Civil Disobedience in Gaza

Watching the drama as Israeli settlers are forced to move from their homes I am struck by the poignancy of their sacrifice and heartfelt emotions. What is most memoriable to me, though, is the incredible restraint and humanity that is evident between the government instruments of authority, the soldiers and police, and the angry, frustrated settlement members. They were asked, then forced to leave behind, not just houses and beach front property, but the remains of their loved ones buried in the sand and the memorials to loved ones who died at the hands of terrorists.

The settlers did not fight with guns and bombs, but with sand and oil and paint thinner – thought, at first, to be acid. The police, too, used, not guns, but water. Again, what struck me the most were the pictures of police and soldiers, not in stances of militaristic rigidity and resolve to fight, but face to face with the settlers; their postures reflecting some understanding for the plight of those who were being asked to leave their homes. They were talking with their charges, their countrymen, with what looked like empathy and compassion. The pictures and stories emerging from the pullout from Gaza tell a story as much about compassion and humanity as of civil disobedience. The settlement “hold-outs” are mostly young and idealistic and unable to fully grasp that their sacrifice, and that of their country’s, is a significant gesture toward peace with their Palestinian neighbors. Striking, too, is the obvious disparity in economic circumstance between the well apportioned homes of the Israeli settlers and the minimalist adobe-like abodes of the Palestinians. One irony of the Gaza pullout is that the fine houses and synagogues that have been abandoned will be destroyed. Palestinians will not be able to have more than they have now, except some land on the other side of a historic political boundary. True, some of the infrastructure of streets and plumbing and electricity will remain, a better scenario than that which occurred in the aftermath of America’s occupation of Iraq. But the essential circumstances of economic disparities between Palestinians and Israelis are unlikely to change by this shift of people from one place to another.

The pullout from Gaza is yet another gambit for peace and a valuable demonstration of the sincerity of Ariel Sharon and his country that they want peace. The compassion and humanity shown by the Israeli’s for one another, police and soldiers for the settlers and vice versa is another demonstration of the sincerity of these people for peaceful resolution to their differences. I wish this could be the standard by which Palestinians and Israelis treated each other and the standard by which we, all of us, will one day treat one another.