Gaza Pullout Has Everyone Guessing About Future

c. 2005 Religion News Service GAZA STRIP _ Three weeks before the scheduled start of Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Rafi Peretz planted 26,000 celery seeds in his greenhouse in the settlement of Netzer Khazani. Since it takes two months for celery to grow in the summer, his efforts might be considered, depending on […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

GAZA STRIP _ Three weeks before the scheduled start of Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Rafi Peretz planted 26,000 celery seeds in his greenhouse in the settlement of Netzer Khazani.

Since it takes two months for celery to grow in the summer, his efforts might be considered, depending on your point of view, heroic, delusional, fatalistic _ or maybe an act of faith that partakes of all three.


Given that no one is entirely sure of the logic behind Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, Peretz’s solid faith seems as reasonable a response to uncertainty as any other.

The more public image of opposition is the roiling anger of those settlers who have threatened to disrupt the disengagement, and the Old Testament vengeance of rabbis like Moshe Tzuriel, who warned that the “heavens” may punish Israeli police and soldiers involved in the evacuation with incurable cancer or fatal traffic accidents.

In contrast, Peretz’s quiet rage and sorrow _ mixed with a citizen’s respect for government and the faint hope that perhaps his pessimism about the future is misguided _ is closer to whatever passes for the norm in a place where the personal and the political are so intimately meshed.

Is the Gaza pullout the first step in a larger withdrawal from land occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, including settlements in the West Bank? Is it a peace gesture? Is it simply a bait-and-switch game so Israel can win Western support for a significant withdrawal from occupied territory while actually consolidating its position in the West Bank, especially in settlements near Jerusalem?

The Sharon government has done a masterful job of confounding Israelis and Palestinians alike, and whether this is a matter of policy or improvisatory carelessness is anyone’s guess.

Only days before the Aug. 15 disengagement, settlers _ about half of whom had signed up for relocation, while others held out for a miracle or, at the very least, the dignity of a last stand _ still had questions about what kind of compensation packages they would get and where they would move. Despite pledges by Israel to work with the government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to coordinate security and other issues, those discussions have been sporadic and, until some forward movement recently, unproductive.

A well-planned and generous relocation package for settlers and a serious effort at engaging the Palestinians, many analysts believe, would have gone a long way toward silencing critics and shoring up the more moderate center among both Israelis and Palestinians.


By fostering a more chaotic withdrawal, “Sharon is contributing a new chapter to the fictional series, `We gave them everything they wanted and they repaid us with violence,”’ Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wrote recently in a column in the daily newspaper Haaretz.

If the disengagement goes too smoothly, Sharon seems to be reasoning, it could create too strong an argument for moving quickly to decisions about West Bank settlements. The result is that the settlers and Palestinians alike feel Sharon has carelessly bulldozed their concerns.

In a speech in 2003, Sharon framed the pullout as a way to redeploy the Israeli Defense Forces “along new security lines and a change in the deployment of settlements, which will reduce as much as possible the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population.” Many interpret this, along with continued settlement expansion in the West Bank and continued building of the security fence around Jerusalem, as a promise that only Gaza settlements will be evacuated, and only for security reasons.

Others think Sharon is using Gaza as a trial balloon and that settlements in the West Bank, particularly the most controversial outposts, will be next.

One of Sharon’s vice prime ministers, Shimon Peres, said last month that no peace with Palestinians will be possible unless Israel divides Jerusalem and pulls out of the West Bank city of Hebron. Was he sending an official signal?

Everyone has opinions _ if Israel could trade in opinions as the Persian Gulf nations have traded in oil, it would be a country of millionaires _ but no one knows. That leaves plenty of room for everyone, including extremists among Israelis and Palestinians, to react to his own version of what he thinks is true. Since those versions of the truth tend to be simpler and more easily grasped than the more complex understandings held by Palestinians and Israelis of the great middle, they are the ones that tend to stick, turning both sides into caricatures.


Contrary to those caricatures, Israel’s religious right is not monolithic.

