Say Sa-Nur, Hear Homesh

Monday, August 22, 2005

Almost from the very first day that Ariel Sharon announced his plan to evacuate Gaza of its Jews and to remove the settlers from four settlements south of Jenin, the conventional wisdom has been that he was setting in motion an inexorable clash that would climax in outright violence – bloodshed, insurrection, civil war, the demise of the Third Commonwealth. And as is often the case in Israeli political rhetoric, hyperbole and exaggeration fill the gaps where reason is incapable of persuading the other.

Thus, the opponents of disengagement easily moved from declaring the decision – passed by the government and the Knesset, approved by the Supreme Court – not merely illegal but evil, to calling the soldiers and police who came to remove the settlers, Nazis. And the proponents of disengagement, watching the scenes from Gaza’s settlements on TV could easily describe the childish – and sometimes dangerous -- efforts to resist the evacuation, ‘dastardly crimes.’

Today, the evacuation of Gaza’s Israeli settlers came to an end with the removal of the settlers of Netzarim, the first of the settlements planted in the middle of Gaza by a Labor Party government in the early 1970s that believed that the settlement serve a security purpose – dividing northern and southern Gaza, overseeing the tiny Gaza fishing port. It was sheer nonsense, of course, to believe that a settlement of a few dozen Israeli families could serve any security function surrounded by almost a million (at the time) Gazan Arabs, but after the 1967 Six Day War, few dared to argue with Israeli claims about how it guaranteed its security. After the withdrawal from Sinai’s Yamit, to ‘compensate’ the Rightist National Religious Party, an ally of the Likud, ‘Gush Katif’ was established in nearly a third of southern Gaza. Again, the settlement of Gaza was described to Israelis - and the world – as a ‘security belt’ for Israel. It would divide Palestinian-Gaza’s Rafah from Egyptian Rafah. As for the settlements in the northwestern corner of Gaza – they were obviously for security, a buffer between the Palestinians of northern Gaza and Israel proper.

It is easy nowadays to describe the entire project as delusional, especially now that Ariel Sharon himself, king of the settlement enterprise, came close to using that exact word – delusional – in his speech to the nation last week when he said that it was clear that the ‘dream’ of settling Gaza was impossible to fulfill. But in the 1970s and even through the 1980s and ‘90s, the settlers of Gaza were part of ‘the consensus,’ meaning Labor, as well as the Likud, voted year in and year out on the Knesset Finance Committee for the funding for the settlements. Netzarim, after all, ‘was the same as Tel Aviv,’ Sharon was saying only two years ago, as he made a mockery of his Labor Party rival for the premiership in the 2003 election, after Aram Mitzna proposed a unilateral withdrawal from only besieged Netzarim, as a gesture of goodwill to the Palestinians.

When the army and police were preparing their plans for evacuating the settlers from Gaza, they saved Netzarim for last. As the founding settlement of Gaza, it was considered one of the most ideological of the communities. Its burghers refused to allow government officials enter the gated community to discuss post-disengagement plans with the residents. Those (few) residents who dared mention that they were making plans for the post-disengagement era were immediately ostracized by their neighbors. In a community as tiny as Netzarim, indeed as tiny as the entire Gaza settlement project, barely 1,500 households, that kind of treatment by one’s neighbors is mortifying.

So, convinced that the great battle for the evacuation would take place at Netzarim, the army and police saved that settlement in Gaza for the last stage of the Gazan withdrawal. By the time they got around to Netzarim, the commanders reckoned, the troops would be experienced with all forms of resistance to the evacuation. They didn’t take into account that perhaps it would be the inhabitants of Netzarim who would learn the lessons.

And that’s what happened. As the inhabitants of Netzarim saw how the ‘illegal infiltrators’ trashed the communities they invaded elsewhere in Gaza, as they saw how the images of settlers haranguing soldiers and police turned public opinion against the settlers, the combative mood in Netzarim changed from militancy to a resignation that would not preclude protest, but would not include physical resistance. At least not mass resistance.

So, today, the TV images and the radio reports from Netzarim’s evacuation are emphasizing what the settlers wanted emphasized: their sorrow, their disgust with the politicians, their insistence that their ‘positive values’ would continue to energize Israeli society. Nothing was said about how most of the Israeli households in Gaza lived off government salaries, nothing was said about how the ‘magnificent agriculture’ of Gush Katif and Netzarim was largely made possible by free land, cheap water and even cheaper Palestinian labor. Nothing was said about the hundreds of lives lost on both sides because of the delusion that Netzarim and its ilk could survive without massive army protection, without massive repression of Palestinian ambitions for freedom from foreign rule.

Thus, as the withdrawal of the Israeli civilians from Gaza draws to a close – there’s still at least a month of logistical operations to demolish the buildings, remove the rubble and only then hand over the territory to the Palestinians – the image is of tearful settlers leaving behind lush gardens and rich homes, claiming they are being made homeless by a heartless government that they promise to bring down. They are refusing to take responsibility for the fact that none of them engaged the Sela evacuation-compensation administration to help them find a solution for their immediate housing needs. Not a word is being said about the hundreds of thousands of dollars the families will get from the government to rebuild their lives. It’s not an image of rioting teenagers, screaming shrews, and weeping soldiers as is remembered from Gush Katif last week.

Now, the attention turns to the settlements of Sa-Nur and Homesh, which the original Israeli inhabitants abandoned after Oslo, when the settlers found themselves essentially living inside Palestinian territory.

Ever since the original Sharon announcement of his planned ‘unilateral disengagement’ 18 months ago, militants have been moving to the two settlements south of Jenin, with the expressed goal of preventing Israel from giving up any part of the West Bank. By evening, says the army and police, the deployment for the evacuation of Sa-Nur and Homesh will begin. Yesterday there were skirmishes on the approach roads to the settlements. A soldier was hospitalized with a concussion. Rumors speak of stockpiled weapons. Other rumors say the settlers have voluntarily given up their weapons. At least one member of Knesset, Arye Eldad, is in Sa-Nur, ostensibly part of a leadership for people whom even the Yesha Council is now referring to as a lunatic fringe. It might all be exaggeration, like the promises that Netzarim would turn into a new Massada. But the army and police aren’t taking any chances. Thousands of troops will be heading that way in the coming hours.

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