Gaza Arabs Against "Disengagement"

I have avoided commenting on Israel's proposed evacuation of the Jewish communities in Gaza and Northern Samaria, principally because I'm not an Israeli, and as such, it's not really any of my business. However, an interesting article in WorldNetDaily suggests that the anti-disengagement protesters have some support from an unlikely source - Arabs who actually live in the Gaza strip:

"Some workers here have known three generations of Jewish families. I was invited to all the bar mitzvahs and weddings."

Mahmoud, who works in the same greenhouse, said, "I don't want the disengagement to go through. Not just because I'll lose a job, but because I'll lose friends."

Mahmoud said he thinks the Gaza withdrawal is immoral. "The Jews who live here didn't do anything wrong. They were put here by a lot of help from the Israeli government, and told they would stay forever," he said. "Now the Israeli government wants to rip them out. It's not right."

The reasons for opposing the pull out are not merely economic and personal ones. Some Arabs fear what will fill the power vacuum if and when Israel leaves:

"We know once Israel leaves, Hamas is in power. A lot of the Palestinians in Gaza are really upset about this because life won't be good for us," said Mahmoud.

Alan Dershowitz commented in his The Case for Israel that the greatly improved Arab living standards that were the result of the so-called "occupation" between the Six-Day War and the partial transfer of control in Arab population centres under the "Oslo" process paradoxically led to many of the Arabs in the Territories seeing themselves as somehow "apart" from other Arabs, and increased their sense of "nationhood".

Here, however, the Yesha residents, despised by the so-called progressive left the world over, sneered at as religious nutters trying to turn back the clock two thousand years or more, and supposedly the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East, are responsible for this (admittedly rare) example of community and solidarity between Jews and Arabs.