Kfar Darom, Katif

Estee Shalva has the unflappable bearing of a woman who has seen it and done it all before.

Twenty-two years ago, Shalva, then the mother of four children aged three-and-a-half and under, lived in Yamit, the famed Jewish settlement in the Sinai that Israel established and then abandoned when it returned the peninsula, full of sand dunes and red-tinged mountains, to Egypt in 1982.

Like the rest of the Amit pioneers, Shalva, an Orthodox Jew who felt compelled to settle the Land of Israel for ideological reasons, fought the army?s forced evacuation but ultimately had no choice but to leave.

Now Shalva may be forced to move again.

When she and her husband, Moshe, left Yamit they relocated to Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. While many of her fellow settlers made the sandy terrain bloom with greenhouses and clusters of palm trees, the Shalvas opened a family stationery store in the central square of Neve Dekalim, the largest Jewish community in Gaza.

Interviewed in the store just days after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his determination to dismantle 17 of Gaza’s settlements, Shalva, now 47 and the mother of 12, recalled the government’s first full-scale evacuation of a settlement.

The soldiers took us from Yamit, where we had lived for two years. They put us on a bus to Beersheva and left us at the central bus station with four children and two suitcases and said, “You’re on your own. Our parents are Holocaust survivors and suddenly we felt like refugees in our own country, Shalva says, shaking her head in long-remembered disbelief.

“We didn’t believe it could happen, that a Jew could force another Jew to leave his land. If a non-Jew did this, we’d call it anti-Semitism, Shalva asserts.

Asked how she felt when she heard Sharon’s statements, Shalva doesn’t spout platitudes.

“I’m not like I was back then, when I thought it couldn?t happen, but I don’t believe God will let it happen”, she says. “You can’t not think about it, but I’m too busy doing day-to-day things to obsess over it. One of my daughters is getting married and God willing, she’ll move here, too, to Neve Dekalim”.

While recent Israeli governments of all stripes have talked in the abstract about relinquishing some Gaza settlements in the framework of a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians, no one in Israel expected Sharon to say that all of Gaza is expendable. His support of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza once was a given.

That the prime minister is suddenly seeking the approval of President Bush to relocate the Gaza Jews to West Bank settlements has also created shockwaves in right- and left-wing circles.

Within days of the double bombshells, Gaza settlers and their supporters devised a multifaceted campaign to fight the proposed evacuations and mobilize public support in Israel and elsewhere.

As part of the media blitz, settler leaders and their supporters, including some in Sharon’s own Likud Party, have accused the prime minister of playing the “Gaza card” to deflect attention from a Justice Ministry investigation into his possible misconduct in a Greek land deal. Taking a cue from settlers on the Golan Heights, who successfully waged a public-opinion campaign in the 1990s by inviting their fellow Israelis to visit the Golan, Gaza’s 7,500 Jews just launched an all-out effort to acquaint others with their communities.

Earlier this week, thousands of Israelis visited the Gaza settlements on a daylong trip organized by the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlers. They drove here in 17 bulletproof buses and hundreds of private cars for a tour of “Jewish Gaza” and a festive street fair in the center of Neve Dekalim. The fair, which featured such made-in-Gaza products as organic vegetables, flowers and artwork, was held the day after Tu b’Shvat.

In addition to attending the fair and touring greenhouses, the visitors toured a small museum that links Gaza’s biblical roots to present-day settlements. At the end of the day, they fanned out again to the various settlements and planted saplings. Those who made the trip, mostly religious, right-wing Israelis already sympathetic to the settlers, said it reinforced their belief that Israel should not relinquish a single settlement to the Palestinians.

Others, such as Staten Island resident Tully Nadel, who was in Israel visiting family, called the tour eye opening.

In the newspapers you read a lot about how terrible it is here, but it’s pretty normal, Nadel said during the long bus ride back to Jerusalem. “With all the shooting and fighting we hear about, people, at least on the outside, go about their normal lives. They have a lot of courage and they deserve to be supported 100 percent”.

This is the kind of response Gaza’s Jews are working toward. They are banking their futures on the hope that the people who meet them, who see their fields, their houses, parks and kindergartens, will return home inspired to fight Sharon’s evacuation plan.

“Our goal is to show Sharon that Gush Katif has a lot of support”, says Eran Sternberg, who has come to the tiny settlement of Kfar Darom, which has just 60 families, for a tree-planting ceremony.

Sternberg, a resident of the Ganei Tal settlement as well as a Gaza spokesman, says today’s tour was just the first shot in the Gazans? struggle to stay here.

“Next week we’re planning a three-day march from Gush Katif to Jerusalem, as well as protests at highway junctions”, he says. “We’re also putting pressure on the Likud MKs to tell Sharon they won’t commit to a disaster as big as Oslo.

Watching as a group of Kfar Darom youngsters lay patches of sod, Sternberg tries to explain to a visitor why the 7,500 Jewish Gazans have a right to live among more than 1 million Arabs.

“It’s strange to me to have to explain why I should not be forced out of my home”, he says. “I don’t care about the number of Arabs compared to the number of Jews. If you want to compare numbers, look at the prisoner exchanges”, Sternberg says, referring to Israel’s decision last week to swap more than 400 Arab prisoners in exchange for a captive Israeli businessman and the remains of three dead soldiers.

Sternberg cites Jewish history as another reason Jews must remain in Gaza.

“This area has 2,000 years of rich Jewish history. It is an integral part of the Land of Israel”, he says. “Why do people think it’s all right to ethnically cleanse Jews from their homeland but wouldn’t consider moving a single Arab??

Yair Amitai, 15, of Kfar Darom, among the most isolated of Gaza?s settlements, says he plans to stay here no matter what.

Three years ago his mother was killed when Palestinians attacked a school bus. Another adult was killed in the attack and three children from one of the settlement?s families lost all or part of their lower limbs.

In all, five Kfar Darom residents have lost their lives, as have 15 of the soldiers protecting them.

“Today, Gush Katif is the border”, says Yair, a tall and thin teen, as a muezzin in the Palestinian town of Dir el Balach, on the other side of the huge cement blocks protecting the settlement, calls worshipers to prayer.

“If we were to move to Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan”, he says, “then Tel Aviv or Ramat Gan would be the border”.

This article ran in Jewish Week, February 13, 2004

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