinian refugees. who now with their descendants total about 5 million people, the largest refugee population in the world. It constitutes the partition of Jerusalem into East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, an Israeli capital and a Palestinian capital. This is what Dov Weisglas said is the political process. He said, the disengagement plan is the preservative of this political process. It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president, President Bush, his formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period of time. The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It provides the amount that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians. The American term, he says, is park conveniently. The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us, says Weisglas, as far as possible from political pressure. It legitimizes our contention that there is no negotiating with the Palestinians. There is a decision here to do the minimum possible in order to maintain our political situation. The decision is proving itself. It is making it possible for the Americans to go to the seething and simmering international community and say to them, what do you want Israel to do? What further could they do? It also transfers the initiative to our hands. It compels the world to deal with our idea. What, when Weisglas is saying our idea, what it is that he's talking about. He's talking about tiny enclaves, ghettos of Palestinian population centers within an Israeli state. And this move, he said, honestly, he said, this move means that out of 240,000 settlers living in the West Bank, 190,000 will not be moved. Okay, so you're talking about West Bank settler population, 90% of whom will stay put in this gesture towards peace. So it's fairly significant from their point of view exactly why they're doing it. Ehud Olmert, who is a deputy, will be, within the next 10 years or so, will be the next prime minister at some point in Israel, a major leader within Sharon's old Likud party and also now in his new party, Kadima. Omer described the disengagement plan equally as starkly, and he said that the reason for the, uh, for the disengagement was, uh, the demographic fear, uh, and the fear, this is key, the fear of the switch from the Algerian model of the Palestinian struggle to the South African model. The Algerian model being a national liberation movement against a settler colonial project, okay, which, uh, the Palestinian situation is at right now, to a South African model, indigenous Bantustans or ghettos fighting an uprising against a sovereign state in an apartheid situation, He said the South African model, the anti-apartheid struggle, is a much cleaner struggle, a much more powerful struggle. And for us, for Israel, he said, it would mean the end of the Jewish state. The idea that one person, one vote within this land called Eretz Israel or historical Palestine, were you to give one person one vote, that would be the end of the Jewish state because statistically, ultimately, they're going to be, the Jewish population is going to be a minority again within historical Palestine. The move, Olmert said, was for maximum Jews, minimum Palestinians. When you look at a map like this, uh, weaving in and out as it does, you can start to understand maximum Jews, minimum Palestinians. You create borders, uh, that let the state be Jewish in essential characteristics as long as possible. Crucially, and as Weisglas was saying about Bush's endorsement of Sharon's plan, the Americans, and this is where it's interesting and important for us in Canada, the Americans actually gave credence to Sharon's plan. Bush announced a policy initiative saying that the facts on the ground, the 250,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank and 250,000 illegal settlers in East Jerusalem, the major population centers, Bush said, were facts on the ground and would not... realistically, the situation would not be a withdrawal to the 1967 borders, but rather something much closer to carved-out Bantustans. Well, it wasn't just Bush that said this. They put this before Congress, and Congress voted 407 to 9 to endorse Bush's plan that looks very similar to the fourth map, And then the Senate, just to add gravy on the situation, the Senate voted 95 to 3. You have virtually unanimous American support for Sharon's plan. And this is what Weisglas is saying. He said, in the decades and years to come, this is Weisglas, Sharon's Karl Rove, in the years and decades to come, when negotiations are held between Israelis and Palestinians, the master of the world will pound his fists on the table and say, we stated 10 years ago that the large settlement blocks will stay part of Israel. This is the key move for people for Sharon, and this is one of the reasons that Sharon has so much support right now, despite the fact that he's leaving his party and forming a new party and will still win the elections, is that Israelis understand that Sharon made a shrewd move and has bought Israelis a generation, essentially, according to Omer, 25 years. According to Sharon, he says... that the whole process is frozen completely, indefinitely. That's Sharon's quote to the Israeli people. These are not secret meeting files. These are speeches that he's delivering to the Israeli people. So I want to talk a little bit about how the disengagement itself played out. Because, as I said, during those days in August, there was round-the-clock coverage on CNN and the major cable news networks. but it was only a very small fraction of the, naturally, of the real picture. So how did it play out? I'm going to do some myths and some realities of how it played out. One of the reasons Israelis said that they were withdrawing from the settlements in the Gaza Strip was because the toll was