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=> The double-edged sword of inhumanity

The double-edged sword of inhumanity
Posted by Maggie (Guest) - Thursday, August 11 2005, 19:56:23 (CEST)
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As Pullout Nears, Gaza's Graves a Stumbling Block
By Laura King, Times Staff Writer


NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip — Shlomo Yulis thought the sand-strewn hilltop cemetery that holds the dead of the Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip would be his final resting place. Especially after he buried his young son here.

Now, less than a week before the Gaza settlements are to be evacuated, Yulis does not know when or how the body of 14-year-old Itai, who died in 1993 of leukemia, will be exhumed and reburied after the settlers depart.

"How can I leave without him?" said Yulis, who moved to Gaza 23 years ago. "He wanted to be buried here, and I told him I would stay with him always."

The disposition of the graves of Gush Katif, Gaza's main settlement block, has become one of the most wrenching questions surrounding the evacuation of nearly 9,000 Jewish settlers, which is set to begin Wednesday. The bodies of 48 people are buried in the cemetery, where blue-and-white Israeli flags flap in the searing summer wind and an electrified fence carries a warning sign to keep away.

Funeral and mourning rituals, governed by strict rules pertaining to the handling of bodies, occupy a hallowed place in Jewish tradition. And thus the planned removal of the cemetery, this most literal leaving of the land, has become painfully entwined with the larger battle over whether Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is right to relinquish Gaza, which was seized by Israel in the 1967 Middle East War.

A majority of Israelis support the decision made by Sharon to end Israel's occupation of a teeming, poverty-stricken strip of territory that is home to more than 1.3 million Palestinians. But settlers and their supporters have struggled determinedly to thwart the uprooting of settlements and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

The Israeli government says it is doing all it can to handle the planned exhumations with sensitivity and understanding. But officials quietly complain that the settlers, many of whom still believe that the Gaza withdrawal won't take place, have resisted all efforts to reach an agreement on details of the bodies' removal and reburial.

Emotions on both sides boiled over last month when Brig. Gen. Yisrael Weiss, the chief chaplain of the Israeli military, visited the largest Gaza settlement to try to discuss the exhumations. Demonstrators mobbed him, throwing crumpled-up black garbage bags in his face and telling him to use them to gather up bones.

One protester even shouted at Weiss, whose adult daughter was killed several years ago in a traffic accident: "Should someone come and dig up your daughter's grave?" The rabbi visibly paled.

"Such an attack is not worthy of my anger," he told Israel Radio later. "These people lashed out in rage, with burning hatred, crossing all red lines and losing their own humanity."

Jewish religious law, or halacha, does make some provisions for the exhumation and reburial of bodies. Among the permissible reasons for moving graves is knowledge that they would probably be damaged, for example by flood.

"Honor of the dead is a very basic tenet in Judaism, and normally every effort is made not to disturb the dead," said Rabbi David Golinkin, a professor of Jewish law at Jerusalem's Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies. "But there are exceptions, and it seems this is one of them."

Israel's two chief rabbis — Sephardic Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Ashkenazi Rabbi Yona Metzger — agreed that the risk of graves being desecrated by Palestinian extremists once Israel left Gaza was enough to justify uprooting the cemetery.

"The graves must be moved if Jews will no longer be there," Amar told Israel Radio.

But the rabbis insisted that a detailed agreement must first be reached with the families. Many families, however, refused to talk about the matter with government representatives, saying they could not make decisions about reburial without knowing where they themselves would ultimately resettle.

The battle went all the way to Israel's Supreme Court, which ordered the government to reach some accord with the relatives before acting to move the bodies.

"The families are very vulnerable," said attorney Motti Mintzer, who represented 17 sets of relatives in their Supreme Court case. "And time is ticking away."

In the withdrawal's wake, the bodies would probably be removed by the rabbinate of the Israeli military or of the Defense Ministry, which have specially trained units made up of observant Jews.

But many people who are religiously observant balk at the idea of cooperating in any way with the pullout. The Zaka burial society, an Orthodox Jewish organization whose volunteers are a fixture at the scenes of suicide bombings searching for the tiniest scraps of flesh, was approached by the security establishment about helping with the exhumation of the settler graveyard, according to Israeli news reports. But its leaders refused.

The exhumation, when it occurs, will not only be harrowing, but technically demanding. Because the bodies of civilians are buried only in shrouds — unlike Israeli soldiers, who are interred in caskets — the surrounding ground must be carefully sifted in search of any remains.



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