10 Days in Gaza in Santa Cruz
Thanks to all those who made it out to see 10 Days in Gaza tonight at Hillel. We had a great turnout, amazing questions and I was very impressed! Keep up the good work team!!
posted by iheartisrael at 11:46 PM
3 Comments:
Just to recap: it was a Channel 2 News film covering this past summer's Gaza pullout. Gadi Sukenik, an Israeli journalist for over 30 years, spoke after the film presentation. He posited that since Sharon decided to pullout from Gaza and north West Bank, the question of future pullouts is no longer a matter of "if," but of "when?" :(
A couple things that I noticed: the freedom of the journalists to be involved with their video cameras. You will NEVER see that kind of freedom of the media in any Arab countries (or probably not even in the US for that matter). They were in there recording the good, the bad, and the ugly, the whole way through.
One other thing: I spent a Shabbos in Gush Katif last year, in Neve D'kaliim to be exact. It was hard for me to watch the footage of Jews being forced out of their homes by other Jews from Neve D'kaliim.
But what stood out to me was the lack of mortar shells and kasam rockets falling during the pullout... It's as if the terrorists were like, "We'll kick back and let the IDF take over our ethnic cleansing for a while."
When I stayed in Neve D'kaliim, at least two mortar shells blew up while I was there. One of them was close enough to the house I was in to shake the foundations of the house. But the residents didn't even flinch, because literally thousands of rockets had been shot into that community by terrorists, it was almost a daily event. But during the pullout, no worries...
Ethnic cleansing? What diction!
The documentary portrayed the tragedy, the moral dilemnas both soldier and settler were made to confront. While it was very sad to see, the reality is that 8,000 Jews cannot live in luxury homes hogging access to the coast and water while 1.8 million Arabs live frustrated, in poverty, and full of hate. Gadi likened the situation to a ghetto - that is that the Jews constructed their own ghettos because of the insane amount of security fencing around the settlements, different roads for Jews and Arabs, etc.
The Israeli gov't always wanted to use the territories as bargaining chips; that's why resolution after resolution in the Knesset never approved of making the Golan, Gaza, or the W Bank officially part of Israel.
Disengagement was sad, but necessary.
I know, "ethnic cleansing." Sometimes I have to marginalize myself to get a response out of you people... ;)
But anyway, talking about luxury homes, some of the nicest luxury homes I saw all of my year in Israel were in Arab-Israeli towns. That's the truth. Nicer houses than my family's neighborhood in Orange County, California. I also stayed at a house in Gush Katif. Luxury? No. Not at all. Not even by Arab standards.
As far as the settlements being ghetto-like, I don't know if you noticed on the multiple huge-map shots of Gaza how tiny the whole settlement-bloc was. And what was it that those tiny settlements were doing to warrant rockets being shot at them everyday?
I don't really know. They moved out to a speck in the desert and started living there, made it bloom and created one of the best farming sites in the world. While the Arabs around them were living "frustrated, in poverty, and full of hate." Was that the settlers fault?
These are important things to think about.
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