too high. The toll of terror, Palestinian terror, was too high on Israelis living in Gaza. And it's interesting to point out those statistics. Seventy Israeli soldiers killed 28 Israeli settlers in Gaza, killed in Gaza, and direct fighting in the Intifada, which lasted for five years from September of 2000 until, well, it's simmering now, 70 soldiers, 28 settlers. Well, you juxtapose that with the toll for Palestinians living amid these settlements in the Gaza Strip, living under occupation. In the last five years, More than 2,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip alone have been killed, ostensibly to protect these settlements, these 6,000 settlers. More than 20,000 people injured. So you have massive casualty statistics, which Israelis say is ostensibly to protect these settlers. We were told that the settlers were kicked out, expelled from their homes, transferred. These kind of terms were used implying that people would have a stick with a bag, throw it over their shoulder and walk down the street to, you know, to their new life on the street. The reality, unlike the Palestinian tents that you saw, Previously, when Palestinian homes are demolished, the fact is that Israelis were given hotels. They moved into nice tourist hotels in resort towns, literally in resort towns. They were given two million shekels compensation, which is about half a million American dollars as compensation for living on stolen land with this great labor deal with their horse stables and green grass and swimming pools. And before they left, the Israelis uprooted 1,000 mature date and olive trees date in olive trees which predate Jewish presence in the Gaza Strip by literally hundreds of years. There was a lot of talk about an Israeli civil war, that there was going to be a clash within Israeli society. The Israeli general that was in charge of the disengagement plan sort of put this notion to rest when he told Haaretz magazine that instead of Gettysburg, we did Spielberg. This is what he said of the disengagement, and it's true. You know, you had unarmed Israeli soldiers with baseball hats uh, a posture that in, you know, nine months, ten months in the occupied territories, I've never seen police officers, soldiers with baseball hats, but they had that for the disengagement, for the evacuation of the Jewish settlers. and they treated them with essentially kid gloves. About the Israeli Civil War as well, it was rarely noted or not noted enough that more than two-thirds of the Israeli public actually supported the disengagement from Gaza. It was a vocal minority opposing it and these numbers in support of the disengagement only increased during the disengagement process itself when many Israelis understood settler actions in the Gaza Strip to be vulgar and excessive, including one infamous picture which was on the front page of the papers and was scorned throughout Israel. One rabbi in the Gush Katif settlement of Neve Dekelim during the evacuation had some young girls, girls between the ages of 7 and 11, walk with their head down with a yellow star on their arm, which was symbolic pictures in Israeli consciousness of the liberation of the death camps in Europe, and the photographs of the, of the Jewish internees walking, you know, with their head down, dejected and starving, uh, walking out of these camps. People in Israel didn't take that well, and there was a lot of that kind of talk, a lot of, talk about suicide pacts, that the settlers were going to commit mass suicide. One of the most intriguing headlines of the whole process, which was a process of intriguing headlines, was one in Haaretz which said, Gush Katif surfer teens threaten suicide pact on the waves. And it was this whole story about how these teenagers from Connecticut that lived in the summers in, in Gush Katif and surfed all the time, uh, if they were gonna have their places in Gush Katif taken away from them, uh, that they were gonna take their surfboards out to the sea and commit suicide. None of this happened. None of this transpired. Because there was a lot of talk about Israeli violence. Was there going to be Israeli on Israeli violence? Were they going to take up arms against the soldiers who were expelling them from their homes? But once again, the reality always inflicts the Palestinians with a curse much deeper than the Israelis. And the only people that died during the disengagement process were Palestinians. Four Palestinians killed in an Arab-Israeli village in the northern... area of Israel, when an Israeli soldier wearing his army uniform, his full uniform and his army-issued machine gun, walked onto a bus and opened fire on a bus in the northern Israeli town, miraculously only killing four people, though he emptied the clip of his M16. The other attack was in a settlement where an Israeli settler grabbed a gun from a security guard as he was driving out of the settlement where the Palestinians go in and out each day to work as indentured servants, essentially, for the, for the Israelis, this settler who makes a profit off the Palestinian labor grabbed the gun from a security guard and turned and shot all four people in his van. When that settler went to court, he gave his sort of, you know, notorious top of the courthouse steps speech, and he said, I did this to inspire people to pick up arms and kill Sharon. I hope Sharon is next. And he yelled into the camera, I hope Sharon is next, and then was dragged off. So once again, there is no Israeli on Israeli violence, but Israeli on Palestinian violence ruled the day. United Nations ambassador for Israel, Israel's United Nations ambassador, Dan Gillerman, went on CNN International and said that it was the most difficult army operation ever to take place. Literally, he said that, fairly bold words, when in reality what I said, unarmed