GUSH KATIF (Gaza Strip): Israel’s government last week postponed the implementation of its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip for three weeks, ostensibly to take into account an annual Jewish period of mourning. One look around the settlements and a few conversations with some people there confirm what has been mooted as an alternative explanation for the delay: the government is nowhere near ready. Posters line the road into the Gaza Strip, proclaiming the Jewish presence there to be “eternal” and pronouncing the impossibility of Jews evicting other Jews from their homes.
The evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan is now slated to take place in August. It will entail the removal of some 7,000 settlers who now occupy more than 20 per cent of the Strip’s scarce land, amid some 1.5 million Palestinians who live on the remainder.
The settlers are mobilising their supporters throughout the country. They show up in Gush Katif, the settlement bloc in the south of the Strip, for demonstrations on holidays. And, as happened again this week on Monday, they blocked highways in the centre of the country with burning tyres in protests against the ‘disengagement’.
But in the settlements themselves, away from the orange-clad protesters, life continues much as before. Here and there major construction projects are still in progress, supplies are being delivered, and cranes and bulldozers are at work, as if expansion is on the agenda rather than dismantlement.
Opposite Neve Dekalim, the largest of the Gush Katif settlements, a new wooden synagogue has arisen on a spot where the ultra-orthodox believers who pray there say a settler was killed by Palestinian fire. A group of mostly very young newcomers want to set up the first ultra-orthodox settlement in the bloc. For now they sleep in tents next to the synagogue, in the soft sand dunes.
“We are here to build, not to be evacuated,” says Raziel Shevaz, barely 19, and dressed in the ultra-orthodox way, with side curls framing his face and fringes coming out from under his shirt. He is from Holon, a commuter town next to Tel-Aviv in the secular and well-to-do centre of the country.
As Shevaz talks at the end of the midday prayer, a huge explosion rocks the site, and he dives to the ground. Just a few dozen metres away a large plume of smoke rises from the settlement’s greenhouses. It is a Palestinian Qassam rocket.
The militant groups have kept up their attacks despite a ceasefire that is supposed to be in place. The Israelis have not always stuck to the truce either but the government seems to want to keep things calm for now. The group of ultra-orthodox settlers does not want to come out directly to oppose the withdrawal. “No, we are not training or preparing in any way for when the soldiers come,” says Shevaz. But the well-rehearsed rhetoric of the right does come to the surface very quickly. “What do we feel about the disengagement? Well, how do you think the Jews in Europe felt when the Nazis came to take them away?” The level of bile among the settlers varies. During a recent holiday, the settler movement had people perform so-called ‘scenes from life in Gaza’ in an open space amphitheatre in Neve Dekalim. An actor in Arab dress, leaning on a walking stick, announced himself as Abu Ziad, a Palestinian from Gaza City.
“If the Palestinian Authority knew that I was here telling you what they really think about the Jews, they would kill me,” was his opening line. He told the audience of children and their amused parents that they should never trust the Palestinians, despite all the agreements “that are not worth the paper they are written on.” Then he launched into a fictional account of how he himself one night had rounded up a few men “to kill the Jews”. Such propaganda which verges on incitement seems to reflect the official position of the Gush Katif council and its spokesmen, but is quite far removed from the responses of the majority of the settlers. One prominent rabbi in Neve Dekalim says his main problem with the evacuation is that he does not know where he and his family will live in a few months. He blames the government for not giving the settlers more time.
Socrate Soussan is an immigrant from France who has lived in Rafiah Yam since 1989. He says that four of his friends have been killed by Palestinians in the time that he has been living in the settlement. Soussan is upset that the government has not acted more quickly and pro-actively to arrange for their evacuation. “Nobody has been here to talk to us,” says Soussan.
He says he is willing to move but demands proper compensation, so that he can set up his business again somewhere else. That kind of demand is criticised especially by left-wing Israelis who contend that the settlers received enough government support when they moved to Gaza. “I don’t want more than I deserve,” says Soussan.—Dawn/IPS News Service
