Personal Voices: The Occupation is Not Over

In the breezy, far northwestern corner of the Gaza Strip, where the Mediterranean collides with golden sands and an in-sea barrier marking the border with Israel, there is a small Palestinian village.

Al-Siyafa, according to the residents of this area, was once a paradise with lush strawberry patches as far as the eye could see, guava and avocado trees that were the envy of every farmer, and citrus orchards that masked the salty coast humidity.

Now, it is a scorched, barren landscape that accommodates little more than the occasional wildflower.

For days, we have been bombarded with images of weeping settlers on our television stations. How hard it must be, we are told, for these settlers to give up the only homes many of them have ever known. How cruel and inhumane that they are being "forcefully evicted," children clutching dolls and mothers sobbing by their side.

But we do not hear of the village of al-Siyafa, sandwiched between the settlements of Dugit and Eli Sinai, their red-roofed, sea-front villas visible in the distance, safely set apart from their neighboring Palestinian village with barbed wire and acres of cleared earth.

It is for their sake, for their safety and pleasure, that this once flourishing land was cleared of its trees, and the Palestinians of their livelihoods.

In their name, millions of Palestinians' lives have been crippled, roads torn apart and sealed off, homes destroyed and Palestinians made homeless, hundreds of innocent lives lost, and acres of fertile farmland razed and annexed.

We do not hear of Um Ahmed al-Ghul, who lost her only son to the sniper tower that once overlooked this village, as he was picking mint leaves from their small garden.

Al-Siyafa has been turned into an open-air prison in recent years, sealed off from the rest of Gaza with barbed-wire fences, an Israeli sniper tower, tanks, and a complicated and arbitary permit-entry system for residents, all in the name of security for the settlements.

Residents have no access to health care inside their fenced-in village, no electricity, and no schools. In order to reach these facilities, they must pass through an Israel-imposed checkpoint, which opens at particular hours of the day, and often not at all.

But soon, the settlers will be gone. The red-roofs, the sniper towers, and the fences will gradually disappear. Gaza, we are told, will finally have the opportunity to thrive and prosper as an independent and free territory.

Or will it?

Just because the visible markers of occupation will be gone, it does not mean the occupation itself will end. Instead of controlling our lives from within, Israel will control our lives from without in a convenient, secure manner.

That is, after all, what disengagement was about: tactical maneuvering; isolating the Gaza Strip that Rabin hoped to wake up one morning and find swallowed by the sea; rendering a contiguous Palestinian state impossible and stopping a negotiated peace dead in its tracks.

In a few weeks, the Israeli army will simply be redeploying to outside of the Gaza border, taking control of Gaza's Palestinians like a prison warden in charge of his inmates.

Israel will also maintain its troop presence along the Philedelphi corridor in Rafah, where some 20,000 Palestinian lost their homes in a systemic policy of demolition to make way for this border buffer zone. Where young children, like Iman al-Hims and Noran Deeb, lost their lives to an indiscriminate Israeli sniper.

Even the latest round of talks on the status of the Rafah crossing -- Gaza's only route to the outside world -- have been inconclusive.

Likewise, Palestinians will be unable to move freely to and from the West Bank. And without such a territorial link, a viable Palestinian economy, or state, is impossible.