Yes, many settlers believe the country’s destiny is to own all the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, but most aren’t prepared for a bloody fight to realize that destiny. According to a recent poll by the Israeli organization Peace Now, only 2 percent of settlers say they are willing to take up arms. The disengagement is not likely to lead to civil war. It does, however, highlight the conflicting views of Israel that remain unreconciled 57 years after the nation’s birth in the ashes of World War II.

Over the past few decades, the religious right’s view of that identity has gained strength, particularly among the young settlers who’ve chosen to rebel by outdoing their parents in religious zeal and a messianic conviction in Greater Israel.

Israel’s decisive victory in the 1967 war became a challenge to the view of Zionism as a secular, democratic movement. Nationalists and religious fundamentalists _ including Sharon, then a general, who argued for the “Zionist answer” to Arab hostility _ felt security interests and God’s will justified building Israeli settlements and suppressing the rights of the Palestinians who lived in the newly occupied territories. These are the same forces challenging the Gaza pullout.

On the lunatic end of the opposition are the rabbis and far-right activists who recently invoked a lethal pulsa denura (“lashes of fire”) curse against Sharon. The fringe also includes many of the demonstrators who attended the Woodstock-like rally in mid-July at Kfar Maimon _ a moshav, or farming cooperative _ near Gaza, where thousands of settler supporters, most of them in their 20s, faced off against Israeli soldiers, also in their 20s, chanting slogans like the ever-popular “Jews don’t evict Jews.”

There’s also a more moderate end of the right, made up of people like the Peretzes, who resist with obstinate pride but refuse the path of violence.

When I first met her, Rachel Peretz, responding to a question about how she and her family would deal with the disengagement, said firmly, “My husband planted celery yesterday. He planted it today. And he will plant it tomorrow.” In other words, she wanted to make clear, she and Rafi and their six children weren’t planning to go anywhere.


Rachel and her friend Michal Dana, who had moved to Netzer Khazani two months before with her husband, Yehudah, and seven children in a gesture of solidarity with the Gaza settlers, were adamant they weren’t leaving.

“This is our land,” said Michal. “We were promised this place.”

Added Rachel, “No people would surrender or give up their land.”

But the next week, the Peretzes seemed resigned to relocation. “I’m doing as much as I can as long as I can,” said Rafi. “When the soldiers come, we will make them coffee and tea. I will ask them for two minutes to take down my mezuzahs. And then we will take our bags and go. Where? I don’t know.”

Some 8,000 Israelis make their homes in Gaza on land occupied by Israel after the 1967 war _ not including the estimated 700 or more people like the Danas, who have moved into the large settlement bloc of Gush Khatif, which includes Netzer Khazani, over the past several months.

They live in 21 settlements (another four settlements, in the West Bank, are part of the disengagement package), surrounded by almost 1.4 million Palestinians who, not surprisingly, are planning massive celebrations when the settlers leave.

“It’ll be like Christmas,” said Basim al Haj, a 24-year-old Palestinian at the Abu Holli military checkpoint, which is the only crossing between south and central Gaza.

Al Haj had been detained at the crossing for four days with a hundred or so other men, partly because Israeli security forces were stretched thin trying to prevent demonstrators from entering Israeli settlements, and partly because of the murder of an Israeli couple, Dov and Rachel Kol, near Gaza’s Kissufim checkpoint several days earlier.


“The Palestinians have suffered terribly with the draconian roadblocks, which have basically turned Gaza into a prison,” said Jessica Martell, who heads B’tselem, a Jerusalem-based organization that monitors Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. In the trucks lined up at the crossing, filled with rotting produce and other goods, drivers mopped their brows. Some lounged by the roadside. A week earlier, a child had been critically injured at the checkpoint by Israeli soldiers, according to an official Palestinian Authority Web site.

This wearyingly familiar ritual of humiliation and attack, attack and humiliation _ a ritual that only leads to more security fears on the Israeli side and more fury among Palestinians _ is partly why most Israelis not only support the disengagement but think that the Gaza occupation was a lousy idea from the outset, according to a recent poll by the Herzog Institute of Tel Aviv University.

