DAHANIYA, Gaza Strip — A thin cordon of Israeli soldiers protects the people of Dahaniya from the seething wrath of their Gaza neighbors, who view them as traitorous collaborators with Israel.
When Israel pulls out of Gaza this summer that security line will disappear, exposing the villagers to what they fear will be arrest, if not slaughter.
"This would be a catastrophe," said villager Abed Shtewi, 38.
Dahaniya's people say they are not traitors. They blame Israel for the deadly rumors about them and say it should make amends by giving them refuge and Israeli citizenship.
Israel agrees that the vast majority are not collaborators — and therefore they must stay in Gaza.
"They say they want to build a village in Israel like they have here. It isn't going to happen," said Shlomo Dror, a Defense Ministry spokesman dealing with the village.
The town of 350 people, a tiny collection of concrete homes and dusty streets in southern Gaza, gained its reputation as a collaborators' haven during the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s. Israel turned the town into a massive safe house for collaborators who had been outed by their neighbors and threatened with death.
The collaborators were brought here, given Israeli ID papers and eventually moved into Israel, leaving only their stigma behind with the town's original residents.
Throughout Gaza, those living in the village are known as the vilest of traitors, and it remains an open question whether their angry neighbors will be willing to listen to their protestations of innocence.
Many in the village have already tasted retribution for their alleged crimes.
In 1995, Salima Rmeilat, 57, was arrested as she walked into a pharmacy to buy blood pressure medicine. She spent the next 29 days in a Palestinian Authority prison.
She said her interrogators demanded to know her connections to Israeli intelligence agents, threatened to beat her and kill her and warned she would never see her seven children again.
She was only released when Dahaniya's Israeli liaison intervened, she said.
A man who would only give his name as Abu Muhammad, out of fear of being identified with a village he called "a cancer," said he was jailed for six months by the Palestinian Authority in 1994 on suspicion of collaborating.
Neither he nor Rmeilat has crossed the fence from Dahaniya back into Gaza since their arrests.
"If my father rose from his grave and called me over, I wouldn't go back," Abu Muhammad said.
Hundreds of alleged collaborators were killed during the Palestinian uprisings, usually because they were suspected of providing intelligence to the Israelis about the Palestinian underground. In 2000, a Palestinian with a truckload of explosives was caught trying to drive into Dahaniya, the villagers said. Later, gunmen opened fire on a villager who crossed into Gaza to get a tractor tire patched, they said.
The village, not marked on maps, lies near the now-closed Palestinian airport at the nexus of Gaza, Israel and Egypt.
Israeli soldiers thoroughly search visitors to Dahaniya and ban photography to protect the villagers' identities.
Most villagers work in Israel and are not subject to the frequent closures that affect the rest of Gaza. Their school is paid for by Israel and they use Israeli hospitals. These special rights date from the time Dahaniya housed collaborators, Dror said. Many here say they feel more connected to Israel than to Gaza. Abu Muhammad's Arabic is interspersed with Hebrew phrases.
Israel plans to raze Dahaniya this summer to clear room around the airport for the Palestinians, Dror said.
All the villagers will be given compensation, and about a quarter of its population — three collaborators and 17 other residents with Israeli IDs along with their families — will move to Israel, he said.
The remainder will stay in Gaza, Dror said.
"There is no risk to their lives. They are not collaborators. They never were collaborators with Israel," he said. "We are not going to take to Israel anyone that was not a collaborator."
The villagers disagree. "The only place where we can live a safe life is in Israel," said Abu Muhammad.
The people of Dahaniya feel this is only the latest in a string of wrongs they have suffered.
Most of the villagers lived as Bedouins in the Sinai Peninsula when Israel captured it and the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the 1967 Mideast War. Israel took their land and gave them a tract straddling the Gaza-Egypt border.
In 1982, Israel returned Sinai to Egypt along with much of their new agricultural land. Fearing Egypt would jail them as traitors for cooperating in the land swap, many of Dahaniya's people chose to stay here.
Despite Israel's insistence that there are few collaborators left in Dahaniya, Israeli media and even some lower-level military officials regularly assert that it's full of them. Further clouding the reputation is the villagers' assertion that Israeli police come here regularly in search of recruits to plant inside Israeli criminal rings.
Now the borders are about to change again. But although Israel announced its withdrawal plan more than a year ago, the villagers say Israeli authorities did not contact them until a month ago. Visiting Defense Ministry officials told them the village was going to be destroyed and those with Israeli identity cards moved to Israel.
The rest were left confused about their fate. Thirty-five of the families have hired an Israeli lawyer, Yoram Melman, to press their demand for resettlement in Israel.
The villagers say Israel caused their problems and needs to deal with the consequences.
Abu Muhammad said he is so worried he might try to force his way through the border, preferring an Israeli jail to Palestinian anger.
"We are not looking for trouble," Salima Rmeilat said. "We are not on anybody's side. We are just looking for a solution. We can't stay here."