Netzarim is a small, isolated settlement on the sea shore, in the heart of the Gaza Strip, far from any other settlement. It was implanted in the middle of a Palestinian population of a million and a quarter, half of them refugees, in the most densely inhabited place on earth. A whole battalion of the IDF defends it, and that is not enough. To reach it from Israel, one has to cross the entire width of the Gaza strip. All traffic is by armored vehicles. Up to now, more than twenty soldiers have been killed in the defense of the settlement and the road leading to it.
Crazy? The settlers themselves maintain that it was the army that had demanded to set up the settlement as a base for observation and control. The fanatical nationalist-religious founders have since disappeared, their place taken by adventurers who risk their own lives and the lives of their children--not to mention the soldiers, male and female, who have no choice. The government sacrifices them on the altar of the settlement.
The Palestinians, of course, suffer more than anyone else. Any who come near the settlement are shot. Anything that was standing or growing nearby, or along the road, has been destroyed or uprooted long ago. This week, the army demolished two Palestinian high-rise apartment blocks, each 12 floors high, some hundreds of meters from the settlement, because from there the goings on in the settlement could be "observed". This is typical: like a cancer in the body that gradually extends its malign influence, every settlement slowly destroys its surroundings in an ever-widening circle
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http://www.counterpunch.org/avnery11072003.html
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