Disengagement Costs
In despair, Gaza settlers wonder if their stay in "paradise" is over.
DINA KRAFT
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Elei Sinai, Gaza Strip
alya Eluz walks into her cream-
colored sunken living room and
takes in the view of sloping sand
dunes leading to the shimmering blue
Mediterranean Sea and the electric fence
that surrounds what she calls paradise.
"Look at it — it's like Malibu," Eluz
says, holding her month-old baby
daughter. "But people hear Elei Sinai
and think of terrorists. They think we
live war every day"
This "Garden of Eden," as Eluz and
her neighbors like to call Elei Sinai, is a
settlement in the northern Gaza Strip,
founded in 1982 by a small group of
families evacuated from the Sinai settle-
ment of Yamit when it was dismantled
after the peace treaty with Egypt.
Elei Sinai's cul-de-sacs and palm tree-
lined streets are quiet except when the
thud of mortar shells, which fall almost
d2ily, break the hush.
The quiet also belies the scene the
same day at the Beit Lahiya refugee
camp, whose rooftops and minarets are
visible from Eluz's kitchen window: As
Eluz, 36, serves coffee to visitors, seven
Palestinians have been killed by an Israeli
tank shell retaliating against terrorists fir-
ing mortars into Israel. Six of the dead
are innocent youths from one family.
Twenty-three years after the first house
was built in Elei Sinai, the talk is again
of evacuation. The community is home
to 85 families, mostly secular Israelis
who do not share the ideological and
religious stands of settlers in the Gush
Katif settlement bloc in the southern
Gala Strip.
But Elei Sinai residents are divided on
how to respond to Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon's plan to withdraw from the
Gaza Strip, a plan that would force them
to leave their sprawling homes by the
sea, the rose gardens they planted with
care and the close-knit community they
have forged.
. Nobody wants to leave, residents say,
but some have begun meeting with
lawyers and government representatives
to investigate the reparation packages
they would receive should the day come
when Israeli policemen and soldiers
arrive to evacuate Elei Sinai and other
Gala settlements.
T
em part of the Gaya Strip that contains
the majority of the 7,500 Jewish resi-
dents of Gaza.
Ganei Tal was established in 1979,
mostly by young religious couples look-
ing to begin new communities.
Most residents here believe Gaza is
part of the biblical Land of Israel and say
that it's their birthright as Jews to live
here.
Friman and her husband were among
Arik Hopaz listens to poems written by
the first to settle in Ganei Tal, back
laugher Liron, who was murdered by ter-
when the area was an endless expanse of
rorists near their home in the Gaza Strip.
sand dunes, "a desert."
"We didn't steal anything from any-
one," she says. "Look at the life we have
built here. Why take it away from us?"
Today, Ganei Tal has wide paved roads
and rows of hothouses growing gerani-
ums and tomatoes for export to Europe.
Its spacious homes, with white stucco
walls topped with red tile roofs, are nes-
tled in lush thickets of palm and jacaran-
da trees. In some families, three genera-
dons live together.
Friman doesn't believe the evacuation
really will take place, but she's among
those actively lobbying against it. She
was among the Gush Katif settlers seen
on recent television broadcasts wearing
controversial orange Stars of David.
The decision to wear the stars —
rocket had landed
drawing an implicit comparison between
with a thud, missing
the planned evacuation of Jewish settlers
the school and the
and the Jews who were thrown out of
children inside by
their homes during the Holocaust —
just 10 feet.
was widely condemned in Israel.
"They are shoot-
Sitting in the house where she raised
ing at children —
three children, Friman, 55, says she is
inside a nursery
confused and angered by the course set
school!" Ita Friman
by Sharon, whom the settlers used to
shouts
toward
a
tele-
Talya Eluz hands her baby to neighbor Ravit Cohen in the
consider their champion.
vision
camera.
Eluz home in Elei Sinai, Gaza Strip.
"We never imagined that this could
Friman rushed out
of her house next to the school when she happen. We supported Sharon all these
to think of it herself, she says.
years; he helped establish all this," she
Eluz and her husband are active in the heard the boom. She wags an angry fin-
says, looking out from her living room
ger and faults the Israeli army for not
Committee for the Struggle of Elei
onto a porch covered with potted flow-
Sinai, a group of residents determined to taking stronger action against Khan
ers, spider plants, ferns and wind
Yunis,
a
Palestinian
refugee
camp
near
show the government they intend to
chimes.
Ganei
Tal.
stay.
Just beyond is a large green lawn with
It's one of the main places launching
"We are not going to react with vio-
a stone fountain that Friman's husband,
mortar rounds and rockets fired into
lence, but we are doing what we must
the former head of security for the settle-
surrounding Jewish communities.
do quietly, with dialogue," she says. She
ment, built by hand.
The night before, a mortar shell had
presents a colored flier produced by the
Friman immigrated to Israel from
crashed through the side of a kitchen,
group: Under the heading "Stop the
Ukraine
as a young girl and says she
killing
a
20-year-old
Thai
woman
who
Mistake," the flier presents a few para-
can't
imagine
recreating somewhere else
worked
in
the
settlement's
greenhouses.
graphs of background on Elei Sinai's his-
the
sense
of
community
she has found
Ganei
Tal
is
an
agricultural
settlement
Strip
and
Ga72
tory and a map of the
among Ganei Tars 80 families.
in the Gush Katif settlement bloc, a
southern Israel.
Friman differentiates herself and her
swath of Jewish settlements in the south-
"I built this house with my own
DISENGAGEMENT COSTS on page 22
Eluz and her husband finished build-
ing their dream home — an airy, open-
plan two-story house with floors of beige
the and hard wood and a hot tub off the
master. bedroom — just four months
ago.
Eluz is a homemaker, and her hus-
band works in events promotion for the
Israeli branch of the Carlsberg brewing
company. They moved from the Tel
Aviv suburb of Rishon le-Zion.
They couldn't afford to build a private
home there, but they could afford one
here, where a plot of land with a sea
view cost them $13,000.
"I didn't know Gala even really exist-
ed here. My husband said we were mov-
ing across the Green Line," Eluz says.
"I'm not ideological. I'm here because I
love this place. I saw the sea and decid-
ed it was here I wanted to live."
She can't bring herself to discuss the
possibility of evacuation with her chil-
dren, aged 3 and 6. She can hardly bear
hands," Eluz says. "I won't chain myself
to the house, but if I know the house
will be given to Palestinians I will break
down all the walls."
Elsewhere in the Gaza Strip, a black
Kassam rocket sticks out of the sandy
dirt in a playground outside a nursery
school in the Ganei Tal settlement.
About an hour before, the Palestinian
1/27
2005
21