On the Strip: Homeless in Gaza

"For Gaza shall be forsaken," warned the Old Testament Prophet Zephaniah. "Woe unto the inhabitants of the seacoast."

Through most of recorded history, that prophecy has seemed tragically well founded. Egypt's Pharaoh Thutmose III used Gaza as a fortress 3,500 years ago, and since then Egyptian armies have launched as many as 85 invasions from that vicinity against Palestine.

The Gaza "Strip" was created by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It was the only bit of Palestine that the Egyptian army could salvage after fighting ineffectively against the creation of the state of Israel. The Egyptians subsequently used the region as a base for raids into Israel. Those raids ceased after the 1956 war between Egypt and Israel, when Gamal Abdel Nasser agreed to the placement of a U.N.

Emergency Force along the Gaza-Israeli border. On June 5, 1967, after Nasser ordered the U.N. forces out, the Israelis attacked Egyptian positions, took over the Gaza Strip, and have held it ever since. Today, Gaza's 458,000 Arabs live midst sand and citrus groves, in poverty and overcrowded conditions.

Anwar Sadat proposed this month that Gaza be used as the starting point for negotiating local autonomy for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza. He reasoned that Gaza I was of less importance to the IsraeIis than the West Bank; this is true for religious and emotional reasons and once the peace treaty with Egypt is signed, it will also be true for military reasons. Besides, only about 500 Jewish settlers live in Gaza, vs. 5,000 in the West Bank. Sadat also suggested that during the interim period, the Egyptians set up a liaison office in Gaza and police the area. The Israelis did not like the sound of that, fearing that Egypt might be trying to stage a comeback in Gaza.

Most Gaza Palestinians are unenthusiastic about the Camp David accords. They are especially bitter about Jerusalem's insistence upon keeping Israeli armed forces in the West Bank and Gaza permanently, and Israeli citizens' having a right to settle in the strip. There is also a generation gap among the Gazans while the elders still pine for their old homes in Ashkelon or elsewhere in Israel proper, the young aspire to the goals of an independent Palestinian state.

It is rage, however, that binds young and old alike in the refugee camps. Holding on to the reins of his donkey, his shoes caked with slime from open sewage drains, Mahmud Mustafa Magded, 45, shouts: "Camp David, Israel, Egypt, Syria, they're all the same. I want to go back to my country, to Ashkelon!"

Hasan Matwar, 23, is angry about Camp David because it seems to him to ignore the predicament of the West Bank and Gaza. "Everybody in the Middle East has a father," he laments," except the Palestinians."

Despite the anger and disillusionment, a number of Gaza's leaders are unmistakably moderate. Rashad al-Shawa, mayor of the town of Gaza (pop. 118,000) generally favors compliance with the Camp David accords, "but there must be some modifications." His most important demands: 1) participation by the Palestine Liberation Organization in the negotiations; 2) clarification of the status of the West Bank and Gaza following the five-year interim period; 3) assurances that the Israelis will dismantle their settlements and build no more.

But even if Gaza finally achieves some kind of self-government, its leaders must still find ways of pacifying the dispossessed who dream of returning to their old homes in Israel. "We will have to provide them with places to live in Gaza to help them forget," says Mayor al-Shawa. "And we will have to convince them somehow that they have not moved away from Palestine, but have merely moved from one part of it to another."

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