It is nearly a year and a half since a government-sponsored advertising campaign reassured the nation that "there's a solution for every settler" - a reference to the thousands of Israeli citizens then slated to be removed from Gaza and northern Samaria as part of disengagement.
However the sorry truth is that not a single evacuated family has been relocated to a permanent home. Most of the evacuated breadwinners are still unemployed. Only 10 of the 400 farmers were given new land, and even that was woefully inadequate.
And the advances that have been paid on compensation (the final extent of which is still bogged down in red tape) are being eaten up by the cost of daily subsistence in lieu of income. Many previously well-to-do settlers are being reduced to financial ruin and cannot afford to buy new homes.
The litany of post-disengagement misery for these uprooted Israelis is long, and includes the breakup of families, truancy and physical and/or psychological ill-health. Officialdom's excuses, which may have been semi-tolerable in the immediate aftermath of the complex and wrenching unilateral pullout, are patently no longer sufferable.
This is from an editorial at today's Jerusalem Post. On the same Jerusalem Post editorial page where, on August 16, 2005, this attempt was made to rationalize the 'disengagement':
Though called unilateral, disengagement is thus really an unwritten, unsigned agreement with the international community. The agreement says: if we hand over territory fully to a Palestinian government, you will hold that government diplomatically and economically responsible, and we will hold it militarily responsible, if it refuses to eliminate terrorism from its realm.
How's that unwritten, unsigned agreement working out so far?
Here we have the two matching bookends of the 'disengagement' disaster. The uprooting of a thriving, vibrant, productive community, the destruction of homes and synagogues, lives and livelihoods, orchards and greenhouses, the betrayal of the hopes and dreams of so many people in return for a series of inevitably false promises based on a demonstrably faulty premise.
I could just scream.
