Ten years on, many former Gush Katif residents are still mourning the loss of their homes.
By ANDREW FRIEDMANOpponents of the disengagement from Gush Katif confront Border Policemen at the Gaza Strip settlement of Kfar Darom as the pullout was underway, August 18, 2005(photo credit: NIR ELIAS / REUTERS)
To the outsider, there is little not to like about Netzer Hazani.The village is home to 103 families, nearly all of whom were evicted in the summer of 2005 from their homes in the original Netzer Hazani, in Gush Katif, the Israeli settlement area inside the Gaza Strip, but a decade after disengagement it appears to be a picture of success.The village, located some 30 kilometers east of the port city of Ashdod, broils in the mid-summer sun, but the heat does not impact on the comfort of a newly built community with air-conditioning in all buildings; amenities like a neat, modern playground (covered by sunshade); an attractive new community center and synagogue, linked together by a well-tended park and amphitheater. On the outskirts, some signs of agriculture are visible, including a greenhouse and chicken coop, but most residents work out of town.Both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are an easy 45-minute drive away.The community is so new ‒ the first families moved in January 2013 ‒ that there is hardly a “lived in” feel to it. Walking around the perimeter of their home, Anita and Stuart Tucker show off their surroundings with pride. For Stuart, an Orthodox rabbi in his 70s, the backyard patio is the jewel in the crown. Covered by a wooden pergola it can be easily converted into a sukka. On the walkway leading out to the street, Anita absentmindedly bends down to pick an errant weed in a flowerbed, and points out interesting homes in the vicinity.Three of their five children, and 23 of their 28 grandchildren, live in Netzer Hazani.Despite the comfort of their new surroundings, the Tuckers are careful not to use the word “home.” For them, like most residents here, that term is reserved for another time and place.That story that ended in August, 2005, on the day they were evicted from their home by Israeli soldiers and watched it being demolished by IDF bulldozers.“We were the second family to move to Netzer Hazani in 1974,” Anita recalls to The Jerusalem Report. “We’d made aliya from New York in 1969, and we went to see the planned site for Gush Katif. But when we got out of the car I screamed and said to Stuart, ‘Augh! Let’s get out of here.’ There was nothing there ‒ no people, no animals, only sand.“But our kids ‒ aged five, four and three at the time ‒ had opened up the trunk of the car and pulled out a roll of plastic garbage bags. They took a few, climbed up the tallest sand dune they could find and went careening down sitting on the garbage bags.“To me, that is Gush Katif. The warm, fine sand. Special sand. Something about it seemed to hug you, soft fine warmth.That’s what the young people long for ‒ the special adama ‒ land, that connected you to the Land of Israel in a very special way,” she says.A decade after the disengagement from Gaza, it remains an open sore for a majority of the families who lost their homes.Their former communities have become launching grounds for rocket and mortar attacks by Islamic militants ‒ more than 10,000 in those 10 years ‒ a bitter, reminder of the warnings they and their supporters issued after prime minister Ariel Sharon announced the disengagement plan in January, 2004.Even worse, a bevy of current and former public officials, representing the spectrum of the political map, admit that disengagement failed to accomplish its goals. As early as 2006, former Labor Party MK Yossi Beilin, former chief of staff (and current defense minister) Moshe Ya’alon and others confirmed that the settlers’ pre-disengagement warnings about the unilateral move had indeed proved correct.“Many people who warned about the results of the disengagement were right,” said Beilin, an architect of the Oslo Accords, in a 2006 interview to the Hebrew-language Haaretz daily marking the first anniversary of the move. “To many Palestinians, the pullout proved that violence can get them the gains that negotiations cannot,” Beilin said.More recently, Labor Party Chairman Yitzhak Herzog acknowledged that the pullout did not, as Sharon promised, reduce “the day-to-day friction and its victims on both sides.” Rather, Herzog said that “from a security perspective, the disengagement was a mistake.”IN SIMILAR vein, evictees contend that Hamas walked away from Israel’s pullout empowered and confident, something that led directly to the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, as well as to the three subsequent military operations in Gaza ‒ Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge. They also note that they were not the only victims of disengagement. Whereas prior to 2005, Hamas rocket attacks only affected them and Israeli communities