If the disengagement is to lead the way to a renewed peace process and further disengagements, though, the majority view will have to make itself felt over the noisy anguish of the right.

At the funeral for the Kols, held in the late afternoon’s golden light at a cemetery high in the Jerusalem hills, the rhetoric was angry and florid.

“Sharon’s hands are dripping with the blood of my beloved,” said the Kols’ niece. Someone else noted that the funeral coincided with one of the fast days leading to Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the destructions of the First and Second Temples. “On this day bringing us closer to our remembrance of the destruction of the temple,” said another speaker, “we’re getting closer to the destruction of Israel.”

Rafi Peretz, 53, is slight and wiry and angular, his face worn by years in the sun and the crushing, humid heat of his three greenhouses. Rachel, 47, is round and fair-complexioned. Both their families are from Morocco _ Rachel’s from Casablanca, Rafi’s from Fez. Both Rafi and Rachel are native Israelis, though, and their children, ranging in age from 26 to 8, were all born in Netzer Khazani, where the Peretzes moved 28 years ago “for ideological reasons,” as Rafi puts it.


Ideological, but practical too. After the 1967 war, settlement was encouraged by Israeli governments of the left and the right. Settlers like the Peretzes were drawn by the opportunity to be in a community of like-minded observant Jews, but also by the lure of larger homes than they could afford elsewhere, made possible through subsidies and tax discounts.

That’s why many Israelis have limited sympathy for the settlers. As they see it, not only have the settlers been coddled by the state, they’ve required hefty expenditures in terms of security _ Israeli soldiers are deployed to guard each settlement _ and capital. For them, the settlers’ maddening sense of entitlement has made their own lives more dangerous, and the future of Israel more perilous, by perpetuating Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza.

In turn, the settlers feel misunderstood by Israelis who don’t appreciate the daily threats that haunt their lives.

The day after the Kols’ murder, the Peretzes _ indeed the entire surrounding community _ were still coping with the shock. One of their daughters was in a car just a few vehicles away from the Kols; Rachel knew Rachel Kol and her sister. In the morning, at a women’s prayer service, Rachel Peretz and some 20 or so other settlers read psalms and prayed for strength for the ordeal of disengagement.

“For the sake of Your name, O Lord, revive me; with Your righteousness, deliver my soul from distress,” they read, in Hebrew. “And with Your kindness, You shall cut off my enemies, and You shall destroy all the oppressors of my soul, for I am Your servant.”

The same people who read these words tinged with bloodlust are warm and welcoming. It’s seductively peaceful to be among them in their simple concrete homes on sandy lots in Gush Khatif. Children flit about happily. Michal’s toddler plays in the sand.


It’s easy to understand why people would stay here, surrounded by community and a shared sense of certainty.

Along with most of the settlers, Rachel and Rafi believe strongly that they are living on the land of Judaism’s forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. “This is our place,” said Rafi. “We have no other.”

“Everyone believes that if we give up Gaza we’re going to have peace,” said Rafi. “Hah. The Messiah will come if that happens.”

Maybe, he concedes, peace would be worth the sacrifice.

Still, for Rafi his family’s welfare trumps ideology. Had the Sharon government paid more heed to those practical concerns, it would have planted fewer potentially toxic seeds of resentment among the many Gaza settlers who share Rafi’s outlook.

“I feel as though everyone is against us,” Rafi said. “The police, the press, the high courts.”

The Peretzes will not go voluntarily, but they will go. Rafi will give up the new storehouse and refrigerator room that are almost finished, an investment of $66,000 he made during the spring, when he was still hoping the disengagement wouldn’t happen. Rachel will give up the spare, spacious house with the kitchen she designed herself.


They will not abide violence, and they will make sure that their older boys, who tend to be “hotheads,” toe the line.

As Jews have done throughout history, they will, as Rafi said, “close one door and open the next.” Perhaps the new door will open onto a future that will make the upheaval worthwhile.

He isn’t counting on it.

MO/RB END JEROME-COHEN

(Deborah Jerome-Cohen is deputy editorial page editor for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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