The Aboviches Give Up Their Home, and Their Dream

Arieh Abovich didn’t want to wait for the knock on the door.

A couple of weeks from now, on a heat-hammered day in August, Israeli soldiers and police are to begin the difficult process of going from house to house in all 21 Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip, telling settlers it’s time to go. Some will have to be carried away kicking and screaming.

But the Abovich house, in the red-roofed seaside settlement of Rafiah Yam, already stands empty.

In early July, family members packed up the last of their belongings, coaxed their big, shambling dog, Sherry, into the car, and said goodbye to Gaza, for good.

“It was time,” Abovich said simply, sitting on the porch of the little cabin the family has rented in Gesher Haziv, a kibbutz in rural northern Israel with a view of the softly rolling hills of the Galilee.

The Aboviches -- Arieh, his wife, Nina, and their three children -- thought they could live the good life in Gaza, and for a time they did. They moved to Rafiah Yam in 1998, a few months after immigrating to Israel from Ukraine, settling into a two-story villa with a yard full of flowering plants and a sliver of Mediterranean on the horizon.

“It seemed like a dream,” said Nina Abovich, 41, shaking her head as she unfurled a floral tablecloth in the kitchen of her cramped new home.

As secular Jews, the Aboviches did not share the fervent belief of many settlers that Gaza was sacred ground, promised in the Bible to the Jewish people. Subsidized housing and hefty tax breaks helped lure them to Rafiah Yam, but they also thought they were doing a service to their new country by moving there.

“We believed the settlements had security value to Israel, that our presence helped protect all Israel,” said Abovich, echoing the argument made through the years by politicians such as Ariel Sharon, the prime minister who is now presiding over the Gaza evacuation plan.

With the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, the Abovich family had an unwitting front-row seat to the conflict. Gun battles raged in the Palestinian town of Rafah, almost on the doorstep of Rafiah Yam. Mortar shells rained down around their home. A close friend, a settler farmer who lived nearby, was shot dead by one of his longtime Palestinian workers.

“I began to see the logic of separating ourselves from the Arabs there in Gaza -- I saw that we could not live together,” Abovich said. When Sharon last year unveiled his plan to “disengage” from the strip and also evacuate four small settlements in the northern West Bank, Abovich said he asked himself, “So what took him so long?”

Uprooted settlers are to receive financial compensation, averaging several hundred thousand dollars per family, under a complex formula based on family size and property assets, as well as up to two years of rent if they relocate temporarily.

About half the Gaza settlers, more than 700 families, have entered into talks with the government agency that is overseeing the relocations.

The Aboviches have put the compensation question into the hands of their lawyer and say that although they hope to get enough to establish themselves here, they expect no windfall.

Some settlers who have made the decision to leave want to move their communities en masse. The Aboviches said they missed their neighbors but had no desire to be reminded every day of what they had left behind.

“I’m not putting up a sign here saying that I’m a miserable refugee and everyone should pity me,” Abovich said.

He brushed aside criticism from neighbors who thought all Gaza settlers should stand together and fight the pullout. His family’s decision to move in advance of the mid-August deadline, Abovich said, was spurred by the extremist tactics used by some of the withdrawal opponents, who taunted and scuffled with Israeli soldiers guarding the settlements.

“My first interest is my family and their safety,” he said. “That’s more important to me than anyone’s ideology. And when the [withdrawal] happens, there will be scenes that none of us needs to see.”

The Aboviches briefly contemplated moving to a West Bank settlement but quickly rejected the idea, even though Sharon signaled that he would use the Gaza pullout to help cement Israel’s grip on large settlement blocks close to the Green Line, the de facto border that separated Israel from the West Bank before the 1967 Middle East War.

“Look, I’m a chess player, and you think always a few moves ahead,” Abovich said. “We don’t know how it’s all going to play out with the West Bank settlements, and we don’t want to wind up moving again.”

The relocation has not been without its stresses. The Aboviches’ new home, which the family is renting temporarily until a larger unit becomes available, is only a little larger than a studio apartment. Arieh and Nina are both trained agronomists, but neither has a new job yet.

They worry about the daughter they left behind: 18-year-old Rita, who is doing her national service in the Israeli police force, stationed in the main Gaza settlement block of Gush Katif. Their 12-year-old son, Michael, was shy and withdrawn the first days after the move, mostly staying inside with his mother. But now he splashes in the swimming pool with other kids.

They sleep well at night now without the crash of mortar rounds. And the forested hills, with pine cones strewn on the ground, remind them a little of the Ukrainian landscape they left behind years ago.

“It’s a new life,” Nina Abovich said. “That’s what we were looking for, and that is what we are going to make for ourselves.”