Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Right-wing protesters screamed and threw stones, but the machinery of disengagement is grinding on. A report from the front lines of Israel's historic withdrawal.
Aug 17, 2005 | On Tuesday, day two of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the long-predicted clash of Jew vs. Jew finally arrived. As more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers flooded the largest Gaza settlement, Neve Dekalim, settlers and their supporters hurled stones and eggs and verbal abuse at their adversaries, most of them Israelis of the same age. At least 48 demonstrators were arrested, while others took refuge in the synagogue. Despite the hostile encounters, senior Israeli Defense Force officers said they hoped to complete the evacuation of the settlement, the center of opposition to Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan here, within 24 hours. But the real test is to come Wednesday, after the deadline for voluntary evacuation has expired.
On Monday, Tisha B'Av, the holiday that commemorates the tragedies of Jewish history, thousands of soldiers and policemen drawn from units across Israel finally received the detailed disengagement instructions their commanders had distributed. Massed in makeshift camps near Gaza, they pored over the pocket-size handbook covering every element of the operation, from how to respond to settler threats to how to calm a hysterical child. "It's good to see things in writing like this," said Dubi, an Air Force officer, wiping a layer of dust off the bright-green cover. "It makes everything feel a little less chaotic."
In Gaza, the remaining residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc were getting some last-minute instructions of their own. Over the weekend, the Yesha Council of settler leaders announced their final desperate effort to thwart disengagement by blocking convoys carrying soldiers and policemen into Gush Katif, and told protesters to head for southern towns like Sederot and Ofakim. On Monday, new leaflets signed by several prominent West Bank rabbis advised those still inside Gaza, especially those there illegally, to "hamper and prevent the movement of the security forces on the roads," though it urged them to resist without violence.
But the latest settler blockade wasn't enough to halt the disengagement countdown. As Tisha B'Av ended, and with it more than three decades of government-sanctioned Israeli residence in this coastal strip captured by Israel after the 1967 war, authorities responded to the Yesha blockade threat by setting up roadblocks on all Israel's southbound highways in the western Negev, starting at the Ashkelon junction. Later that evening, the last civilian car passed into Gaza through the Kissufim crossing. At midnight, every Israeli left in Gush Katif was officially breaking the law. Soon after, the first buses and ambulances carrying thousands of bleary-eyed troops rolled into Gaza.
Most of the northern settlements are empty now. Many of the rest are little more than ghost towns; soldiers have started marking abandoned homes with an "X" inside a circle. At least three of every five settlers have already left the coastal strip, or agreed to leave by Wednesday morning. It may be a matter of pocketbook over principle: The government has set aside more than $870 million to fund the Gaza evacuation, and those who leave before Wednesday will be fully compensated for their property. For those who remain, that offer drops by 30 percent. And thousands of residents have already made that choice, especially in the religious settlements of Gush Katif. Some say they are simply looking to make a statement by lingering as long as possible; others are vowing to actively resist their eviction.
As dawn arrived Monday and troops reached their destinations, settler frustration showed throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Shortly after the deadline hit, riots were reported in Neve Dekalim; as soldiers arrived to deliver the government's official 48-hour eviction notice, settlers inside blockaded the entrance with piles of dumpsters and wire and set tires afire. Troops haven't approached the five settlements expected to provide the fiercest resistance: the religious communities of Kfar Darom, Atzmona, Dugit, Netzarim and Katif, who negotiated their way out of a Monday meeting. The first time settler and soldier will come face-to-face in these communities is when actual eviction operations begin on Wednesday.
When they do meet, the soldiers' plan of action has been scripted in painstaking detail. First comes the knock on the door, and careful negotiation by a team leader. If they can't talk the occupants out, teams of four soldiers are assigned to enter the home and carry each settler to a bus waiting to take them back across the Green Line. The teams are divided by gender and size, from some male teams assigned the heaviest men to female teams handling women and small children. The soldiers have been trained to expect a sustained verbal assault, and a certain amount of physical abuse. The settlers are dealing with emotional trauma, said IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz, and during the beginning of this week, "we [the IDF] are there to take it, and not to dish it out."
Technically, once a house is cleared, it becomes government property, with just a few politically considered restrictions on use. But no matter what, most soldiers insist they won't be able to stay in the home of someone they've just evicted. "If I have to, I'll make myself comfortable on one of their nice green lawns right outside. I couldn't stay under the roof of someone I kicked out, I'd have nightmares," said a young Air Force captain.
The fiercest resistance so far isn't necessarily coming from Gaza settlers themselves, but from anti-disengagement infiltrators who've slipped across the border illegally all summer; by the deadline, their numbers had climbed to as high as 5,000, and border police have arrested hundreds more still trying to make it across, including some posing as television crews, and others stowing away in moving vans arriving to carry residents in the other direction. (From Monday night through Tuesday alone, authorities arrested more than 800 right-wing protesters.) It's a mixed group that includes yeshiva students, young families from other, still-legal settlements, and some sympathetic Americans (like former New York Rep. Dov Hikind and Helen Freedman, executive director of Americans for a Safe Israel, both of whom arrived this week). It's the teenagers dubbed the "hilltop youth" who worry authorities the most: groups of male religious students and others who've set up camp in tents or empty buildings and pledged to remain for a final showdown with the IDF.
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