Former Gaza Settlers Feel Abandoned on the Roadside

c. 2006 Religion News Service YAD MORDECHAI, Israel _ The row of tents that includes Yossi Levy’s temporary refuge is a roadside blur to those driving north of the Gaza Strip. The tent city, pitched in the shadow of a gas station in August after residents were evicted from a settlement three miles away, was […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

YAD MORDECHAI, Israel _ The row of tents that includes Yossi Levy’s temporary refuge is a roadside blur to those driving north of the Gaza Strip.

The tent city, pitched in the shadow of a gas station in August after residents were evicted from a settlement three miles away, was supposed to be packed up in a matter of days. Instead, Levy and about 80 other former Elei Sinai settlers hunkered down in sleeping bags, fired up electric generators, and held out in their negotiations with the Israeli government on their future homes.


“It’s not easy living in a tent, but we’re surviving,” Levy said.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon removed the Gaza Strip’s 8,200 Jewish settlers last August. That the residents of the tent city have become almost forgotten serves as an important lesson ahead of Israel’s March 28 parliamentary elections. There have been two important shifts in Israeli public opinion: an unprecedented demand for a unilateral divorce from the Palestinians, and a growing acceptance that settlements like Elei Sinai must be sacrificed so the break can be made as cleanly as possible.

As Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at a Jerusalem research institute, the Shalem Center, explained it: “The Gaza withdrawal was inconceivable, and yet the inconceivable not only happened but happened with relative ease. Now the country is confronted with a prime ministerial candidate who promises even more unilateral withdrawal, and the public is reacting not only with equanimity but with support.”

Public opinion polls consistently favor Kadima, the political party founded by Sharon and inherited by Ehud Olmert after Sharon suffered a stroke in January, leaving him in a coma. When Olmert, the acting prime minister, suggested earlier this month that he plans to set Israel’s border by 2010 with or without the Palestinians, most Israelis understood the subtext: a new pullback and more settlement evacuations on the West Bank.

Before last year’s exit from Gaza, an announcement like that would have rallied tens of thousands of settlers to demonstrations in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. But the once-ubiquitous orange ribbon symbolizing solidarity with the settlers is rarely seen today.

Residents of the tent city say they feel betrayed by politicians and settler leaders, so they aren’t expecting much on election day.

“People are too hurt by the government to talk about elections,” Levy said. “It’s hard for someone in this situation to decide to give their vote to a party.”

The plight of the tent city could have generated sympathy for the right wing’s election campaign to unseat Olmert. But the displaced residents have had little political contact. They say they are more focused on their private battle to find a new home. They say government lawyers have dragged out talks for months.


“They don’t understand what it’s like to be evacuated,” said Levy’s wife, Molly. “Those who live in Tel Aviv don’t care about us. Even during the evacuation, they didn’t care.”

After seven months she is weary of this place. The 49-year-old grandmother explains there is no privacy and no place to host her family.

Residents here share almost everything, from kitchen duty to access to six rancid showers.

“Just like in the army,” joked Yossi Levy, a bear of a man with a gray mop of hair.

The Levys miss the suburban comforts of upper-middle-class Elei Sinai. The family’s sleeping quarters is a tiny igloo tent inside a large catering tent divided among 10 couples, who hang sheets as partitions.

Eli Bohadana, a 40-year-old journalist living in the camp with his three children, said: “There is a lot of hatred toward the settlers. The prime minister’s chief of staff has never even visited here.”

It hasn’t affected Olmert in the polls. Nor has an embarrassing comptroller report that criticized treatment of the evacuees and criticized police violence against Jewish protesters on the West Bank who tried to block the demolition of nine uninhabited buildings in the hilltop outpost of Amona.


Most Gaza evacuees now live in cookie-cutter prefabricated cottages in neighborhoods planned overnight. Only a few have found permanent housing. And about 400 families remain in the limbo of hotels or this tent city.

“The ball is in their court,” said Haim Alterman, a spokesman for the government office charged with resettling the evacuees. “They are one of the last communities that haven’t found a solution.”

After relocating up the road from their former homes in the northern corner of the Gaza Strip, the tent residents have not escaped the daily tensions of conflict with the Palestinians.

Bohadana said the alarm that warns of incoming rockets is traumatizing his 31/2-year-old child.

Every time he hears the drone of a rocket, he said, “I think, `Oh, they’re firing from the rubble of my house where there was once laughter and children.”’

Bohadana, who represents the tent city residents in talks with the government, said, “It’s not clear to them why it has to be like this.”

MO PH END MITNICK

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

Editors: To obtain a photo of Yossi Levy, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.


A version of this story moved today on Newhouse News Service.

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