adjacent to the Gaza border, today more than 50 percent of Israeli citizens are in rocket range.Supporters of the disengagement are quick to respond that attacks on Gush Katif residents and Israeli soldiers as well as the rocket fi re were responsible for 42 Israeli civilian fatalities and extensive property damage during the years of occupation of the Strip.Nearly all Gaza evictees have remained connected to their Gush Katif communities rather than being absorbed into the general population, or even into West Bank settlements in Judea and Samaria.While there are success stories ‒ within fi ve years, a group of Netzarim residents had reestablished a network of greenhouses just outside Gaza and were well on their way to establishing the community of Bnei Netzarim.But this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Ten years on, fully one-third continue to live in “temporary” housing ‒ upgraded mobile homes known as caravillas that were intended as a fi rst stop for their absorption back over the Green Line.Whereas the government has undertaken massive construction projects in various locations such as Ramat Beit Shemesh and the East Jerusalem suburbs of Gilo and Har Homa, Gaza evictees continue to wallow in neglected places like Nitzan, Amatzia and others.Less than half have returned to agriculture; community representatives say there was virtually zero unemployment among the 8,900 residents of Gush Katif, and that more than 75 percent of the jobs there were in the farming sector.For instance, take the story of Benny and Rachel Yefet, also of Netzer Hazani. Their son Itamar was murdered by Palestinian terrorists in their greenhouse in 2002, and the community center in the new Netzer Hazani is named Beit Itamar after him.Like many Gush Katif residents they’d spent the power years of their 20s and 30s building the community and contributing to the economic output – in their case, fresh herbs.But sitting in their spacious home in the new Netzer Hazani, it is clear that that their lives since disengagement have been a far cry from those halcyon days.“We had 50 dunams of greenhouses in Gush Katif, and the crop would mature every 30 days or so. Here, we’ve got less than 10 dunams, and the herbs grow every 70 days. So that’s an enormous loss,” Benny Yefet tells The Report.“When we were kicked out, it was like the sky fell. I was 55 years old, in good health, but I couldn’t find a job after having worked for myself all those years. I took a course in bus driving, but the conditions were untenable. So we grow a little bit parsley and mint and a few other things, but mainly I’ve been unemployed since it all happened.”In addition, several hundred families continue to pay mortgages on the homes and greenhouses left behind in Gaza, and not one of them says the compensation was sufficient to cover their losses.There is a widespread feeling among the evacuees that the government’s failure to attend to their needs on the day after ‒ the topic of a withering state commission of inquiry in 2009 ‒ was not the result of government incompetence, but rather of a well-planned program to destroy their communities. They claim that both the Sela Disengagement Authority, with a regimen of red tape and the government property tax authority, which assesses war and terrorism damages and pays compensation, routinely stonewalled their claims.Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, the founder of JobKatif, a support organization that focuses on job placement and professional retraining for Gush Katif evictees, disagrees with this view. “I know that many Gush Katif people feel that Ariel Sharon set out to ‘teach them a lesson,’ but I simply cannot believe that,” he tells The Report.“Yes, there were many, many screwups, but they stemmed from the fact that Sharon tried to address the challenges of resettling these people and their communities using ordinary government tools. That was a mistake; he should have realized that the situation created by disengagement was an emergency situation for all the affected families, and it required emergency measures.But I absolutely would not say that the poor administration of the issues at hand following the move was the result of malice.”Many former Gush Katif residents feel betrayed. They describe themselves as refugees, not only because they lost their homes, but also because they feel that they had been abandoned by the rest of Israeli society, outside of the religious Zionist community. During the months and years leading up to the pullout, many settlers believed they were solidly inside the consensus, that a silent majority of Israelis supported their cause and would rise up when push came to shove to prevent the pullout from taking place.That bubble began to burst three weeks before the move when Gush Katif leaders, backed by religious Zionist rabbis and right-wing politicians, called for a mass procession from the Kissufim Junction to Gush Katif, a