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Politics & Policies: Gaza - a boiling pot

By Claude Salhani
UPI International Editor
Posted on Tuesday November 15, 2005

GAZA, (UPI)—Gaza, after the Israel Defense Forces redeployed out of the Strip once it made certain the 7,000 or so Jewish settlers were moved back into Israel over the summer, was left to its own devise.

Gaza is currently stewing in the limbo stage of nation-forming. It is not quite hell, though at times it certainly feels that way. The former Egyptian-administered territory, later occupied by Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, now, for the first time, finds itself autonomous. However, as part of the Palestinian Authority, it is ruled remotely from the West Bank, but local Fatah and Hamas militants are the quasi-leaders who often try to run the place. They often end up fighting each other.

Despite the mild temperate climate, the azure Mediterranean nearby and the palm trees lining the city’s avenues, Gaza is certainly not paradise.

Although one member of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, I had met left me with a chilling goodbye. “See you in paradise,” said the young militant. It made getting into the waiting taxi a teeth-grinding experience.

Only an hour earlier, the same man asked me if I could tell him how to go about obtaining a scholarship to a U.S. university. Intrigued, I asked him why he wanted to study in the United States, a country his organization was so opposed to.

“We don’t like America’s current foreign policy, which is degrading to us,” he said. “But we have nothing against the American way of life.”

The attitude of the young Hamas man is by no means an exception in Gaza, or in the West Bank for that matter, where tens of thousands of young people have very little to look forward to.

Now the majority of Gazans are stuck in this small, overpopulated strip, sandwiched between Egypt to the south, Israel to the east and north, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, with very little to do.

For the millions of Palestinians stuck in the Gaza Strip there is only one way out of the territory, through the Erez crossing point, their main link to the outside world. From there, those few lucky enough to be allowed to transit through Israel, can then catch a flight from Tel Aviv¹s Ben Gurion International Airport to the outside world; that is assuming they have visas in their travel documents.

Until recently tens of thousands of Palestinian workers would cross into Israel every day to fill menial jobs in farming and construction.

But since a recent wave of terror bombs exploded in Israel, the Israelis decided they are taking no chances. They simply shut the border down to all except a handful of select Palestinians and internationals.

The Israelis are in the process of building a huge state-of-the-art passenger terminal to replace the crude tunnel that now serves as the crossing point, and according to two Israeli soldiers who asked not to be named, passport processing on the Israeli side will be taken over by civilians as of January 2006.

As it currently stands, the tunnel, about 1,000 yards long, connects the Palestinians in Gaza with the Israelis in Erez. On the Palestinian side of the tunnel, there is just a large crude hole with dirt ground, littered by refuse, left-over food and Coke cans left abandoned by Palestinian travelers. At the Palestinian end of the tunnel, two soldiers sit on a bench by a table covered with a blanket upon which rests a large ledger into which names and passport numbers of visiting internationals are entered.

As one approaches the Israeli side, there is a complicated system of electronically controlled metal gates that automatically open and close as a traveler nears or leaves. Eventually, the passage narrows allowing only a single passenger at a time and the luggage is placed in an X-ray machine that will scan the suitcase for explosives. The crossing from Israel to Gaza, or in the reverse, a distance of only a quarter of a mile can take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours.

The night this reporter crossed into Gaza with another American who worked for an NGO, I asked the young Israeli female soldier at the passport-control booth how long it normally took to come back. She shrugged, smiled and said, “I never came back,” she told United Press International with a shrug.

But the Palestinians are not grinning nor shrugging. In fact the Palestinians in Gaza are fuming.

Gaza feels like a giant prison with every access closely controlled and Israel maintaining a right of veto on who may or may not travel out of the territory.

The humiliating treatment reserved to Palestinians crossing into Israel, along with the refusal by Israel to allow transit rights to Palestinians it suspects might be a threat to national security, is making Gaza into nothing short of an incubator of Islamist radicalism.

Former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, now the special Middle East envoy, was reported by a local newspaper to be “frustrated” by the lack of progress in establishing a new protocol that would allow the crossing of Palestinian goods and people in and out of Gaza.

Israel has indicated it would start renewing permission for about 15,000 Palestinians from the West Bank to enter Israel and limit Gazans to about 3,000.

Meanwhile U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice traveled to the region where she met with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in an effort to influence both sides into finalizing the agreement.

The agreement is a difficult one to implement as Israel is under pressure to find the adequate middle ground. Throwing open the borders, they say, would invite Palestinian terrorism. Keeping them shut tight, as they are now, will invite the Palestinians to become even more radicalized.