From Palmah to Gush Katif to Bnei Dekalim

As a child, Esther Bazak served in the Palmah. As a single mother she moved to Yamit with her four small children, and from there to Neveh Dekalim.

By TAL ARIEL AMIR
Esther Bazak521 (photo credit: David Buimovich)
Esther Bazak521
(photo credit: David Buimovich)
When Esther Bazak comes to visit Bnei Dekalim, a community being built in the East Lachish region, her eyes get moist. At the age of 83, and eight years after being evacuated from her house due to the disengagement, Bazak watches wistfully as foundations are being laid in the sandy soil, roads are being paved and trees planted. She is really looking forward to the day when, once again, she will be able to feel that her home has ideological significance.
The last time she felt like this was in August 2005, exactly eight years ago, when she celebrated her 75th birthday in Gush Katif.
The celebration was both sad and happy. Dozens of her friends and family members gathered, knowing that just two days later they would have to leave behind a huge house, endless memories and a lifetime of experiences.
Bazak did have one surprise guest at her birthday celebration: Maj.-Gen. Uri Bar-Lev, the police commander who oversaw the evacuation. Bazak’s children had invited him to the party; she tearfully told him about her life. Bazak spoke to Bar-Lev about her years with the Palmah and how proud she was to raise eight children (one of whom is Shai Bazak, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s former media director).
Before Bar-Lev left the party, Bazak asked him if she could be the last person to leave Neveh Dekalim, her home for 23 years. “Where should I go?” she asked Bar-Lev with a pained look on her face.
With the energy of a 1,000-watt battery, Bazak decided just a few days later that disengagement would not put an end to her busy, Zionistic life. She and a number of other evacuees concocted a plan to found a new town that would be built upon their shared values and ideals. “It was no coincidence that we chose Lachish,” Bazak says in an interview. “Thousands of Palestinians live in this area, but almost no Jews. Once again we are pioneers building a Jewish settlement. Our goal is to strengthen the region. Just after Tisha Be’av I went to see my house being built there. They were digging and preparing the foundations. We are continuing to build Jewish communities throughout Israel.”
When Bazak says, “we,” she is referring to 50 families from Neveh Dekalim who have chosen to live temporarily at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, and not to join the other Gush Katif families in Nitzan. Unlike the strong unity that existed among the area’s residents during the evacuation, today there is an abyss between the various groups of former residents. “The families living now at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim were not interested in going to live in Nitzan,” Bazak says emphatically. “We knew that we were going to form a new town from the day we were evacuated.”
Why didn’t you agree to go live in Nitzan? Why should I live in the center of Israel between Ashdod and Ashkelon? Who will watch over Israel’s borders if I don’t? Living in Nitzan is a life devoid of any ideology.
Do you miss Neveh Dekalim? Sometimes I do – but I prefer to look forward to the future. A few days ago, on the eve of Tisha Be’av, after the evening prayers in Ein Tzurim, I drove down south with a few others so that we could be as close to Neveh Dekalim as possible. We stopped just after Kissufim junction, next to the security barrier. We sat down there and read the Book of Lamentations. My stomach began to hurt – we were not far from where my house stood for more than two decades.
Did you cry? No. There is a greater power that is charting our lives for us and I accept whatever happens with love. Now I spend my energy building Bnei Dekalim. My heart fills with joy every time I see how the building is progressing.
After Succot, the first hill will be filled with the first few dozen residents, and I hope that after living in Yamit and Neveh Dekalim, I will finally have a permanent home.
BAZAK WAS born in 1930 in Hamburg, Germany. Her father was a doctor and a scion of the famous Sharshevski family, and her mother was a homemaker. On the day Hitler came to power in 1933, a note was posted at the entrance of her father’s clinic that read, “The doctor working in this clinic is Jewish and therefore it is offlimits.”
That very same night, her father left Germany and made aliya.
Bazak and her mother and siblings arrived a few months later. Her family settled into a house on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, and Bazak has just one memory from that period. From their balcony, she watched as masses of people joined the funeral procession for the national poet, Haim Nahman Bialik. A short while later, the family relocated to Jerusalem. That is where, Bazak says, she was taught to be a Zionist and love her homeland.
“I was about five when one night my mother asked me to go stand next to the wall that separated our street from the next one and bring her a package. I will never forget the hand that emerged from a hole in the wall holding a heavy box, which I then carried back to my mother. I was asked by my mother to go receive packages a number of times, and for some reason I was neither scared nor asked my mother what was in these boxes. Only many years later did I ask her. She told me that they had contained weapons, and that she had asked me to bring them since she knew that British soldiers would not be suspicious of a little girl carrying a package.”
Asked if she was angry at her mother for putting her life at risk, Bazak replies: “No. It was common for children to be sent to carry out such missions in those days.”
Bazak remembers that during her early years, her family’s economic situation was unstable. Every year the family, with its three children, would move; they finally settled in their grandmother’s house in Bat Yam. At the time it was just a small neighborhood surrounded by sand.
When Bazak turned 13, she volunteered for the Palmah’s Elitzur Guards,and at night would walk around Bat Yam pasting posters on walls. It was not unusual for her to fall asleep at school the next morning.
