GUSH KATIF VIEWPOINT

By  Rachel Saperstein
 

 
GUSH KATIF IS A GHETTO! 

The noose is tightening around the people of Gush Katif. A month before the it scheduled expulsion the army and the police have been given the go-ahead  to put Gush Katif under closed military rule. The area must be 'sterilized', kept clean of visitors so that it will be easier to go from house to house cleansing the area of Jews.

"I'm filled with shame," L wept. "They are humiliating me. My country is doing this to me. I no longer live in Israel. I need a magnetic card to get in and out of my home. I'm examined and questioned at three different checkpoints. The cars are backed up. Tour buses are turned away. Buses filled with elderly women are told they cannot visit Gush Katif for the day. We have to call a special number to ask permission for a family member to visit. And it takes twelve hours until we get that precious permission. "Restrictions, red tape, begging, pleading with the army. The police beat our children. What country is this? Do you know, Rachel, that a policeman gets a bonus of 18,000 shekels for working on the 'disengagement'? Imagine, "chai" shekels to destroy the lives of decent people. What kind of Jewish policeman would take this money?"  I met C at the health clinic. Her shoulder was broken. "I can't get out. The roads are blocked and I need to get to the hospital. How can Israel do this to me? I come from France. Sharon tells the Jews of France to come live in Israel so they will be safe from attack. And now I am treated like a criminal. Chirac is not expelling his Jews but Sharon is expelling fifty French families from Gush Katif."

One of our bus drivers walked in to the health clinic, fuming. "I drove my bus to one checkpoint. I was checked, as were all of my passengers. Same thing at the second checkpoint. By the time we got to the third checkpoint I became enraged. I parked in the middle of the road, took my bags and walked off the bus leaving the passengers behind. The soldiers ran after me. I told them I refuse to continue playing their game. 'Okay', they said, 'take your bus and go.' So I did." "Is this how Jews in Europe felt when restriction after restriction was placed on them? When their enemies attacked them at will and the authorities did nothing? Now I understand what is meant by 'a ghetto'." A few nights ago at our Town Hall meeting we were told about the three-day march scheduled to begin Monday, July 18th. Thousands will start the trek from the southern city of Netivot to Gush Katif.  The Sharon government is terrified that these thousands will enter the Gush and remain, making the planned expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif that much harder - thus the early closure of the roads. May the Almighty empower the Good with the strength to overcome the massed  forces of Evil.

THE  ADL:  LEGAL  VS.  MORAL

I received an article by Mr. Abraham Foxman that appeared in the Haaretz newspaper. Mr. Foxman is the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL-The Anti Defamation League, was established to seek out all forms of anti-Semitism and bring them to light.  In short, to fight for the rights of Jews throughout the world. But there is one place the ADL has declared off limits — Israel,  and especially the systematic home by home expulsion of innocent Jews in Gush

Katif.  Mr. Foxman finds the expulsion edict passes the test of democracy and legality.  He writes that it is “a fulfilling of the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty through its institutions of democratic government.” Apparently Mr. Foxman has forgotten that our prime minister hires and fires cabinet ministers by whim, bribes political parties and brought his defeated political opponents into a government that would vote for Jewish ouster. Yes, it may be legal. But is legal the equivalent of moral? Historically the Jews of the world were expelled by legal decrees. But the edicts were morally wrong. Is it moral to watch, as I do, the tears of adult males as they weep over trees they planted or the farm they had tended until the crops began to grow? Is it moral to ask mothers to disinter the corpses of their beloved sons and daughters? Is it moral to pull mezuzot from doorposts, bulldoze synagogues and destroy yeshiva buildings? Would ADL allow this to happen in any other part of the world without a storm of protest? Mr. Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League endorsed the ‘disengagement’ plan. Will you be drinking your second cup of coffee as you sit in front of your tv watching CNN report on the destruction, one by one, of Jewish communities? Will the ADL receive an “Organization of the Year” award while Jewish parents grasping infants are pushed onto waiting buses?

 Were ADL employees putting stamps on envelopes filled with requests for funds while you endorsed the edict of Jewish expulsion? Excuse me if I ask these questions. I am just a grandmother. And no one gives me awards for living under incessant bombardment. I see my husband holding on, grasping at straws of hope with his remaining three fingers. He gave his right arm in the Yom Kippur War and two of his remaining fingers as a victim of Arab terror.  We are the symbolic Jew. The Jew who left America to come home to live as a free people in our land of Israel. A Jew ready to sacrifice for Israel’s existence. A Jew who went to settle the Biblical homeland of Israel. I see the pain in my people – my people of Gush Katif and my people of Israel. The sovereign state of Israel should not be rewarding their brave Jews with expulsion. Come to Gush Katif, Abraham Foxman. Come to where your father Abraham walked and dug his wells. Meet the people whose expulsion you endorsed and then speak about the word legal.  Indeed, legal is not moral.

