After Gaza Pullout, Bitterness Remains

When Said abu Aklen turns on the water tap at his home in one of the Gaza Strip’s most squalid refugee camps, only a thin brackish trickle emerges.

Abu Aklen, a 46-year-old Palestinian father of nine, doesn’t expect that particular daily deprivation to ease anytime soon -- certainly not when Israel hands over Gaza to the Palestinian Authority this week, ending a 38-year military occupation.

“Will we be happy to see their soldiers leave? Of course,” he said reflectively, holding up a glass of cloudy, discolored water. “Will it change the bitterness we drink every day? No.”

For the more than 1.3 million Palestinians crammed into Gaza’s tumbledown cities and sewage-fouled refugee camps, the end of the Israeli presence is at once a cause for celebration and a reminder of the bleak realities in this impoverished and overpopulated sliver of territory.

Some see the pullout as a fruit of the Palestinian uprising that erupted nearly five years ago. That is the view emphatically put forth by Hamas, a driving force behind the armed conflict with Israel and now a growing political power. In the Shati camp, the militant group’s green banners flutter from walls and lampposts, bearing slogans such as “Who liberates Gaza establishes a state -- Hamas.”

But many Gazans have a far more nuanced perspective, wondering whether the Israeli departure represents real liberation or will merely aggravate woes such as lawlessness, factional fighting, corruption and rampant unemployment.

“What’s happening here, the departure of the Israelis, is historic, of course,” said Gaza-based economist Salah Abdel Shafi. “But with all that, the potential for disappointment and disillusionment is very great as well.”

The Palestinian Authority has ambitious plans for developing the land that Israeli settlers vacated last month, which represents nearly one-fifth of Gaza’s 140 square miles.

The red-roofed homes where some 8,500 Jewish settlers lived have been demolished, and Palestinian blueprints call for construction of a seaport, an industrial zone, a sprawling housing complex, a swath of parkland and, unlikely as it might sound, facilities for tourism.

Large-scale development in Palestinian areas has often carried the taint of mismanagement, misspending and cronyism. This time, if the projects go ahead, Palestinian Authority officials are aware that they will face intense scrutiny from foreign donors as well as domestic critics.

Hamas, the Palestinian Authority’s principal rival, has always sought to highlight the corruption issue, and probably will hammer away at it in coming months as the two sides duel for political dominance in Gaza.

Hamas believes that garnering even one-third of the votes in parliamentary elections in January would guarantee it Cabinet seats in the government of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, giving the group considerable leverage in long-term decision-making.

At the same time, Hamas has made it bluntly clear to Abbas -- who took over the helm of the Palestinian Authority after the death last year of longtime leader Yasser Arafat -- that it intends to retain its standing as an armed force outside his control.

“The Palestinians are in a period of transition, perhaps the most crucial in their history,” said Yohanan Tzoref, a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center, an Israeli think tank. “This is a transition not only between Israeli control and Palestinian control over the Gaza Strip, but between Yasser Arafat’s rule and that of his real successor.”

Throughout the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, militant groups fought Israeli troops and Jewish settlers in Gaza and lobbed crude rockets at Israeli towns and villages. But few suicide bombers who struck in Israel came from fenced-off Gaza; most entered through the more porous border along the West Bank.

Still, because Gaza served as a nerve center for Hamas and other militant organizations, Israel’s military often would respond to attacks with fierce operations in the seaside strip. Bullet-pocked buildings, vast expanses of land bulldozed to create shoot-on-sight zones around the settlements, and rows of demolished homes all bear testament to that.

Though Israeli troops will no longer be a daily presence in Gaza, Israel has indicated that if militants continue using the area as a base for launching attacks, it could hit back even harder than during the intifada, with troop incursions or even artillery strikes.

“We have mortars too,” the Israeli army chief of staff, Dan Halutz, told lawmakers recently.

For Abbas and his government, the most pressing concern is an outbreak of unrest when the last Israeli troops depart Monday or Tuesday.

Already, Palestinian security forces have at times been unable to hold back Gaza residents striving to get a close-up look at the settlements. Last week, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians who got too close.

Although the settlements were islands of suburban comfort in the midst of some of the region’s most grinding poverty, Palestinian officials acknowledge that emptying the communities will bring about almost no immediate material gains for the strip’s restive population.

Israeli officials said they poured billions of dollars into Gaza’s infrastructure over the years, though much of it may have been ruined when the settlements were demolished. Palestinians hope to inherit at least the remnants of the settlements’ electricity and water grids, but their condition after the demolition is unknown.

Palestinian officials are also worried that a sudden crush of demand on the shallow aquifer below what was the main settlement block of Gush Katif -- which yielded the territory’s purest water -- will lead to the same salt-water intrusion that has tainted much of Gaza’s supply.

“In so much of Gaza, you have water you cannot even use to brush your teeth. Back when more Palestinian workers had jobs in the settlements, they would be happy just to rinse their faces with water the settlers used for their crops,” said Ribhi Sheikh, the deputy head of the Palestinian water authority. “But however much we might wish it, there is not enough of a supply there to alleviate our problems.”

Other key questions remain on the eve of Israel’s departure, particularly about the movement of people and goods in and out of Gaza, said Palestinian Authority advisor Diana Buttu.

The main border crossing with Egypt has been closed for the hand-over, and Israel and the Palestinians are still arguing about who will control it. Egyptian troops began fanning out along the frontier Saturday.

And though Israel has indicated it will allow the rebuilding of Gaza’s war-battered international airport, it has not yet said whether the Palestinian Authority will be allowed to operate it.

Gazans’ stifling sense of imprisonment -- yet with a tantalizing whiff of freedom on the horizon -- is palpable at Gaza City’s tiny harbor, where a broken-down breakwater protects a ragged fishing fleet.

For most of the intifada, Gaza fishermen say Israeli patrol boats have forced them to remain within a mile or two of shore, even though they’re supposed to be allowed out six miles.

“If they let us move, to go out to sea, we can make a decent living again,” said Jamal Ali Ahmoudi, a 49-year-old squid fisherman who sat cross-legged, mending nets on the grimy beach.

However momentous Israel’s departure from Gaza might be, many Palestinians and Israelis see it as just one step in a larger process.

A Tel Aviv University survey released this month indicated that more than 70% of Israelis believe the relinquishing of the Gaza settlements is a prelude to Israel giving up more settlements in the West Bank. Most of those surveyed also said any such pullback would have to be part of a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians.

“An overwhelming majority of the Jewish public thinks ... the unilateral disengagement from Gaza is not the end of the story,” wrote the survey’s authors.

Ali Ahmoudi, the fisherman, said he believed the two sides could somehow resolve their differences, even after such a long and bitter struggle.

“All anyone wants,” he said, “is a decent life.”