JERUSALEM – It might have been expected that Israel, not wanting to have pictures broadcast of Palestinians triumphantly entering the evacuated homes of settlers in the Gaza Strip, would want to demolish those homes. It might equally have been expected that the Palestinians, wanting to be seen marching into the homes of their retreating occupiers, would want the houses to remain intact.
But the question of what to do with some 1,600 settler homes – inhabited by 7,500 settlers – that are to be evacuated in mid-August as a part of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan has become an increasingly vexing one, for both Israel and the Palestinians.
After initially signaling that the homes would be demolished to spare the settlers the sight of Palestinians entering their houses, Sharon recently indicated that the matter was still unresolved. The reason: the military has informed the Israeli leader that it opposes demolishing the homes because this would significantly increase the time it would take to complete the Gaza withdrawal and would expose soldiers to increased risk of attack from Palestinian militants.
If the homes had to be demolished, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said, "we would have to maintain military forces, security guards, and forces to destroy the houses in the middle of enemy territory, and there is no assurance that there wouldn’t be terror attacks." Mofaz added that he was "not prepared, as the defense minister of the State of Israel, to endanger Israeli soldiers in order to destroy the houses of settlers."
It would be "very difficult for me to look into the eyes of the mothers of Israeli soldiers … and explain to them that their sons were killed because we insisted on destroying these buildings," he told Israel Television.
For now Sharon is procrastinating, caught between the advice of the army and the voices emanating from a part of his ruling Likud party and the settler community calling for the homes to be demolished. Sharon’s main rival in Likud, finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has become the most outspoken opponent of the withdrawal plan in the government, has said that leaving settler homes standing would be portrayed as "a great moral victory" by the Palestinians. "We have to prevent a situation in which the Palestinian murderers will inherit the homes of their victims, dancing on the rooftops, waving Hamas and Islamic Jihad flags," he said.
The issue of settler homes is not giving just Israeli leaders a headache. While there had been suggestions that the Palestinian Authority might want the homes left intact so that they could be used to house refugees, officials have increasingly called for the structures to be pulled down. Senior minister and key Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said last month that the houses were not suited to Palestinian needs.
But Palestinian leaders quietly express fears that looting might follow an Israeli withdrawal and that there might also be attempts to seize the homes after the settlers depart, sparking infighting. If Israel demolishes the houses, the Palestinian Authority will also save itself the thorny problem of deciding who should inherit them.
Earlier this month, a senior Palestinian official said that if Israel did not demolish the homes, the Palestinian Authority would – and that they would be replaced by high-rise apartment blocks that would provide a more effective answer to the needs of the crowded Strip than the low-rise, red-roofed, single-family settler homes, with their gardens.
"If Israel does not destroy settlers’ homes, we will destroy them," said housing and public works minister Mohammed Shtayyeh. Most Palestinian cabinet members, he said, backed demolition. The reason: the Palestinians need to make more efficient use of scarce land resources in Gaza. The rubble from the demolitions, he said, could be used to construct a port in the Gaza Strip on the Mediterranean Sea.
The first time that the Israeli government evacuated settlers was in the early 1980s when Israel withdrew from the Sinai desert as part of its peace treaty with Egypt. The man in charge of the operation 23 years ago was Ariel Sharon, and he oversaw the demolition of all the homes in settlements set up in northern Sinai.
As Sharon now dithers, speculation is growing over whether he will go the same route again. At one point, he was said to be ready to leave the homes intact, as long as they went to Palestinian refugees and did not end up in the hands of militants. There was also talk of World Bank readiness to buy the homes, but these reports were quickly squashed by Israeli officials.
With the withdrawal only two months away, Sharon has to decide quickly. He will be acutely aware of the dangers posed to soldiers by prolonging their stay in Gaza in order to destroy the homes, and he will also have listened to the voices from Washington urging him not to go the demolition route.
But he will also be attentive to voices on the Right calling for the homes to be torn down. By leaving Gaza, he has enraged and alienated a large section of his political support base, and he might well need them after the Gaza pullout is over and Israel enters an election year in 2006.
