c. 2005 Religion News Service

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip _ There’s an almond tree where Atah Sweliem used to live.

The lone plant and a mound of churned-up earth are all that is left of his family’s six-room house.

Four years ago, Israeli bulldozers turned his home and the verdant fruit orchards around it into a barren no-man’s land to protect the nearby border crossing from attack by Palestinian militants who often hid in the groves.

Sweliem and his family of 12 were shuffled off to a three-bedroom government tenement, where they still live with piles of clothes stored in plastic bags because there’s not enough furniture.

Now a strange thing is happening to the unemployed Palestinian bus driver: A steady stream of real estate brokers have been calling to ask about his 21/4-acre lot.

Many have offered close to triple the land’s value _ $7,000 per acre, up from $2,750.

“I was shocked,” said Sweliem, 49, of the big offers. “I said no one would pay that much money unless he knew it would become something in two or three years.”

So Sweliem will wait for a better offer.

As Israel prepares for its historic evacuation of Gaza on Aug. 17, there are signs of a bubbling land rush in this debris-littered coastal strip.

Real estate prices for properties in war zones adjacent to the soon-to-be-evacuated Jewish settlements and military bases have at least doubled since the beginning of the Palestinian uprising _ or intifada _ nearly five years ago. Prices have climbed inside Gaza City, too, though more moderately.

“Prices are rising because people have hope now,” said Salah Harzallah, a real estate broker in Gaza City. “People feel that once Israel is out of Gaza, the whole economic situation will improve. At this point, buying a piece of land is the best investment.”

To understand the economics here, you first must understand the complicated way people live.

Nearly a decade after a landmark peace accord gave them the first chance at self-rule, 1.4 million Palestinians are fenced off from the 8,500 Israelis who will be forcibly evacuated next month from their government-subsidized settlements. For much of that time, Israeli military incursions and home demolitions have been common retaliations for militant rocket attacks and suicide bombings.

The conflict has pushed Palestinian poverty levels to 60 percent, dropped the average annual household income to $2,700, and fed the spreading popularity of Islamic fundamentalist groups like Hamas.

At the same time, the Palestinian government, which controls about 90 percent of the land here, has struggled to reassert its rule over independent militias that threaten to reignite fighting with Israel, and perhaps even spark a civil war.

Those are among the reasons the real estate boom is met skeptically by many. Additionally, some fear Israel is leaving only to neatly seal the border, leaving Gazans locked inside their own world of turbulence.

“There is a lot of uncertainty,” said Salah Haider Shafi, a Gaza economist. “Investors need to have clarity on a lot of issues _ such as access (to Israel and its economy).”

Before the most recent uprising, tens of thousands of Palestinian workers and merchants commuted into Israel daily at the Erez border crossing. Sweliem himself used to drive them from the border to Israeli cities. But violence forced frequent closures of Erez, choking off the main income source for Gazans. Today, just north of the remains of Sweliem’s house, Israeli cranes hoist metal rods at a construction site next to the old Erez terminal. Israel says the expanded border checkpoint will be able to process 30,000 people a day. It also is supposed to become a departure point for a 42-mile overland link to the West Bank, where another 2.4 million Palestinians live.

With visions of a constant stream of traffic passing through his land, Sweliem believes he could get 10 times the value.

“We believe that we’re advancing to something better than we had,” Sweliem said. “But you can’t tie a rope around me and let (me) walk, and then at the end of the day pull me back.”

Not far from Beit Hanoun, the streets of Gaza City tell a story of people still caught between tenuous calm and the persistent cloud of conflict with the Israelis _ and even the Palestinians’ own ruling Fatah party.

Around the corner from a street lined with rubble of destroyed buildings, a crew of builders last week prepared to pour cement for pillars to support a new eight-floor apartment building. As government workers removed the green and yellow banners of rival Palestinian militias from the tops of lampposts, murals depicting heroic insurgents set against a fireball sky dominated the public squares.

It is an insurgency that, in many ways, remains divided.

“We are in a chaotic situation here so we have to be careful,” said Abu Shadi, a Fatah soldier who kept an AK-47 assault rifle at his side during an interview. “We are worried that Hamas and other factions will suddenly become the leaders of the national cause after the disengagement. They will say, `We liberated Gaza.”’

Not far away, in the narrow streets of the Beach Refugee Camp in Gaza City where there is no construction, a booming voice echoes through a loudspeaker. The man is asking for contributions to the mosques that have “graduated the martyrs in the fight against Israel.”

The pitch doesn’t interrupt a backgammon game under the shade of a sidewalk shanty.

“I am not optimistic for the situation to get better,” said Ibrahim el Madhoun, an unemployed tailor, as he shoots the dice. “It’s a kind of international policy of Israel, the U.S. and Europe to talk, talk and give a piecemeal solution that isn’t a full solution.”

Back in Beit Hanoun, Sweliem gazes at the site of his former home. He is waiting for foreign investors to build an industrial complex nearby and dreams of becoming a partner in a coffee shop that might be built on his land.

When asked what he will do with his land if that vision doesn’t materialize, he said he will seek compensation from the Palestinian government, while warning of an unavoidable “explosion.”

“If peace doesn’t bring security, stability, freedom and work, why do we need peace?”

MO/PH END MITNICK

(Joshua Mitnick wrote this story for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Atah Sweliem, whose suddenly valuable property in Gaza was bulldozed by Israel four years ago.