Sugar Cubes

Read part 1 here

By Mustafa Barghouti*

But the Israelis did not get out of Gaza. A big fuss was created about the great sacrifice Israel was making and how painful it was for settlers to leave. If you steal a piece of land and keep it for 20 years, of course it becomes painful to leave it but it is still something stolen that should be returned to its owners. Prior to the disengagement, a total of 152 settlements existed in the occupied territories: 101 in the West Bank, 30 in East Jerusalem, and 21 in the Gaza Strip. These figures do not include the settlements that Sharon and the Israeli army have created in the West Bank without officially recognising them. With the disengagement, and the evacuation of settlements in Gaza and four small settlements in the Jenin area of the West Bank, 127 settlements have been left in place.

The total population of settlers — illegal under international law, and under the 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which states that the separation wall and every settlement in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem must be removed — numbers some 436,000: 190,000 in Jerusalem, and 246,000 in the West Bank. Just 8,475, or two per cent of the total number of illegal settlers in the occupied territories were removed from the Gaza Strip and Jenin area. Yet in the same period, the settlement population in the West Bank has grown by a massive 15,800.

So why remove settlers from Gaza if the disengagement was simply an exercise in relocation? Firstly, Israel never really wanted to keep them there. They were a bargaining chip to use when the time came to talk about the future of the occupied territories. But providing security for this relatively small number of settlers through a sustained military presence in the Gaza Strip was proving costly.

*Mustafa Barghouti secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative.