Neveh Dekalim. 10 P.M., a knock on the door. I don't leave the computer, and as customary in the settlement that has been my home for almost five months - and where mortar shells land constantly, but where cars are parked outside unlocked, with the keys in the ignition - I invite the visitor to enter. In the doorway stand two young, unfamiliar young men, glowing with happiness. Apparently, they did not know who would be on the other side of the door, either. About 20 years old, they are bearded and wear colorful woolen skullcaps; one has a guitar, the second carries a large knapsack.
Without wasting a moment, they skip to the center of the room and burst into song: "Mitzvah gedola lihiyot besimha (It's a big mitzvah to be happy), eizeh tov hashem, eizeh tov hashem (How good is God, how good is God)!" They get into it, pull me to dance, I join. Between one song and the next I try to extract some information about the little party that has suddenly erupted in my room. They are students of Torat Haim, a yeshiva in Neveh Dekalim. On the ideological landscape of Gush Katif it is considered pious and militant, but the spirit of Jewish New Age beats among many of its students.
Nobody sent them. This is their own spontaneous initiative, which is designed to raise morale during a week when panic and depression have spread among the residents: The army has put up roadblocks and has begun to monitor the entry and exit of Israelis from the Gaza Strip. So Yair and Nachman - those are their names - are incidental troubadours, who are going from door to door. It's not so terrible if this time they landed on a reporter who is renting an apartment in Neveh Dekalim, until the evacuation.
Advertisement
The guitar was put aside, the conversation developed, and then I recognized Nachman, the guitarist, the guy I had seen at the end of June near the beach. Several dozen extreme right-wing activists had then taken over an abandoned Palestinian building in the Muasi neighborhood - the Arab enclave within the area of Gush Katif - conducted three days of street fights with the Palestinians, and also clashed with Israeli security forces. Most were not residents of Gush Katif; some were students from Torat Haim. The vast majority of local residents were disgusted bytheir actions.
One day I sneaked onto the roof of the building where they were entrenched, and there I saw Nachman. The sight was so shocking and terrible that it was etched deep into my memory: While his friends were throwing stones from behind barriers, he was walking on the roof under a barrage of Palestinian stones, upright, arrogant, playing and singing. "Eizeh tov hashem" - he was singing the same song, if I'm not mistaken. Not a single rock hit him.
As long as we had been dancing in my house, I wanted to rejoice in Nachman; I liked him. Now I couldn't. Before they left for the next house, I asked him how everything had ended then. He said that when the outpost was evacuated following that day of battles, the police had arrested him. He sat in prison for a week and then returned to Gush Katif.
"Look what a country," he said, the smile not leaving his face. "They arrest a person for playing the guitar."
Here I have once again been thrust between roles: reporter and resident, guest and host, observer from the sidelines and participant. Since last March, when Haaretz rented an apartment here, I have been playing all the roles at once, and I belong to two different communities. I am one of about 3,500 residents of Neveh Dekalim, the largest and most important of the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Like the other residents, I am no longer upset by the thunder of the rockets, I carry on a routine conversation with the neighbor hanging up the laundry, and if I have some free time on a hot hamsin day, I hop over to the beach.
The other community comprises about a dozen reporters and photographers who moved to Gush Katif a few months before the evacuation - most of them photographers with the international news agencies - in order to cover the implementation of the disengagement from up close. In spite of the competition, here too a consolidated community has been formed, socially speaking. There is no end to the contradictions between these different groups and their aims: One is suffused with faith and fighting for survival, the other is skeptical and has come to record the last months of Gush Katif.
Until recently, the settlers conducted their battle against the evacuation while making every effort to maintain the daily routine inside the settlements. Especially in Neveh Dekalim - any sign of departure from the daily routine was considered a genuine threat to the fall of the entire Gush. For that reason, for example, the settlers adamantly refused, until mid-July, to host the masses of their supporters from outside who wanted to beef up their ranks on the eve of the evacuation. But the first journalists entered already in February.
Moreover, the media have always been considered here - and perhaps now more than ever - a hostile factor conducting a tendentious campaign against the settlers and their enterprise. "The media are killing us!" cried a sign hung in the center of the settlement of Gedid. That was after those same bloody riots in Muasi, which provoked claims that the media had inflated the events and blamed the residents for the sins of the outsiders.
