Dan Amiel never doubted the inevitable course of history in his patch of the Gaza strip, or his place in the struggle to make it happen.
As a rough sign of his intent, he gestures to a painting on the wall of the community hall in Kfar Darom — a fortified, battered and embittered Jewish settlement of about 65 families in southern Gaza — depicting the borders of the ancient state of Israel running deep into what is now Jordan and far into the Egyptian Sinai.
”We are like soldiers in the frontline. We were sent to fight; not with guns but by putting our bodies here to claim the land. It’s a war for all that Israel came to build here — a country,” he says.
Amiel, a 20-year-old religious student, arrived in Kfar Darom two years ago with his new bride. They had a child, whom he describes as another soldier in the struggle.
In October, a Palestinian rocket hit the synagogue where Amiel was praying, tearing off his right leg and mauling his hands. His fingers are buckled and the backs of his hands deeply scarred. It is, he says, the price a soldier pays.
But now the Israeli government has listed Kfar Darom as one of the first Jewish settlements to be cleared out by force after the deadline expires next week for the settlers to leave under Ariel Sharon’s ”disengagement plan” that will return all of Gaza to the Palestinians.
”Sharon has betrayed what we were sent here to do,” says Amiel. ”I don’t understand it. God told us to come back to Israel and build it again, and we should keep going. This is a place with a mission.”
The Israeli government’s determination to remove all Jewish settlers from Gaza has not only left Amiel with a crisis over where to live but challenged his entire view of what Israel and Zionism are about.
From Kfar Darom, established as a settlement 16 years ago, the view was always clear: the Jews were strong, the Palestinians weak. The settlements grew in little more than two decades from tiny enclaves to spacious and comfortable towns of about 8 000 Israelis sprawled over one-fifth of Gaza’s territory, including some of its best beaches, pinning 1,2-million Palestinians into what remains.
So far as Amiel and many other settlers were concerned, that was the inexorable pattern of things to come. And somehow, although Amiel was unsure how, the Palestinians would recede to the point of irrelevance.
Ask him about his Arab neighbours, and whether they might be suffering because of the settlements, and he looks momentarily stunned. ”I don’t think they have a tough time. They still support the terrorism. I don’t really think about them,” he says.
Assaults
But weak as the Palestinians were, they did not go away, and the unceasing assaults on the settlements that helped force Sharon into pulling out of Gaza also ensured that Kfar Darom was forced to live up to its motto: ”Perseverance above all”.
Five of its residents have been killed and many more maimed in Palestinian attacks on the settlement, which is sealed behind high concrete walls and machinegun posts with tanks guarding the gates.
The colony’s political campaign to halt disengagement includes a video of small children and teenagers wounded or bereaved by the attacks. It features 12-year-old Tehila Cohen, whose legs were blown off by a bomb detonated next to her school bus five years ago. In the film, Tehila hauls herself on to her prosthetic limbs and looks into the camera: ”I don’t understand what kind of soldier will be willing to drag me from my home and ruin my life for the second time.”
Tehila’s siblings, Orit and Yisrael, also lost limbs in the attack. Last year, the family home was hit by a rudimentary Palestinian rocket although no one was injured. Their mother, Noga, still says that to remove her children from the danger by leaving would be a victory for terrorism. ”People sacrificed their lives to defend Kfar Darom and the government is awarding a prize to the terrorists who killed and maimed us.
”The children ask all the time: ‘How can we give our house to the terrorist who took our limbs?’ I won’t give them the house, with my children in wheelchairs or on crutches. It won’t happen.”
The same video shows a little girl, Reut Amatai, whose mother died in the bus attack. ”Did my mother, who loved the land of Israel so much and was murdered here in martyrdom, die for nothing?”
Resistance
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Israeli supporters of the settlers, who have slipped through the army checkpoints and into Kfar Darom and the Gush Katif block, say she did not.
Among them are religious and right-wing teenagers who have turned resistance to the withdrawal into a kind of summer camp. For girls in long denim skirts and headscarves, the Gaza settlements are the place to be seen this August. Some have tagged it ”Gushstock”.
But at the weekend the Kfar Darom settlers and their supporters got a taste of what is to come. Israel’s intelligence service began its pullout by loading a large portable cabin, attached to a mast bristling with antennae used for electronic monitoring of the Palestinians, onto a lorry. As the vehicle moved towards Kfar Darom’s main gate, women with children in strollers and babies in cots strung themselves across the road and hundreds of young men and women planted themselves in front of the lorry.
Settlers pleaded with soldiers and police to disobey orders. ”Judgement day is coming. You’ll have to account for yourselves,” the settlers said. And: ”The Nazis were obeying orders too.”
Dozens of police and soldiers linked arms and marched toward the settlers. The protesters were quickly shoved aside and cars blocking the road lifted clear, leaving the stunned settlers to ponder how they are going to stop the settlement closures without resorting to violence.
”We will not use violence,” says Rachel Gdan, a 42-year-old teacher and mother of 10 children. ”We will do what the rabbi here told us to do. He’s very much against violence. He said we should try and convince the soldiers to leave us here. And then if we have to go we will go.” – Guardian Unlimited Â