Palestinians, Israel Troops Share Sense of Liberation

Israeli soldiers traded pistols and rifles for brushes and brooms on Thursday, scrubbing down jail cells emptied of their last Palestinian prisoners just hours before, as the sprawling command center that anchored 27 years of Israel’s military occupation here became a powerful symbol of the liberation now at hand.

But in a land that has become free on paper alone, the scene at the downtown fortress here also underscored one of the most powerful driving forces behind the historic agreement for Palestinian self-rule: It is a liberation as much for the occupiers as the occupied.

And on Thursday, Israeli commanders were as anxious to hand over their headquarters to the Palestinians they jailed and ruled for decades as the Palestinians in the streets were to see them go.

Palestinian youths, just beyond the base’s barbed wire, erupted in cheers and jeers when soldiers started dismantling the last of the towering roof antennas that Israeli commanders used to control this desperate, violent strip of land.

But none of them saw the young Israeli soldier inside take off a flak vest inscribed “No one gets out of here alive” as he helped load a flat-bed truck with dozens of desk-top fans.

At one point, the two sides met. A large group of Palestinian children formed near a rip in the wall. They touched hands with several soldiers in full combat gear, and this dialogue began:

“So when are you all leaving, anyway?” one of the young Palestinians shouted in Hebrew.

“You have to ask the PLO,” the soldier replied. The Palestine Liberation Organization negotiated the autonomy accord that was signed Wednesday but then requested several more weeks for the transition from an army of occupation to the Palestinian police force now mandated to run Gaza’s future.

“You should get out of there now!” the young Palestinian persisted. “That base is ours now.”

“No,” the soldier replied with a pained yet patient smile. “For now, it still belongs to us.”

But in a quieter corner of the 60-year-old colonial complex that served as the Gaza Strip military command headquarters for the Israelis--as it did for the Egyptians and British before them--a young veteran of Israel’s occupation force paused for a moment to reflect. He then echoed the views of so many of his colleagues who have served on this front line in an impoverished, angry land that most Israelis now wish to forget.

“Believe me, my wife, my family, especially me--we are the happiest of all the whole world about leaving this place,” the young Israeli soldier said. “Really, we don’t need them. And they don’t need us.”

In a rare, official briefing an hour later at the future border between Gaza and Israel--where work began this week on a 38-mile electronic fence--a senior Israeli military commander insisted that the army is in the business of missions, not emotions. But as he sat in the shade of an army tent at the Erez border crossing, even Col. Shuki Shichrur conceded that Israel’s military mission in Gaza is one that any soldier would prefer to leave behind.

“Here and there, you will find soldiers who are happy or anxious to go out of here--each for their own reasons,” he said. “When you’re acting as a military force within a civilian population, you sometimes find yourself doing what is really a police mission. And I believe every soldier would rather not do missions like that.”

But just when this mission--which has claimed scores of Israeli soldiers’ lives in ambushes by armed Palestinian extremists through the years--will come to an end was among the many questions Shichrur could not answer Thursday.

It depends, he said, upon the Palestinian leadership, which requested three to four more weeks to implement the agreement.

If it were up to Israel alone, Shichrur and other senior Israeli commanders said, the Israeli army would--and could--be out within a week.

For weeks, the Israeli military has been packing all but the most essential equipment from its dozen or so major bases throughout Gaza. They have moved the equipment into Israel or onto new bases inside the Jewish settlements that will remain under Israeli military protection even after autonomy begins.

“We are prepared to give any facility (to the Palestinians) right now--at that very moment they ask for it,” he said. “It all depends now on the other side, and their ability to take it over.”

The colonel insisted that Israeli troops are leaving military bases in the best condition possible. They’re even leaving behind a $1-million computer at one such facility, he said.

But there were few signs of such largess on Thursday at the command headquarters here, where soldiers were packing and moving out everything that could be moved--everything, in fact, except the plumbing, the walls and the kitchen sinks. Even the Israeli military spokesman at the scene, when asked for examples of what the troops were leaving behind, replied, “We’re leaving the showers, the sinks, things like that.”

The decrepit, steel-barred cells, the interrogation rooms and the stark visitors’ hall will remain behind in a prison facility so feared and hated by the Palestinians who will inherit it that they nicknamed it “The Slaughterhouse.”

Zevi Kahanov, an Israeli army reserve sergeant overseeing the base evacuation, said he witnessed and sympathized with the outpouring of emotion that greeted the last 180 Palestinian prisoners released from the facility within hours of the signing ceremony the day before.

“For them, it is momentous,” he said in the first-ever press tour of the command center’s prison.

“Is it as momentous for you and the other soldiers?” he was asked.

“Yeah, it really is,” he replied. “It’s a moment of hope and of peace for us, as well. Whether it will be that, only time will tell.”