Nach Gaza (3)
Heute erreicht mich per e-Mail die Nachricht einer lieben Freundin, Reem Makhoul, aus Jerusalem, die für das dortige Büro der New York Times arbeitet. Sie schreibt: “I was asked by the NYT office yesterday to go to the Old City in Jerusalem and to the Arab part of the city, make interviews with people, and try to understand from them how they feel about the disengagement in particular, and about the situation here in general. … I managed to interview 10 people. I did this project with 3 others from the office, but they did the Jewish side, and I did the Arab side.” Ihre Interviews sind schliesslich in einen sehr aufschlussreichen Artikel eingeflossen, der eine grössere Bandbreite von Meinungen aus dem Alltag über den Rückzug Israels aus dem Gazastreifen wiedergibt:
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Israelis Watch Images From Gaza With Tears and Toughness
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: August 17, 2005
JERUSALEM, Aug. 17 – The forcible evacuation of Israeli citizens from Gaza today filled television screens and radio programs with emotional images and speeches. Regular programming was replaced by all-day news coverage of the evacuation, which was heavy on sentiment and images of settlers screaming at soldiers or hugging them.
“Television has succeeded in bringing all the tears and the pain into everyone’s house but also the exemplary behavior of police and army,” said Haim Gouri, 82, an Israeli poet and journalist. “Before us is a torn people and it is not important what the exact proportions are.”
Uzi Arad, director of the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, and a critic of disengagement, described what he saw on television as “a historically tragic occasion, which only accentuates that such great cost and straining of our democracy is being employed to enforce such a dubious policy.”
“I feel terrible for them,” said Bracha Ben-Avraham, 55, a musician who lives in the Galilee, “but there are so many people in Israel who have no homes, while these people are being given every opportunity to start over, no matter how difficult it might be. I don’t know how many times in history people have been forced to leave by their own army, but it’s got to be dealt with. And we definitely don’t need the Gaza Strip.”
“Once they start uprooting people in the territories, it makes it possible for the government to uproot Jews anywhere,” said a Jerusalem green grocer, Yitzhak Mor, 67, who opposes the disengagement plan.
“The settlers are fine people, patriots, they undertook the mission of bodily defending the whole of the State of Israel,” Mr. Mor said. “I watch on TV, and tears run down my cheeks. I cry! If I could trust the Arabs, I’d be glad to live in peace with them, like cousins, but you can’t trust them.”
Mr. Mor’s brother Aryeh Mizrahi, 54, simply turned off the TV in the shop.
“One of the things that’s hurt me most is to see the settlers, who were sent there by the government, being portrayed as if they were greedy,” Mr. Mizrahi said. “They were pioneers! They defended the border for us! I can’t watch it on TV or listen to the radio.”
Jac Friedgut, a Jerusalem pensioner, worries about what will happen on the Palestinian side.
“Hamas is still talking of elimination of the state of Israel and P.L.O. is saying next they’ll liberate Jerusalem,” Mr. Friedgut said. “Sharon did this in a unilateral way, which upset me, but I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Peace hopefully will come,” said Tamar Lahav, a 32-year-old producer from Jerusalem. “The Palestinian Authority will have to take charge. We are extending a hand for peace in what we are doing, but I don’t feel confident about it.”
Arab East Jerusalem also had its pessimists and optimists. A Muslim shop owner who identified himself only as Mohammed, age 60, expressed a little hope. “Disengagement serves only the Israelis,” he said. “Now they are leaving Gaza, but our happiness will be complete when they go back to the borders of ‘67, including Jerusalem.”
“When the Palestinian Authority came,” he added, “they said that Gaza and the West Bank will become like Hong Kong. People became so poor after the P.A. came, and Gaza became worse than any African country.”
But Sami Haidar, a lawyer, 50, said that “Sharon is doing something great, and he is the only one who can do it,” adding that “peace is not easy to talk about, it takes time to see results.”
Israel radio’s acerbic talk show host, Gabi Gazit, opened his morning program with a two-pronged attack on settler tactics. He specifically took the settlers to task for exploiting their infants for the purposes of protest and their use of comparisons with the Holocaust.
“I am not prepared to accept this cruel, distorted and foolish analogy,” said Mr. Gazit, himself the child of Holocaust survivors.
“Our program’s office is piled high with letters from Holocaust survivors,” he said. “They say, ‘Enough, stop.’ It’s true the sadness of leaving a house, a garden, a greenhouse is sad, but Ganei Tal is not Bergen-Belsen and Neve Dekalim is not Auschwitz, even if you repeat it thousands of times. And even if you apologize a thousand times, your apology will not be accepted. Leave the Holocaust alone, leave the infants alone, act like adults.”
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