Gaza Withdrawal

TERENCE SMITH:

At midnight, the gates came down and the Gaza settlements were officially off limits to Israeli citizens. In Jerusalem, large crowds gathered in front of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office to protest the planned pullout.

PROTESTER:

All my family died in the Holocaust and dreamed for this land; now we're giving it away for terrorists.

TERENCE SMITH:

This densely settled 139 square mile stretch of land at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea has been disputed for decades; 1.3 million Palestinians call it home, but 35 percent of them live in refugee camps, with unemployment rates soaring to 60 percent.

Only about 4,000 Palestinians in Gaza have jobs in Israel, in part because of the tight restrictions at the border. Until today, 8,500 Israeli settlers lived among the Palestinians, but they and the troops who protect them must now leave, in a move announced two years ago by Prime Minister Sharon.

The main cluster of 15 settlements is at Gush Katif, with other settlements to the north at Kfar Darom, Netzarim, and Nisanit. Clearing all of them out is expected to take up to three weeks. Under the terms of the withdrawal, Israel will maintain control of Gaza's borders, coastline and airspace.

It was during the Six Day War in 1967 that Israel captured the Gaza strip from Egypt. Today's pullout marks the first time since then that Jewish settlers have ceded land in Gaza to the Palestinians. Palestinians want the land for their own independent state. And after Israelis leave, they are free to move into the evacuated zones.

MAN (Translated):

Life is going to change. We will be able to live well. We will live in freedom. There will be no settlers, no army, no one to forbid us to move around as we wish.

WOMAN (Translated):

With God's will, after the disengagement we will be happy because the roads will be open and they will remove the checkpoints and we can move freely. With God's will we will have work and we will live normally like it was before.

TERENCE SMITH:

Many of the Israeli settlers being relocated are angry and have stripped their homes of anything of value.

JEWISH SETTLER (Translated):

We are dismantling everything. Here is the kitchen I dismantled. In fact, you can't leave anything to them. Those people who terrorized and didn't do anything good, they do not deserve to live here and get these houses like in a vacation deal. I would have left it for them if they were human beings, but they are not human beings. Me, I wouldn't even leave them even one.

TERENCE SMITH:

For some this isn't the first time they've been pushed out of their homes. Avi Farhan was among the last Israelis to leave the Sinai settlements in Egypt when Israel withdrew in 1977 as part of the peace agreement. His family then relocated to Gaza.

AVI FARHAN (Translated):

Today, for the second time I will be an exile in my own country. Experts say that a tree can be transplanted to a temporary place, maybe for two years, and still have a chance to grow, but if you uproot it and transplant it another time, it will wither.

TERENCE SMITH:

Other settlers, about half, have refused to budge, with some even sneaking into Gaza from Israel and West Bank settlements, camping out in tents and forming human chains on the edges of settlements.

TERENCE SMITH:

We get two perspectives now of the people of Gaza — the settlers and their Palestinian neighbors. Steve Cohen is a national scholar at the Israel Policy Forum, a non-profit organization that supports the peace process. And Omar Dajani is a former senior legal advisor to the Palestinian Authority. He's now an assistant professor of law at the University of the Pacific. Welcome to you both.

Steven Cohen, generally speaking, who are the Israeli settlers in Gaza? When did they move there and what was their motivation in the first place?

STEVE COHEN:

The first group of settlers came to Gaza in the same way that other settlements were created in the period right after the 1967 war and these were paramilitary settlements. Then, about 10 years later when there was an important election in Israel and for the first time the Likud came to power they began to move into the idea of civilian settlements and then many more people moved in.

Now it is true that there were a small number of people who lived in settlements in Gaza in the 40s and had to move out once the war began in 1948. But most of these people have come in these last years and there was a big influx of people who came in the last few weeks, including, for example, the fact that three religious seminaries transplanted themselves from the West Bank to come to Gaza during this time in order to strengthen their will to oppose the government decisions.

Many of the people in Gaza had in fact agreed that they would start to negotiate with the government to move and in order to pack themselves on time. But then when the social pressures began to become intense from settlers in the West Bank who came and who had a much more radical view of the situation, they convinced many of the Gaza people to draw back from the agreements with their government and to go into a situation where they would not agree to leave until the very last minute or even after the last minute.

TERENCE SMITH:

Omar Dajani, let me ask you essentially the same question. Who are the Palestinians of Gaza, when did they move there and why?

OMAR DAJANI:

Until 1948 there were about 80,000 Palestinians living in Gaza, most were farmers, lived an agricultural life. With the war of 1948 and Israel's establishment 200,000 Palestinians came down from — fleeing from what's now Israel and settled in the Gaza Strip, most in crowded camps. That proportion, about three-quarter refugee, one quarter indigenous, has continued up until this day; so that what you've got now is a population of just under a million refugees in the Gaza Strip, a portion of whom live in eight extremely crowded camps, and the remaining being sort of the original Palestinian families from Gaza.

For many of these people the two sort of deepest continuities of the last 50 years since 1948 have been, number one, poverty — the World Bank estimates that 65 percent of Gazans are living under the poverty line which it sets at $2 a day. And a considerable number of Gazans are unemployed. The other sort of deep continuity has been an inability to move.

