Middle East

An unsettling plan

A plan to move Jewish settlers out of the Gaza Strip has sparked controversy - particularly among settlers.

[Times photos: John Pendygraft] Most Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip live in attractive single-family homes. Critics say the settlements block the development of Palestinian areas.

[Times photos: John Pendygraft] Metael Cohen, 11, Shmoel Levingale, 12, and Neta Rosen, 16, take a break during an orchestra rehearsal that was extended because of reports of sniper fire near the Gush Katif Community Center.

Ita Frieman says she and her husband spend every Friday working on the lush landscaping around their Gush Katif home, and have helped transform their neighborhood from a desert since moving there in 1977.

Moshe Saperstein shows a mortar that landed on his property. He says he will not resist violently if ordered to leave his home, but he'll lay down in the road and "some Israeli soldier will get a hernia trying to move me."

Children play indoors at the community center in Gush Katif late Monday evening as mortars and sniper fire are reported outside. The community center is in radio contact with the military to coordinate the most secure times to allow the children to leave the building. On Monday snipers and mortar fire were being reported and the children were held late.

Eitan Kasspi, 28, a reserve soldier in the Israeli army, mans a checkpoint to enter one of the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Because of frequent Palestinian attacks, security is heavy throughout the settlements.

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip - Oblivious to the din outside, the Gush Katif community orchestra launches into Gaite parisienne.

The adult members are immersed in the music. Some of the kids look as if they would rather be elsewhere. For now, though, nobody is leaving the Gush Katif Community Center.

"There's shooting," announces Shimon Shimshon, the civil defense director.

Walkie-talkie pressed to ear, he has just been warned by Israeli soldiers that a Palestinian sniper is in the area. One bullet zinged a car in the parking lot minutes before dozens of kids were to board buses for the ride home.

The musicians stay put.

They are among 8,000 residents of Gush Katif, a swath of 21 Jewish settlements in the predominantly Palestinian Gaza Strip. Many resemble Florida gated communities with their ample homes, tiled roofs, emerald lawns. Others have a tired, sun-baked look.

All the settlements, though, share a common feature - extraordinarily tight security. Israel's government won't say what it costs to protect settlers here and in the West Bank from their Palestinian neighbors; an Israeli newspaper estimated it at $1-billion year.

To settlers, that is a reasonable price to pay for what they see as a divine mission: Reclaiming the "Land of Israel" that God promised the Jewish people 2,000 years ago.

"This is our home," says Ita Frieman, one of Gush Katif's original residents. "My son was a soldier, my husband was a soldier, so we paid our duty to our country. Their duty is to keep us alive."

But to most Israelis, the settlements are an enormous strain on Israel's budget, image and efforts to make peace with the Palestinians.

This year, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unveiled a plan to evacuate all settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank by next fall. It was a stunning move, as if President Bush suddenly announced the war in Iraq was a huge mistake.

The so-called "disengagement plan" has pit resident against resident. The government says a third of the families in Gaza, tired of living in a military zone, have indicated they are willing to leave voluntarily. But many are afraid to admit it for fear of being ostracized by their hard-line neighbors.

Neighbors like Moshe Saperstein.

"They are social misfits," Saperstein says of those who would go. "They didn't do well before they came here, and they haven't done well here. I think it's remarkable that two-thirds are not willing to take the compensation and walk away. That gives you an idea of how dedicated we are."

When Ita Frieman moved to Gaza in 1977, she found a landscape of undulating sand dunes and little else.

"It was a desert. Not a tree, no flowers, no birds, nothing," recalls Frieman, 55, then a young mother of three. "I said, "How can we grow here?' "

But the bleak terrain held special significance. "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great River Euphrates," God told Abraham.

Jews say that and other Bible verses support their claim to Gaza's 144 square miles - a claim Palestinians strongly contest.

Nobody had much interest in the parched strip before 1948. Until then, it was controlled by Britain, and was to be part of a new Arab nation formed by dividing the region known as Palestine into Jewish and Arab states.

But the U.N. partition plan fell apart when Arab states attacked Israel in 1948, and Gaza came under Egyptian control. As many as 600,000 Arabs - soon to call themselves Palestinians - flocked to Gaza after they fled or were forced from their homes in the new Jewish state.

In the 1967 Mideast War, Israel captured Gaza and the adjoining Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Jewish settlers flocked to the Sinai, only to be uprooted when the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979.

Many of the Sinai settlers relocated to the Gaza Strip and were joined by families from Israel. They had been encouraged to move by Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, who wanted to establish a Jewish buffer along the Egyptian border.

"We came with the okay of Rabin," says Frieman, whose round face and deep-set eyes reflect her Russian Jewish heritage. "He says to come here because we are young families and we can grow our children in our beliefs."

At first, the only water came from tanks the Israeli army filled daily. Settlers had to drive an hour into Israel to buy groceries. "It was very hot, very windy, a very difficult life," Frieman says. "But slowly, slowly, we grow."

By 1985, there were a dozen Jewish settlements in Gaza, with schools, stores, synagogues, clinics, restaurants, even a zoo. Trees and grass replaced sand and scrub.

Frieman and others look back wistfully on those days. Settlers would visit the nearby Palestinian town of Khan Yunis to shop and get their dental work done, at a third of what it would cost in Israel.

And every day, hundreds of Palestinians entered the Jewish settlements to work in the greenhouses and cultivate the flowers and vegetables that are a mainstay of the settler economy.

"When we came here they started to work with us and we were very good friends," says Frieman. "They say, "Please stay here, we learn from you.' They are good people also."

But as long as Gaza remained occupied, the Palestinians were in legal limbo, citizens of neither Israel nor Egypt. Jammed into increasingly crowded refugee camps, their resentment built as they looked at the settlers' spacious homes and their seemingly endless supply of water.

