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The Israelis take their leave of Gaza

From Graham Usher in Gaza

September 15th, 2005 -- In the early hours of 12 September 2005 the Israeli army completed its largest logistical operation since it invaded Lebanon in 1982 — the evacuation of settlers and soldiers from the interior of the occupied Gaza Strip. In their wake, the people it had suborned for 38 years reclaimed their land in a rising, gathering and inexorable tide.

Some came out of freedom — like the thousands who streamed through the blasted shell of the Gush Qatif settlement bloc, past the shrivelled shelters of the Muwasi enclave and finally to the sea: for many, the first time they had reached the shore in five years. Six Palestinians drowned in the baptism, for want of lifeguards and the impenetrability of the mass to ambulances.

Some came out of vengeance — torching synagogues, crushing Torahs beneath their boots and planting Palestinian flags on the ruins of red-tiled villas.
Some came out of victory, like the Islamic Jihad men, faces wrapped in black masks, rocket-propelled-grenades in their hands.

Thousands came to scavenge: sifting sand for copper-coated bullets (“two dollars for one kilo”), ripping mangoes from trees and loading corrugated iron, plastic piping, concrete posts, even palm trees on to carts drawn by exhausted donkeys. “This is war booty. We won’t leave a thing standing,” said one, with a broad wink.

But most came to look, including the 5,000 or so Palestinian police. “One cannot prevent the people from expressing their joy,” shrugged one officer asked about the fate of the smoke-wreathed synagogue in what had been Netzarim settlement.

And some paused in awe before the realization that Gaza was actually free of Israeli soldiers, settlers and settlements — like 16-year-old Haytham Abu Tukiya, standing atop Netzarim’s broken watchtower. “This was the absolute bane of our life and now … now it’s a castle in the sand.”

But the dominant mood, everywhere, was ambivalence. “Joy because the bulldozers that had destroyed our homes and our fields to secure the settlements ended up by destroying their homes and their fields,” said Musa al-Ghul, mukhtar of the village of Sayifa, whose land for the last five years has been cut in a pincer between the Alei Sinai and Dugit settlements in northern Gaza. “And sorrow over the enormous sacrifice, the sheer number of martyrs, it took to reach this point.”

Ghul has lost three of his family to the army, including, in October 2004, his brother, Adnan, second-in-command of Hamas’ Izz al-Din al-Qassam militia.

The Rafah crossing

Ambivalence was the temper of the Palestinian Authority. On 11 September there were two official ceremonies marking the end of the Israeli presence in Gaza. The PA refused to show because “the Palestinian leadership has understood that Israel does not intend to fulfil its commitment to a full withdrawal”, said Civil Affairs Minister Muhammad Dahlan.

One reason was the location of one of the ceremonies — the Erez checkpoint which guards the northern crossing into Israel. The PA are insistent that this falls on occupied land and must be withdrawn several hundred metres to the border as drawn by the 1949 armistice line. But the greater cause was the status of Gaza’s southern crossing into Egypt at Rafah, the Palestinians’ sole outlet to the outside world.

On 7 September — after months of fruitless negotiations and on the day 750 Egyptian soldiers took up new positions on the Gaza-Egyptian border — Israel took action as it is wont to do, unilaterally. It closed the Rafah crossing for six months, insisting that from 25 September onwards all passage of Palestinian people and goods must go through Kerem Shalom, a corner of territory where the Israeli, Egyptian and Gaza borders meet.

Until then, goods and people between Egypt and Gaza will go via Erez, a circuitous detour that will involve entry into Israel and negotiation of several Israeli checkpoints. After six months’ probation, the Israelis have agreed “in principle” to third party monitors at Rafah for the passage of people, a concession some see as an important precedent for future borders in the West Bank. But this of course will depend on whether Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians can agree on security and customs arrangements.

The PA was livid, not least Dahlan. He told a press conference in Gaza on 11 September that the PA and Egypt had agreed to third party monitors at Rafah (with Britain touted as the most likely candidate) to assuage Israel’s security fears. It accepted that merchandise could be transported via Kerem Shalom “for a year”. It had even agreed to the temporary crossing arrangements there. But it was quite “unacceptable that a Palestinian will have to travel 120km to request an Israeli permit to enter Gaza through the Erez terminal”, said Dahlan.

Dahlan’s anger is laced with fear. He is fully aware that the Kerem Shalom solution will not only maintain the Palestinians’ absolute dependency on Israel for trade and mobility; it will make both more onerous, since any diversion into Israel will turn what is already a slow passage into a glacial one. There is also the anxiety that, six months down the line, these “provisional” security arrangements will become permanent borders, akin to the “temporary” construction of the Wall in the West Bank.