soldiers with baseball hats, it actually only took six days to evacuate the settlers from the settlements, and they treated them with kid gloves. Bilayin, this is a village near Ramallah in the West Bank, a Palestinian village where they're building the wall through this village and expropriating half the village's land. Well, it's been a flashpoint, Bilayin, for international protest as well as Israeli protest against the Israeli wall. Jews from Israel have been coming to Bilayin for about six months now and protesting every week. against the wall which is expropriating this Palestinian land. This is a Jew from Israel underneath the Israeli soldier who's clearly armed with full soldier get-up on. This is how they deal with the Israeli leftist protesters protesting against the wall. Juxtapose that with the way that they treat the settlers in the settlements where unarmed soldiers carried people out, the soldiers themselves were crying, and this kind of thing, juxtaposed with this kind of image you see from Bilayin. Again, there was a lot of footage of Jewish house demolitions because the Israelis decided rather than leave the infrastructure there for the terrorist Palestinians to take over, that they would demolish everything and leave nothing for the Palestinians at all. And so that's what they did. They destroyed every house in the settlements. And we saw a lot of footage of that, but we rarely see this kind of footage, which is what it looks like in the Palestinian areas of the Gaza Strip. Just after, as I said, after the disengagement was announced alone in February of 2004, just at that point alone, after the Israelis said, we're leaving Gaza, they demolished 2,500 Palestinian homes with Caterpillar D9 bulldozers, which are built here in North America. for the Israelis, and that left 27,000 people homeless just since the disengagement process was announced, let alone statistics from before that. Again, we're told it's a step towards peace, is the narrative right now in the, in the, in the media, is that Israelis have taken a step towards peace, they're withdrawing from the areas that they occupy, and giving Palestinians a chance for statehood, but in fact, It's the opposite of peace, and Sharon himself has been explicit about this, that it's the opposite of peace because they didn't, specifically Israel didn't use the terminology withdrawal. Withdrawal is a legal term, and what happened from the Gaza Strip was not a withdrawal. It was actually a military redeployment. A withdrawal means the formal end of occupation, the release of control over borders and airspace. Whereas disengagement, which is a term that no one had ever heard of before, the Israelis decided that that's what was happening in Gaza, could simply have been put across with our propaganda systems, could simply have been put across as a withdrawal. But in fact, the Israelis didn't even try to call it a withdrawal. They called it disengagement. And also, the Israeli Interior Ministry announced, in order to assuage the consciousness of the Israeli people during this process, Sharon had the Interior Ministry release statistics saying that 18,000 Israelis had moved into the occupied territories. The West Bank alone had moved into the occupied territories in the 18 months since the disengagement from Gaza was announced. So when they announced that 6,000 Jews were leaving occupied territory in Gaza, 18,000 moved illegally into the West Bank. This is Israeli Interior Ministry statistics. As well, in the Step Towards Peace column, it's always worth mentioning that there still remains 121 illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank alone, and 101 outposts. outposts are precursors to settlements, areas that are fortified and controlled by force of arms against the Palestinian population. A lot of talk about Gaza being free. Gaza is far from free. This is an Israeli warship patrolling the Gaza coast, close enough that you can see it from shore. Just two days ago, a 40-year-old Palestinian fisherman using a boat similar to this one was killed when a warship shelled it from the sea. You have an advanced Israeli navy attacking fishermen using a canoe that they punt along the water. in order to catch fish so that they don't have to do fishing from shore. I asked Palestinians why they fish from shore. This is why they said, because there's warships killing people off their own coastline. Gaza's free during the Israeli occupation of Palestinian areas. Anywhere there's Israeli control over Palestinian areas, flags are outlawed. So even for the anarchists in the crowd, Palestinian flag is significant national symbol. And part of the reason is that is because it's an anti-imperialist, anti-occupation act simply to have a Palestinian flag, particularly historically when Palestinians were denied existence at all. But previous to the Israeli disengagement, a house that looked like this would simply be cannon fodder in the literal sense of the term. This house would be shot up ruthlessly if the Israelis were still in the area, if their sniper towers and tanks were still patrolling. What you see here is a Palestinian festival of freeness. They show their festival of freedom. They show their support for their particular political factions. The yellow flags are the nationalist Fatah movement, which is the sort of mainstream nationalist Palestinian movement founded by Yasser Arafat. You see the red, that's the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Marxist leftist organization, socialist organization. The green is Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, and the black is Islamic Jihad, which is a strictly militant faction of the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaza's free, but this is a school in Gaza that was bombed after Gaza became free. The new Gaza looks a