Amrousi - Remembering Gush Katif

Emily Amrousi
Yisrael HaYom
07 August '11

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=289


“This is a very hard fight,” said Stav Shafir, one of the organizers of the social justice protests sweeping our country, on Saturday. “There are very powerful forces standing in our way.”

What forces, Stav? Why is it so hard? The media are going out of their way to carry you and your friends around like royalty. Every Facebook group is aggressively promoted, every five students are a new “hotbed of protest,” every 200 protesters to enter the fray enjoy adulation and extensive broadcast coverage. Current affairs presenters Orly Vilnai and Guy Meroz encouraged viewers on live television Saturday night to go out and join the demonstration, which was basically a free rock concert in the middle of the summer vacation.

All their friends in the journalism world have aching hands from their automatic applause for the revolutionary council that has replaced democracy.

I don't know if you know this, Stav, but in two days we will observe the Hebrew anniversary of the disengagement, which uprooted the communities of Gush Katif and northern Samaria in 2005. “This is a very hard fight,” you said on television last night, and as I looked at you I remembered how our protest was silenced six years ago.

I remember the 250,000 people who poured into the streets demanding a national referendum. “Let the people decide,” they cried. I remember the hundreds of thousands who visited Gush Katif on Independence Day. The thousands who took part in prayer assemblies. The throngs of shouting citizens whose voices were not heard. The media did not make our lives easy.

Two months before the disengagement, 40,000 vehicles took part in a “Stop for a Moment and Rethink” demonstration, turning off their engines along highways. About 150,000 people got out of their cars and quietly hoisted signs. To the media's great disappointment, no one blocked traffic or burned tires. The next day a small news item about the demonstration appeared below a small headline saying, “The protest stayed on the margins.”

I can give you countless examples, Stav, of how we were denied our simple democratic right to protest that summer. When the prime minister betrayed his voters by disregarding the platform on which he had been elected, journalists' most urgent concern was who would carry out the evacuation -- police or soldiers? When he fired two ministers on the eve of the government's vote on the disengagement, newscasts were preoccupied with the question of when settlers' weapons would be appropriated. When he ignored the referendum of registered Likud voters, journalists wondered about how much settlers would get in damages. The disengagement was a divisive issue, but in the media there were no divisions.

In the past few weeks the Israeli media have once again become a unified front. Whoever dares set foot outside the circle, as singer and telelvison personality Margalit Tzanani did, is publicly whipped. Yesterday, precisely six years after those homes collapsed, I read the signs and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. The signs were a little less red and more patriotic this time. “Don't be a homewrecker,” they said. “Save our home.” “We're all responsible for each other.” They're the same slogans, Stav. Try to find the difference.

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