Palestinians Ponder Gaza’s Future

Ali Jhamari remembers when it was possible to see and smell the Mediterranean Sea from the shantytown in the southern Gaza Strip where he has spent most of his adult life. When it was possible, even, to walk across a mile of brine-scented dunes to the seashore.

He often tells this to his youngest grandchildren, who tumble and play at his feet, but he isn’t sure they believe him. Looking in what he assures them is the direction of the sea, they see only the high concrete walls and jagged watchtowers of Jewish settlements that hug the shoreline, extending for miles to the north and south.

“They’ve never seen it for themselves, the sea,” said Jhamari, who at 77 has ramrod posture and piercing eyes that seem at odds with his rueful smile. “So why should they believe an old man’s stories?”

For Palestinians old enough to remember the time before Jewish settlement-building began in earnest in the 1970s, the past and the future are converging. Soon, the land on which the settlements lie will revert to Palestinian hands, and Gaza will be transformed.

But into what, no one knows. Gaza could become a proving ground for Palestinian statehood -- or a showcase for failed aspirations.

“Gaza could become a much, much better place than it is today, a place where people can live with some measure of dignity,” said Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist and human rights activist. “Or, as hard as it is to imagine, it could become even worse.”

Gone will be the 8,500 Jewish settlers and constant reminders of the troops who guarded them: the gun barrel of a tank poking over a hill, the watchtower draped in camouflage netting. The checkpoints that constricted and defined Palestinians’ routines will be lifted. Roadways where only settlers and soldiers were allowed to drive will fill with Gaza’s chaotic traffic: rattletrap trucks, crowded communal taxis and donkey carts.

But for all the eagerness to see the settlers depart, and for all the displays of bravado and triumph by militant groups and ordinary Palestinians alike, there is considerable trepidation.

“It’s hard to imagine what it will be like,” Jhamari said. “Because it won’t be anything like the way it was.”

Much has changed in the 38 years since Israel seized Gaza from Egypt in the 1967 Middle East War. The narrow strip’s Palestinian population has nearly tripled. Amid grinding deprivation, Islamist teachings have taken hold in refugee camps and slums. Militant groups such as Hamas have become not only a well-armed militia but also a powerful social force.

Clan ties, so long the backbone of traditional social values, have metastasized, particularly in the last five years, into a culture of gangsterism and corruption.

“We have our warlords, our mafia, all of them linked to figures in authority, all of them outside the law,” Sarraj said. “So there are people who stand to lose a lot if things change. Which is very dangerous.”

The Palestinian Authority, the governing body set up in 1994 under the defunct interim Oslo peace accords, has only a tenuous grip on power in Gaza. President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement is not only locked in rivalry with Hamas and other groups, but also riven by internal fighting that periodically erupts into street battles and gunplay.

In a measure meant to assert at least symbolic authority, Abbas has chosen to stay in Gaza during the Israeli withdrawal, away from his usual base of Ramallah in the West Bank. He also announced this week that long-awaited Palestinian parliamentary elections, which Hamas has said it will participate in, will be held Jan. 21.

Abbas and other senior Palestinian officials repeat almost daily their hope that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is a prelude to a similar pullback from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But any such Israeli territorial concessions could be years away, if they come at all.

All of this has thrust Gaza, burdened by an array of woes, into the role of a forerunner of a Palestine that is yet to be.

“It’s a test for us, there’s no question of that,” said Jibril Rajoub, a senior security advisor to Abbas. “It’s up to us to show the world that we deserve a state, and that this state will be a stabilizing force in the region.”

Many Palestinians fear that it is an experiment doomed to fail. Gaza seems an inauspicious prototype for a potential Palestine: poorer, angrier, more radical and less sophisticated than the West Bank.

“It’s a tiny, backward place, disconnected for so long from the rest of the world,” said Hamdi Shaqqura, a Palestinian social scientist. “People have such great expectations, and I am afraid those might turn out to be an illusion. And where will that lead?”

But the new era in Gaza is also expected to lead to an international outpouring of goodwill, and perhaps some much-needed cash. And though the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may have little love for the territory and its inhabitants, Israel is well aware that an impoverished and lawless statelet on its doorstep will benefit neither side.

“We hope to live with our Palestinian neighbors in peace,” said Vice Premier Shimon Peres. “They should turn their attention now to developing a modern economy and infrastructure, and we and the international community should be of support where we are asked.... The Palestinian people deserve hope, and a better future.”

Palestinians agree that economic development is the key to a peaceful transition. But even with the withdrawal underway, they have not received assurances they have sought on the free movement of people and goods between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or on prospects for reopening its war-battered international airport.

“You simply can’t talk of Gaza being a viable entity without these things,” said Diana Buttu, a Canadian of Palestinian descent who is an advisor to the Palestinian Authority.

Still, polls of Palestinians suggest a degree of optimism not seen in years about prospects for improvement in their economy and thus their living conditions, said Nabil Kukali of the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion. In one rather poignant indicator of sentiment, the tiny and cash-poor Palestinian Stock Exchange, moribund during nearly five years of bitter fighting, has been on the rise since the withdrawal began.

“Disengagement is not separation,” the Palestinian prisoner affairs minister, Sufian abu Zaida, wrote in an open letter to Israelis, using the term both sides have adopted for the Gaza withdrawal. “We have common interests, and it would be best if we both take steps to promote them.”

If Palestinians tend to stress the crucial need for a workable economy in Gaza, Israel places much more emphasis on whether Abbas can rein in militant groups. If not, Israel, with heavy troop concentrations just outside the strip, can stage military strikes just as easily as it did during the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that began in 2000.

It could be two more months before Israeli troops are gone from Gaza. They will spend six or eight weeks dismantling their bases once the settlements are empty, Israeli Maj. Gen. Dan Harel, the commander of the withdrawal, said Tuesday. Israeli officials have previously said it could be the end of the year before troops leave a security strip along Gaza’s border with Egypt.

Hamas and the other main militant groups have promised to hold their fire through year’s end, but say they have no intention of giving up arms altogether. “We will not be dismantling our military wing, and certainly will not be handing over our weapons,” said senior Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.

Conservative Israeli politicians such as Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom contend that Gaza is already showing signs of a downward spiral into “Hamas-stan,” but the militant group’s ambitions for a more traditional political role are clear, particularly on a local level.

“We have to concentrate on rebuilding,” said Mohammed Kafarna of Hamas, who is mayor of Beit Hanoun, a Palestinian town in northern Gaza that was all but flattened by fighting during the intifada. “The people expect us to show leadership, and an ability to govern.”

Abbas, well aware of the smarting sensibilities the withdrawal has caused in Israel, has gone out of his way to not gloat over the departure of settlers and soldiers. As the withdrawal was about to begin, he sought to address Israelis directly by granting an interview to the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot.

“Leave our land in peace; return as tourists and as guests and you’ll get all due respect,” he said. “Ahlan wa sahlan [welcome], but don’t come back as settlers.”