Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: Israel Completes Gaza Pullout, 08/22/05
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec05/gaza_8-22.html

Initiating Questions:

1. Where is the Gaza Strip?

2. Who lives there? Why?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What major event is occurring in Israel this month?

The Israeli government finished forcing all residents out of the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip on Monday, completing an operation that while emotionally wrenching for the Middle Eastern nation, did not spark the violence that some had feared.

2. Where is the Gaza Strip and why is it controversial? Who lived there?

First captured from Egypt during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War or Six-Day War, the Gaza Strip is located on the Mediterranean Sea, bordering Egypt and Israel and was home to some 8,500 settlers surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians.

3. Who were the Jewish settlers living in Gaza? What did many of them believe?

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Jewish settlements grew from crude military outposts to neighborhoods boasting upscale villas. Many of the Israelis who moved to the settlements were professionals who sought inexpensive housing, tax incentives and rural living outside Israeli's urban centers. Others were ultranationalists, extremely politically conservative Jews, who believed that the settlement area's lands were God-given and that it was their mission to live there.

4. Who decided to pull settlement out of Gaza? When did this occur and why was it so surprising?

Prime Minister Sharon's decision to leave Gaza came as a surprise, since he was one of the original architects of the settlement movement. But in February, Sharon pushed a plan to withdraw all 21 Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and four from the West Bank through his cabinet.

5. Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government has said the price of settlement upkeep and protection had become too great. But what other reasons do Middle East experts give for the settlement pullout?

Some Middle East experts believe that Sharon's decision, which was made without any Palestinian input, was a shrewd political move aimed to secure Israel as a majority Jewish state. Because the birthrate of Palestinians continued to outpace Israelis, eventually there would be more Muslims than Jews, which could pose a dramatic challenge to the democratic state.

"Within a decade and maybe even within six years, the Jews could be the minority. And Sharon has awoken to this. He thought the mass of immigration of the 1990s would reverse this demographic trend, it did not," David Makovsky told the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

6. What did initial polls indicate about Israeli opinions regarding the planned settlement closure?

Although initial polls indicated that 55 percent of Israelis support the planned closure of the settlements, Sharon and his government are facing criticism, even from within his own conservative Likud political party.

A week before the start of the Gaza pullout, Israel's finance minister and one of Sharon's main political rivals, Benjamin Netanyahu, resigned saying the pullout would endanger the nation's security by allowing Gaza to become a "base of Islamic terror."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. If you were Prime Minister Ariel Sharon what would you have done about the Gaza settlements? Explain your answer with clear examples and reasoning?

2. What should happen with the settlers who were forced to leave their homes in the Gaza Strip? What responsibility does their government have to them? Should those who left willingly be treated differently than those who resisted leaving their homes? Explain your reasoning.

3. "Gaza could become a much, much better place than it is today, a place where people can live with some measure of dignity," Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian psychiatrist and human rights activist, told the Los Angeles Times. "Or, as hard as it is to imagine, it could become even worse."

What is supposed to happen in the Gaza Strip now that Israel has evacuated all its settlements there? Who has a direct stake in the outcomes there? How might different outcomes occur? What role, if any, should the United States play in the area?

Write a 300-500 word essay on either of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.