The border dilemmas of a desert town

Press, 9 February 1982, Page 16

The border dilemmas of a desert town

By

ERIC SILVER

in the “Guardian,” London

Saleh Sayeed. a lean, dry Arab - farmer with a black and white Kefiyeh headdress hanging loosely above hollow cheeks and a stubby grey beard, keeps, a wife, five sons, four daughters, an aged mother and sundry female cousins on the produce of the seven hectares he owns on the western fringe of Rafah.

He has come to lobby the mayor because he fears he will lose it all when Israel completes its withdrawal from Sinai on April 25 — the date palms and guava trees, the marrow, cucumber .and onion patches. The new-old border wil bisect his holding, leaving his house on one side and the well he pumps for drinking water and irrigation on the other. If a buffer is fenced between Sinai and the Gaza Strip, Egypt and Palestine, he will forfeit some of his best land.

Saleh Sayeed hoped the Israeli Defence Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, would bring home a solution from last month’s talks in Cairo, but Rafah was one of the last “technicalities” bounced back to the experts. Saleh Sayeed is not alone in praying that they will get on with it.

The international border was first drawn across the desert by British and Turkish officers in 1906. They laid 106 markers from the Bed Sea to the Mediterranean, and with scant regard for the natives they seem scarcely to have noticed

that Rafah was split down in the middle.

Israeli and Egyptian officers have redrawn the same line, if not with the same markers, and Rafah, grown to a town of 85,000 people (50.000 of them Palestinian refugees who fled south in 1948), is stuck with the same division, but a more complex dilemma.

For the first time in 34 years, the two sides of the shabby, sprawling, flyblown town will be governed by two different States, Egyps and Israel, which for the time being are at peace but may not stay so for ever. When Egypt ruled the Gaza Strip from 1943 to 1967, barbed wire separated “Rafah Sinai” from “Rafah Palestine,” but the townsfolk could cross fairly freely through a checkpoint manned by the Egyptian police. Will they need visas from Cairo and Tel-Aviv to do so now?

The border - runs through about 20 houses, which will probably have to be bricked up on one side or the other, Sinai or Palestine, according to the random nationality of the occupant, or be demolished to save him the trouble. A black and white flag on the roof of a twostorey ice-making factory marks where it will be cut in half.

We drive down a rutted, dusty alley barely wide enough to take a'single vehicle. Mahmood Hassan, a Palestinian shopkeeper whose family has lived in Rafah for generations, shows us his house on one side and his son’s house on the

other. After April he will live in Israeli-occupied territory, and his son ip Egypt. The alley is the border.

The mayor, Hilmi Zurob, merchant, landowner, travel and insurance agent, explains the problem. Of Rafah’s 85,000 inhabitants, 20,000 are Egyptian citizens, .living for the most part on the Sinai side of the line. And 65,000 are Palestinians. 15,000 of them original Rafah people, the other 50,000 refugees. Under Israeli occupation they could freely cross an invisible frontier.

Hilmi Zurob, a portly figure with a generous moustache and well-cut brown suit, is an Egyptian, but owns four shops on the Israeli side. He will probably get by. He has a second home and travel agency in Cairo, and is retiring into private, business life after April 25.

Others will fare less well: 516 Palestinian families, decanted from refugee camps a decade ago when the Israelis drove security roads through them, were rehoused in “Canada,” an abandoned United Nations base manned by Canadians before the 1967 war. “Canada” is on the Egyptian side of Rafah, and Egypt made it clear when it recovered El Arish three years ago that it was not taking in any refugees.

The “Canada” families —‘ about 4000 people — would in any case prefer to live in the Gaza Strip. ..

The 2000 Bedoin of the Remelat Tribe were settled on

the desert edge of town in the early seventies when the Israeli Army fenced in their traditional grazing ground in the strategic Rafah Approaches. Each of the 80 extended families was given a rudimentary house and one and a quarter acres of arable land.

Their forcible removal caused a scandal at the time, but the Bedoins’ resettlement turned into a success story. This is now threatened because the border will separate their homes (in the Gaza Strip) from their land (in Sinai).

The Remelat are Egyptian citizens. They could, no doubt, revert to their desert wanderings. But they have tasted something better. “We cannot go backwards,” their chief, Sheikh Hassan Shtewi, insists. “We have learned to live in houses, we have fields here and modern irrigation systems.”'

Sheikh Hassan has his own solution. “Why not,” he asks, “give us one of the Moshavim (the Israeli farm villages already in the throes of evacuation)?” He has put the idea to the Egyptian authorities. The Egyptians, have not yet answered.

The “Canada” ‘families and the Bedoin are. the hard cases that will needpolitical as well as technical answers. With average' goodwill, the mayor believes, Rafah’s... other problems can be resolved.

Sharon’s proposal to .bend the border, leaving the town either wholly in Egypt or wholly in the Gaza Strip, is a non-starter.

says Hilmi Zurob. The Egyptians don’t want the Palestinian refugees, but equally they will not yield an inch of “sacred Egyptian soil.” The best approach, he suggests, would be to issue, crossing permits to anyone who can

show that he needs one, for family or business reasons. If any property has to be demolished, the owners must be paid fair compensation. So far the mayor has heard nothing from Israel or Egypt. April 25 is less than three months away.