Life in Gush Katif was good, even idyllic. The children had free range to roam about. No one locked their doors. And the sea was always there along with rolling acres of gleaming golden sand.
Once, a child of five went missing. The people searched everywhere, fearing the worst. At last they found him, fast asleep, under his best friend’s bed. That child is now 40 years old.
In the early days, during the 80’s, not too many Gush Katif people owned cars. So the Jews would go to nearby Khan Yunis to do their shopping or get their drivers licenses. But it was a symbiotic relationship and the Arabs in Khan Yunis depended on the Jews of the Gush as much as the Jews depended on them. Thousands of Arabs were employed by the Jewish farmers of Gush Katif.
In fact, our tour guide on 10 Buses for 10 Years, Oreet Segal, said that Ganei Tal, where she lived, employed 400 hundred Arab workers at the time of the “Expulsion.” “That’s what I call it,” she said, “Because that’s what it was.”
Segal notes that their Arab workers just wanted to do their work and go home to their families at the end of the day. Unfortunately, in uprooting 22 communities, and expelling just shy of 11,000 people from their homes (if you count those expelled from the Shomron, Samaria), the Sharon government effectively created a situation of rampant Arab and Jewish unemployment. The Arabs who had worked in Gush Katif for the Jews, were now without work. But the Jews of Gush Katif lost their farms and also had no place to live, despite assurances that “for everyone, there is a solution,” which turned out to be a lie.
As of this writing, ten years since the Expulsion, 300 Gush Katif families/expellees still have no homes.
Most of the 11,000 had no idea where they were going when they were trucked out of the communities to which they had devoted their youth and strength, making something out of nothing, a bit like the Creator. When they moved in, an Arab sheikh had dropped by with bread and salt to welcome them. “What will you do?” he asked. “No one has ever managed to grow anything here.”
Ah, but the Jews have come back, they said. Now things will grow.
And grow they did. They grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. They prospered. And all of it was l’tiferet Medinat Yisrael, for the glory of the State of Israel, for they were not only trying to carve a living from hostile growing conditions, but living the Zionist dream.
It was the government that encouraged them to live there, the government that put them there. And now, it was the government that on a capricious whim expelled them as if these people and the lives they’d built were inconsequential. They took them out in trucks, stuck them in hotels and guest houses, where some of the expellees lived for a year.
Does living in a hotel for a year sound like a fun time? It might until you consider that your children might be in separate rooms, sometimes on separate floors, behind locked doors. Or perhaps all together in one room, mother, father, and all five children.
While the expelled were in the hotels, the government set up “caravillas” for some of them, or as Segal called them, “Cardboard boxes.”
I remember all this in vivid living color, because I monitored the sitution from my perch in Efrat. I remember how the missiles rained down on the caravillas and the irony of that. We’d thrown them out of their homes for “peace” and installed them in cardboard boxes, making the expellees targets for the tens of thousands of missile attacks that would and did (and do) ensue as a result of the Expulsion.
We were a small minibus of a group, touring the communities that absorbed most of the expellees of Gush Katif. The idea behind this tour, sponsored by the International Young Israel Movement, Israel Region (IYIM), was to raise awareness of the plight of the Gush Katif people, ten years on. Nine more such groups will be visiting the area in upcoming weeks. I would urge anyone who can to sign up for the limited number of seats available, because this is one helluva shocking eye-opener.
The injustice done to these people is horrifying. It makes you sick to your stomach to think of it: how Sharon made the Expulsion an election issue, promised he would not do it. How he then promised to accept the mandate of the people and then promptly rejected the results of the referendum that was held. How he promised that the settlers would be compensated.
And how subsequently they were NOT. Not compensated.
Sure. They got something. Take Oreet, our tour guide from Ganei Tal. She had a home there that was 325 square meters and received a compensation package that was enough to build a home that was 160 square meters. Oreet and her family were farmers. They grew tomatoes, herbs, and peppers. When they had a good year, like other people in Gush Katif, they built on an extra room. What else were they going to spend their money on?
So she had this money, after 11 months of being in a hotel with her 5 children. She and her husband no longer had the farm, hence no livelihood. They were middle-aged, too old to be employable, unless they wanted to bag items for customers in the local Superpharm. But they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.
What kind of solution is THAT?
Continue reading…
From Israelly Cool, here.
