After 26 Years, Couple Hang On Till the Bitter End

Sitting in the shade of the settlement’s grassy plaza, Avi Scherr watched the trickle of moving vans leaving Tuesday and bitterly absorbed the finale he had hoped against for months.

As the final hours ticked down before the Israeli army was to begin removing settlers by force, if necessary, residents here coped in various ways. Some held fast to the routines of daily life, cleaning rooms and hanging laundry outside the suburban-style houses that punctuate a landscape of dunes and scrub. Others grudgingly began to pack, while praying for a miracle that would somehow halt the evacuation.

Scherr, an American who grew up in Philadelphia, and his Israeli wife, Batsheva, were not waiting for such a turnabout. Last week, the couple packed up their home of 26 years and shipped the belongings for storage at a friend’s place in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. After that, they remained in their bare house, sleeping on a mattress and eating from paper plates, in order to stay until the end.

On Tuesday, Avi Scherr said, that moment had come. The couple plan to move into a temporary replacement home, in a kibbutz north of the Gaza Strip, once it is ready.

“I hate to see the [community] break up after 26 years,” said Scherr, 56. “But apparently, that’s what the government wants: to break the people up.”

Scherr said he mentally began preparing for the departure soon after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced a year and a half ago plans to withdraw settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the West Bank. Scherr compared the sensation to that of a cancer patient who knows he is sick but not how it will turn out.

“I feel, the day before, that I’m at death’s door. I feel my symbolic death’s waiting for me, that the cancer has beaten me,” he said.

Batsheva Scherr, from the Israeli city of Haifa, said she had been on a weeklong crying jag, made worse each time another friend left. One neighbor left earlier Tuesday morning. Though settlement leaders insisted only a small fraction of Netzer Hazani’s 90 or so families had moved out, the Scherrs said about a fourth were gone.

“I feel like I’m being thrown out with the dogs,” Batsheva Scherr said.

Netzer Hazani was established in 1973, the first community to be built in what is now the main Gaza settlement block, known as Gush Katif. When the couple arrived in 1979, the Jewish settlement was a sparse collection of 30 houses planted on an expanse so barren that Batsheva Scherr navigated by a series of colorfully painted bomb shelters. “It was all sand,” she said.

Over the years, the vegetable-growing community attracted a diverse group, including a handful of American families, French immigrants, ethnic Kurds and Israelis. Now it has a synagogue, wedding hall, kindergarten and playground.

During that time, the Scherrs raised four children and formed the kind of tightknit friendships that tend to sprout in tiny communities, links that grew stronger amid regular barrages of mortar shells and Kassam rockets fired by Palestinian militants during the most recent conflict. Four residents, including a rabbi, were slain during shooting attacks on the road to Israel.

Batsheva Scherr was secretary in a packing plant in the neighboring Gadid settlement until orders dwindled with talk of the government’s plan to abandon Gaza. Avi Scherr grew crops for years and more recently worked at a rehabilitation center for the disabled in nearby Neve Dekalim settlement.

The couple planned to drive away later Tuesday, but remained deeply uncertain about the future. “When I cross the Kissufim checkpoint, I have no place to go,” Batsheva Scherr said, referring to the crossing that linked Gush Katif with Israel. It has been closed since Sunday night to anyone entering Gaza.

Despite the pain of departure, Avi Scherr said he was braced for the day when Israel might end its presence in Gaza, where about 8,500 Jewish settlers have lived among 1.3 million Palestinians on land captured during the 1967 Middle East War.

“In my Jewish heart, I hope we’ll be here for 2,000 years,” he said. “But in my American mind, I knew we would have to leave someday.”