Out of Gaza, settlers in the cold

The wood-framed photo stands atop the television set, an obstinate reminder of what Avi Burstein’s family lost.

In it, Burstein, his wife and four children are hugging one another on the green lawn of a sprawling red-roofed house. The tanned faces of the two grown sons stare bitterly into the camera. Their younger sisters, in long denim skirts with their brown hair pulled back, wear sad expressions.

The shot was taken hours before Israel removed more than 8,000 Jewish settlers, including the Bursteins, from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005.

“Imagine,” Burstein said, a green knit skullcap covering his graying hair, as he peered at the photo through dark-rimmed glasses. “A person builds a house with his own 10 fingers. And then one day it’s all erased.”

But more than his home is gone. Burstein, 49, a farmer who grew lettuce, tomatoes and roses in greenhouses for export, has been jobless since the evacuation.

The Bursteins live in this southern Israeli community about 15 miles north of the Gaza Strip along with the biggest group of Gaza evacuees, numbering in the hundreds. Their temporary prefabricated house is less than half the size of the one they lost.

Straining to meet daily expenses, Burstein already has spent one-third of the compensation his family received to build a permanent home.

Other Gaza evacuees are in a similar fix. Many are older than 50 and unskilled for available jobs, an evacuees committee said. Others who restarted their businesses are losing money because costs in Israel are higher than in the Gaza Strip.

At this point, a quarter of the Gaza evacuees remain unemployed. And in more than 21 sites designated to become their permanent communities, construction has been delayed by the red tape of a resettlement program that has cost the Israeli government more than $2 billion.

The evacuees’ predicament is a measure of the decline in political power of Israel’s settler movement. It also is an indication of the difficulties Israel may encounter in any evacuation of the much larger number of settlements in the West Bank, considered an inevitable part of any final peace accord with the Palestinians. Only four small settlements in the northern West Bank were evacuated at the time of the Gaza withdrawal.

Israel’s unilateral pullout from Gaza, led by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was widely welcomed by the international community as a step toward reviving long-moribund peace talks with the Palestinians. It was the first withdrawal from territories captured during the 1967 Middle East War and claimed by the Palestinians as part of a future state.

Most Israelis supported Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza, which included the closing of Israel’s military bases in the coastal strip. But the settlers, viewed by most Israelis as obstacles to peace, protested their “expulsion” from land they consider part of Jews’ biblical birthright.

After Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke in January 2006, Ehud Olmert inherited the leadership of his newly formed centrist Kadima party, founded on a platform aiming to redraw Israel’s borders.

Olmert was elected to succeed Sharon as prime minister in March 2006 on a pledge to withdraw many of the 250,000 settlers in the West Bank, a plan supported by the United States. The idea was shelved after Israel’s war with Hezbollah last summer ended without clear resolution, weakening Olmert’s government.

But the settler movement has not recovered.

The National Religious Party and the National Union, far-right parties closely identified with the movement, won a total of nine seats out of 120 in last year’s parliamentary elections, and are part of the opposition. They had 11 seats between them in the previous parliamentary term, when they were initially part of the governing coalition.

Their decline is attributed in part to voter disappointment over their failure to influence the government to stop the withdrawal, political analysts say.

Another sign of the movement’s waning power is the fact that few Gaza evacuees have chosen to restart their lives in the West Bank.

“People who in the past would have been considered perfect nominees for settling there are more hesitant because they’re afraid they’ll face the same future,” said Yair Sheleg, a researcher at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute and a columnist for the Haaretz newspaper.

Since the Gaza pullout, the settler movement has succeeded in pressing the government to support settlement expansion in the West Bank, in violation of Israel’s commitment to freeze such activity under a 4-year-old U.S.-backed peace proposal known as the road map, with which neither side has complied.

Dror Etkes of Peace Now, an Israeli advocacy group that opposes settlements, said the settler population in the West Bank has continued to grow at a rate of about 5% a year in the last decade, mostly from births, and new construction has averaged about 1,500 housing units annually.

But the settlers have failed in efforts to persuade the government to establish new settlements in the West Bank. Defense Minister Amir Peretz approved plans in December to build a new housing outpost for Gaza evacuees on the site of an abandoned army base in the northern Jordan Valley, but an international outcry forced him to freeze construction a month later.

For many Gaza evacuees, their frustration has less to do with where they are allowed to relocate than how to make ends meet.

From his tiny office on the premises of what used to be a barber shop, about nine miles east of the city of Ashkelon, Lior Kalfa accuses the government of mishandling the evacuees’ troubles.

“The system is doing all it can to wear us out,” Kalfa, chairman of the evacuees committee, said.

Kalfa says the compensation settlers received for their Gaza homes is too little to allow them to build similar houses in southern Israel, where most have relocated.

Each family received between $70 and $93 per square foot of their former homes, he said, but in southern Israel building costs range from $90 to $110 per square foot.

Evacuees also say that compensation for their businesses, such as retail shops, factories and greenhouses, has been insufficient for them to start anew.

And they say Israeli law doesn’t pay farmers for the loss of several growing seasons or compensate other business owners for the time it takes them to reestablish their companies.

“The Finance Ministry didn’t want to create a costly precedent,” Kalfa said. “They’re worried about the financial significance of, God forbid, another withdrawal.”

Avigdor Itzchaky, a member of Knesset, or parliament, with Olmert’s Kadima party, acknowledged that the law had several “distortions” on payouts and he was mediating between the evacuees and the government to resolve them.

Criticism of the government’s resettlement program has crossed political lines. Leading public figures who supported the Gaza pullout, including writers Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, issued a petition this month warning the government that continued neglect of the evacuees “may erode the state’s legitimacy” should it try to withdraw settlers from the West Bank.

Some of the problems stem from the fact that most Gaza evacuees rejected direct contact with the government until after the withdrawal. Nor did it help that the government agency created to administer the evacuation became fully operational only six months before the pullout.

Some evacuees won’t let their disappointment get in the way of establishing new, remote settlements along Israel’s desolate frontier lands.

Clad in a long beige skirt and black sweater, Dikla Cohen stood on a barren hill just east of the southern Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, surrounded by mostly hilly, rocky terrain speckled with patches of woods.

Two days earlier, Prime Minister Olmert had toured the area and promised to step up plans for seven new communities in Israel, mostly for Gaza evacuees. They would be situated less than a mile from the barrier separating Israel from the West Bank.

Cohen, 42, said her group’s initial request to move to the West Bank was rejected by the government.

“We searched for a piece of land that Israel hasn’t yet developed,” said the mother of nine, with a gleam of eagerness in her blue eyes. “The government betrayed us with the evacuation, but they won’t succeed in breaking my ideology.”