distance of about six kilometers, hoping the army would be defenseless against a massive show of support, with hundreds of thousands rising up in protest.But, as the protest began at Kfar Maimon, just three kilometers from the Gaza border during a ferocious heat wave in mid-July, the community woke up to the sad reality that they were alone. Of the 30,000 people who camped out at the religious moshav for three days hoping to march on Gaza, virtually every head had a kippa on it.THE WITHDRAWAL from Gaza was hardly traumatic for most Israelis. True, the pullout made banner headlines for a week in mid-August. But while Gush Katif residents tried desperately to convince IDF soldiers to refuse orders, and then scrambled frantically for housing and jobs in the aftermath of their eviction, the cafés, beaches, water parks and other summer attractions were full from Tel Aviv to the Galilee.Indeed, many Israelis refuse to show sympathy for the evictees for two main reasons.One, they shouldn’t have been there in the first place. According to this view, the entire settlement enterprise is at best a mistake and, at worst, a violation of international law. They argue that fewer than 9,000 Gush Katif Jews living in heavily guarded villages in the midst of a large, hostile Palestinian population was a security nightmare. In addition, according to this line of reasoning, Gush Katif communities ‒ like their counterparts in Judea and Samaria ‒ presented a long-term demographic threat by steaming head-first toward a one-state situation that would lead to demographic parity between Arabs and Jews, and eventually to an Arab majority.Second, critics of the settlers note that they had plenty of time to prepare for the move and chose to do nothing. Stories abound of families who refused to “grant legitimacy” to the move by packing their belongings or by making arrangements for accommodation on the day after. Others put their faith in religious leaders, such as former chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who assured residents in the months leading up to disengagement that ‘nothing would happen,” either because the silent majority of Israelis would rise up to block it, or that God himself would prevent the move “somehow.”Many settlers in Judea and Samaria still believe they enjoy the support of a silent majority of Israelis. They do not acknowledge that virtually no secular Israelis attend holiday events at places like Shilo and Hebron, despite Israel’s historic connection to these places.The Orthodox settlers of Netzer Hazani, Bnei Netzarim and Amatzia continue to speak passionately about the Land of Israel and the historic mission of settling the land.The years have done nothing to lessen their disdain for the Israel-Palestinian “peace process,” which they view as little more than an international anti-Semitic plot, supported by weak-willed left-wing Israelis, an attempt that has gone a long way to destroy the positive relations they enjoyed with Palestinian neighbors prior to the Oslo Accords of 1993.Although virtually every Gush Katif community bears a memorial to one or more of the 42 terror victims who were killed prior to 2005, that aspect of life in Gaza has either been suppressed or willingly overlooked.“The mukhtar of Deir al-Balah came here to personally welcome us with a basket of fruit and vegetables on the day we moved into our original caravans,” recalls Anita Tucker. “Before the expulsion, the Palestinians who worked in our greenhouses told us how sorry they were about all of this, and how fearful they were about the future. That’s the way real relations were in Gush Katif, behind all the media hype.”Predictably, the initial period following their “expulsion” ‒ the evacuees’ preferred phrase to describe the pullout ‒ was followed by a diffi cult period. Several individuals said they could not bring themselves to stand when the prayer for the State of Israel was recited on the Shabbat following the disengagement, and it took many families several years to begin to come to terms with what they considered their abandonment by the state they believed in. Several families reported that some of the then 17-year-old children refused to be drafted into the army following the pullout.Eventually, however, the community made its peace with the state. Some echo Rimon’s belief that the poor treatment they received over the past 10 years stems mostly from government bureaucracy, rather than malice. Nearly all their young people serve in the IDF, many in elite combat units and offi cers in all branches of the military.Others continue to mourn the loss of their beloved Gush Katif, but they reject the notion that the state stabbed the settlers in the proverbial back.“Ultimately, I believe we will return to Gush Katif ‒ if not my grandchildren, then my great-grandchildren. But it will happen. I am sure of that,” says Tucker wistfully.
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