Sunday, May 16, 2004

Meanwhile in Gaza

The bulldozing continues.

Azizah Abu Anzah was watching an Arab soap opera on television when a 56-ton armored bulldozer ate its way to her house in this Palestinian refugee camp on the Gaza Strip's southern edge.

The 30-year-old woman recalls grabbing her children and hiding behind a house in the next alley. She stole peeks around the corner as a blade taller than a man began scraping away her three-room home.

She and her husband, Musa, moved their family deeper into the refugee camp -- farther from the encroaching bulldozers, spasms of gunfire and thunderous tank rounds. But the bulldozers kept coming, flattening the neighborhood, house by house. Last week, 16 months after their first house was demolished, the Abu Anzahs' second home was demolished by Israeli forces during a new outbreak of battles between the Israeli military and Palestinian fighters.
  WaPo article

The Israeli claim is that by destroying these people's homes in this way (by their count, they've dozed over 1,000), as they have been doing for over three years, they are removing the hiding place of Palestinian guerillas. Has it been working? Could it possibly work? Of course not. And nobody really believes it can, do they? That's not really why they're doing it. And it wasn't really why the U.S. forces borrowed the tactic to bulldoze Iraqi orchards, either.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.