So why did the residents open their doors to us, in spite of everything? Cynics will say money, and there is something to that. A year and a half ago, when the press began to take an interest in housing in Neveh Dekalim and other settlements, there were a few apartment owners who didn't wait until their communities decided on a clear policy. They understood the temptation. A mobile home for which rent during the years of the intifada was NIS 200 a month, was rented out in February to journalists for twice as much - and that was just the beginning.
The key to a three-room apartment in Neveh Dekalim was handed over two weeks ago to a European newspaper for NIS 2,000 a month, and an international media network rented a villa here for $1,000 a week. But already weeks before the Gush Katif real estate market jumped to the levels of that in Manhattan, the secretariats of Neveh Dekalim and other settlements gave their silent agreement to allowing journalists to enter. For the residents this is a policy decision, whose importance and daring is hard to exaggerate: Reporters and photographers who live inside the settlements are also witnesses to intimate interactions, to emotional crises, to internal contradictions within the community.
The settlers have come to the conclusion that the media are an arena as well, in the struggle that has been tearing apart Israeli society for a year and a half. Residents have hosted journalists and photographers in their settlements, without ascertaining their viewpoints ahead of time, but in the hope of "influencing the dominant view in the media, and bringing about a cancellation of the edict of expulsion," as one of the leaders of the settlement told me five months ago.
Nevertheless, the question remains: "So are you for or against the uprooting?" Frequently, it is tossed out in a tone of suspicion and defensiveness, occasionally out of politeness and curiosity, or even not in so many words - but almost always, it is present. In everyday conversation or during an interview, I have been asked dozens of times already. Children and teens in particular do not hesitate to try to find out whether the reporter or the photographer "is for us or against us," and how much he can be relied on.
For or against, now the evacuation looks like a fait accompli. During the past two weeks - without any connection to the fact that thousands of "orangers" have sneaked in, in spite of the army roadblocks that tried to prevent exactly that, and scattered among the settlements of the Gush - residents, even some from Neveh Dekalim, have begun to seep out. This began to happen much later than the government had predicted. In the beginning, this process was conducted in secret: Some of the residents brought crates home, secretly, and began to pack. A glimpse into the garbage bins in the street revealed superfluous documents, old clothes and items that were no longer needed. At the beginning of August, individual veteran families began to leave in broad daylight, and in the past week, it has become a stream. Now the dam is expected to burst.
But many of the residents - it is hard to estimate their number - have not made any preparations so far, and are planning to remain until the end. Even a few days before the date of the evacuation, Neveh Dekalim remained a vibrant and lively place. The rabbis and the leadership want to preserve this vitality as long as possible. In the past two weeks, they have been understanding toward those who are leaving, but are encouraging anyone who can to remain. "We're not moving from here" is the title of the manifesto that just days before the evacuation was circulated in Neveh Dekalim, and hundreds of residents promised to stick it out as long as they could. Some of them are endangering their property and a large proportion of the compensation money the government promised them.
Why are they staying? In a recent Shabbat sermon, the Gaza Strip regional rabbi, Yigal Kaminetsky, said in the synagogue: "God is organizing such a miracle for us that nobody will be able to claim it wasn't he who caused it."
In the bulletin distributed to the residents, it said: "Every day in which we live in Gush Katif and look right and left and see our friends with us - every such day is another day of kiddush hashem (sanctification of God's name)." That is the official policy that has kept people here until now, but many people, even among those who choose to stay, say they no longer believe in the "miracle" that the rabbis have promised. They say they are staying in the name of loyalty to the community and the struggle against the government.
Only now does it look as though something is beginning to move, but in hindsight, it seems that it was that same week at the end of June, the week of the riots on the beach, that opened up a hidden crack in the stubborn faith of the residents of Gush Katif.
The riots, which included an attempt to lynch a Palestinian boy in the Muasi neighborhood, ended in the evacuation of the two outposts over which Jewish extremists had taken control, in an act that posed a mortal threat to the political struggle of the people of Gush Katif and to their steadfastness. Hundreds of soldiers and police stormed the outposts in the end, and the sight of those images left the residents of Gush Katif feeling helpless. Some saw in them a sign of things to come, and couldn't stand it.
The first family to leave Neveh Dekalim, some four weeks ago, left a letter in which they explained to their friends that their decision to leave before the security forces arrived was made on the day when the main outpost was evacuated, six weeks ago. "The sounds and the sights," they wrote, "were intolerable and incomprehensible to us.
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
