Israel will soon begin evacuating thousands of Jewish settlers from teh Gaza Strip, but many of them feel they've been betrayed, writes Nuala Haughey in Gush Katif
The writing is on the wall for the Gaza Strip's 8,000 embattled Jewish settlers and nothing short of a miracle will save them now. In just over a week's time, Israeli soldiers and police will begin evacuating people from their attractive detached villas in all 21 of occupied Gaza's fortified settlements, a painful uprooting for those who see this coastal tract of dunes and scrub as their biblical patrimony.
The desert land the government-sponsored settlers have cultivated for more than 20 years will be turned over to Gaza's 1.2 million stateless Palestinians in a historic realignment of Israel's frontiers which many here bitterly perceive as a reward for terrorism.
Ariel Sharon, the politician formerly known as the settlers' patron, is today the architect of the planned "disengagement" from the conflict with the Palestinians. The plan involves pulling settlers out of Gaza and a small pocket of land in the north of the occupied West Bank, all territory which Palestinians want as part of a future state.
Ultranationalist Jewish demonstrators, who are excluded from Gaza's settlements by military order, held the second of two mass demonstrations this week, chanting religious anthems and raving about the "catastrophic" scheme of the "dictator" Sharon. The demonstrators included teenagers and children with their parents, but also extremists who have pledged to infiltrate the heavily guarded communities to thwart the withdrawal, scheduled to begin on August 15th.
But inside Gaza's main settlement bloc of Gush Katif (Harvest Bloc), the atmosphere has been oddly calm. Municipal workers were this week busy tending to the flowers and date palms outside the public buildings in Neveh Dekalim, the urban centre of the Gush Katif bloc which runs along the south-western corner of the Strip.
Neveh Dekalim's modern shopping plaza is awash with posters exhorting people to continue the struggle against the pull-out and urging residents to convince soldiers due to evacuate them to listen to their consciences and realise that "a Jew does not expel a Jew".
But more telling, perhaps, is the "35 per cent off all stock" sign in the front window of a small ladies' clothes shop and the large notice in the supermarket regretfully advising customers they can no longer buy on credit.
The trickle of departures began this week, with scores of settlers taking the keys to 300 government-built luxury prefab homes called "caravillas" in the sand dunes of Nitzan, a small coastal community north of the Strip.
Socrate Soussan (49) is moving into one of these 60-sq metre homes and, in preparation for the down-sizing, he has sold some of his furniture to the Palestinians who tend tomatoes in his hothouses for less than €10 a day.
Last weekend, he even gave his workers some puppies, escorting them to the Israeli military checkpoint on their way back to their homes in the Palestinian side of the Strip. For 16 years, the French-born fisherman and farmer of Tunisian origin and his wife Brigitte (42) have lived in Rafiah Yam, the most southerly of Gaza's settlements, which has fabulous views out over the Mediterranean Sea.
Socrate is not religious; he moved to this settlement purely for the lifestyle it offered, and is anxious to differentiate himself from those who he calls fanatics and "sals colons" - dirty settlers.
"For some it's the Promised Land and they want to stay here. I don't think that. I'm not an ideologue. Sharon's plan will strengthen Israel and for that I am prepared to leave, even though I am leaving a paradise," he says.
Socrate clearly gets a kick out of the frontier feel of this settlement abutting the Egyptian border and the Palestinian town of Rafah, which has seen countless Israeli army incursions to thwart militants smuggling arms from Egypt.
Tucked into a hip holster attached to his cut-off denims is a Smith and Wesson handgun, and he says he has an M16 in his bedroom. Three of his friends have been killed in the settlements by Arabs and he supplies details of each ambush, concluding that the fatalities were because the settlers dropped their guard.
For years now, Brigitte has wanted to leave this place, to rear their twin 10-year-old sons Dan and Ron in a less hostile environment. And now they have a chance to get out with a €500,000 buy-out package, a payment well above the family average which should more than adequately cushion the family as they rebuild their lives inside Israel.
Gaza's settlers are eligible for housing and business compensation, moving grants, rent grants and personal grants based on length of residency. There are also special loans (which turn into grants after five years) for those willing to move to designated regions such as the Negev desert in the south or the Galilee region in the north, and compensation for loss of income to salaried employees. The evacuees will stay either in trailer homes or hotels until permanent housing is secured or built by the authorities. The resettlement budget is about €700 million, a fraction of the overall $1.7 billion (€1.38 billion) cost of the disengagement - a hefty tab which Israel hopes will be collected by its major patron, the United States.
Socrate was initially reluctant to talk about compensation; it is clear settler leaders don't like residents to broach these topics with journalists. And for good reason, as mention of six-figure sums chip away at the victim status they have been carefully cultivating, and indeed believe in.
Settler leaders consistently direct journalists to hard-line religious residents whose ideological conviction is strong, and is usually accompanied by an utter rejection of the international consensus which views all Israeli settlements on land it has occupied for the past 38 years as illegal. While the worldview which cherishes this land as sacred and disavows Palestinians' claims for statehood is certainly prevalent here, it is not the only one. Six of the Strip's 21 settlements, comprising some 1,800 residents, are considered either totally secular, or mixed communities, like Rafiah Yam.
