Battle of Wills

Separated by a towering concrete wall, Dan Amiel and Khalil Bashir are neighbors who have never met -- and in all likelihood never will.

Amiel, a 20-year-old Israeli living in the heavily fortified Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom in the heart of the Gaza Strip, lost half of his right leg to a Palestinian rocket attack last year. Bashir, a Palestinian schoolteacher, has for years lived literally under the gun: Israeli soldiers commandeered the top floors of his house in the village of Deir al Balah as an observation post, and his family sleeps in a single room downstairs.

Now Israel is poised to evacuate Amiel and nearly 9,000 other settlers from Gaza after 38 years of occupation, handing over the dusty seaside strip to the more than 1.3 million Palestinians living there, in a move that poses enormous tests for both societies.

Israel’s withdrawal from all 21 Gaza settlements and four others in the northern West Bank officially starts Monday, when troops and police begin knocking on doors, telling residents they must leave their homes within 48 hours.

The planned evacuation, which marks the first time Israel has uprooted established communities from land the Palestinians claim for a future state, has opened deep fissures in Israeli society. Just as significant, however, are broad questions the hand-over poses for the struggling new Palestinian leadership and the tentative prospects for eventual peace between the two sides.

Palestinians are preparing to mark the Israeli pullout with street celebrations on a scale not seen in years.

“Everything is selling fast,” said Gaza City souvenir shopkeeper Tareq abu Dayyeh, whose merchandise includes “I Love Palestine” T-shirts and Palestinian flags emblazoned with the slogan “Free Gaza.”

But the Israeli withdrawal also spotlights the bare-knuckles competition between the governing Palestinian Authority and militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, all eager to claim credit for the pullout.

“We regard it as a total victory for Hamas,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a physician who last year became the group’s senior leader in Gaza, mainly by dint of surviving multiple assassination attempts by Israel. Hamas has been holding celebratory rallies, including one in Gaza City on Saturday that featured a rare joint public appearance by its founders and surviving leaders.

The evacuation will sorely test the strength and backing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a pragmatist who opposes armed struggle and wants to see Israel leave Gaza without an outbreak of attacks by Palestinian militants.

Rocket and mortar fire by groups such as Hamas would invite harsh Israeli reprisals and undercut Abbas’ effort to portray the withdrawal as an achievement for his 7-month-old government. Even an orderly exit will probably amplify Hamas’ claim that it chased Israel out, just as the militant group embarks on its first run for seats in Palestinian parliamentary elections, tentatively set for January.

“We are on the verge of achieving a dream of the Palestinian people, a dream we have long been waiting for, and that is to see the occupiers start leaving our land,” Abbas told lawmakers in Gaza City last week. While he spoke, masked gunmen strutted outside the parliament, a reminder of the lawlessness that besets many Palestinian cities.

The Palestinian Authority is doing what it can to signal its readiness to keep order. On a sandy lot in Gaza City, with the sparkling Mediterranean as a backdrop, hundreds of Palestinian troops last week staged field drills for the cameras, marching in parade formation and struggling through a round of calisthenics. Their commander, Col. Mohammed Rawa, appealed to the international community to better arm the Palestinian security forces, acknowledging that they are outgunned by Hamas.

For Israel, the smoothness of the withdrawal will help determine whether months of turmoil leave its democracy damaged or stronger, and whether the rift between religious and secular Israelis widens further. It also remains to be seen whether the four-week pullout inspires further Israeli pullbacks in the West Bank, or will instead allow Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government greater leeway in tightening its grip on the more than 100 Jewish settlements there.

“This is a precedent, and any precedent is either a success or failure,” said Guy Bechor, who heads the Middle East department of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Bechor said a smooth hand-over could lead to small unilateral pullbacks by Israel in the future, measured steps that he said would enhance long-term prospects for peace.

The Bush administration hopes the evacuation will breathe new life into its stalled diplomatic initiative, known as the “road map.” Palestinians hope the Gaza pullout will set in motion a chain of events that will culminate in the creation of an independent state. They already see signs that Israel will come under increased international pressure to meet its commitments under the peace plan, which envisions statehood for them, and to return to the negotiating table to begin mapping out that state’s eventual borders.

They fear, however, that Sharon might instead use a successful pullout as an excuse to freeze the peace process and solidify Israel’s grip on large chunks of the West Bank. Sharon says further progress will come after the Palestinians fulfill their commitment under the peace plan to dismantle armed groups.

Although many on the Israeli left hope the Gaza hand-over will create momentum for a wider wave of settlement evacuations in the West Bank, political realities may get in the way.

Sharon could face elections by early next year and probably would move to the right to fend off a challenge from his expected rival for leadership of the Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu, who quit as finance minister last week to protest the withdrawal.

“We’re not going to see an immediate move by Sharon or anyone else for further disengagement because we’re going into an election,” said Yossi Alpher, co-editor of www.bitterlemons.org, a website that promotes Israeli-Palestinian dialogue.

As for the Jewish settlers facing evacuation, many are expected to wait until after the 48-hour notice is given before leaving. It is unclear how many people authorities will have to remove forcibly when the deadline expires Wednesday, and how much resistance they will face from holdout settlers and thousands of extremist infiltrators from the West Bank.

About 1,100 of the 1,700 families to be evacuated have applied for government compensation.

Some settlements, particularly a trio of small and mainly secular ones in northern Gaza, are already ghost towns.

“I thought, why wait?” said Mike Berger, who had lived for 15 years in the small settlement of Dugit and said he intended to leave before troops came knocking at his door.

