New Home in Israel Leaves Family Wanting

With hands pressed on her hips and sweat dripping down her neck, Rachel Dayan sighed in frustration Monday as she surveyed her new home in this sand-strewn desert community just outside the Gaza Strip.

No hot water. No electricity in some rooms. No gas, and a dusty backyard instead of the lawn her family had counted on.

Hours earlier, Dayan, her husband, Yossi, and a son still living at home had been among the last families to leave the northern Gaza settlement of Nissanit. Many in the other 20 Jewish settlements in Gaza are resisting evacuation, but residents of Nissanit for the most part went quietly. By the time the Dayans left, almost no one remained there.

“My husband, the kids and I were tormented for a year in anticipation of this evacuation,” said Dayan, a 54-year-old former worker at a military equipment factory. “The government and everyone else made our life difficult.”

Now that the initial shock of uprooting is behind them, she added, “the disappointment with the house isn’t helping us cope.”

The Dayans didn’t want to leave the seaside home where they had lived for the last decade. But instead of protesting the pullout, in March they cast their lot with a few other families who wanted to try to relocate together to a community nearby. Three adult Dayan children are also leaving Nissanit, though not for Kibbutz Karmiya.

At the time, Yossi Dayan thought foresight would better prepare his family for the move. But standing amid a chaotic jumble of brown boxes crammed into the family’s new subsidized housing, he shook his head.

“The government wasn’t prepared for this evacuation,” he said Monday. “They only started dealing with our group’s request in June. And only yesterday did we finally get the keys to this house. I am truly disappointed.”

The scene outside was a ramshackle construction site, filled with workers, power shovels and dump trucks. The heat indoors and out was ferocious as the Dayans began unpacking.

A family from the settlement of Elei Sinai, next to Nissanit, moved into a house across the way that had been flooded by a burst pipe.

Still, the new arrivals have dreams for the community that is now their home. Yossi Dayan said the new site, an addition to Kibbutz Karmiya and only about three miles from Nissanit, would eventually have paved streets, a synagogue, a playground and a grassy area.

Rachel Dayan said she hoped they’d get more company now that they had left Gaza. Before, guests were afraid to visit, fearing rocket and mortar attacks by Palestinian militants.

In some ways, the Dayans are glad they’re still close to their old home. But the proximity also makes them nervous. Yossi Dayan said his biggest worry about the new house was its lack of a security bunker.

“I think Hamas will take over the northern Gaza area as soon as it’s evacuated, and their rockets will fall over here,” said Dayan, who makes his living renting out office space in buildings he owns.

The Dayan family, which received about $200,000 from the Israeli government for leaving their Gaza home, has the option of leaving the new home in Kibbutz Karmiya in two years and buying land at a discount near the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.

In the meantime, they are paying $450 a month in rent, which comes out of their compensation package.

Even amid the upheaval, a small sense of domesticity took hold in the family’s first hours in the new house. Rachel Dayan scolded her 5-year-old grandson for playing with a fragile vase, and wondered aloud which box to tackle next.

And visitors arrived: four teenage girls, their long skirts indicating they were religiously observant. They asked if they could help.

Religious youngsters like these make up the bulk of protesters trying to block the evacuation of the settlements, but these girls had other ideas.

“Many of my friends are busy blocking intersections today,” said one of them, Shani Azulay. “We came here because it’s more important to help these people build new lives.”