Since 1948, during the years of Egypt's administration of the Gaza Strip and particularly since Israel took over in 1967 when it established its military occupation there, Gazans have not only been barred from moving to other parts of the country, to the West Bank and to what's now Israel, but also have been barred from leaving Gaza and moving around inside Gaza. And I think that those two things together combined with the experience of having been refugees, are what define Gazan identity to a greater extent than anything else.

TERENCE SMITH:

Steve Cohen, the land that the Israeli settlers developed in Gaza, did they buy it? Was it expropriated, how did that happen?

STEVE COHEN:

Most of the land was land that was taken as defense land and then developed by the settlers as a result of being expropriated by the military. I think that a number of the Israelis who came were part of a movement that was created as a result of the situation in the 60s in Israel where there was a big decline in the Israeli economy and a large number of new immigrants that had come to Israel. And so there was a big downturn, recession in Israel at the end of the 60s. And the new land that was available in the West Bank and Gaza became very attractive to people who had very little: Not good housing, not good jobs and certainly no opportunity for farming or anything of that kind. So that's one kind of thing that happened.

It's also important to note that religious settlers who are important to what was developed in the West Bank are also important to what was developed in Gaza because they believed that this was land that should remain as part of the Holy Land and should become part of the land of Israel, the greater land of Israel. And so that was also an important source of settlers. And they, too, were able to take advantage of the fact that certain areas in Gaza were cut off from the Palestinians and became part of areas that were seized by the military and handed over to the Israeli settlers.

TERENCE SMITH:

I suppose, Omar Dajani, that the Palestinians see it differently, the land, the encroachments, especially as Steve Cohen has suggested as it expanded with greater security perimeters around the settlements.

OMAR DAJANI:

Absolutely. Although, only 5 to 10 percent of the land on which the settlements were built was originally owned by private Palestinian owners, much of the rest of the land was previously farmed sometimes in sort of a cooperative fashion. And the key thing is that for Palestinians I think that they've experienced the settlers' presence in a few specific ways.

Number one as you alluded to, over the course of time as Israeli concerns about security have grown and as settlers' plans for expansion have also grown, what you've seen is that a lot of Palestinian homes have been confiscated, occupied by Israeli troops; in some circumstances entire farm areas were razed if, for instance, there was attack on a settlement in the north in Tagit, for instance, Palestinian greenhouses and fields were razed by bulldozers. That kind of experience I think prejudiced Palestinians even further against the Israeli settlers.

In addition to that, I think the presence of the settlers and location of the settlements, which were placed in between Palestinian population centers meant that for Palestinians to travel from Raffa in the south up to Gaza City in the center of the country it was necessary for them to go through an Israeli checkpoint. And very frequently when there was Israeli settler movement between the settlements and Israel, Palestinians would stand in line for hours, sometimes, and this seems like exaggeration but it's true, sometimes even days.

TERENCE SMITH:

Let's look ahead now. Steve Cohen, do you have any sense of what percentage of these eight or nine thousand settlers are going to dig in and refuse to go willingly and what percentage may obey the government's orders and go freely?

STEVE COHEN:

Well, the expectations now are that almost 80 percent of them will leave peacefully and those that will not leave peacefully are not intending to engage in violence against the police and the military, but rather to engage in active resistance; that is they will try to hold off as long as they can, but it's unlikely that they will use violence and they have had their guns collected during these last few days. So that we're not dealing with a situation of heavily armed settlers the way it had to be dealt with in the past by the Palestinians.

The one thing that I think needs to be said and I am sure that you would also agree on this is that the Palestinians in Gaza because of their very difficult socioeconomic status and their status as refugees were very susceptible to developing extreme ideas about the future of their relationship to Israel. And for a long time they were a special place for recruitment for extremist groups among the Palestinian movements.

TERENCE SMITH:

Well, let me interrupt you there and ask Omar Dajani to tell us whether he agrees with that and also what you believe the prospects are that some of these groups will stand by and let this process go ahead and be completed more or less peacefully.

OMAR DAJANI:

I think Dr. Cohen is right. Many of the Palestinians and the refugee camps have been fertile — a perfect audience for militant Islam for a few different reasons. The first is the poverty and sort of social deprivation that they've been dealing with.

Secondly, a lot of these people were refugees from a very sort of traditional farming life within Palestine pre-1948. They come from a traditional society and many of them, stripped of their land, found themselves in an urban setting in the Gaza Strip and sought some way of rendering coherent their existence there. And I think that some of the militant organizations were very opportunistic in taking advantage at that dynamic. So, yes, I think that that is true.

As far as looking forward, I think that the Palestinian Authority has made it very clear that it regards the Palestinian – the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip — as a critical opportunity to turn the peace process around. And I think that it will do everything possible to try to maintain order, but it's not going to be an easy task.

TERENCE SMITH:

All right. We'll have to — I'm afraid that we'll have to leave there, but I want to thank you both. And obviously we're going to watch this process over the next 48 hours and in the weeks ahead. Thank you both very much.