Sharon's Shell Game in Rafah

by Starhawk
May 23, 2004



Just over a year ago, I sat in a home near the Egyptian border in Rafah, in the Gaza strip. A five-year-old, curly-haired charmer of a girl was on my lap. Her older sister and brothers did homework to the background music of the thudding of bullets into the walls. The children were so inured to gunfire from the Israeli sniper towers and tanks that they didn't even react until the gunfire grew so loud that the older ones dived for the floor, the babies for the fragile shelter of their mother's arms.

I was there with the International Solidarity Movement, which supports nonviolent resistance against the Occupation. I'd come to help the teams that were with our member Rachel Corrie, who was crushed by a soldier in a bulldozer as she attempted to stop a home demolition, and with Tom Hurndall when he was shot trying to rescue a group of children who were under fire from an Israeli sniper tower.

I think of them, of the families I met and the traumatized children who followed us in packs whenever we ventured out on the streets, as I read the horrifying reports of the last weeks in Rafah. The homes I stayed in have been razed to the ground, along with the crowded neighborhoods where the old men would visit each other at twilight to brew tea over a small fire and talk, where the women still baked bread in clay ovens. The olive groves, the orange trees have fallen to bulldozers. Children like the ones I held and sang to, and their parents, have been killed in the demonstrations protesting the destruction of their communities.

To make the lives of those more hopeful, and to safeguard the lives of Israeli children, it is vital that we understand the true thrust of Sharon's current policies. Sharon is the sleight-of-hand magician, saying 'Look here!" while the real action is somewhere else. Sharon says, "Look over here! We're pulling out of Gaza!" and Bush says, "OK, and in return, we'll stop looking at what you're doing in the West Bank." But Gaza and the West Bank are related, and unless we keep our eyes on both, we'll be victimized by the shell game.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=5578