STANDOFF  AT  KFAR  MAIMON

Thousands of police and soldiers stood in the hot sun, arms linked. They formed a human barrier caging in the tens of thousands of brave Jews who had gathered in the small northern Negev town of Kfar Maimon, the staging ground on the trek to Gush Katif. The Jews of Israel – secular and religious, young and old, singles and families – had come from every part of Israel to protest the expulsion of the people of Gush Katif. The government had given orders to pull bus drivers from the buses ferrying the protestors to the town of Netivot for the opening rally. And the protestors became angry and the anger turned into rage. The rights of a citizen to travel from place to place had been trampled upon. Democracy in Israel had failed its people. So they took their cars and many took to their feet. And they marched step by step to the Negev. Dr. Arye Eldad, a member of the Knesset, exhorted the people: “If you have  no bus, come by car, by foot, by rail. But come!” And they did. Despite the physical barriers put up by the army and the endless checkposts  put up by the police, the people came and came and came. Struggling with backpacks, baby carriages and strollers, children on their  shoulders, a sea of people swept into Netivot and then trudged to Kfar Maim on for the night.

Day 2, Tuesday, July 19: The villagers of Kfar Maimon welcomed the people into their homes to rest and shower and use their facilities and eat cooked food. Many residents drove up and back between their village and Netivot, giving lifts to the weary. The protestors sang, danced, held Torah lessons and rested under the trees. Police and soldiers could only stand arms linked and stare at the joy around them. They could not rest, they could not learn Torah. They could only do the cruel job they had been assigned. The misery on their faces reflected far more than their discomfort at the heat.

Day 3, Wednesday, July 20: To move forward? To stay in Kfar Maimon? To go home? The masses were told by the Yesha leaders to go onto waiting buses and return home. Many decided otherwise. At midnight the young men of Yeshivat Merkaz Harav in Jerusalem began a twelve hour march to Gush Katif. Their mobile phones were turned off and wire cutters were used to open paths through barbed wire. Twelve hours of walking in silence, forward, forward to Gush Katif. And they walked into a trap. The police were waiting for them.  Exhausted, told by the police they were being returned to Kfar Maimon, the boys climbed onto waiting buses. Only to be driven to the police station in Beersheba where they were arrested and charged with attempting to enter a closed military area. But others, singles and families, managed to slip into Gush Katif where every tent and building is filled.The standoff at Kfar Maimon will be added to the lore of Eretz Yisrael. The Jews were not intimidated. They did not cower before the authority of the  state. They did not accept the edict of expulsion!
 

THROWING  IN  THE  TOWEL?

Two weeks before the threatened expulsion the township of Gush Katif is filling up. Schoolrooms are homes to families and every empty building is used to house the visitors. Teenagers sleep on the grassy lawns in the center of town. The supermarket shelves are emptied as quickly as they are filled. Bread and dairy products remain plentiful but canned goods and paper and cleaning products are in short supply.

The synagogues are packed. Congregants wept as we blessed the new month of Av, the month of evil decrees. Psalms and Torah study sessions are held almost hourly in all our synagogues. Rabbi Chaim Eisen and his wife, friends from Jerusalem, have moved into our home. Every weekday evening and Shabbat afternoon Rabbi Eisen gives lectures in our home crowded with listeners and participants in the discussions.

And the families here are suffering. There are those who decided they must leave. We said goodbye to an elderly couple, Holocaust survivors, who found the pressure too terrible to bear. A friend working outside has left because she found it impossible to exit and return every day. There are those who need stability and cannot function with uncertainty. “The expulsion is inevitable” said a close friend packing to leave, “and we don’t want our children to witness the cruelty of the soldiers and police or to be marched at gunpoint to waiting buses. We want to remember Gush Katif as it was.”

Others say “I can’t pack. My children won’t permit it. They cannot believe that the miracle they have worked and prayed for will not happen.” There are those, like myself, who have sent out minimal furniture and household utensils to start a new home in smaller quarters if need be. My husband opposes this. We argue often. He refuses to pack any of his treasured possessions, even the compact discs collected over many years. “I know that you are the practical one,” he says. “But to pack is to surrender, and I refuse to throw in the towel.” Most people here are like my husband. Some Gush Katif women describe bouts of intense crying. Their homes, their nests, are to be dismantled, friends and neighbors separated. Rabbis come to comfort us and raise our spirits and remind us of our bravery and courage. Moshe Feiglin, of the ‘Jewish Leadership’ faction in the Likud, begs us not to evict ourselves. He firmly believes, like my husband, that we will not be expelled.

Earlier this week we watched tens of thousands stream into the town of Sderot for a rally on our behalf, like the Kfar Maimon rally a week ago. However, this time their clear intention was to march directly to Gush Katif. Leaders spoke, politicians spoke, rabbis spoke. Instead of marching to Gush Katif the crowd was directed to Ofakim, then sent home. It’s as if the Yesha Council had thrown in the towel.

 To my fellow Jews…  Move, move towards Gush Katif. Do not let Gush Katif fall. Do not throw in the towel. If your leaders let Gush Katif fall, Yehuda and Shomron will fall. All of Israel will fall. We need you by the thousands. Get here.