Storming the Gaza diehards' bastions

Aug 19th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

Israeli troops have stormed synagogues in Jewish settlements in Gaza, where many of the remaining protesters against the pull-out were holed up. The imminent fall of these bastions of opposition means that Ariel Sharon's “disengagement” may be achieved within days

ISRAELI troops and police using riot shields and water cannon stormed a synagogue in the Kfar Darom settlement on Thursday August 18th, as they continued their task of clearing the remaining Jewish settlers and protesters from the Gaza strip. Troops also burst into synagogues at Neve Dekalim—whose main gates had been torn down by police on Tuesday—and at two other settlements, to drag out hardline opponents of prime minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan.

By the time Israeli forces suspended their operations on Friday evening, to observe the Sabbath, they had cleared all but three or four of the 21 Gaza settlements, and more than 80% of the strip's 8,000 Jewish settlers had left or been removed. Under the disengagement plan, four of the 120 Jewish settlements in the West Bank are also scheduled to be dismantled; of these, two have now been cleared of people. There were anti-withdrawal protests in various parts of Israel on Thursday and Friday. But the fall of some of the protesters’ last remaining bastions in Gaza means that Mr Sharon’s government is well on its way to completing the pull-out by August 23rd, as it now expects.

The withdrawal, which had been planned for months, got under way on Monday when soldiers began handing out eviction notices to the remaining settlers. On Wednesday morning, after the expiry of the midnight deadline for them to leave, troops moved in and started ordering out—in some cases dragging out—those settlers who still refused to budge.

Urged by their rabbis to avoid violence, many of the Gaza settlers have agreed, however reluctantly, to go when told to. The main worry all along has not been the settlers themselves but the thousands of protesters from outside, who had wormed their way into the Gush Katif block of settlements in the south of Gaza by various ruses.

These protesters, some from the most hardline West Bank settlements, are mostly young and—unlike the Gaza settlers themselves, who have families and futures to think of—they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from a protracted battle with the army and police. There have been a few nasty scenes at the synagogues, in which soldiers have had everything from paint to acid thrown at them. But so far casualties have been relatively light.

In Dugit—the first Gaza settlement to be cleared, which had been home to just 17 families—one resident had painted a poignant sign outside the house: “Bulldozer driver: please leave nothing.” That, indeed, is the intent: the bulldozers and cranes have already arrived at some of the evacuated settlements to begin razing the settlers’ homes to the ground.

Mr Sharon is determined that the Gaza pull-out will be completed come what may. On Wednesday, he urged the settlers not to attack the police and troops sent to remove them.
“Attack me. I am responsible for this,” he said. “Blame me.” Opinion polls show that most Israelis support the withdrawal (though there is widespread scepticism that it will make Israel safer or bring peace nearer). So do the 1.3m or so Palestinians living in the strip, though they worry that Mr Sharon is only letting go of Gaza to strengthen Israel’s grip on the much larger Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Apart from a few minor incidents there has been little sign of Palestinian militants complicating the evacuation by firing on Israeli troops and settlers. On Wednesday, in what seems to have been an attempt to provoke the militants, a settler shot dead four Palestinians in the West Bank settlement of Shiloh (which is not scheduled for evacuation). Hamas threatened to retaliate but has so far held back. Mr Sharon condemned the killings as “an exceptionally grave Jewish act of terror.”

Despite the continuing clashes in some settlements, the army remains optimistic that the evacuation of Gaza will soon be over. For several days now, a steady flow of settlers has been arriving, dazed, at the new neighbourhoods of “caravillas”, the prefabricated houses set up for them near villages to the north and east of the Gaza strip. Plonked down among sand dunes with nary a bush for shade, the new neighbourhoods are not too unlike the Gaza settlements themselves when they first started.

For some of the strip’s less affluent residents the caravillas are hardly any worse than the houses they are abandoning, though for exiles from places like Dugit they represent a harsh comedown. Eventually they will be able to build permanent homes, many on the dunes of the Nitzanim nature reserve, about 20 minutes’ drive north of the Gaza strip.

But the move is messy and poorly co-ordinated, partly because so many settlers refused to put their affairs in order until the last minute and partly because construction of the new neighbourhoods began only two months ago. Some are being put up in hotels while their caravillas are readied. To the complaints about the standards of accommodation now will soon be added those about the inadequacy of the compensation package—worth roughly $300,000 per family—for the grand houses and spacious gardens that some of the settlers have given up. But this is unlikely to gain them sympathy among most Israelis.

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