whole lot like the old Gaza. This is an elementary school, an Islamic boys school, that the Israelis bombed. And part of my work, of course, as an objective journalist, is that I phone the Israelis and ask why it is that they carry out the atrocities that you're witnessing here slide after slide. And this particular explanation was an interesting one because I said it's an elementary school, and I've just been there. I've just come from the elementary school. You know, there's no Hamas flags. There's no, you know, guys diving through the fiery... circus hoops or climbing across the monkey bars, like, you know, the terrorist footage that we see on TV. It's just an elementary boys' school, so why was it bombed? They said, we'll call you back. They called me back about an hour later, and straight up, the Israeli spokesperson, Yael Hartman, captain of the Israeli Defense Forces, told me, uh, that the school was bombed because it was raising the next generation of Hamas members, which in theory, is roughly as accurate as saying that a public school in New Brunswick is raising the next generation of liberals or the next generation of Green Party members. It's roughly logically accurate, but it's nonsense. You can see what a missile does to a classroom. You can see the ceiling fans bent like that from the heat. You can see the desks. You can see a hole through the classroom. So this is Gaza when it's free. This is not Gaza before it's free. This is Gaza free. A lot of discussion about the onus being on Palestinians now. The Israelis have made their move, like Weisglas said, now the international community will focus on the Palestinians. I think it's important to just dispel this notion roughly in closing that it's time for Palestinians to make a move towards peace. In 1988, Palestinians accepted their National Liberation Movement accepted, in principle, a Jewish state on 78% of historical Palestine, 78% of territory that before 1948 was Palestinian land. It's actually a historical compromise rather than a historical rejection as Arafat is always sort of known for his rejection of Israel's miraculous peace deals and glorious offers that are given to him. In fact, the historical compromise that Yasser Arafat made was in 1988 when he accepted a Jewish state on 78% of historical Palestine, areas not including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. It was a historical compromise that's never been acted upon by the Israelis. And as I showed from previous maps that you can see, not only is the 78% not being respected by Israel, the compromise the Palestinians made, but it's being slowly eroded increasingly quickly eroded from Palestinians by Israelis. In closing, before we can break it open to discussion, I think it's important to show what's going on now in Palestine, uh, what's going now in Gaza and the West Bank, and what is it that we're gonna face in the future, uh, because I think one of the most important things about going over and reporting and coming back is to give people tools that they can use in, in their daily struggles against these things here at home. So all the while that the world was focused on the Gaza Strip, This is what was happening in the West Bank, a major motion to cement the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, to prevent a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and to prevent a viable, sovereign, contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank. The wall, which is much like the Friends of Israel or Pro-Israel activists like Alan Dershowitz are famous for saying that it's not a wall, it's a fence. And roughly that's accurate. Large sections of it are in fact a concrete wall with sniper towers. That's a sniper tower that you see there. And that's razor wire inside the eight meter high concrete wall. Razor wire in order to protect the concrete wall that's protected by a sniper tower. This is the situation that Palestinians are increasingly living under, no matter where it is in the West Bank or East Jerusalem that you're living in. You can see here, this is East Jerusalem. So you might wanna ask, why is it that in an area that's the size of New Jersey, Is there a 650 odd kilometer wall or barrier snaking through it? And this is the main reason, and you can see here, the way it weaves in and out. It's not simply a border. It's not a wall that, you know, demarcates an international border. What it is, is it's a wall that demarcates ghettos within an Israeli state. This is the key detail that has to be understood about what's going on in Palestine. You're not creating a border of a national entity, what you're doing is creating fortified ghettos for this indigenous population to live in. You know, you can call these areas what you want. Like I said, Sharon calls them cantons. The Afrikaners in South Africa called them bantu stands. Here in New Brunswick, we call them reservations or reserves. The Nazis called them ghettos. You can call them whatever you want, but you can see how on the map here, Uh, what's being created is Palestinian ghettos. You can see how the wall weaves in and out, uh, and creates enclaves. If you look at the village, the city of Chalkilia, in fact, on that map, as it's rendered on that map, the queue of Calcilia doesn't even fit in the ghetto that is now Calcilia. So you see mapping becomes extremely difficult in a conflict over land like this. And this map is permanently being changed. The face of the occupation, the face of the West Bank is permanently being changed right now, while people are focusing on the tiny enclave of the Gaza Strip, which is a veritable prison, In any case, the major areas of the West Bank, the major areas of the occupation are literally being cemented right now at a rate that, although it's nice to be optimistic, at a rate that is literally irreversible at this particular point. What we're gonna be dealing with as activists or as people concerned about social justice, is that this is what we're going to be dealing with, this ghettoization, this apartheid, permanent, cemented, literally cemented apartheid situation is what we're going to be dealing with in the Israel-Palestine conflict for the next generation, just like Sharon said. You can see on a map like this, it's almost impossible to render on a map the detail of and the obstructions are so significant. What you're looking at there is a map of the West Bank, and you can see how it's turned into ghettos. The blue areas are settlements, and the blue areas in the center there is Jerusalem. And the whole key to Jerusalem is to make it fully Israeli-controlled, literally splitting the West Bank in half. Just to get people to understand what occupation means in the West Bank, since the disengagement, since the freedom that's come from the disengagement, there's now only 650 checkpoints and obstacles to Palestinian movement in the West Bank alone. That's down from roughly 750 a year ago. And you can see this is becoming daily reality. The living conditions for Palestinians have become a wall like this with a sniper tower where children ride their bike inside the ghetto but don't leave the ghetto. You can get an idea of the proportion of this wall. Again, eight meters high, reinforced concrete. You're talking about a major obstacle. So the Israelis call it a fence, the Palestinians call it an apartheid wall, and the international diplomatic language is this, is the barrier. You can inject security in there if you want. But like I said, there's a debate about whether it's a fence or a wall. In fact, the cruel irony of these debates, just like the debate about Jenin in 2002, you know, was Jenin a massacre or was it just the killing of 35 innocent civilians? Is that a massacre? What is the definition of a massacre? Instead of evaluating the facts, we debate the language. Completely irrelevant because in fact, in the situation of the wall, the fence, the barrier, the fence is actually worse. So this is the fence that Dershowitz is talking about. It sounds like a white picket fence between your neighbor, but really what you're looking at is a massive infrastructure of colonization, colonization and control of the land. And that's why you see such an expansive area. You see on the right-hand side of the screen, razor wire, three coils high, roughly 15 feet high. You have a trench that's roughly 15 feet deep, however many feet across there you can see. That's an electronic fence, many areas operated by automatic machine gun. Some areas it's mined. And then you have the trace road, as it's called, a road where you can see if people have walked on it or not. And then you have what's there. The road there looks like a nice new road, but in fact it's a closed road and it's used for Israeli security patrols. So literally they can drive around and around the ghetto to make sure no one's getting out. If you look in the upper left-hand corner, you can see olive trees. You don't have to use your imagination too significantly to, to imagine what was there before that brand new infrastructure that you're looking at was there. Hundreds, literally thousands of olive trees, mature olive trees, have been uprooted in the creation of this wall. And so naturally, uh, anytime you have the increased permanent occupation, you're gonna have an increase in social unrest, an increase in popular uprisings, an increase in militant uprisings, and in fact, generally, that's the way it goes in Palestine. These demonstrations, popular demonstrations, don't get any coverage in North America, and many peace activists in North America talk about their wish for a Palestinian peace movement, but the reality is there's a vibrant peace movement in Palestine, Uh, there's literally protests every single solitary day anywhere you wanna go, uh, in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Uh, even as a reporter who's there and keen to report on what's going on, demonstrations go right by me without me more or less paying a glance, uh, because they're so common. Demonstrations of school kids, just as common as elderly. Demonstration of men, just as much as women. Demonstrations from all sectors of the population, they don't get any coverage. and are generally met with force such as you see in these images, Israeli riot squads dealing with live ammunition in a lot of cases. I mean, Palestinian school children after five days of curfew in Rafah in 2004, after five days of curfew, five days of having their school canceled during an army operation, uh, school kids organized a protest of school children to march towards the Israeli presence. The school children started to do that and Israeli attack helicopters, Apache longbow attack helicopters fired missiles into the crowd of children, killed 10 children. This is not historical stuff from way back when, this is stuff that happened in 2004, stuff that should have been on The National with the same frequency as a suicide bombing in Netanya, or what, what have you, um, but simply doesn't get coverage. Essentially, the key element to wrap up and to understand is that the disengagement was a smokescreen. It was a way, as I told you from Israeli officials, it's an array of Israeli officials to buy time for their occupation regime of the Palestinians. It's not a move towards peace. It's actually a move that threatens peace because while the world focuses on whether Palestinians can control themselves in Gaza, the Israelis are cementing a intractable occupation regime in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and it's going to be something that we as activists or people of concern to the issue are going to be dealing with for decades to come.