The strawberries, carnations, cherry tomatoes and other high-profit produce that made Gush Katif one of Israel's agricultural export powerhouses will find few buyers in Gaza; the more mundane crops could compete with local farmers and send prices plummeting.
The answer "quality of life" seems a bad joke, but everybody in Gush Katif, religious (the majority) and secular, gives it.
Al-Qaṭīf, also spelled Katif, town and oasis, Al-Sharqiyyah (Eastern) region, northeastern Saudi Arabia.
The only civilians here are the settlers of the Gush Katif bloc, a string of settlements — Neveh Dekalim among them — along the beaches of southern Gaza, between the Palestinian city of Khan Younis and the Mediterranean.
Just before we reached the fortified entrance to the Gush Katif bloc, we passed the ramshackle Bedouin village of Muwassi.
At a small museum at the entrance to Jerusalem named for the former settlement bloc, Gush Katif, that loss is on display: the keys to a former synagogue hanging on a wall, a cup of broken glass from its windows nearby and color photographs of smiling farmers in their greenhouses cultivating yellow peppers and geraniums.
A poem on the museum wall declares in part: "Katif is a wasteland now.
In addition, what Rafah identified in 1999 as sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed - the Gaza international airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a giant Israeli sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years by a checkpoint and the Gush Katif settlement).
"While thanking and recognising Sharon's great contributions to the State of Israel, we must also thank God for the fact that Sharon was taken from our public lives before he was able to bring to residents of Judea and Samaria [the biblical term for the West Bank] the tragedy he brought to the residents of Gush Katif and around Gaza".