For some residents, this is simply the place where the government sent them at the height of Gaza's settlement boom in the 1980s, with cheap mortgages, business loans and grants. If you ignore the soldiers guarding these clustered communities, they look just like US-style housing estates with handsome and spacious red-roofed villas, expansive gardens and bougainvillea-lined streets.
BEFORE THE PALESTINIAN rockets and shootings started when the current intifada erupted almost five years ago, life here must have been very pleasant; the area even attracted Jewish tourists. There are good schools and kindergartens, plenty of play areas for children, sandy beaches on which to spend Sabbaths and a strong, kibbutz-like community spirit. The settlements are mostly agricultural, with romantic names which translate as Song of the Sea, Gardens of Dew and Fishing Boat.
Older residents remember a time when the area was not bristling with army towers and checkpoints for their protection and they could pop into nearby Palestinian towns to do their shopping.
Dror Vanunu (29) represents the official face of the Gush, as locals call it. He is director of the Katif Region Development Fund which raises money for community projects such as play areas.
The chatty Israeli-born father of three welcomes us into his spanking new modern bungalow which he moved into four months ago. His first remark upon hearing we are Europeans is a glib reference to those "crazy Muslims, you are starting to feel them now in Europe". While other residents were this week packing their belongings into containers and dismantling the hothouses which used to grow herbs, flowers and vegetables, Dror was planting an olive tree in his sandy garden and responding to questions about his plans to quit the area with a silent glare.
"When the Hamas terrorists are shooting the Qassam rockets at us, on most of them they write 'Al Quds' [ Arabic for 'Jerusalem']," he says. "Their target isn't Gush Katif, it's the state of Israel. They want Israel. They say it clearly and loudly and only stupid people or liberal professors can say that they really don't mean it."
New York-born Bryna Hilberg (55) and her husband Samuel (56) are also in the ideological camp, but at least they will talk about the plans for E-day. The couple say they will not voluntarily leave the home they have lived in for 26 years in the small agricultural settlement of Netzer Hazani which is among the oldest in the Gush bloc, established in 1973.
"Our plans are to stay here and if they come and they move me out they will have to take us to a hotel until they find a different way to solve the problem," says Samuel. "They'll come in and carry us out. We're not going to fight anybody. We will passively resist."
The Hilbergs grow organic cherry tomatoes for export to European retailers, including Marks & Spencer. They raised six children in their attractive villa, its garden brimming with fruit from their mango, pomegranate and orange trees.
The couple moved to Israel in 1972, inspired by the romantic Zionist impulse to make the land of their biblical ancestors bloom. They wanted to live in a young agricultural community and the government gave them a choice: Gaza or the Golan Heights in the north, both territories which Israel conquered from neighbouring Arab states during the Six-Day War of 1967.
They chose Gaza because of its location and warm climate and were given their house and two greenhouses on a part grant, part loan basis.
"This is ours, we built it and there was nobody here before we moved in," says Samuel. "We didn't push anybody out of here." Samuel later mentions that they can see the Palestinian town of Khan Younis from their house. Khan Younis is a large, dirty, cramped refugee camp of 50,000 residents whose access to the sea is cut off by the settlements, which have also inhibited any natural expansion westward.
So what about Palestinians' desire for statehood? "I don't understand whey the world is so upset that the Palestinians have to have a state," says Samuel.
"Why don't the Basques have to have a state, why don't the Kurds have to have a state? Or the American Indians? Why doesn't every other minority in every country that thinks it has to have its country have its own country?"
But could the settlers' painful concession not be a step towards the internationally sponsored Road Map which envisages a Palestinian state living peacefully with its Jewish neighbour?
"By giving in to terror all you do is create more terror and the Arabs see that," replies Samuel.
"And they are already planning victory celebrations," adds Bryna. "We ran out of Lebanon and that encouraged the last five years of fighting here. Lebanon was a bona fide country. We are not talking about a bona fide country here. Gaza is part of the Land of Israel."
BOASTS BY HAMAS militants that they are driving the Israelis out of Gaza just as Israel was driven out of southern Lebanon in 2000 by Hezbollah are particularly galling for the Hilbergs. Their 22-year-old son Yohanon was killed in Lebanon in 1997 when an operation by his elite Israeli naval commando unit was foiled. His body is buried in Gush Katif's only cemetery, along with three other soldiers and six settlement residents killed in Palestinian attacks. All 48 graves are due to be relocated in the coming days.
Palestinians fear Sharon's plan to evacuate a total of 9,000 settlers from 25 settlements in the Gaza Strip and West Bank is part of a ruse to deny them statehood by strengthening Israel's hold on land in the occupied West Bank and Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem where some 430,000 settlers live alongside 2.5 million Palestinians. But the Hilbergs see it as part of a cunning scheme by Sharon to divert the public agenda from police investigations of his alleged role in corruption scandals.