Israel hopes to finish with all the evacuations, including military outposts and the settlements of the northern West Bank, by the start of Jewish holidays in early October. But it probably will not withdraw its final troops from a volatile strip along the border with Egypt until the end of the year.

No Israelis will remain in Gaza after that, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said. “We will not be in any territory that is part of the recognized boundaries of Gaza,” he told reporters last week. “We will be out.”

The Israeli government is paying each settler family several hundred thousand dollars in compensation, and steering evacuees to replacement dwellings, including 351 mobile homes set up so far as temporary shelters in a seafront area 12 miles north of the Gaza Strip.

The air-conditioned units are fairly roomy, but many residents find them a poor substitute for the spacious, suburban-style houses they left behind in Gaza.

“I’m not used to living in a matchbox,” said Ronit Edri, 39, who left the Nissanit settlement after 10 years and moved into a 970-square-foot mobile home in Nitzan with her husband and four children this month. “We had to dump or give most of our property to charity since it’s so tiny here.”

Despite ferocious opposition, the planned withdrawal enjoys majority support among Israelis. A newly issued poll by researchers at Tel Aviv University found the plan backed by 60% of respondents, with 34% opposed.

But Israelis on both sides worry that the bitter debate has divided society so starkly that reconciliation may be difficult, if not impossible, in the months ahead.

Many Israelis have been dismayed by what they view as unseemly tactics by settler leaders, including organized roadblocks, rabbis’ calls on soldiers to defy orders and harsh rhetoric challenging the legitimacy of the government. Some say the ordeal has dealt a serious blow to public backing for the settler movement as a whole.

For their part, religious leaders opposed to the evacuation say the conduct of the country’s secular leadership during the debate has aggravated long-standing mutual suspicions between devoutly observant Jews and the rest of the country.

“The problem is in our relations with the secularist leadership, with the elites. I believe the wall between us has grown taller,” said Rabbi Yaakov Medan, who oversees an academy in the West Bank combining religious and military training. “I am not saying that it will be impossible to mend things later on, but it won’t be easy.”

That chasm may deepen if violence breaks out between protesters or settlers and Israeli soldiers, or if Israel’s abandonment of Gaza is later deemed to have encouraged a renewal of armed attacks and suicide bombings by Palestinian fighters.

Uzi Landau, a member of parliament with Likud, the conservative ruling party, said tensions at home over the withdrawal reflected a wider societal battle.

“It’s not about the land,” he told the settlers, who were wearing the yarmulkes and head scarves of the religiously observant. “It’s a spiritual struggle, a struggle for the soul of our nation.”

Foes of the withdrawal, claiming that the land was given to the Jews by God, say they have lost faith in Israel’s civic bodies, which they charge were manipulated by Sharon to push through his plan in the face of opposition.

“Democracy is a big lie,” said Amiel, the Kfar Darom man maimed by a Palestinian rocket attack last year.

Amiel was among 35 residents attending a town hall-style meeting in Kfar Darom last week with Landau, who plans to challenge Sharon for leadership of Likud. The session, during which residents fumed that they were being betrayed by their government, came after the Cabinet gave final approval to withdraw from Kfar Darom and two other ideologically hard-line settlements.

Other Israelis worry about provocations from the country’s right fringes. Fears grew after an AWOL Jewish soldier who had recently joined a band of West Bank ultranationalists opened fire aboard a bus in northern Israel this month, killing four Israeli Arabs. Security around top officials, such as Sharon, was tightened months ago.

“I hope the suicide bombings will stop and that things will get calmer and that everything here will be better,” said Liat Toren, a 32-year-old scriptwriter in Tel Aviv, sitting at a cafe. “But I’m also hoping that we won’t kill each other in the streets over the disengagement from Gaza.”

Bashir, the Palestinian schoolteacher, said he empathized with Jews who were being told to leave Gaza -- but only up to a point.

“This loss of theirs, the settlers, echoes what we have felt here for so long in Palestine, with the Israeli seizure of so much of our land,” he said.

Throughout the last five years of fighting, the Israeli army has created sprawling free-fire zones to defend the Gaza settlements against attacks by militants, demolishing hundreds of Palestinian homes and uprooting fruit-laden orchards and centuries-old olive groves. Bashir watched an Israeli armored bulldozer level his farmland three years ago.

“What I most want to do is replant my orange groves and rebuild my greenhouses, and live in my own home without soldiers upstairs,” Bashir said. “I am not rejoicing in the settlers’ misfortune. But I want my life back.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Israeli evacuations begin

Evacuation of 25 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will start Monday. The deadline is Wednesday, when forcible evacuations will begin. The settlements and approximate population figures:

West Bank: four settlements, 675 residents.

Largest settlement: Homesh, 230; residents have turned in army-issued weapons and are expected to leave peacefully.

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Northern Gaza: three settlements, 1,580 residents. Largest settlement: Nissanit, 1,100;

it has been one of the most accepting of the evacuation. Most of the 250 families opted for government compensation; it is now nearly deserted.

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Isolated settlements: three settlements, 1,220 residents. Largest settlement: Kfar Darom, 500; was home to Jews before Israel was a nation. Became an army post in 1967 after the Six-Day War; first civilians moved there in 1989.

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Gush Katif block: 15 settlements, 6,450 residents. Largest settlement: Neve Dekalim, 2,700; largest Gaza settlement and seat of the regional council. Residents are Orthodox Jews and largely expected to resist the evacuation.

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Sources: Associated Press, Jerusalem Post, United Nations

Ellingwood reported from Kfar Darom and King from Deir al Balah, Gaza Strip. Staff writer Shlomi Simhi in Nitzan and special correspondent Tami Zer in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.