Re: I just don't believe in reveling in someone else's misfortune. And to some degree that's what you are doing.
Let them taste the bitterness....
For the Palestinians, bitterness and sympathy
By James Bennet The New York Times
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005
BEACH CAMP, Gaza Strip The essence of the Palestinians' national story, the one told in their songs and schoolbooks, is a tale of dispossession and eviction by Jewish and Israeli forces. It is symbolized by keys to houses unseen for two generations and affirmed by maps showing Palestinian villages lost in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and boundaries blurred in the one in 1967.
This week, Palestinians watched Israeli Jews forcibly evict other Israeli Jews, who struggled and wept over their homes and what they saw as a devastating new chapter in the Jewish people's own story of dispossession, of loss.
As news reports conveyed images of agonized settlers and soldiers, some Palestinians celebrated the removal of those they saw as usurpers of their land and liberty. But mixed with the jubilation and grim satisfaction, there were flashes of sympathy, too, from some of those who know what it means to lose a home.
"I feel that as a Palestinian this is my territory, this is my land," said Mkhaimar Abu Sada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University in Gaza City. Members of his family became refugees in 1948.
"This is my life," he said, "and I really want this to be happening right now. But on the other side, it's something on the human level - it's not an easy thing to take someone from their property and make them leave."
There is a bewildering upheaval under way here, a shifting of the theoretical and actual grounds on which the conflict has been fought. Israeli Jews have been barred at army checkpoints from reaching the settlements; giant armored bulldozers are preparing to demolish Israeli, rather than Palestinian, homes. Gaza is being unsettled, and everyone is struggling to understand what it means.
Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist in Gaza City who was made a refugee as a boy in 1948, said of the evacuation, "It provokes feelings of victimization and a kind of feeling we are all victimized by the whole thing."
In this Palestinian refugee camp, where tents long ago hardened into houses of cinder blocks and memories of lost villages softened into myth, refugees said they found themselves thinking back this week on their own experiences. But some said that did not make them sympathetic.
"Let them taste the bitterness," said Amona Aksham, who has lived more years and been surrounded with more grandchildren than she has counted.
Illuminated by a bare bulb as she sat on a thin mattress on the floor, she remembered her "beautiful life" in a village near Ashkelon. There, she grew grapes instead of buying them and left bread still baking when she fled the Israelis in 1948 without any belongings. "No, I can't sympathize with them," she said. "They didn't sympathize with us."
Unlike the settlers, Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by an enemy during war, and no one compensated them. There are more differences than parallels between their experiences, despite a shared romance with the land and with their remembered notions of their present antagonists.
Palestinian refugees like to say that life with Jews was neighborly before the Zionists came and spoiled it all; for settlers, the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza were their friends until Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, came to Gaza in 1994 under the Oslo peace accord.
A few blocks from Aksham's house, Suheil Abu al-Aaraj sat with his brother, Abdel Khader Abu al-Aaraj, in the balmy evening air and recalled the family's former home in Israel, which he visited for the first time in 1972.
"Maybe I shouldn't mention this," he continued before a visitor raised the subject of Israeli settlers. "I saw a settler crying on television. But they've been settlers for what, 20 years? What about those who stayed refugees for 50 years? They are victims, and we are victims, too."
His brother, 50, hotly interrupted him. "They are not victims," he said. "They are occupiers. They kicked us out of our land. They killed us."
Suheil Abu al-Aaraj, 40, replied, "When I say victims, I meant victims because their government cheated them." The Israeli government sent them to Gaza in the first place, he said. "It's their government that caused this misery for them."
Many Palestinians were irritated by what they saw as excessive news media attention to the travails of people they believe have caused untold Palestinian suffering. Diana Buttu, an adviser to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, said, "I feel no sympathy for them whatsoever."
Buttu also said Israeli governments had used the settlers by encouraging them to go to the West Bank and Gaza. "But at the same time it's not as though they weren't warned they were living in occupied territory," she said.
Israeli Jews argue that Israel is their historic homeland, to which they have returned after 2,000 years in exile.
In the zero-sum game that can define Israeli-Palestinian relations, something that makes one side sad might be expected to make the other proportionately happy. Yet Palestinians are wary of all this Israeli tumult.
Palestinians have for decades seen Ariel Sharon, one of Israel's most ferocious commandos and an architect of the settlement movement, as a bitter enemy. Now they are watching him, as prime minister, turn against the settlers.
Sarraj, the psychiatrist, said, "It's very strange and very comical, even, that this same man has victimized his own people twice: once luring his people into this settlement activity and then evicting them, and at the same time victimizing Palestinians."
Many Palestinians are reluctant to celebrate the withdrawal, and officials fear that excessive jubilation might send the message that the Palestinians consider Israel to have ended its occupation even before it releases control. "It's a huge bind," Buttu said. "The colonization is finally over, but occupation is not."
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