Sticking Point in Stucco

The newspaper advertisement a quarter of a century ago promised affordable property and a rustic life next to the Mediterranean Sea. Jacob Farkash, a 31-year-old Israeli, bought a compact house in the new Jewish settlement of Gadid and moved in with his young family.

Over the years, Farkash planted ficus trees and a lawn in the scrubby dunes of the Gaza Strip. As his family grew to include five children, the 600-square-foot house quadrupled in size, and today it looms over a shady corner lot, with air conditioning and a porch swing.

Suleiman abu Zarga, a 20-year-old Palestinian university student, shares three rooms with 12 other family members on the edge of the labyrinthine Khan Yunis refugee camp. His ramshackle neighborhood, scarred by skirmishes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian fighters, sits perhaps a mile from Farkash’s settlement and its “luxury villas,” as Palestinians call the American-style stucco homes.

Although many of the houses are small and simple, others are spacious, two-story structures. Capped by red tile and fringed with bougainvillea, they are arrayed in neat tracts to form a necklace of 18 enclaves in the southern Gaza Strip.

The Palestinian student would give anything to have the keys to one of these residences. But the 1,600 single-family homes in the Gush Katif settlement bloc may instead fall to the wrecking ball.

If that happens, a question remains: Will the Israelis tear them down, or will the Palestinians?

The neat rows of houses, which look as if they had been plucked from a Southern California suburb, are to be emptied under Israel’s plan to remove settlers and soldiers from all 21 settlements in Gaza, including three at the northern end, and from four communities in the West Bank.

The idea is to extricate Israel from a zone of frequent clashes while allowing it to focus on keeping its hold on major settlement blocs in the West Bank. The uprooted residents are to be compensated by the government and relocated in Israel.

With the withdrawal set for mid-August, the question of whether to demolish the structures or leave them to the Palestinians is taking on a growing urgency on both sides.

The Israeli Cabinet is expected to make a decision soon, with some officials saying Israel should destroy the houses rather than let them fall into Palestinian hands. Palestinian leaders say they will probably raze the homes, which now house about 8,000 people. They want to make way for high-rises that would better address the severe housing shortage among the 1.3 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded places on Earth.

So far the deliberations have taken place separately, with little coordination between the two sides. The talks are complicated by a web of competing sensitivities surrounding the withdrawal, from what would look good in the world’s eyes to concerns about environmental damage to enmity born of long years of bloodshed.

Israeli officials and many Jewish residents of Gaza object to the prospect of Palestinian gunmen clambering onto the settlements’ tiled roofs, claiming triumph over Israeli forces.

“We can’t imagine people dancing on our rooftops with a Palestinian flag,” said Farkash, the homeowner. “These are the people who have been killing our people.”

Although Farkash moved out of the family house after a breakup with his wife five years ago, he still owns it, and gets emotional about its fate. He grimaced when asked whether the government should tear down the houses. “I cannot even imagine it,” he said while lunching recently in Neve Dekalim, which, at 2,500 residents, is the largest of the bloc’s settlements.

But a companion, Yoel Shifman, was adamant: Israel should raze the homes if it goes through with the evacuation, even amid fierce resistance by settlers. “Don’t leave them, in any case,” said Shifman, 42, who lives in the nearby Netzer Hazani settlement.

If the homes are left standing, said Abu Zarga, the Palestinian student, they should go first to Palestinians whose houses have been destroyed in Israeli military raids since the eruption of hostilities in September 2000.

“Everybody who suffered a lot should be given one of these houses,” he said.

But Palestinian planners say the structures don’t fit their development model and would accommodate too few families, which in Gaza number 7.5 people, on average.

“Only 2,000 houses occupy an area that makes up 18% of the total area of the Gaza Strip,” said Mohammed Shtayyeh, the Palestinian housing minister. “They don’t fit within our development vision, within the way that we see housing projects in Gaza. This is very horizontal development. What we are looking for is to go into vertical development, because there is a land scarcity.”

For Israel, which gets first crack at deciding the fate of the houses, the dilemma turns heavily on considerations of image.

Many leaders want to avoid scenes of Israeli bulldozers leveling Jewish communities, as occurred in 1982 when Israel handed the Sinai Peninsula back to Egypt as part of a peace agreement.