Whatever Sharon's motives, polls show that most people in this largely secular state welcome the withdrawal. For many, Gaza's isolated tiny settlements in the midst of a densely populated Palestinian area are a demographic no-brainer and are not worth the cost of defending, financially or in terms the lives of soldiers who guard them.
Even still, it will not be easy for Israel's Jews, a historically persecuted and rootless people, to watch their kin being uprooted again, even if they are merely moving from occupied land to Israel proper. Some of Gaza's older settlers are Holocaust survivors and others already experienced the trauma of evacuation in 1982 when the Sinai settlement of Yamit was demolished following a peace deal with Egypt.
In a country where hyperbole is de rigueur and tolerance of others' opinions is far from the norm, opponents of the plan have exploited every angle in their PR battle. There have been road blockages, dire warnings of civil war, newspaper reports of planned mass suicide by extremists and speculation that, with the Strip's settlements gone, Palestinian mortars will soon be raining down on distant Jewish cities such as Tel Aviv, Ashdod and Afula.
People have invoked the language of the Holocaust by talking of the "transfer" of Jews and, there was even a short-lived craze for orange Stars of David akin to the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear during the Nazi era. Orange has become the colour of the disengagement opponents who have churned out ribbons, bumper stickers, T-shirts and rubber wrist bands. Supporters of the plan belatedly adopted the colour blue from the national flag, but they have been swamped by the orange tide and complain that attaching a blue ribbon to their car antenna is an invitation for the aerial to be snapped.
Leading the hysterical wing on the orange side is a small but vocal group of ultra-nationalists, including messianic rabbis and the "hill top" youth from the West Bank settlements. Death threats have been made against Sharon, and a group of extreme right-wing activists put an ancient and deadly "bolt of fire" curse on him similar to one placed on the former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin before he was assassinated in 1995.
The 19-year-old army deserter who on Thursday shot dead four Israeli Arabs on a bus in the town of Shfaram, before being lynched by an angry mob, did so in protest at the evacuation. There have been mini-mutinies amongst the mainly conscript army, with soldiers reduced to tears and dozens disciplined for refusing to take part in planning the evacuation. One hesder yeshiva platoon, whose soldiers combine military service with religious study, was disbanded in the past fortnight after nine of its soldiers disobeyed orders. Soldiers due to take part in the evacuation are being offered trauma counselling.
Gush Katif's settlers have produced a DVD which includes footage of a visit by Sharon four years ago when he told them they were "the frontline of defence and the backbone of Israel". This week, he had a different message for them: "Don't be tempted to believe that the disengagement won't be implemented or that it will be delayed."
But in a community where every Palestinian rocket that has failed to kill or maim has been declared an act of a benevolent God, there remain those who still believe in miracles.
E-day in the Promised Land Gaza Strip: a rough guide
The Gaza Strip is a roughly rectangular coastal area on the eastern Mediterranean, bordered in the south by Egypt and in the north and east by Israel. It is 28 miles (45km) long, no more than 8 miles (12.8km) across at its widest point and 3 miles (4.8km) at its narrowest, and encompasses an area of approximately 140sq miles (225.3sq km).
Prior to 1948, the Strip had no territorial demarcations, but was part of British-run Mandatory Palestine. It was intended to be included in a new, contiguous Arab country under a 1947 UN plan which also envisaged the creation of a Jewish state, but which was rejected by Arabs.
The UN plan foundered in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 which followed the creation of the Jewish state, and Gaza came under Egyptian control. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out of the new-born Jewish state during the Arab-Israeli war, and some 250,000 wound up in Gaza refugee camps.
Israel seized the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Six-Day War, along with the West Bank of the River Jordan, land which had been set aside for a future Arab state under the UN partition plan. The United Nations considers the West Bank and Gaza to be occupied territories, but many Israelis reject this view, arguing that they are "disputed" territories.
Gaza's settlers, most of them Orthodox Jews, constitute about 0.6 per cent of the Strip's total population, yet their homes and the military infrastructure in place to guard them consumes about a fifth of its land. The settlements control prime agricultural land, some of the area's main aquifers, and approximately one-third of the total coastline of Gaza.
About 1.2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, one of the most densely populated regions of the world. There are 123 persons per square kilometre in the Gaza Strip's settlements, compared to 4,362 persons per square kilometre in the rest of the Gaza Strip.
A Jewish presence in the Gaza Strip can be traced back to biblical times, but many Jews do not believe that Gaza was part of the biblical Land of Israel, Erez Israel.
The first Jewish civilian settlement was founded in the Strip in 1970. It was named Kfar Darom, meaning south village, after a legendary Jewish kibbutz founded in 1946 and destroyed by the Egyptians in 1948.
Gaza's 21 settlements are clustered in five "fingers", designed to be defensive buffers between Egypt, the Palestinian population, and the western Negev region in Israel proper.
The settlers say Palestinian militants have fired 5,300 rockets at their settlements in the past five years of the intifada.