Sunday, August 22, 2010
Elder of ZiyonHere's the version that would have been decent:
KIBBUTZ KARMIYYA, Israel — Dana Chetrit, her husband Alain and their two young children in August 2005 reluctantly left their home in the northern Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai, never to return.Instead, AFP threw in a "balanced" set of paragraphs about Arabs in Gaza with no consistent viewpoint and some questionable quotes, breaking up the narrative and changing the article from something pretty good into a nonsensical mishmash.
They were among 8,000 Israeli settlers evicted by their own government from 21 settlements in Gaza, in a move heralded as ending 38 years of Israeli occupation and as bringing closer an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
To Chetrit, a 36-year-old art teacher, the pullout brought broken dreams, broken promises and a broken marriage.
Five years since soldiers ordered settler Dana Chetrit out of her home, she is still living in temporary accommodation at the Karmiya kibbutz just across the border in Israel.
Her marriage collapsed under the strain of the move.
As a 22-year-old newly-wed in 1996, she had found her ideal home in the small settlement of Elei Sinai, just inside the Gaza Strip and about five kilometers (three miles) from where she now lives.
"It was our first home, it was the home we had been looking for," she said. "We wanted to live in a communal community, it was cheap, there were other young couples there, everyone was like us."
The idyll was shattered in October 2001 when Hamas gunmen cut through the settlement's perimeter fence and shot dead a 19-year-old girl and her 20-year-old boyfriend. Another 15 Israelis were wounded before the attackers were shot dead in a gun battle with soldiers.
Chetrit said the incident only strengthened her attachment to the settlement and her commitment to her neighbours.
But in 2004, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the withdrawal of Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza. On August 18, 2005, the Chetrits were turfed out of their home.
The violence, however, followed them across the border to the small kibbutz collective farm, where she and the boys now live in a five-roomed prefabricated house.
Gaza militants regularly fire rockets across the border. In February 2006, a Qassam rocket, produced in the workshops of the Palestinian territory, thudded into a neighbour's house, destroying it and blowing a toddler out of the playpen in which he had been sitting.
The injured child recovered but the traumatised parents moved out the same day.
"Rockets had fallen before but this was a direct hit," Chetrit said. "If you had seen the house, you would have been amazed that anybody could come out of it alive."
In a separate attack, a rocket fell on the kibbutz football pitch, injuring two people, she said, adding that there were plenty of near misses as well.
Of around 50 families from Elei Sinai who were initially housed at Karmiya, only about 20 remain today, some driven out by fear of more rockets.
Chetrit, who has been promised land on which to build a home in the nearby village of Talme Yafe, said the bureaucratic wheels are turning very slowly.
"We haven't yet received a plot," she said. "By the time we get building permits ... it could be another four or five years."
She is not going to move again until she has a permanent home. "Qassams or no Qassams, I'm not leaving again ... I can't see myself packing up again and moving house," she said.
Why is it so against wire service editorial standards to have a story exclusively from an Israeli perspective? They sure do it for Palestinian Arabs enough.