It is clear what such a future would mean for Dahlan and PA President Mahmud Abbas’ efforts to claim the Gaza withdrawal as a victory for their advocacy of negotiations rather than resistance, says Palestinian analyst Khalil Shiqaqi:

bu Mazen has to be able to say to the Palestinians that “we have the Rafah crossing. From now on Israel no longer controls our access to the world.” If he cannot say that, it means Israel still has the key to the Gaza prison. And that is the message Hamas will take to the parliamentary elections [now scheduled to take place in January]. It would say that Abu Mazen’s diplomacy has achieved nothing, even when the Hamas resistance gave him the victory of a Gaza free of settlements. So Abu Mazen must gain Palestinian control of the Rafah crossing. It is now the uppermost objective for him.

The killing of Musa Arafat

It is not the only one. On 7 September, “perhaps 100” gunmen stormed the home of the PA’s former head of Military Intelligence, Musa Arafat, nephew of Yaser Arafat. After a 30-minute gun battle (during which the quarry frantically phoned Abbas and PA Interior Minister Nasser Yusuf — neither, apparently, was at home), he was dragged from his bed and then executed gangland-style in the street, with 23 bullets to the head.

The hit was claimed by the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), a “post-factional” militia based in Gaza made up of former Fatah activists, security personnel and, say sources, Hamas militants disgruntled over the latter’s turn to “calm” and parliamentary politics.

“This is a message to the PA,” said Abu Abir, a PRC spokesman. “We are saying anyone who is corrupt must be punished by God’s law and that what was stolen from the people must be returned to them. Musa Arafat was the head of the drugs, alcohol and cigarette cartels in all of Palestine. We have the proof.”

That “proof” had been extracted from Musa’s son, Minhal, who, after several days of interrogation, was released on 9 September, shaken but relatively unscathed, after mediation by the Egyptians and PRC leaders like former security chief Jamal Abu Samhadana.

Few Palestinians mourned the passing of Musa Arafat. Nor was there a shortage of potential assassins. In the mid-1990s he was in the van of the PA’s mass arrest campaign against Hamas, gaining notoriety by forcibly shaving the beard off Hamas leader Mahmud Zahar.

But Hamas has disclaimed all responsibility for the killing and most Palestinians believe them. First, because there is no meaningful motive, especially after Abbas demoted Arafat from security chieftain to “minister” in April this year. And second, because Hamas has rarely become embroiled in the tit-for-tat assassination attempts in Gaza that is rather the signature of Fatah and its allied security forces.

More recently, Musa Arafat had been in a lethal power struggle with the PA’s Preventive Security Force and its still commanding patron, Dahlan, who, say sources, has tried to kill Arafat on at least two occasions. But few would see the timing of such militia justice as anything other than disastrous for Dahlan and Abbas’ make-over efforts to present the new PA leadership as committed to reform, institution-building and the rule of law.

Rather, say sources, the assassination is exactly as it appears: a settling of accounts by disaffected Fatah cadres who are also divided among themselves — as witnessed, in this case, by the “southern wing” of the PRC under Abu Samhadana’s command denying all involvement in the slaying, and the northern, Gaza city, branch insisting that, yes, it did kill Musa Arafat and was proud to have done so. It is also the worst possible news for Abbas, as he stands on the cusp of assuming governance in Gaza. Shiqaqi, again, explains why:

Unless there is reform in Fatah, Abu Mazen will not be able to defeat the electoral challenge posed by Hamas. He will not be able to reform the security forces and so impose law and order on the street. And he will not be able to root out the corruption which, for most Palestinians, is the main blight afflicting the PA. Without these changes, Fatah will not be united behind Abu Mazen’s leadership and, without a united and democratic Fatah, he cannot pursue his core policies of government reform, a factional cease-fire and negotiations with Israel.

Hope

“Abu Mazen is a general without an army,” says Musa al-Ghul beneath a huge tree outside his home in the village. “The army is still loyal to Yaser Arafat, or to those appointed by him.”

So, does Ghul have hope for a future, post-withdrawal Gaza? “Yes,” he answers, firmly. “Israel tried to destroy our hope by destroying our land and livelihoods. But now it is leaving Gaza and the land, the hope is restored. The very least we must do is replant our lands and rekindle our hopes.”

Ghul has reason to be hopeful. During the last five years, of Sayifa’s 3,900 dunums (390 hectares) of agricultural land, 3,500 was taken by the Israeli army to secure the miniscule settlements of Dugit and Alei Sinai. The village was also divided in two by a fence, with access determined by a gate, regimented times for opening and Israeli soldiers with Alsatian dogs. That oppression has now been lifted, largely through the armed resistance, thinks Ghul. But there are other harder struggles to come.

“The priority is rehabilitation — economic and social,” he says. “We must also prepare carefully for the negotiations with Israel, which will be very tough. Above all, we need internal change. The current PA is morally and politically bankrupt. Only elections can change its black reputation. Palestinians must have leaders they can trust.”

Ghul is planning to run for the parliamentary elections in January. Will it be on a Hamas list like his brother, or a Fatah list like his elected president? Neither, he says, “Independent.”


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