In 1987, the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, started. "They did not want to kill us then," Frieman says, "but they poured oil on our crops to kill them."

That uprising ended with the 1993 Oslo peace accords, which set out a five-year plan for returning parts of Gaza and the West Bank to Palestinian control. But the progress frustrated Palestinians, who launched a more violent intifada in 2000. Militants shot at settlers, fired rockets at their homes and tried to infiltrate their communities.

Now Jewish residents of Gaza live in a cocoon of barbed wire, electric fences and steel gates. No one can enter the settlements without proving to Israeli soldiers they have good reason for being there.

A solid majority of Israelis - even members of Sharon's own Likud Party - view the situation in Gaza as untenable and say it's time to pull out. Frieman knows the remote, dangerous Gaza settlements have little to offer young adults - that's why her children now live and work elsewhere - but then she looks at her garden.

For 27 years the Friemans have spent every Friday tending their yard, now a lush oasis with mature shade trees and a profusion of flowers. She can't bear the thought of leaving.

"The Arabs, they will destroy it. I get up in the morning, I give water. How can our government think a thought like this? We are not stones you take from there to here, we are people. We built this."

Moshe Saperstein has lived in Gaza just a third as long as Ita Frieman. But he is even more adamant that this is Israel's land - his land.

His car sports orange flags that say "Gush Katif Forever," along with what he drolly calls "right-wing, extremist bumper stickers."

"Psychologists often come out here to help us, and they find that kids in Tel Aviv have a higher stress level than kids in Gush Katif," says Saperstein, a former Jerusalem Post columnist. "Part of it has to be religious, part has to be a sense of purpose, a sense of mission. People know why we're here. We could pick up and leave at any time - whatever we're going through, we're going through by choice."

A native New Yorker, Saperstein moved to Israel three decades ago and lost his right arm in the 1973 Mideast War. The outbreak of violence after the Oslo accords - his middle daughter was injured in one of many bus bombings - convinced him Palestinians were not interested in peace.

"As individuals," he says, "we're safer during open hostilities and a war situation than we are when we're negotiating for peace."

Rather than "sink into senility" in Jerusalem after retiring, Saperstein and his wife, Rebecca, moved to Gush Katif in support of the settlement movement. She teaches English and does public speaking; Saperstein, 65, often parries with journalists, most of whom "just don't get it," he says, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"Arabs are the most charming people - we had genuine friendships with Arabs in Jerusalem. That doesn't change the fact that down here, it's them or us. Everyone talks about how well we live and how poorly they live, as if I'm guilty for their living poorly. When you consider the hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S., Europe - what happened to all that money? Why wasn't it funneled down to local Arabs? I reject the idea we're the cause for their misery."

Saperstein is unmoved by Palestinian grievances: that Israeli soldiers block Palestinian roads for hours; that they bulldoze buildings, leaving hundreds of Palestinians homeless; that missile strikes against radical leaders also kill innocent civilians; that Israelis in tanks kill boys with rocks.

"It breaks my heart," Saperstein says in a voice thick with sarcasm. "Nobody forced them to throw stones."

Saperstein is convinced an Israeli pullout from Gaza would lead to destruction of the entire Jewish state. But what about the alternative - continuing to occupy an area where 1.3-million Palestinians are denied the right to vote? Isn't Israel jeopardizing its claim as the only democracy in the Middle East?

"Israel is a Jewish state, it is supposed to be a Jewish state. Israel can be a democratic state for Jews with full rights except for Arabs. If that makes me undemocratic, so be it. And I can't accept the two-state solution because it means cutting my one state in half."

A few weeks ago, Saperstein was in his back yard, hanging up laundry, when a Palestinian rocket landed a few dozen yards away.

"Since September 2000, there have been 4,700 strikes - considering all of Gush Katif is just 15 kilometers long by 2 kilometers wide (about 11 square miles) there is no rational explanation for why the number of people killed is just two. There are quite literally hundreds of stories which you can write off as chance or luck, or you can see it as some sort of divine protection for people who live here."

Ruti Degorker had a close call, too. But it helped convince her that it's time for the Gaza settlements to go.

A slim, gentle-voiced Swedish Jew, Degorker acknowledges she moved to Gush Katif not because of ideology but because it offered inexpensive housing in what was then a safe, quiet area. For $450 shekels a month - about $100 - she, her husband and five children rented a home that would have cost six times as much in Jerusalem.

Although the house was small and run-down, the kids loved Gush Katif. The schools were good and there were plenty of cultural and recreational activities. In warm weather, they went to the Mediterranean beach at least twice a week.

"Everything we dreamt about came true here except the security," says Degorker.

A year and half ago, she and her daughters were folding clothes in the living room when they heard three rocket strikes - the third so loud it shook the house. Outside they found a broken pipe gushing water and the windows of their car shattered.

Since then, Degorker, 34, has had troubled sleeping, worried the next rocket could hit the house.

"I don't think it's important for Jews to live here because we don't get along so well here. We met the Arabs on the roads, and all the time I saw their eyes - hatred, suspicion, fear - and I understood it. They don't want us to be here, and I don't want to be here. These settlements are an issue, and I personally don't mind to get out of here if it will help all the population, and I think it will."

Last week, Israel's Parliament approved money to compensate Gaza settlers for leaving their homes and moving to other areas. Because they are renting, the Degorkers won't get as much as many other families, though she expects to receive money for her business, an acupuncture clinic.

"My little boy, I told him we have to move and he said, "Who will live in our house?' I said, "Most likely Arabs. They live worse than we do.'

"And he said, "Okay, I don't mind if you give it to Arabs.' "

Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com

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