“I would hide the posters under my clothing,” Bazak recalls. “I would paste them on the walls with a flourand- water mixture so that if the British were to catch me, I could just eat the dough. When I turned 15, I became responsible for the projector. I would climb up to the top of the water tower between Holon and Bat Yam and hold up a projector to light up the road from Jaffa to Bat Yam, so that Arabs would not be able to reach us. Every few minutes I would turn it on and then off, so that the Arabs wouldn’t be able to take aim and shoot at us.”
While no one would deny that this was a pretty scary job for a young girl, Bazak says: “Maybe, but that doesn’t matter. I knew that I had to keep Bat Yam safe from the Arabs, and that’s all that was important. I never complained when we ran out of food, and I had to make do with only a slice of bread and some olives. I was happy when we had a little money and could buy margarine.
I matured a lot in those days – I turned into an idealist and a Zionist. When I was 16, I dropped out of school so I could devote all of my time to the state.”
When she turned 17, Bazak began volunteering in a children’s home and later was a counselor for children who had spent time in displaced persons camps in Cyprus. Three months before Israel declared independence, Bazak joined the Palmah and began a training course to become a medic.
“What I remember most vividly from that period was all the dead bodies. There were so many of them,” Bazak says in a whisper. “I was the one who had to determine whether people were still alive. I’ll never forget how the day before the State of Israel came into existence, residents of Kfar Etzion and Palmah fighters were butchered by the Arab Legion. I was brought in from Jerusalem to take care of people who were wounded, but all I found there were corpses. I was so shocked when the first one that I saw was my friend’s fiancé.
“After that, I don’t remember anything that happened that night. I guess I worked like a robot. Later, I ran into my friend who was searching all the hospitals for her fiancé. I ran away – I couldn’t face having to tell her that he was dead.”
Asked whether this was a traumatic period for her, Bazak explains: “I don’t think I was traumatized per se, despite my young age, since I was so busy. It’s so difficult to describe the early years. We grew up knowing that this was our country, and that we needed to do our duty if we wanted it to survive. Because of my experience in the Palmah, I was the one who noticed that my grandmother had died. I was with my mother at home and we found my grandmother lying on the bed. For many years I kept thinking that had I given her CPR, she might have lived a few more years. But I didn’t know CPR back then. I was still a child, barely 18.”
WHEN BAZAK speaks of her childhood, she goes back to being that same energetic girl. Her tone becomes childish and her eyes light up with a special spark. Even though she is now 83, she seems much younger. She still lives alone and drives by herself to visit her children, who are spread out between Beit Yatir in the South Hebron Hills and Acre.
The Bazak family comprises eight children, 50 grandchildren and 40 great-grandchildren. Bazak actually knows – she laughs – most of their names, but sometimes she forgets one of the great-grandchildren’s names. Up until three years ago, when they all gathered for the yahrzeit of her husband, Shmuel, Bazak still cooked for everyone.
Shmuel, who was an economist, businessman and writer, was the son of Bezalel Bazak, a well-known religious-Zionist activist. Shmuel met Bazak when she was carrying out her military reserve duty at the Shenlar camp; she was a social work student in Jerusalem at the time. Bazak does not remember the first time she laid eyes on Shmuel, but she does remember how he helped her complete her university papers.
“He was studying economics and history, and was considered an excellent student,” Bazak laughs. “I used to see him every time he came to the medical clinic or when he would come to say the evening prayers. We married in 1952 in the Great Synagogue in Tel Aviv, and I remember being very tired. At some point, Shmuel and I snuck away from our guests and went into the women’s section. We lay down on the benches and apparently fell asleep, until someone came and woke us up.”
Over the years, Shmuel worked for the Finance Ministry and even served as the secretary of the Knesset Finance Committee. When their fifth child, Shai, was born just after the Six Day War, Shmuel left the Knesset and joined his friend, former finance minister Ya’acov Meridor, in managing a fruit shipping company.
The Bazak family once again relocated, this time to a huge house in Ramat Gan, where Shai’s three younger sisters were born. The family’s idyllic circumstances were interrupted when Shmuel died of cancer in 1982. Five weeks later, Bazak gathered together her four younger children, Shai among them, and settled in Yamit.
“The situation at the time in Israel was such that it was not possible to indulge myself,” Bazak says, as her eyes become little slits. “My four older children were married – one of them was in the midst of moving with his family to Yatir. And my dream was to move to Yamit in the hope that it might not be evacuated.”
Were you that naïve in those days? Yes. That’s how I had grown up. For me, religious Zionism was loving and building up the Land of Israel.
If my husband hadn’t gotten sick, I would have gone to Yamit much earlier and not just three months before it was evacuated. I remember that my cousin, the late journalist Michael Sasser, came to Yamit as a left-wing activist with foreign journalists. Michael was telling them that the Yamit residents understood the importance of the evacuation [in 1982]. I interrupted him and told the journalists that he was talking nonsense. Michael was very embarrassed. Since we were children we have always had heated political discussions with each other.
