New Jersey Jewish News Story

Mission given insiders’ look into disengagement’s aftermath

by Gil Hoffman
NJJN Israel Correspondent

JERUSALEM — Israel’s Gaza Strip withdrawal ended in August, six days after it began.

But for the evacuees and the people in charge of defending the Israelis who live near Gaza, the disengagement’s aftermath is still part of everyday life six months later.

That was one of the lessons learned by participants in the MetroWest Impact in Israel mission, which allowed members of the local community to view the work being done in Israel with the support of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey.

On Monday, March 20, the day after Hamas finalized plans for a new cabinet that will govern the Gaza Strip, UJC MetroWest lay leaders and staff spent the day meeting Gaza evacuees, visiting communities near the border, and observing IDF soldiers as they monitored the security fence surrounding the strip.

The eye-opening day, halfway through their nine-day mission, exposed participants to the challenges that were created in the wake of the withdrawal.

The day started with a visit to the Yaacov Herzog Center for Jewish Studies on Kibbutz Ein Tzurim in the northern Negev, which facilitates dialogue groups between different sectors in Israeli society. It was there that the group met with women who had been evacuated from their homes in the Gush Katif bloc of Gaza Strip settlements.

The women described their difficulties leaving behind their homes, communities, and livelihoods and the ongoing challenge of dealing with Israelis who they say have not sympathized with their trauma. The women also said the evacuations were motivated by politics, not security, and accused their guests of naivete for believing otherwise.

Ava Kleinman of Morristown said she gained an appreciation of the settlers’ views and an understanding of the tension in Israeli society in the aftermath of the pullout. She said she hoped the government was listening to the settlers and learning how to better address their needs before further evacuations take place in the West Bank.

“Hearing them talk about disengagement as ‘a crime against humanity’ shocked me because it was a decision made by a democratic country,” Kleinman said. “I learned that Israel is facing two threats: an external threat from its enemies like Iran and an internal threat from the deep social rifts that we explored today. The security threat is paramount but we also have to learn to live together here in a Jewish state.”

To that end, mission-goers had a chance to learn more about a dialogue group at the Herzog Center, sponsored by UJC MetroWest, between residents of two communities it adopted as partners through the Israel Emergency Campaign of 2001: right-wing settlers of Gush Etzion south of Jerusalem in the West Bank, and left-wing kibbutzniks of the Sha’ar Hanegev region near Gaza.

The Herzog Center’s Avraham Stein said the goal of the Etzion-Negev program was “to bridge the Green Line between Right and Left and religious and secular and to help participants discover that the other guy does not have horns.”

Mission participants then visited Nitzan, a community of temporary housing hastily built for 300 families evacuated from Gaza. They met with evacuees who run a community center on the site that was established with the assistance of a $15,000 grant from UJC MetroWest, made on the second day of the withdrawal.

Nitzan residents said that one of the main problems in the community was that families of up to six children had been crowded into homes that are too small. The evacuation sites also lack sports facilities and a library.

Supporting the displaced

UJC MetroWest associate executive vice president Arthur Sandman said that to help children affected by the disengagement, MetroWest donated $30,000 for nursery school and kindergarten scholarships, split evenly between Nitzan and Sha’ar Hanegev.

“We saw how the suffering of the people of Gush Katif cuts across political and religious lines,” Sandman said. “A lot of us will come back to our allocation discussions and talk about the need to continue supporting the displaced.”

The meetings with evacuees in Nitzan and at the Herzog Center were emotional for the mission participants. Barbara and Daniel Drench and Michael Slepak spoke at the Herzog Center to one woman whose three-year-old son talks about returning to Gush Katif. Another woman told how she had to mediate between a daughter who is a settler and a son who is an air force pilot who does not believe in settling over the Green Line.

“Sitting with the evacuees and hearing their personal circumstances first-hand made it much more real to me,” Barbara Drench said. “Your heart goes out to them no matter what your political views are. To me, it was not a political issue but an emotional issue. As a mother and a grandmother, I am concerned about the future of these people, who are starting a new life from scratch without much going for them.”

MetroWest Israel and Overseas Committee chair Joyce Goldstein of Essex Fells said she had mixed emotions after having seen the evacuees in their spacious homes in Gush Katif and then seeing them again cramped into small temporary homes.

“You have to balance the emotional with the intellectual,” Goldstein said. “I saw how they had made the desert bloom. It was an emotional feeling for me to see them again now, because one side of me said the disengagement was good for the country, but then you hear the stories about how people are suffering.”

After Nitzan, the group visited Kibbutz Erez in the Sha’ar Hanegev region. They toured bomb shelters that had been refurbished with UJC MetroWest’s assistance and are now being used for children’s activities and art classes. The visitors ascended a hilltop and looked down upon the Gaza Strip below.

They saw the locations of former Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip that are now being used as launching points to fire rockets at Israel and the nearby Reading power plant in Ashkelon, which has been targeted unsuccessfully. Mission participants said they were surprised that the kibbutz residents showed no sign of fear despite their close proximity to Gaza.

“In Erez, you can’t tell by the people that they are in a confrontation-line community,” Goldstein said. “The children don’t act frightened. You got a feeling of life.”

A separate MetroWest group was in Erez on Sunday when the kibbutz was infiltrated by a young man who came across the fences to find work. He was later found to be harmless and was released but the incident emphasized the enormous challenge of ensuring the security of the site.

The last stop of the day was at an IDF base, where a corps of young women soldiers are in charge of monitoring cameras stationed outside the fence on the perimeter of the Gaza Strip. Mission participants, after viewing videos of terrorists carrying weapons who were intercepted trying to enter Israel, said that coming to the base had given them a reality check.

“The visit to the army base underscored the difficulty of protecting Israel’s border from Kassams and infiltrators in as humane and intelligent way as possible,” Kleinman said. “The rest of the world doesn’t appreciate what these soldiers are doing. Girls that age in New Jersey are buying designer handbags, while these 18-year-olds are performing such a critical service to the country.”

Comment | Print | Subscribe