Maybe you really can't go home again. But for a few former Gush Katif residents now serving in the IDF, Operation Cast Lead is a long-awaited opportunity to return to the Gaza Strip.

Yael Noyman stands in front of one of the massive concrete sewage pipes that serve as improvised protective measures in Nitzan, north of Ashkelon.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski

To be sure, it's not a standard homecoming. Itai Noyman, for example, a 21-year-old tank commander who grew up in Neveh Dekalim, is currently deployed inside Gaza. A few days ago, as the IDF was bisecting the strip to cut off the movement of Hamas gunmen and their weapons, Itai let his parents know that he had reached the ruins of the former settlement of Netzarim.

The irony of the situation is not lost on the Noyman family.

Back in Gush Katif, Itai's father, Yossi, owned a cement factory, where he employed Palestinians from Khan Yunis and the Muwassi area.

"Before the 'expulsion' they helped us put up our protest signs," says Yael Noyman, Itai's mother. "I know, it's surprising, right? We asked them, 'Do you know what these say?' And they said, 'Oh, sure, we understand.'"

The family is still in touch with many of those workers, Noyman says, and they aren't shy about saying how much they miss the Jews. "Boy, are they really crying now," she says, referring less to the current fighting than to the stagnation and hardship that have characterized the Gaza Strip since disengagement in 2005. "They're just waiting for the Israelis to come back in on their tanks and put everything back to the way it was."

Should one of those tanks turn out to be Itai's, all the better. "I hope the army finishes this operation like it needs to be done, and doesn't simply push for a cease-fire," she says. "If we don't destroy Hamas, we will have accomplished nothing." Even though her son is in the thick of things, Noyman says she hopes the IDF "really goes in and puts things in order there."

Aside from being engaged in battle, former Gush Katif residents serving in Gaza are not authorized to talk to the press. Family members who have been quoted in the past few days, however, report high morale and a special sense of purpose among them.

"Itai is so eager to go into Gaza and fight. It's how he was raised and what he's been trained for, after all," Yael says.

But Itai is not the only Noyman family member involved in the fighting. Yossi, a retired major who is no longer required to perform reserve duty because of his age but has volunteered to do so, was called up on the first night of the operation to join his unit at Southern Command's logistics base.

THAT LEAVES Yael at home in the "caravilla" site at Nitzan, north of Ashkelon, that houses many of her former neighbors. It's a place very much clinging to the past, with all sorts of businesses named after Neveh Dekalim and a "museum" documenting the settlement and subsequent "expulsion" of Jews from the Gaza Strip at the entrance to the site.

Nitzan is also a place where people are trying to move on, though. Passion-fruit vines, heavy with ripening fruit, are thriving, climbing over roofs of dozens of the temporary homes here. Many of the families, including the Noymans, have begun construction on their new (permanent) homes on lots nearby, and younger evacuees are beginning to receive building permits for subsidized housing, too.

The IDF's incursion into the Gaza Strip is reopening the wounds of disengagement that had just begun to heal. Itai Noyman, his mother says, is fighting now, but he delayed his induction for two years. "He never thought he wouldn't serve," Yael explains, "but he needed time to heal and put things in perspective before he could."

What remains to be seen is whether Itai and other soldiers like him will be able to maintain that perspective as the fight continues. The early success of Operation Cast Lead is also allowing evacuees to entertain thoughts - three years later, now that they have begun to move forward - of returning to the places they left so reluctantly.

Dror Vanunu, for example, finds the possibility of returning to Neveh Dekalim after an IDF conquest of the Gaza Strip tantalizing. Like a lot of his neighbors, Vanunu blames the current crisis on the "messianic zeal" of Israeli leaders to concede the land and the infrastructure that Gaza's Jewish settlers developed "in exchange for an illusory peace." He is waiting for an expected call-up to reserve duty with mixed emotions, saying he would eagerly fight "if the purpose is to uproot that Nazi-like and Taliban-like regime entirely," but if the goal is "only to make sure that rockets stop for a short time, or are minimized, then it wouldn't be worth risking life and limb."

"We have to destroy Hamas," Vanunu says, but "if I'm going back to Gaza, I have to know that we're not going to mess around."

While Vanunu allows himself to imagine a triumphant return to Neveh Dekalim, the Noymans won't be joining him. They spent 23 years in the settlement and miss it terribly, and yet "to start fighting again? Personally, I couldn't see myself doing it," Yael says, sighing. "But if my kids were to be able to go back some time," she adds, her voice and expression making it clear she holds out little hope of it happening, "I'd be happy."

NOTHING IS conquered yet, though, and tensions are running high in Nitzan - as in all the towns within range of the rocket fire that persists despite massive aerial bombardments in Gaza. Yael, who works for the Education Ministry instructing kindergarten teachers in the Gaza periphery, says the impact of the rocket threat is much greater than what she faced in Neveh Dekalim.

"We had thousands of mortar shells rain down on us, but the rockets are much more frightening. The Kassams make such a big 'boom.' I don't know," she says with a shrug, "maybe it's just that we have grown older. Maybe it's that we're living in these flimsy wooden homes without a reinforced room. But sitting here and wondering what we can do, and where we can go, is terrible."

The spread of the threat beyond the immediate Gaza area is a bitter and unsatisfying vindication of the warnings that Gaza settlers made for years.