Al-Ahram Weekly
22 - 28 September 2005
The Gaza disengagement was just an Israeli smokescreen to hide
extremely sinister developments in the West Bank, writes Deborah Stokes
"Facts on the ground" is a tactical term used by some Israeli settlers and right-wing activists seeking to increase Israeli presence in the West Bank, to describe a situation, which, once created, due to its physical existence cannot be ignored.
Thus, in the case of the West Bank, settlements which may initially have been illegal cannot be ignored once they exist and since many have, with the complicity of, or direct/indirect investment from the Israeli government, grown and expanded, their sheer physical presence and size makes it increasingly difficult to dismantle or destroy without provoking mass protests from a sizeable section of the Israeli public.
The word "settlement" is misleading; it conjures up images of pioneers living in small hastily-erected communities cooking over log-fires and while this may be the case in a few examples, the over-riding impression of Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim and other settlements is of large established towns with integrated infrastructures and transport systems which no Israeli government, under no matter how much international pressure is going to pull down.
Sharon, who has always been a military strategist before being a politician, is playing games not only with the heads of foreign governments but also with the media. By appearing to bow to international pressure by disengaging from Gaza and a few minor settlements in the West Bank of little historical or religious importance to the majority of Jews, he has succeeded in giving foreign heads of states the impression that he is interested in peace.
Outsiders, unable to see what is going on in the West Bank are also being persuaded that this process of "disengagement" from settlements may continue. This is far from the case. While the majority of the world's news organisations were in Gaza reporting on the pull-out, momentarily distracted from expansion of the settlements near Jerusalem, construction of the remaining segments of the wall which will eventually separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, was continuing at a frenzied pace out of the camera's eye.
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