The upcoming “disengagement” from Gaza is providing Arik Sharon a convenient smokescreen for the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West bank.
“You have to imagine what it feels like to wake up one morning in your own house, the house your grandfather built long before the state of Israel existed, and to find the official notice on the wall. Your home, where you have lived your life, is soon to be destroyed; you and your children will be refugees. It must seem unreal; a house is so stolid and enduring a presence, a thing of mortar and stone as well as intimate refuge. Now the intimacy has been violated; you are threatened, afraid, exposed. A long line of condemned homes stretches all the way up the hill, toward the wall of the old city. In the protest tent where we have come to plan the next moves, a large-scale aerial photograph is pinned to the wall, each of the 88 buildings circled and numbered. Abed points to number 9, his grandmother’s home: the man who built it, her grandfather, died 100 years ago, so the house goes back to the 19th century, Turkish times. Anywhere else it would be preserved as a historic monument, but in Israel-Palestine such considerations are irrelevant; Israel, or Sharon, wants this plot of land, like all the rest.”
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