Gaza’s beaches

The last of the Israeli occupying army has left Gaza for the first time in 38 years. Even in leaving it was impossible for the Israelis to camouflage the insidious character of this colonial occupation. The very joy of the Palestinians in having gotten rid of them exposed it.

Hundreds of Palestinian children rushed to the beaches of the Mediterranean with their families. Those youngsters, who may have lived only a mile from the shore in hot and crowded refugee camps, had never been in the water before. The seaside had been an exclusive resort for the Israeli settlers.

Ariel Sharon made sure in his last acts in Gaza that the world would remember he was the war criminal responsible for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon during the 1982 Israeli occupation. He ordered the comfortable homes of the Israeli settlers bulldozed.

He wouldn’t consider leaving a few buildings standing to make up for the thousands of Palestinian homes the Israel state has destroyed as it kept finding new destructive uses for the bulldozer. But he spared the synagogues, forcing the Palestinian Authority to bear the onus
of tearing them down.

Gaza still has no connection to the occupied West Bank. Its sea and air space is controlled
by Israel.

But the reaction of the Palestinian people shows that even a very partial victory is sweet—and it was hard won. With all its shortcomings, the Gaza pullout is proof that the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, was not in vain and that a determined people can push back their oppressors even when the military odds seem totally stacked against them.

Long live Palestine!