Gaza Israelis Begin Moving Out

by Ferry Biedermann

(IPS) GUSH KATIF -- He is bronzed, carries a pistol prominently on his hip, and generally looks the part but Socrate Soussan does not sound like a typical Jewish settler in Gaza.

In the garden of his house in the settlement Rafiah Yam at the southern-most point in the Gaza strip, a stone's throw away from the Egyptian border, he talks of his support for the plan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to "disengage" Israel from Gaza. That involves the removal of all the settlers in less than a week's time.

"We cannot rule over more than a million Palestinians," he says. He has both moral qualms, accepting that military action against the tightly packed Palestinian population could lead to "genocide," as well as economic reasons. He does not want Israel to take responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinian population.

But Soussan, a 49-year old immigrant from France who has lived in Rafiah Yam with wife Brigitte since 1989, does rue the loss of his "paradise." That is his house with sea view, but no access because the beach is a closed military zone. It overlooks Rafah from where come Palestinian laborers who work in his two greenhouses, but also attackers. And it has a view of the Egyptian border, from where he says weapons are smuggled through tunnels to Palestinian militants.

"Yes, it is not very safe and we have been talking about moving out of here over the last couple of years, during the Palestinian Intifadah," says Soussan. But like many settlers, he contends that life in Gush Katif is safer than in Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem, simply because they are the bosses in their own community.

Not long ago, he says he pulled his gun on a Palestinian laborer who ignored his warning to stop. "You never know if they want to stick a knife in your ribs," he said, after recounting how three of his acquaintances in the settlement have been killed over the years by Palestinian attackers. It turned out the Palestinian man had just misunderstood his summons.

In Israel proper, he says he could not as easily have pulled his gun, though that too happens. The country has a sizable Arab Israeli minority and the security forces are much more in control.

In Gaza, a tiny minority of Jews has lived in settlements that began to be constructed in the 1970s after Israel captured the area from Egypt in the six-day 1967 war. In some places such as Kfar Darom, the settlements were built on spots from where Jews had been forced to flee decades earlier.

Now, some 8,000 Israelis live in 21 green and generally well appointed settlements among some 1.3 million Palestinians, who often live in abject poverty and who have very limited access to the water that the Israelis seem to have in abundance.

They have to be heavily protected by the army, but the settlers often show a fundamental disregard for the troops who protect them and who now will have to remove them, forcibly if necessary. They call the soldiers "idiots" and "clowns," and on the whole seem averse to any interference by the authorities in what is in effect a semi-autonomous enclave where the writ of the state runs weak.

Some of the settlers' harshest criticism of the withdrawal from Gaza is over the measures the government has taken to find them alternative accommodation and work. Some settlers, the Soussans among them, have taken up an offer to be moved collectively to the Nitzanim nature reserve 45 minutes by car north of the Gaza strip and some 30 minutes from Tel-Aviv.

They complain that the accommodation is cramped. Some have houses more than 200 square metres in Gaza and will temporarily have to do with 60 or 90 square metres. And they are worried that the environmental movement may yet scupper the plan, something they would never have had to bother with in Gaza.

In the Nitzan temporary village, situated between the main north-south highway and rail tracks and an older village, you can see what many are objecting to. They are going to live in full view of the rest of the country, and will have to start following its rules and directives.

The aversion to doing so, even among some of the more moderate settlers, may bode ill for the time when the future of more of the West Bank settlements will have to be considered.

The Soussans are already packed and ready to leave. They have sold part of their furniture to the Palestinians who work in their greenhouses where, like many other settlers, they grow organic cherry tomatoes for export to Europe.

Brigitte, Socrate's wife, is happy about the move. She was fed up with the violence and worried about the safety of their ten-year old twin sons, Dan and Ron. "They were born here and it will be difficult for them that their house will no longer be there," she says. But she is relieved she is leaving the place.

After some 16 years in Rafiah Yam, the Soussans who came with not very much, and received massive aid from the government, will receive at least some 400,000 euro in compensation for their rather modest house by Gaza settler standards. More, the World Bank may buy their greenhouses. Socrate only really frets about his boat and his fishing business, which is his great joy.

But not everybody is that eager to leave, despite even more generous compensation offers. One reason can be seen in the small graveyard of Gush Katif. Samuel and Bryna Hilberg are deeply distraught at the thought of their son Yochanan being disinterred and moved, maybe twice, "because we don't know yet where we are going and we want him nearby."

The Hilbergs came to Israel from the United States in the late 1970s and have been living in the small agricultural cooperative Netzer Hassanim in Gush Katif for the last 25 years. Their son Yochanan was killed in action when his naval commando elite unit was ambushed in Southern Lebanon in 1997.

They say they too came for the cheap land and subsidies because Samuel wanted to be a farmer, and not because of the ideology of a greater land of Israel that many settlers subscribe to.

"But over the years we have become ideological," says Bryna. "We have put down our roots here. Our son is buried here." She says they will not resist the soldiers when they come to get them, but they will not leave voluntarily either. "They will have to carry us out of our house."