“Do we want the world’s TV screens to be filled for weeks with the rubble’s dust? Do we want to watch trucks evacuating the remains of houses, juxtaposed with Palestinian families with many children living in shacks?” opposition leader Tommy Lapid asked this week in an opinion piece in the newspaper Maariv.

He and other leading politicians, most notably Vice Premier Shimon Peres, would rather transfer the structures intact, perhaps through a third party such as the World Bank.

Those advocating such an approach say the Israeli homes could help address the Palestinians’ housing shortage or be converted to other uses, such as for tourists.

Some settlers say they will take sledgehammers to their homes to keep Israel from turning them over. But most refuse to discuss the issue, saying they remain focused on preventing the withdrawal.

“I don’t take my thoughts there -- not yet,” said Debbie Rosen, a spokeswoman for the Gaza settlers.

The pullout plan itself calls for the homes to be razed, and some leading Israelis, such as Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, continue to push for demolition to keep them out of militants’ hands.

“There is already a long line of terrorists gazing eagerly at these houses, hoping to get them as a prize for murdering Jews,” Netanyahu told the newspaper Yediot Aharonot last month.

But other Israeli leaders are having second thoughts as the evacuation draws closer.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has sent conflicting signals, and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz has advocated leaving the structures intact, in part to avoid international criticism.

Giora Eiland, who heads Israel’s National Security Council and is overseeing the planning for the withdrawal, said he favored leaving the homes as they are. He predicted the government would go along with that.

“It is above all a domestic Israeli decision,” Eiland said.

Some Israeli officials worry that razing the homes could take months, delaying the departure and increasing exposure to attacks by gunmen. Environmental officials say a wide-scale demolition could put harmful substances, such as asbestos, into the ground. And the cost of cleaning up thousands of tons of rubble is estimated at $25 million.

Peres said intact settlements could be turned into resorts for Arab visitors, boosting Gaza’s beleaguered economy. “We have to help create jobs in Gaza,” he said recently in his Tel Aviv office.

Uri Dromi, a former government spokesman who is publications director for the Israel Democracy Institute, offered a different rationale for turning over the houses: goodwill. A hand-over ceremony under the sponsorship of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, for example, could help Israel and the Palestinians break a pattern of mutual suspicion, Dromi said.

“God knows we’ve tried every other way with the Palestinians for decades,” he said. “Let’s try generosity.”

But many Palestinians worry that the houses would end up in the hands of corrupt Palestinian leaders or their cronies.

“I hope ... the priority is to give them to the families of the martyrs who have no houses and also to our people in the diaspora who must come back and live in dignity, and not to be given to officials or officers,” said Mohammad abu Obeida, 38, a fugitive member of the militant group Fatah Hawks in Khan Yunis.

Palestinian officials worry about a chaotic scramble for the homes by members of armed groups, such as Hamas, and other Palestinians. Some leaders say they also want to make sure uprooted settlers don’t return years from now to reclaim the homes.

Palestinian officials say the residences will do little to ease the formidable housing shortage, which stands at about 281,000 units in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Nor are they suited to the Palestinian style of community living, they say.

“The settlements are abnormal -- they’re not communities that developed naturally,” lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi said. “They are not part of the community dynamic.”

Palestinian planners want first to determine the best use of the land, about 20 square miles covered by the settlements and hundreds of small farm plots. Southern Gaza, home to all but three of the settlements in the strip, is especially fertile and sits atop an ample supply of fresh water, planners say.

But Palestinian officials complain that Israel has yet to give them an inventory of what is there, from homes and greenhouses to sewer and water lines. The Israelis counter that Palestinian officials have shown little interest in the fate of the houses.

In a sign of how much the two sides mistrust each other, some Palestinian leaders worry that Israel may preserve the homes to spite them, leaving it to the Palestinians to wield the wrecking ball before television cameras and haul away the waste.

“They want us to appear that we are the ugly one,” Shtayyeh said. “If they want to help us, destroy [the houses] and take the wreckage and leave the land as it used to be.”

Times staff writer Laura King in Ramallah and special correspondent Fayed abu Shammalah in Khan Yunis contributed to this report.