Did you have any physical altercations with soldiers like [former Kadima MK and former minister] Tzachi Hanegbi did? Tzachi acted a bit crazy there. He’s a very unique person. I was making a statement by living there, but I wasn’t interested in causing any trouble. I did not teach my children to fight with Israeli soldiers.
BAZAK’S FAMILY returned to Ramat Gan after leaving Yamit, but Bazak did not rest on her laurels. “Even though I had been thrown out of one place, I knew I would find another where I could be of use,” she says.
“At the Yamit evacuees’ conference, people spoke about moving to Gush Katif, and I was definitely interested.
Why would I want to live in central Israel? What kind of Zionism is that?” Shai Bazak, whose term as Israeli consul in Boston is now coming to an end, remembers when they made the decision to move to Gush Katif. “There was absolutely no room for debate,” he says. “My mother announced to us that we were moving, and we of course agreed. She is a very strong woman. She was a single mother who took her four children and began a new life in Gush Katif.
“She’s still like that today. Even though she is over 80 years old, she prefers to build a new community in the Negev, instead of enjoying a quiet life in an old age home. Her love for Israel is limitless.”
There was one incident in which Bazak’s love for Israel caused Shai a bit of embarrassment. In 1997, in the midst of talks with the Americans, three families and a few single people moved into the neighborhood of Ma’aleh Hazeitim in Jerusalem, next to Ras el-Amud.
Netanyahu ordered them to be evacuated and Bazak was one of the people protesting the evacuation. Only after Shai explained his difficult personal position, as media adviser to the prime minister, did Bazak relent and go back to Neveh Dekalim.
“When I moved to Gush Katif, I thought that the trauma we experienced at Yamit would never happen again,” Bazak says with a trembling voice. “This was the longest I had lived anywhere in my entire life.”
Yet Bazak was proven wrong. It’s still hard for her to recall the last six months of life at Neveh Dekalim. This was a time of fateful decisions, and Bazak, its oldest resident, was treated as an important member of the area’s leadership. She was presented with the Gush Katif Woman of the Year award during this period.
“That’s not very important,” she maintains. “I wasn’t focusing on home or my kids’ studies in those days. I spent all my energy on Neveh Dekalim.”
But Bazak’s friends and family were thinking about her in those last days at Neveh Dekalim when they celebrated her 75th birthday with singing and dancing, so they could forget for a few short moments the tough decree that had been handed down. And then Bar-Lev walked in.
“I will never forget Esther Bazak,” Bar-Lev says fondly. “Her daughter invited me to the party. I sat across from her at a table that was covered with chocolate cake and candies and listened to the fascinating story of her life. Esther was very sweet – it was very important to her to hear how I felt, too.
I knew that this was very hard for her, and I told her that it was also very hard for me. Evacuating citizens is nothing like fighting against an enemy.
“Before I left, Esther requested that we allow her to be the last person evacuated from Neveh Dekalim. We were both teary-eyed by that point. I found Esther to be a very deep-rooted person. The State of Israel has supreme importance for her. If I were to say that she is salt of the earth, it would be an understatement.
“I would be honored if she were to invite me to her 120th birthday celebration as well. I am sure that by then she won’t have just founded one more community, but an entire region.”
Were you really the last one to leave Neveh Dekalim? No, my children asked me not to be, and I acquiesced.
Are you angry with anyone from that time? I’m still angry at [then-prime minister] Ariel Sharon for deciding to carry out the disengagement, but on the other hand he has been punished enough. How he is today [comatose] is the worst punishment anyone can receive. He’s neither in this world nor the next.
At the time you were quite angry with Gen.
Gershon Hacohen, the officer who was in charge of the disengagement. Do you still feel this way? I’m not angry with him. I have nothing to say to him. His late mother had been a good friend of mine.
I didn’t want Gershon to be in charge since he was like family to me. Every week, he would stop by Neveh Dekalim for 30 minutes to say “Shabbat shalom.”
Had he refused the order it would have cost him his military career.
So he should have sacrificed his career. He’s one of us.
He grew up with us. Gershon was born 12 hours after my daughter, Ronit, in the same hospital. He shouldn’t have evicted Jews. I will never have a relationship with someone who did this to us. I cannot compromise on this issue.
I understand that you are also no longer in contact with former Gush Katif residents who now live in Nitzan.
They have given up their values for comfort. You can’t be a true Zionist if you live between Ashdod and Ashkelon. They have their priorities and I have mine.
I’m not angry with them, but neither do I speak with them. Not everyone came to live in Neveh Dekalim for ideological reasons.
How involved are you in the decision-making for the new Bnei Dekalim settlement? I was one of the first people to come up with idea, but I’m no longer one of the leaders. I’ve had enough – I’m so much older than the rest of them. In the first five years I attended all of the meetings, but I participate much less often now. I hope the next two years pass quickly – I can’t wait to move into my house there.
Are you curious to know what happened to your house in Neveh Dekalim? No. I can’t control if it will remain standing or be destroyed, so why should I wonder about it? I see that other than the four small pictures on the wall, you don’t have any photographs from Neveh Dekalim.
I don’t need photographs. Neveh Dekalim will always be here in my heart.
Translated by Hannah Hochner.


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