Mideast takes a first wary step

The classic formula for Middle East peacemaking is land for peace. This week, after nearly three years of conflict, Israel and the Palestinians are attempting a scaled-down version: pummeled territory for temporary truce.

In a quid pro quo intended to add momentum to a US-backed peace plan known as the road map, Israel has agreed to withdraw its forces from the Gaza Strip and militant Palestinians groups are getting ready to cease their attacks against Israelis for three months.

While the deal may yield short-term calm - at least one Israeli commentator is calling the cease-fire the end of the "1,000-day war" - a long-term peace remains as elusive as ever. Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the US, dismisses the idea that the cease-fire is the end of anything, or even the beginning of the end. "It's merely the beginning of the beginning," he says. The terms of this week's trade-off again suggest that Israel maintains the upper hand in this conflict and that engaging in violence has hurt the Palestinians. Should the cease-fire hold, the Israelis will get the "quiet" they have long demanded as a precursor to the resumption of substantive negotiations.

The Palestinians will get back some of what they had three years ago, when they enjoyed autonomy in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

Should the withdrawal indeed occur - it is expected to begin Monday - the Palestinians will regain authority over a largely impoverished people hit hard by the conflict.

In Gaza more than a million Palestinians surround Jewish enclaves that house some 7,000 Israeli settlers. The territory is a sliver of sand and densely packed humanity hemmed in by Egypt, Israel, and the Mediterranean.

Israelis know it as a source of cheap labor and of the homemade rockets and mortars that Palestinians occasionally fire at nearby Israeli communities.

During the past 33 months of strife, Gazans have accounted for roughly a third of the 2,200 Palestinians who have been killed in the conflict.

Israel has destroyed more than 12 percent of the territory's agricultural land, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza City, in order to clear "security zones" on the Gaza side of the Gaza-Israel border, along roads used by settlers, and around the settlements themselves.

From the outbreak of the conflict until April 2003, Israeli forces had destroyed 1,064 buildings in Gaza, according to PCHR, most of them residential. Israel destroys Palestinian homes to punish and deter terrorist attack, as part of the creation of security zones, and in the course of strikes against Palestinian targets.

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