c. 2005 Religion News Service

GAZA STRIP _ About 41/2 years ago, Israeli troops bulldozed Mosbah Shamalakh’s farmland near the Israeli settlement of Netzarim, which had been attacked by Palestinian militants.

Shamalakh, 65, and his wife, Amina, live with several of their grown sons, one of their grown daughters and eight grandchildren in a large concrete house along a dusty thoroughfare. The road is pocked with rubble and lined with walls covered by angry graffiti and stiffly posed pictures of Palestinian suicide bombers.

“It was Jan. 21, 2001,” said Shamalakh. “We were working on the farm. The IDF came without warning. They kicked us out and destroyed our land.”

According to Shamalakh, the Israel Defense Forces flattened his seven acres of cucumbers, potatoes, eggplant, figs and grapes, all of which the Shamalakhs sold in Israel.

Too many Palestinians have similar stories, the flip side of Israeli stories of Palestinian terrorism. All such stories, Israeli and Palestinian, end badly.

On the political extremes of both sides, the ensuing sense of outrage can lead to militancy, in the form of Islamist groups or followers of extremist rabbis _ especially among the young, who like the bracing clarity of absolutes.

In the wide and more temperate middle, occupied by the Shamalakhs, it leads to a profound mistrust of Israeli and Palestinian politicians and power-seekers of all stripes.

The withdrawal of Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, which officially began Monday, is greeted with fatalistic skepticism by many Palestinians as the next false promise, the next con by incompetent governments that have always used them as pawns on the Middle Eastern chessboard.

Still, even some Palestinians weary of promises are beginning to believe the withdrawal might mark the beginning of a different narrative. One day, they hope, stories like Shamalakh’s might form the foundation tales of a Palestinian state, in the same way that Israelis invoke their pre-1948 struggles against the British.

“It is extremely important that the Palestinian people understand that this is not just another political game,” James Wolfensohn, the former World Bank president who serves as special envoy to the disengagement, told reporters in early August.

Teams of experts _ from the World Bank, from Israeli and Palestinian institutions and from Wolfensohn’s group, which represents the so-called “Quartet” of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia _ are investing months of their lives in the proposition that the best way to change the narrative is this: Get people like Shamalakh farming again and make sure they have efficient ways to get their goods to market.

In other words, the key to a successful Gaza disengagement is growing the Palestinian economy. Do that, says one development expert working on the World Bank team, and the security problems in Gaza become less intractable.

Why? “Because then Hamas and Islamic Jihad have less to offer,” says the expert, who prefers to remain unnamed to respect the confidentiality of the group’s work.

The siren song of militancy is a lot less alluring to people who have jobs. A solid middle class feels far more empowered to fight radicals reluctant to give up their revolutionary swagger. It’s people without food who fill Hamas’ soup kitchens, even if it’s often the educated, disenfranchised sons of the Arab Muslim bourgeoisie who run them.

Since the start of the second intifada five years ago, the Palestinian economy, never strong, has plunged dangerously. According to a World Bank report from 2004, unemployment in Gaza hovers around 40 percent and the poverty rate tops 64 percent.

Given the importance of Gaza’s economy to the overall outcome of the disengagement, you’d think planning would be moving briskly along.

You’d be wrong. If many Israeli settlers only weeks before the start of the disengagement were frustrated and baffled by unanswered questions about where they would resettle and the terms of their resettlement, Palestinians in Gaza are equally confused about what the game plan is for them. This is especially true of people like Shamalakh, who want to know, first, whether they will get their land back and, second, how they will earn a living if they do.

“What will Palestinians eat the day after?” was how a headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz framed the question a few months ago.

If Israel leaves Gaza and locks the door on its way out _ if Gaza becomes even more of a prison than it has been under the harsh gantlet of Israeli security checkpoints, severing Gazans from jobs and trade (as well as relatives in the West Bank) _ “it will lead to a third, even deadlier intifada,” said journalist Danny Rubenstein, who writes for Haaretz.

Or, as last year’s World Bank report more delicately put it: “Unless today’s impasse is soon broken, the (Palestinian Authority) could melt away, leaving Israel with a poor, embittered neighbor with whom dialogue could be much more difficult.”

Israeli officials have offered public assurances that their aim is an economically viable Gaza Strip. “We cannot leave Gaza and seal all the entrances and exits,” Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said recently, shortly after U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Israel to encourage Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on withdrawal plans.

Some analysts, though, say Israeli security concerns make planning difficult. “It’s understandable that Israelis pull back each time there’s an incident,” says Salah Abdel Shafi, a German-trained economist from Gaza who’s a local consultant to the World Bank, “but each time there’s a terrorist attack we have to go back to square one.”

One short-term priority for planners is to make sure assets of the evacuated Israeli settlements are distributed fairly, without the patronage and corruption that have made Palestinians wary of their own government. But the overriding long-term goal is to make Gaza attractive to private investors.

What investors want to see, in addition to security (why invest in Palestinian infrastructure if it’s going to be destroyed by the Israeli military in response to a series of terrorist attacks?), is the opening of Palestinian borders to trade and a reasonable flow of Palestinian labor into Israel.

They also want a loosening of closures through Israeli-held land in the West Bank; Gaza and the West Bank are viewed as a single economic and political unit, and both need to prosper if the disengagement is to lead to future Israeli withdrawals and a Palestinian state.

Over the past few weeks some agreements have been reached. One is that the Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt will be patrolled by Egyptian troops, who will be charged with securing the border and preventing smuggling of arms and goods. Planners are fairly certain that future agreements will lead to an open border between Gaza and Egypt.

Another project approved recently is a Palestinian seaport. Work on the port began in 2000, then halted a few months later because of Israeli security concerns. Abdel Shafi points out that construction is likely to take at least three years, during which time Israel may once again intervene.

Much more remains to be figured out, including the possible reopening of Gaza’s airport and a system to inspect trucks and containers moving in and out of Gaza. A sunken roadway between Gaza and the West Bank, with lanes for trucks, cars and train tracks, is also under discussion.

There’s also the question of whether Israel will allow more Palestinians to work in Israel. The disengagement plan calls for eventually ending almost all Palestinian employment in Israel, which the World Bank team sees as a disaster for the Palestinian economy.

Abdel Shafi laughs when he’s asked whether he’s optimistic. “Of course not,” he says.

For Shamalakh, though, there’s too much at stake to be anything but wound up and worried.

“So far,” he says, “I’ve been visited by people from the Palestinian Authority. I’ve been visited by people from NGOs (nongovernmental organizations). They talk to me. They write everything down. Then they leave, and I know nothing.”

Abdel Shafi says families like the Shamalakhs, whose farmland was razed during the recent intifada, will have priority after the disengagement. But that’s small consolation for Mosbah Shamalakh, who after five years of living on uncertainty finds it thin gruel to feed his family with.

“I don’t trust any of these people,” he says. “But come back in a year or so. Who knows?”

(Deborah Jerome-Cohen is deputy editorial page editor for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

KRE/PH END JEROME

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Mosbah Shamalakh and Amina Shamalakh