A trip to the shop is a 37-mile round journey and part of it in an army convoy. Every excursion carries the risk of ambush by Palestinian militants.
Two residents of the settlement of Ganim have been killed in ambushes and several have been wounded. Twenty families have already left the community, which is next to the Palestinian city of Jenin, and last week the remaining 35 sent a letter to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, requesting negotiations on evacuation.
It read: ‘We ask you and those in office to begin negotiations with us to evacuate the settlement willingly.’ The residents wrote that they wanted these negotiations because of ‘the difficult security situation of our settlement and the progress in the peace process in our region’.
It was a rare example of moderation among the 225,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza who have become a byword for extremism and are seen as a big obstacle to the kind of peace apparently envisaged by George W. Bush, Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, better known as Abu Mazen, the Palestinian Prime Minister, in Aqaba last week.
A more common example was found among the thousands of settlers who congregated in Jerusalem last Wednesday to demonstrate their outright opposition to any of the aspects of the ‘road map’. Their banners read: ‘God’s Road Map: the Bible gave us the land’ and ‘Road map equals reward for terror’.
Yet Ari Achdari, a father of three, rejected that attitude. ‘We are not like them,’ he said. ‘Almost all the families in Ganim live here because it is a nice place to live, not for ideological reasons. I believe in the road map. Let each live in his own area, even if it means we have to give up our homes. If they decide that Ganim is small and isolated and should be given up, so be it.’
His neighbour, Avner Sinuani, a member of the central committee of Sharon’s Likud party, signed the letter on behalf of the community. ‘The state is holding us hostage,’ he said. ‘If the state knows it is going to evacuate us, why does it keep us here? My blood is not up for grabs.
‘The state sent us here 20 years ago and now it seems as far as they’re concerned we’ve done our bit and can go.
‘I also see the ideology changing with the times. Once, they said “not an inch” and spoke of “both banks of the Jordan”. Today they are talking about a Palestinian state. So I ask: why do you keep me here?…Settlements are going to be cut up like nothing. I don’t want people from Elon Moreh [considered an extremist settlement] telling me what to do. It must be stated that there are settlements willing to evacuate in a proper ordered way.’
Sinuani did not always feel this way. He moved to Ganim in 1983 because of ideological reasons, such as the belief that to ensure that the West Bank remained a part of Israel it had to be settled. He is now more concerned that his children refuse to visit him because of the danger.
Sinuani and Achdari are both from the Yemeni Jewish community, speak Arabic well and maintain telephone contact with friends in nearby Jenin. Achdari said: ‘When the intifada started I was drinking coffee with Arab friends in Jenin watching it on television. Now it’s too dangerous for us to go there. We risk being shot in the head and they can’t come up here because someone might say they are an Israeli informer.’
His wife Dinah said that, in spite of the problems of the past three years, they have remained in touch with Jenin. ‘We treat people as people. I have a friend, an 80-year-old man who still calls us even after his granddaughter was killed by Israeli soldiers as she went to school.’
A part of their motivation is the fear that at some point they will be forced to move without being offered any compensation or alternative housing. Dinah said: ‘People in Israel think we live here for free, but we have put everything we have into our homes. We don’t want to become millionaires but we do want some kind of compensation. I will leave, but I will leave with great sorrow.’
The residents of Ganim have yet to receive a reply from Sharon. Sinuani said: ‘I hope he will reply soon. We are not sitting on our luggage, but we want to know what our future holds.’