Troops Oust Resistant Settlers

By Ken Ellingwood and Laura King

Aug. 18, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip —

Israeli troops evicted hundreds of screaming and weeping Jewish settlers from their homes, schools and synagogues in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, carrying out a chaotic and harrowing operation to end 38 years of occupation.

By the end of the first day of the forced evacuations, the army said that almost half of the 21 settlements were vacant or nearly empty, and that the rest would probably be cleared within days. But throngs of defiant settlers and their supporters remained, including up to 1,000 holed up in a synagogue in the community of Neve Dekalim, and more emotional confrontations were expected today.

The atmosphere surrounding the withdrawal was volatile. A settler in the West Bank grabbed a gun from a guard and fired on Palestinian workers, killing four and wounding one other in what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon described as an act of “Jewish terror” aimed at stopping the withdrawal.

Another West Bank settler was critically injured when she set herself on fire to protest the pullout. And the Israeli military said it had foiled a plot by the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad to bomb Gush Katif, the main Gaza settlement block.

The tumult began before daybreak when thousands of troops, unarmed but accompanied by armored bulldozers, moved into the settlements hours after the deadline passed for residents to leave on their own.

Some settlers and their supporters climbed quietly aboard waiting buses, hugging the soldiers goodbye. Others, though, screamed abuse at troops or likened themselves to victims of the Holocaust.

When forces arrived at a home in Kerem Atzmona, one family sent five wailing young children outside with their hands raised in the air, each wearing a yellow Star of David pinned to their chests. Teenage girls in another settlement lifted their voices in a song best known in Israel as an anthem sung by some Jews on their way to the Nazi gas chambers.

Israel sent in 14,000 soldiers and police officers to handle the evictions -- more than triple the number of residents who were thought to have stayed past the deadline. The settler ranks were swelled, however, by up to 5,000 protesters who came from outside Gaza to support the settlers and impede the withdrawal.

Many of the outsiders appeared to be spoiling for a fight. One fretted in frustration when troops bypassed Shirat Hayam, the settlement where he and several hundred other demonstrators were camping out.

“I feel bad because I’m sitting here doing nothing when I could be part of the real battle,” said 23-year-old Gadi Rosenberg, a student from a West Bank settlement.

That attitude alarmed some of the Gaza settlers, who said they wanted to offer passive resistance and had no wish for clashes with troops.

“Many of the ‘guests’ hold views much more extreme than ours,” said Yosef Elnekaveh, the rabbi in Neve Dekalim. “We can’t control these people, but we need to get off this collision course.”

Throughout the day, many Israeli troops, even the youngest of them, remained stoic in the face of relentless taunts and insults.

“Who gave you a uniform?” protesters shouted at one soldier. They yelled at a young female officer: “What kind of mother will you make?”

Sharon urged settlers and their supporters to refrain from taking out their anger on soldiers. “Do not attack the army and the police; do not accuse them, blame them, hurt them, insult them, criticize them,” the prime minister said. “Blame me, hurt me. I am responsible. It is my decision.”

Israel captured the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and over the years nearly 9,000 Jewish settlers had come to live in the territory, residing in heavily guarded enclaves surrounded by more than 1.3 million Palestinians.

Although Sharon had long championed the settler movement, he eventually became convinced that it was untenable for Israel to maintain a hold on Gaza and ordered the pullout -- Israel’s first from established communities on land Palestinians want for their future state.

There was no serious violence in the course of Wednesday’s evacuation, though fisticuffs were common and emotions ran high. Even settlers who offered no physical resistance vowed to make it as psychologically difficult as possible for troops to evict them.

“This house is a living, breathing house,” a woman named Moriah told Israeli television as she waited for soldiers to knock on her door in the settlement of Morag. “We are making breakfast, preparing lunch. I have laundry in the machine. They will have to turn off the stove themselves.”

Among the most delicate operations were those to clear synagogues where people were praying inside. One young man in an orange T-shirt -- the color adopted by the anti-withdrawal movement -- was carried out of the synagogue in Morag with the straps of phylacteries, small leather boxes worn during prayer, still wrapped around his arm.

The eviction effort centered on Neve Dekalim, the largest Gaza settlement and a center of resistance.

Clearing a single home could be a painstaking effort. It took soldiers nearly 90 minutes to remove about 20 people from the home of Shimon and Dikla Cohen as troops tried and failed to talk the occupants into coming out voluntarily. The discussion turned into a family squabble as Shimon Cohen tried to get his nine children to leave. They refused, along with 10 visiting youths.

