San Diego, CA (special) --The brochure for a regional cooperation conference which would have been held yesterday pictured a bridge over a desert under a radiant sun. Shai Hermesh, mayor of Sha'ar Hanegev, an Israeli municipality lying just across the border from the Gaza Strip, shook his head in distress.

Aimed at fostering economic development and planning between neighboring areas in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the conference had to be canceled, Hermesh said sadly during an interview at San Diego's United Jewish Federation offices on Monday, Oct. 24. "The damage is so heavy and the riots have been so many; all has been destroyed."

Back when the conference was being planned so optimistically, it was given the name "Gaza-Negev: From a Fence to a Bridge" and, indeed, neighbors who had been living together peacefully on both sides of the border were looking forward to it. 

About 2,500 invitations had been mailed to planners, engineers, scholars and farmers on both sides of the border, and a good turnout had been expected.

Such subjects had been planned for discussion as reclaiming sewage water from the Gaza Strip to irrigate crops on both sides of the border, construction of a hospital at the border crossing at Karni to serve both countries, and developing an industrial zone at the same border crossing, able to employ Palestinians while attracting Israeli investment. The unemployment rate in Palestine is about 30 percent.

Hermesh said that Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister, was to have been the keynote speaker at the conference at which participants were to make recommendations on priorities for an initial $400,000 in investments which the Peres Foundation for Peace had attracted from European donors.

Cancellation of the conference in the wake of renewed hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis, after the two peoples had come so close to a peace, is heavily laden with symbolism for Hermesh, one of Israel's staunchest proponents for regional cooperation.

"It is a disaster," he said. "It means the next generation will have the same future as we had in the past: fighting, battles, service in the Army, being ready for the worst that can be."

Hermesh was in San Diego to brief UJF members on the situation in Israel and the Palestine Authority from the perspective of a mayor whose own village is less than a half mile from that border fence. The 11 kibbutzim and moshavim of Sha'ar Hanegev are partners with the San Diego UJF in a revenue sharing arrangement.

Of the 11 villages, six of them like Kfar Aza, where Hermesh lives, are located right on the border with the Gaza Strip. 

Palestinians say the current intifada was caused by the visit in late September of Likud leader Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem while Israelis say Sharon's visit was simply an excuse for violence already planned by Palestinians unhappy they could not get everything they wanted from Israel at the negotiating table.

Before the outbreak of violence, Hermesh said, farmers at Kfar Aza waved to their Palestinian counterparts working just beyond the fence in the olive groves of the Gaza Strip. "We would say 'shalom' and 'salaam' to each other," Hermesh said.

Now, Israelis no longer work in the open fields near the olive groves. With the ever present danger of sniper fire, it is "too dangerous." Neither do the jeeps of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) cruise right alongside the fence, but instead patrol from a safer distance. Meanwhile, security at Hermesh's kibbutz is much tighter than it was only a few weeks ago. "Instead of a single or a couple of persons guarding the fence, there are six people -- which means that there are more people guarding instead of working."

As the cotton was harvested at Kfar Aza in September, normally this would be the time of plowing the earth in order to prepare it for the next season. But if the violence and tension continues, the earth will remained unturned and "won't be ready for the seeding of the cotton or of the corn."

However, said Hermesh, the loss of a crop is unimportant compared to the losses of life and the opportunity the region had to plan for mutual economic development and peace.

Among those who own land in Sha'ar Hanegev is Ariel Sharon, himself, whom Hermesh, as a member of the Labor party, describes as a friend and political opponent.

Hermesh said he believes that Sharon, like every other Israeli, had the right to visit the Temple Mount. But if his neighbor "had asked me is it a good idea to be there, I would have sad it is a bad idea. I would have said that this is not the time to show his right to be on the mountain." 

Now that the violence has occurred, Hermesh says he wonders if he and other Israelis who believed in making peace with the Palestinians were too naive.

"When Ehud Barak offered them what he offered, instead of appreciating him as the one leader who wanted to reach a final agreement, even to the point of splitting Jerusalem, it was construed by them as weakness," Hermesh said. "And at that moment I became like the Likud; at that moment, I decided 'don't give up anything.'"

Besides living in a front-line village, Hermesh has another deep emotional involvement in the crisis. His son, Einav, is in the Army. He is assigned not just to any post, but to the controversial Jewish enclave of Nitzarim inside the Gaza strip. 

"It is a very difficult place which I never supported as a place for Jews," Hermesh said. "There are (Jewish) extremists, people who believe they should be allowed to live anywhere, and now my son is fighting in Nitzarim. And I said to him, 'you know, Einav, you have to go and fight....because otherwise the Palestinians will consider it to be weakness.' When it comes sooner or later to the (negotiation) table, Nitzarim will be an issue for negotiation. But at this moment, every position, every Army position, is a place where we will be judged. We are not able to show any weakness."

Nitzarim is the place where the 12 year old Palestinian boy was caught in a crossfire as his father attempted unsuccessfully to shield him from bullets. The image of the son dying on his father's lap has inflamed Palestinian public opinion as much as the image of an Israeli soldier being murdered and thrown to a howling mob in Ramallah has inflamed Israeli opinion.

Hermesh said no civilized country would use children as cynically as the Palestinian Authority does in its effort to turn world opinion against Israel.

Palestinian policemen shoot at Israeli settlers from inside rings of stone- throwing children, Hermesh said. 

The father of the 12-year-old later told reporters from his hospital bed that they simply were shopping at Nitzarim for a Suburu, a claim which Hermesh said defies logic.

"That junction had been an area of firefights for over four days," Hermesh said. "Everyone who was walking there knew that this was not just a shopping area. Now who is going to buy a Suburu under such circumstances?"

Hermesh said his own child every day has to face "100 other children throwing stones and Molotov grenades. What am I supposed to do? This is my child. He is a soldier. He has to be killed by stones? By Molotov cocktails? By Palestinian policemen shooting and he can't shoot back?"

Asked if there weren't other ways to control the mobs, without so many Palestinians being fatally wounded, Hermesh said tear gas and rubber bullets are regularly employed before the IDF is forced to resort to live ammunition.

Does he see nothing but an ever-escalating cycle of violence and retaliation in the future? "The Middle East is an unpredictable place," he replied. "When we started peace in 1993, it was between two academics in Oslo, two PhD's. No one knew about it, even (then Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin didn't know about it. Maybe somehow, somewhere, there will be people meeting and trying to find a way."

Noting that Palestinians now are prevented from travelling into Israel to jobs, he said, "there are 40,000 Palestinians who now cannot work. They were bringing home between $750 and $1000 a month, and sometimes more, compared to the average salary in Gaza itself of $100 a month. Now their families don't have it. And the Palestinian government's GNP is reduced.

"There is no good future for Israelis or Palestinians without peace," Hermesh said.