Rights vs. Security in West Bank

Ignore the Mediterranean view and sea breeze swirling into Raja Hirzallah’s apartment. He’d rather go home to the cramped Bethlehem refugee camp where he was raised.

“I’m ready to leave,” the 31-year-old said.

But Hirzallah, who Israel says is active in the militant group Hamas, can’t go.

In December, Hirzallah joined the list of Palestinians whom Israel has deported to the Gaza Strip after declaring them security threats in their hometowns in the occupied West Bank. Since it began deporting suspects a year and a half ago, Israel has transferred about 25 Palestinians, most for two-year exiles. (Two years ago, Israel separately sent 26 Palestinian gunmen to the Gaza Strip as part of a deal to end their five-week standoff with Israeli troops at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.)

Like Hirzallah, nearly all the recent deportees were released here from Israeli military lockups where they had been held under administrative detention, in which suspects are incarcerated without trial.

Rights activists say the transfers -- typically made without charges publicly spelled out -- violate due process and international rules barring forced relocations of people living in occupied territories.

“We are against this practice,” said Dan Yakir, chief legal counsel for the Assn. for Civil Rights in Israel. “It is a grave infringement on basic human rights.”

But Israeli officials defend the transfers, formally known as “assigned residence,” as a way to combat terrorism by uprooting Palestinians with past involvement in militant groups or family ties to suicide bombers. They say deportations offer a less burdensome alternative to incarceration in cases lacking sufficient evidence to go to trial.

“It’s sort of a compromise. They’re free, on the one hand, but they won’t go back to their [militant] cells,” said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an Israeli military spokesman. “Their proclivity to regroup in this different environment is a lot less.”

Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld the removals, saying Israeli military overseers in the West Bank can send Palestinians to the Gaza Strip to ensure public security.

“We are doing all we can to balance properly between human rights and the security of the area,” the judges wrote. “In this balance, human rights cannot receive complete protection, as if there were no terror, and state security cannot receive complete protection, as if there were no civil rights.”

Skeptics question Israel’s logic in deporting suspected extremists to the Gaza Strip, which is home to armed Palestinian groups that regularly strike at the Jewish settlements there.

“I don’t think it’s going to take much time for someone from the West Bank to establish contacts. This can be done rather easily and quickly,” said Anat Kurz, senior research associate at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

She said the real value to Israel might be that relocated militants had less opportunity to carry out attacks in Israel from the Gaza Strip because, unlike the West Bank, it was entirely enclosed, by a fence and the sea. A double suicide bombing that killed 10 workers March 14 in Ashdod marked the first time that Palestinians from the Gaza Strip had struck inside Israel during the 42-month intifada.

As the deportees trickle into Gaza City, they are treated as special guests, if not quite VIPs. They hold news conferences and are looked after by the Palestinian Authority, which provides rent-free apartments and pays monthly stipends of about $200.

But the deportees say they live a life of uncertainty.

Sitting in his sparsely furnished Gaza City apartment, Hirzallah expressed worry about how long he would remain away from Bethlehem.

“That’s our home,” he said, explaining why he fought deportation. “If we accept being deported to Gaza, we [would] never know what would happen to us and our families. I’d never know if I was staying for two years or more, because there was no reason given for our deportation.”

His wife and two children recently joined him in Gaza City. The family has a two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise a few blocks from the beach.

Hirzallah was arrested at his home in the Aida refugee camp in December 2002. He said he was ordered held for six months, but not informed of the charges. Israeli security sources say he is a senior Hamas member in Bethlehem, but do not elaborate.

Hirzallah said he once was active in Hamas and imprisoned in 1993 for five years after being convicted of shooting at a Jewish settlement near Bethlehem. But he said he had not been involved since the current Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000.

Hirzallah learned last October that he was being transferred to the Gaza Strip after his sentence was extended. He and 17 other deportees appealed but lost in court.

Hirzallah acknowledged that his new existence was better than confinement in an Israeli jail. (Israeli officials said a few deportees requested relocation over detention.) And, Hirzallah noted somewhat sheepishly, being sent to Gaza offered some advantages over the tough living conditions in the refugee camp.

“I get this apartment for free. I don’t pay for it. I don’t pay my electric bill, or water, and I get a salary at the end of the month. I have the sea here,” he said. “My apartment in Aida camp was half the size.”

Another deportee, Samir Bader, a 28-year-old schoolteacher from a village near Ramallah, works for the Palestinian Education Ministry in Gaza City as an administrative aide. Israeli officials say he is a Hamas member tied to unspecified terrorist activities; Bader denies involvement.

Bader, who was jailed in October 2002, complained that the crowded and turbulent Gaza Strip was a far cry from the hilly West Bank countryside, where he knew his neighbors.

“It’s a completely different society,” he said.

The West Bank deportees have stuck together. They attend televised prayers at the same mosque in hopes relatives back home will catch a glimpse.

Israeli officials say the transfers are temporary and reviewed periodically by a judge. A woman sent to Gaza City 18 months ago returned home to Nablus in the West Bank in mid-March after authorities cut short her term. She and a brother had been deported after Israel accused them of helping a second brother prepare bombs used in attacks in Israel.

Israel has employed deportations before -- not always with favorable results. About 400 Palestinian militants were sent to southern Lebanon in 1992, only to be returned a year later with deadly new tactics learned from Hezbollah fighters based there.

“They came back with a new knowledge about how to prepare bombs, how to make things to improve the attacks,” said Yohanan Tzoref, a counter-terrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. “It was a good school, not a good punishment.”