Faced with attacks from the Gaza Strip since the early 1950s, Israelis were cursing "Lech le’Aza‘ – literally ’go to Gaza‘ and figuratively ’go to hell" – years before their conquest of the coastal strip where their sworn enemies lived in the largest numbers and worst conditions.
Now, as Israel leaves the Strip after nearly four decades of strategic disorientation, Gaza is showing no signs of shedding its dubious distinction as hell’s synonym. Indeed, a vast majority of Israelis – including ones who would not part with its Jewish settlements – woke up this morning happily Gaza-less. To them, this part of the surgery they have just undergone feels less like an amputation and more like the removal of a tumor.
Though this rule has had its exceptions, on the whole when Israelis heard "Gaza" what came to mind was hostility, fanaticism, violence and irredeemable destitution.
The place author Amos Elon once described as "the Middle East’s armpit" was where most years, most Israelis would not go unarmed, if at all. It was the sprawling maze of makeshift alleys, shanty towns and open sewage channels that two generations of Israelis patrolled incessantly and recall traumatically. It was the place that a succession of Israeli administrations tried, and failed, to rehabilitate; the place that supplied well-to-do Israel with thousands of dirt-cheap street sweepers, tomato pickers, cement carriers, kitchen workers, restaurant helpers and other hewers of wood and drawers of water who later turned on it. And it was the place that gave rise to Ahmed Yassin and his following, the people who made the murder of Jewish children legitimate, deliberate and frequent as no one had since Adolf Hitler.
Some Israelis understood early on that the post-’67 coexistence of the Gazan horse and its Israeli rider could not last; others understood this when the violence began to get out of hand. In 1956, David Ben-Gurion opposed Gaza’s conquest due to its demographic complexities. Today, however, all realize that in grabbing Gaza back in 1967, Israel brought a Trojan horse into its midst.
Now, in a typically Gazan irony, a bruised, disillusioned and sober Israel is relinquishing a Strip checkered with its own set of Trojan horses, in the form of dozens of eerily naked synagogues. If Gaza once trapped Israel demographically, it now traps the Palestinians morally: Either they confront the riffraff that is expected to treat Jewish houses of worship as respectfully as the Taliban treated statues of the Buddha, or they summarily undo the gentler, kinder image in which Mahmoud Abbas has worked so hard to shape post-Arafat Palestinian society.
Shimon Peres likes to say that the current departure from Gaza is part of the Oslo Accords, which envisioned cross-border Israeli-Palestinian harmony. Yet post-disengagement Gaza will not be viewed from here the way Belgium is seen from Holland. Instead, it will be seen blurrily, rejected and dejected, through a barrier second in its prickliness only to that which separates North and South Korea. It will continue to loom ominously as a place synonymous with hell.
Not only is Gaza a non-starter in terms of peace, it also has little to offer by way of Jewish memory.
The most heroic thing an Israelite did there – Samson’s uprooting of the city’s gates after he was trapped in it by his Philistine enemies – was necessary only because he had previously surrendered to his temptations by visiting a Gazan prostitute. And the most spiritually significant thing in Jewish history that happened in Gaza was the 17th-century crowning of false messiah Shabtai Zvi.
In dismantling Gush Katif, Israel made it plain it didn’t think bringing the messiah entailed embracing Gaza. Now we can expect daily reminders – like Sunday’s Palestinian cancellation of the handover ceremony – that abandoning Gaza also does not herald the messiah’s arrival.
Unless a miracle happens, Mahmoud Abbas will fail in his stated aim of unleashing "a Jihad of construction," and the Islamists can be counted on to fend off the political freedom, social mobility and creative atmosphere that the West believes are indispensable for the rise of a prosperous Gaza. Yes, miracles do happen, especially in the Promised Land, but even here they never before happened in Gaza. Why should they now?
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