Ma'ayan Yadai rattles off instructions to three teenage girls helping her clean a small house in preparation for two new families coming to this Gaza Strip settlement of Netzer Chazani.
The families will arrive despite an Aug. 17 date that Israel set for the beginning of unilateral withdrawal of Israeli settlers from 21 communities in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the West Bank. In mid-July, in an effort to prevent opponents of the plan from derailing it, the Israeli army said Israelis who do not live in the Gaza Strip cannot enter settlements in the Gush Katif region.
As renters, Yadai and her family could just pick up their things and leave before the chaos of the planned withdrawal begins. But Yadai said she will not leave her community, where her husband is a sought-after cow-hoof trimmer.
Instead, she is helping to find housing in the settlement for outside supporters who are moving there in protest. Yadai organizes rooms for them in homes and helps make storage rooms into livable quarters for others. Her family shares their three-bedroom rented house with two families who arrived from the center of Israel in support of the settlers.
"These people are people of the land, people of peace. This place is blessed by God; if not, nothing would grow here," she said of Gush Katif and its residents. "To take us out of here is not the solution. We are not stopping peace. Stopping terrorism is the solution; it is also the solution for the USA and all the world."
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, considered one of the founding fathers of the settlement movement, has faced an uphill battle against many of his former supporters as he worked to gain official government approval of his disengagement plan.
As the withdrawal date neared, emotions ran high throughout Israel, and opponents of the plan have blocked traffic, planted fake bombs and participated in mass demonstrations to express their resistance. Some political and religious leaders have urged soldiers not to participate in the withdrawal, and nine soldiers now face military proceedings for disobeying orders and failing to prevent protesters from crossing into Gush Katif.
Greenhouses dot the horizon outside Netzer Chazani and the other settlements, and according to Gush Katif Council statistics some 15 percent of Israeli produce exports come from this area. Residents of the various settlements travel on a road where Palestinian vehicles are not permitted. Mothers push strollers through their neighborhoods.
Friends stop for ice cream and peruse a well-stocked bookstore in the Neve Dekalim commercial center where in mid-July store owners said they were still ordering merchandise and expected delivery to continue.
Throughout Gush Katif, where some 8,000 Israelis live in enclaves covering about 4 square miles of the Gaza Strip, modest homes surrounded by green lawns and low shade trees stand in stark contrast to the teeming, gritty Palestinian cities and refugee camps where 1.3 million Palestinians live in a space of 145 square miles.
The Jewish settlers maintain they have a connection to the area reaching back to the time of their biblical forefathers, Abraham and Isaac. In the 20th century, after the establishment of the state of Israel, there was no longer a Jewish presence in the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian control. In the early 1970s, after Israel won some of the land in the 1967 war with Egypt, Jewish settlement was renewed to provide a buffer between Israel and the Palestinians.
"Whenever somebody takes the property of others and uproots them it creates a problem," said Constantine Dabbagh, Middle East Council of Churches executive director in Gaza, noting that the land the settlements were built on was expropriated from Palestinian owners. "This is not land (the Israelis) bought.
"The land will go back to the original owners, whether private or public, so more housing can be built," he said. "People will be able to spread out. It will release pressure on everybody. We don't know exactly yet how and when."
Despite the threat of withdrawal and the mortar and rocket fire into the area by Palestinians, many Israeli settlers in Netzer Chazani would not admit to having started to pack for the move.
"Oh, I know of many people who have started to pack, but everybody is keeping quiet," said one store owner who declined to give his name as he brushed his hands across his mouth as if closing a zipper. Though not a resident of the settlements, he has closed two of his three stores in Gush Katif, he said.
"Yesterday I just locked the door of my other store and left. All the produce, all the dairy products, the refrigerators are still there. But I just don't feel like doing anything. I am 61 years old. Where will I go? I don't have the strength to start over again," he said.
He said he has been in touch with the agency the government set up to coordinate compensation for property owners, but with the amount offered him, he added, he would barely be able to pay for a stairwell in a development town. The government also has offered to move some of the smaller settlements as a whole to empty agricultural land not too far from the Gaza Strip border so as not to tear apart the community structure.
---CNS |