Israel's Bedouin 'Spies' Fear Reprisal in Gaza

Israelis suggest that not everyone who will remain deserves resettlement. "Some of this village, from our point of view. . . have been the opposite of collaborators," Dror said.

Some people are deeply involved in smuggling, the Israelis said. Whatever trouble they might face would likely grow from involvement in criminal networks, according to the officials. The border with Egypt is a common entry point for weapons flowing to Islamic radicals. The local people deny smuggling.

Eshtewi Armelat, 50, the mayor of Dahaniya, reclined on a hot day last week on cushions arranged under a shelter of burlap sacks and poles made of tree branches. Known commonly here as Abu Riad, he chain-smoked Israeli-made Time cigarettes pinched between his thumb and index finger until the ochre sand beside him bristled with butts.

A donkey brayed in an adjacent pen made of barbed wire, tin roofing, hoses and other junk. He apologized. The air conditioning in his town hall office has been broken for months, he said, and the difficulty in getting permits to enter the closed military zone has kept the technician from arriving to fix it.

"I am a citizen of Dahaniya," said Abu Riad, whose family name is the same as the tribe that was the first to arrive here in the late 1970s. "There's no other situation like ours."

Israel originally built the village, set along a grid of six streets, for Bedouins displaced by Israeli settlements in the Sinai following the 1967 war. Most of those who came were from the Armelat tribe, which had roamed the northern Sinai for 600 years by the time the Israeli soldiers arrived. Feeling little allegiance to Egypt's distant government in Cairo, the Armelats helped the Israelis monitor Egyptian resistance in the Sinai.

Abu Riad drove a taxi at the time, and he could zip from Jaffa to El Arish in the Sinai without crossing a single border. But the Israeli withdrawal from Sinai following the 1978 Camp David peace accords with Egypt brought changes to the village.

A barrier rose between Gaza and the peninsula in 1982, and Israel gave the residents of Dahaniya the choice of staying or returning to Sinai. Families fractured as many sons and daughters headed back to tribal lands in Sinai, again under Egyptian control.

"I don't think anyone in the world should be separated from their families," said Abu Riad, whose children all remained in Dahaniya. "But as they say in Arabic, the boats go in the direction the wind takes them."

More than a decade later, another peace effort brought another barrier around the village. In the year before the 1993 Oslo accords placed Gaza and parts of the West Bank under Palestinian control, the Israeli government began using Dahaniya as a way station for collaborators, which prompted the military to build a security fence separating the village from Gaza's Palestinian population.

In all, at least 400 families passed through here, most staying only a few months in a complex of tan concrete buildings on the edge of town before their relocation to Israel. The compound now sits abandoned, some of the buildings vandalized. But the village's reputation as an enclave of Israeli spies had been firmly established among the Palestinians on the other side of the fence.

Although Israeli officials contend that Dahaniya residents are no longer used as spies, people here say they continue to work on behalf of Israeli security services. At times, men from the village disappear for weeks at a time. No one questions them when they return.

Many here, such as Odeh Armelat, have family in Gaza, relatives who decided to leave when the fence went up years ago. Armelat is planning to move near them in Rafah, hard against the Egyptian border, when he is evacuated, and contends it is a myth that everyone helped Israel. "Some people know we are not all spies against the Palestinians, some don't," said Armelat, 63, who is concerned about his future income. "I think I'll be sitting on a pillow with no money."

In the early afternoon, men with pants caked with soil from the cucumber and tomato fields in Israel arrive through the back gate. A tractor rumbles through mostly empty streets, pulling a trailer full of milk, eggs, soft drinks and other groceries that have been brought from Gaza after passing through Israeli military checkpoints.

"For 10 years I've only gone from here to work and back again," said Ashraf Armelat, 21, who works in vegetable fields in Israel but is not eligible to live there after the evacuation. "If they won't allow us to come to Israel, I guess Egypt would be better. I'm not Palestinian."

Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.