One teenage daughter who finally agreed to leave cursed the soldiers as she walked out. About a dozen other young people had to be carried out by soldiers, a task that left some of the young troops in tears. “It’s a pogrom!” Dikla Cohen cried out as she was bundled onto a bus.

Army teams hopscotched around Neve Dekalim in the sweltering heat, skirting burning piles of trash in the street and confronting protesters at nearly every turn.

“You don’t have a heart!” a woman emerging from her house with a baby in her arms screamed at soldiers. When a commander told her that the troops were not her enemy, the woman shot back: “You are the enemy.... If you were not, you would not expel me.”

Just on the other side of settlement walls, Palestinians could hardly believe that the settlers were leaving at last.

“This settlement has been here since I was born, and God willing, it will soon be gone,” said 28-year-old Salim Orjani, who lives just outside Morag. “This was my father’s land and my grandfather’s land, and I want it to be mine again.”

“I’m waiting and waiting, but I won’t believe it until it happens,” said Mohammed Sawarka, a 20-year-old student. “I’m waiting hour by hour, minute by minute.”

Authorities feared that settlers, infuriated by the sounds of triumphal marches in adjacent Palestinian communities, would lash out. Israeli troops intervened when settlers from Kfar Darom tried to set fire to a house in the adjoining Palestinian village of Deir al Balah.

Early in the day, as the first wave of police and soldiers arrived, barricades and trash fires blocked the way at many settlements. But as the long, scorching day wore on, residents of several communities agreed to leave peacefully.

Army officials had initially said they expected the emptying of the Gaza settlements to take weeks, but they now say it may take just days. Four smaller settlements in the northern West Bank are also being evacuated; two are already empty.

Brig. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, the army’s operations commander, told Israel Radio that the evacuation’s current pace “may enable us to complete the mission sooner than expected and help the residents with their new lives, which is the main thing.”

Even as the Jewish population of Gaza began to dwindle, many settlers remained fervent in their belief that Gaza is part of the biblical birthright of the Jewish people, and that the state had no right to relinquish it.

“God promised Jews this land -- this promise exists and will continue to exist,” said 30-year-old Eytan Goldstein, who lives in the settlement of Shirat Hayam. “Many Israelis don’t understand this.”

In a gesture meant to remind settlers in whose authority they came, soldiers were issued caps and vests emblazoned with the state symbol, the menorah, and the blue-and-white Israeli flag.

President Moshe Katsav called the withdrawal “without a doubt one of the most difficult moments in Israeli history.” But he reminded the settlers and their supporters that it was the result of democratic decision-making.

With abiding bitterness, opponents of the pullout began to finally acknowledge that their long struggle was coming to an end.

“The army has won -- it has defeated its own sons and daughters successfully,” said right-wing politician Benny Elon. “Personally, I will remain steadfast in my determination not to rest until Sharon is removed from government so that this trauma is never repeated.”

Settler families are entitled to compensation ranging from $150,000 to $400,000, but many of them, unwilling to accept the reality of the evacuation, had refused to look into the housing options the government has offered. Families with no plans at the ready were being taken to hotels.

At Neve Dekalim, one bearded settler harangued troops as he was carried from his house and onto a bus, asking why they were evicting him. Once he was aboard, a soldier said to him quietly, “OK, Mister, it’s over. Why don’t you stop now?”

“Maybe for you it’s over,” the man replied. “You will be home tomorrow. Where will I be?”

Ellingwood reported from Neve Dekalim and King from Jerusalem. Times staff writer Shlomi Simhi in Neve Dekalim and special correspondent Vita Bekker in Shirat Hayam contributed to this report.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Progress of withdrawal

More than half the Jewish settlements to be evacuated in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were completely or virtually empty as the first day of forced evictions came to an end. Here is the outlook as of 10:30 p.m. Wednesday:

West Bank settlements

Ganim: All residents have left voluntarily

Homesh: Not yet evacuated by army

Kadim: All residents have left voluntarily

Sanur: Not yet evacuated by army

Northern Gaza

Dugit: Evacuated Tuesday

Elei Sinai: 30 families and dozens of protesters remain

Nissanit: Evacuated Tuesday

Isolated settlements

Kfar Darom: 65 families and 2,000 protesters remain

Morag: Evacuated Wednesday; a few families remain