c. 2005 Religion News Service

MORAG, Gaza Strip _ Two decades after being evacuated from an Israeli settlement in Sinai to a similar one here, Yitzhak Idels has seen his auburn beard turn white and his wife Leah’s face become etched with lines. The cramped mobile home they left behind in the Yamit settlement bloc has been replaced by a seven-bedroom, two-floor cottage.

For another few days.

When Israeli soldiers begin clearing this isolated settlement fortress next week, the Idelses will be among a small group of families forcibly evacuated a second time.

“It definitely will be harder (this time) because I know what that feeling was like when they evict you from your home,” Leah Idels said last week. “The feeling then was that we were suffering so it wouldn’t happen again.”

It is impossible not to compare the two events.

In the spring of 1982, some 6,000 Yamit settlers like the Idelses watched as their homes were leveled in the name of peace. The landmark evacuation _ ordered by Prime Minister Menachem Begin and carried out by his defense minister, Ariel Sharon _ was the first time Israel destroyed settlements established in territories seized during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

Television footage of Israeli soldiers dragging holdouts and protesters off a hotel rooftop remains the seminal chaotic image, fueling expectations this month’s evacuation of about 8,500 settlers from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank will be even more unruly.

Even though public opinion tilts in favor of the historic evacuation from lands claimed by Palestinians as part of a future state, the exit from Gaza remains hotly debated. Some evacuees say they are being sold out to appease terrorists, an accusation that resonates among Israelis.

“Before was an expectation for peace. Now everyone knows we face terror,” said Yitzhak Idels, a 54-year-old religious school instructor. “The prime minister says it’s not a fleeing under fire, but everyone understands it that way.”

Twenty-three years ago, the Yamit settlers dispersed throughout the country. Some groups moved together to re-establish communities inside Israel. Others, like the Idelses, followed their ideology to the Gaza Strip, where the sand dunes and fledgling agricultural cooperatives resembled the destroyed communities of Yamit.

Morag is an Israeli island in southern Gaza squeezed between the Palestinian cities of Khan Younis and Rafah. The Idelses’ house stands in the shadows of a military lookout draped in camouflage netting perched several stories high. A concrete wall mural with boldly painted scenes from the Jewish Bible obscures a barbed-wire fence and the battle-scorched expanses beyond the settlement.

“We knew that this was the most dangerous area,” Yitzhak Idels said, “and that they might return it to the Arabs.”

The grandfather is an ideological stoic, avoiding any suggestion of emotional stress. No, he doesn’t suffer any trauma from the Yamit evacuation and, no, he has no feelings of nostalgia for his house or views of the Mediterranean Sea.

And just like in Yamit, he has no plans to pack the family’s personal belongings before the soldiers reach his door. Neighbors in Morag have approached Leah Idels to seek advice on preparations, but she tells them, “It’s hard to prepare. A person can be evicted overnight.”

The roots here in Gaza run deeper for settlers than those left in the dunes of Yamit. The most veteran settlers from Yamit had lived in Sinai less than a decade, but many families here now count three generations.

Sarita Maoz remembers playing amid the rubble of destroyed buildings before female soldiers arrived to pack up her room on her last day in Yamit.

She is waiting for the soldiers again.

A 12-year resident of the northern Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai, the 36-year-old lawyer says she will remain in her house until the final moment. But her children will be gone, shipped off to the grandparents.

“I won’t leave my kids here. I won’t let them see the sights that I saw or experience soldiers coming to move them,” she said, her voice trembling at times.

Back in Morag, the evacuation has become an excuse for a family reunion. A cadre of the Idelses’ grandchildren swarm around a camping tent in the salon, mimicking the anti-disengagement protesters who have set up makeshift cities in Gaza to derail the evacuation.

Now the legacy is being passed to a new generation.

“Like then, we didn’t become depressed, now we’re not becoming depressed,” Yitzhak Idels said. “We’re doing a national service, like the soldiers.

“Sometimes we win the battle. Sometimes not. But we continue to fight.”

MO/PH END MITNICK

(Joshua Mitnick wrote this story for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for photos of Leah Idels and a memorial.