Those who mourn the evacuation of Gush Katif are not mourning justice and the righting of wrongs, but rather the loss of indulgence.

By: Avraham Borg

Akiva Novik is one of my most respected journalists. Right-wing, eloquent, knowledgeable, opinionated, a gracious polemicist and very attentive. He has only one blind spot. The disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Like many of his friends, he truly believes that history began then. With the trauma of the evacuated settlers. He sees half of reality, and is blind in the other eye and therefore does not see the other half. So for him, here is the fuller story.

Twenty years have passed since the disengagement from Gaza, and the memory of the evacuation serves groups in Israel as a lever for national trauma. They mourn the displacement of several thousand settlers, as if a sacred ancestral inheritance had been taken from them. And in the name of that disengagement and the feeling that the state betrayed them and abandoned them, they are doing everything in their power to do one thing and the opposite. To take control of every possible center of power in the state and at the same time to break it into its components. They forget only the true components of the Gaza stew. That was their government - Sharon, Netanyahu, and Dichter. And they have been in power in Israel since 1977, except for a few short years of Barak and Rabin (and if my memory serves me correctly, his life was cut short by one of them).

The disengagement ended an era of moral blindness, in which a handful of Israelis were given disproportionate land and resource allocations to build lavish villas amidst a sea of refugees. These refugees, hundreds of thousands who had been pushed into the Strip by the young Israel since 1948, lived in abject poverty and overcrowding unmatched anywhere else in the world.

And the numbers speak for themselves. 8,000 settlers and a million and a half Palestinians. What was their percentage? Negligible. But when it came to land, these oppressive settlers sat on 20% of Gaza's land. A fifth! And so it was with water. The daily water consumption per settler in Gaza at the time was close to 600 liters per day. And the daily consumption of the Palestinians in Gaza was about 70-90 liters per day (well below the international minimum). Novik's heroes were thirsty, poor people. And yes, they had glorious agriculture. Feudalists of the religion of Moses employed thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Thais. Under conditions of modern slavery. Some profited and others were oppressed. And then came Zion, a savior. That's how it is with this type of salt of the earth.

Israeli plunder in Gaza was colonial robbery in broad daylight. At the initiative and support of generations of Israeli governments. Also of Labor. Water, land and infrastructure flowed to the settlers while right next to them, behind fences, entire families struggled for a basic existence. Those who mourn Gush Katif today are not mourning justice and the righting of wrongs. But rather the loss of indulgence. For the life of detached comfort, for the blindness that did not see those who paid its price. And we haven't even talked about the enormous investment in the security of these "pioneers." Checkpoints, fences, forces that risked their lives, Israeli and Palestinian deaths. All the impure means for the peace of the residents of Paradise. About them, Woody Allen once said: If the end doesn't justify the means, then what does?

Moshe Dayan was right.

It is difficult to overstate the prophetic power of Moshe Dayan's words, spoken in the eulogy for Roy Rothberg at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, 1956: "Let us not today accuse the murderers. What do we have to do with their fierce hatred of us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we are turning the land and villages where they and their fathers lived into our inheritance." Dayan, blind, actually saw the whole reality, but drew from it only the limited conclusions of Novik. "Let us not shrink from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who sit around us and look forward to the moment when their hand will be able to obtain our blood. Let us not turn our eyes away lest our hand weaken. This is the decree of our generation. This is the choice of our lives - to be ready and armed, strong and firm, or else the sword will slip from our fists - and our lives will be cut off."

Dayan then spoke of a young kibbutz established on the ruins of a Palestinian village. Gush Katif was a thousand times more opaque and evil. Islands of ornamental gardens in the midst of a human tragedy with no end in sight. And that is what the Israeli right misses. Because if there is one thing that our patriotic right loves, more than all the land, all the rights, all the power, all the resources and the constant rapprochement - it is to hate. Everyone, all the time for everything. Except for themselves, of course.

Sharon and the Seeds of Anarchy

The father of the current destruction is "their" Ariel Sharon, and the disengagement will prove it. Beyond the question of morality, there is also the question of the method; the way in which Ariel Sharon managed the disengagement. Everything was one-sided then. Instead of leading an agreed-upon political move with a recognized partner, Sharon chose a one-man show: a decision by one person, which was made above the heads of the public and its elected officials while trampling on internal democratic rules of the game. Thus was built a culture of bypassing institutions, of disdain for democratic consent, in a referendum and the forceful implementation of "me and nothing more." Without real dialogue with anyone. Especially not with the Palestinian Authority, which could have grown from there into a full partner. From there grew the roots for today's internal destruction. Sharon, the anarchist right-winger, despised the state and its institutions and trampled them more than once, one by one. And for that, all the right-wing thugs who were born from his womb and who operate today in his image, admired him. In the form of the abused child who becomes a violent parent himself. Weeping over his legacy and doing exactly like him.

The disengagement itself was a morally correct step, but the manner in which it was implemented was wrong. It did not free Gaza from the siege or Israel from control, and it did not build any common future. The result was twofold: on the one hand, the illusion of an end to predatory colonialism within the Strip; on the other, the strengthening of political, diplomatic, and political chaos within Israel. We are reaping the bitter fruits of Sharon, the anarchism, and the arrogance of that time today.

That is why I am not impressed by the crocodile tears of those mourning the evacuation, nor do I share its temples and supporters. I await the day when the leaders, thinkers, and voters will remove the blindfold from their eyes, heal from the partial blindness to which they have become addicted. And will desire real peace. The foundations of which are: equality, recognition of the injustices of the past, true sorrow for all the victims, and joint reparation for the sake of future generations.