The City, Not Long After

Half a generation ago, a gesture in the name of peace turned out to spread plague and disaster.

The Gaza Strip has been a flashpoint of violence for decades. Even the most cursory news stories about it feature pictures of soldiers on one side and militants on the other, pointing guns at each other in a standoff. But through all this conflict, there has always been an underlying sense that both sides knew exactly what they were fighting over—the land. The land between Israel and Gaza is filled with buildings and settlements, yet residents can’t cross the border to go to school or to visit friends. That’s the sense anyone has who lives here: we know what this land looks like, we know where our territory ends and yours begins.

This attitude changed on September 13th, 2005, when two Israeli soldiers were killed by militants near the border fence with Gaza. After this event, Israel declared that any Palestinian entering the security “buffer zone” along the border would be considered an enemy combatant and treated as such. This declaration was followed by intense crackdowns by Israeli forces that exiled Palestinians from their own lands and damaged or destroyed homes. In effect, this policy declared war on anyone who lived within 100 meters of the border fence with Gaza—including children—with no

Half a generation ago, in 1989, the world was full of hope. In the East, Gorbachev was leading the Soviet Union towards democracy. In the West, Reagan was making strides towards nuclear disarmament, and as a result both leaders were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize that year. The two leaders met in November of that year and made a historic agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe.