Chutzpa alert: Gaza 'Palestinians' seek unemployment compensation from former Jewish employers
There's a famous Jewish quip that the following is the definition of chutzpa: You kill your mother and father and then throw yourself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that you're an orphan. Three years after the Sharon-Olmert government expelled all the Gaza Strip's Jewish residents, the 'Palestinians' have learned the art of chutzpa (Hat Tip: Shy Guy). They are seeking to sue their former employers for 'wrongful dismissal' as a result of having lost their jobs at the Gush Katif hothouses (pictured as they were before August 2005). I kid you not. And the government's reaction? It's trying to wash its filthy hands from the entire affair. The uprooting of the vibrant Jewish communities and economy of Gush Katif during the Sharon Administration's "disengagement" from Gaza led to the instant unemployment of about 10,000 people who worked in agriculture and related industries, including 5,000 Arabs from the Palestinian Authority. As of June 2008, over 50 percent of former Gush Katif residents still find themselves unemployed.I don't think the former Arab employees of the hothouses should get anything. They already got - and destroyed - the hothouses themselves. But if they are going to get anything it certainly should not be at the expense of the people who were expelled from their homes. As you may recall, they are already continuing to pay debt on the same farms from which they were expelled.
According to an Israel TV Channel One report, the SELA Administration, which was set up to assist Disengagement evictees to rebuild their lives and communities, told former Gush Katif residents, employers and businessmen that the Arab claims are "your problem."
The government has claimed that compensation funds paid to former Gush Katif residents included a fund to be used for former employees of the Jewish industries kicked out of Gaza. However, compensation payments thus far have not covered the basic needs of the evictees themselves, Gush Katif activists say.
Yossi Schwartz, a former owner of a clothing factory interviewed for the Channel One report, said that former workers' claims could be more than one million NIS in his case alone. Mr. Schwartz, like so many of his former neighbors, is still unemployed.
Anyone still feel like making aliya?
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:28 AM
2 Comments:
The irony is that the bleeding hearts of the Israeli Left, in their rush to make Gaza Judenrein, never looked at the effect the move might have on the Arabs. They left them without a future just as they left the Jews without a future and they're shrugging their shoulders over a fiasco of their own making.
And no the Jews of Gaza neither owe the State or the Arabs an agorot.
"Anyone still feel like making aliya?"
Exactly. Ever since Gaza and Amona, I've taken that word out of my vocabulary.
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