Isiah 2:4
02-08-2004, 03:00 PM
February 08, 2004
Betrayed in Gaza – I can’t believe Sharon is evicting us
Rivka Goldschmidt, a pioneer settler of the occupied territories, is outraged by last week’s decision
Everything around here changed last Monday, when our prime minister Ariel Sharon said he was going to uproot all the Jewish settlers from Gaza.
Everyone here in Gush Katif is in shock. When I heard that sentence of his — “In the end, there will be no Jews living in Gaza” — I felt somebody had just taken my stomach and twisted it. He’s talking about making Gaza Judenrein — off-limits to Jews.
My teenage daughter Dafna started to cry when she heard the news on the radio. My grown-up son Yoav, who is usually very unexcitable, phoned me from Tel Aviv and said: “Ima, we’re going to have to fight to save our home. This time they really mean it. On the news they’re talking about it as if it’s a fait accompli, that it’s not a matter of if, only of how.”
And that’s all I’m thinking about now — how to stop this from happening, because it is madness. If we’re evacuated, and if the army withdraws, Gaza is going to become the biggest factory for terror in the Middle East, and it’s going to explode not only in Israel but in the rest of the world, too. I’m not going to break the law, but if they want me to leave this place, my home, my family’s home for 27 years, they’re going to have to drag me out of here.
I am a high school English teacher and I had a religious upbringing. My parents were from Hungary and they were in Auschwitz for a year. My father lost his first wife and seven children there. He and my mother met and married after they were liberated, and they tried to go straight to Israel but the British, who occupied the country at the time, wouldn’t let them in, so they had to wait until independence in 1948. It was the fulfilment of their greatest dream. They taught us to love Israel, to help build it up, and that’s why my husband Michael and I decided to make our life here in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip.
Michael left a wealthy upbringing in Johannesburg and emigrated to Israel as a young man. We met at a kibbutz where I was doing my military service and he was studying Hebrew. After we married, we got jobs and a big apartment in the city of Rehovot.
Materially we were very comfortable, but we wanted to be pioneers. So we took our two little boys, Eli and Yoav — Avigail and Dafna would come later — and moved into a bungalow in a transit camp for new Jewish settlers in Gaza, and that’s where we lived for two years, waiting to start the farming community of Ganei Tal in Gush Katif.
When we got here there was nothing but sand dunes — not a tree, not a bush, not a house. The Arabs here would tell us: “Hair will grow on our palms before anything grows out of this place.”
And now we have this house that we built by ourselves, little by little, and Michael, who knew nothing about agriculture when he started, is growing hothouse flower bulbs — beautiful red amaryllis, three acres of them, that he exports to Europe and America. We have 15 Palestinians from Khan Yunis, the refugee camp a half mile away, working for us.
They’re telling us that Israel has gone mad, that we can’t leave this place, that we’ve brought them a livelihood. And who is it that wants us to leave now? Ariel Sharon! I always admired him. He was an Israeli hero.
I remember when they had the cornerstone-laying ceremony for Ganei Tal in 1979. He flew in on a helicopter and told us we had to build the land of Israel for the people of Israel, that we were pioneers. Three years ago when he became prime minister the terrorists were running wild. I really believed the only person who had the strength to save Israel was Sharon.
I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen, where I’m going to go if they really do evacuate us, even though I probably should think about it. There’s no other place I want to live. Even when the shooting from Khan Yunis was like a nightly concert, even when mortars were falling on the greenhouses when Michael was at work, even when we were living under siege, even when our neighbours were shot at — and one, Ahuva Emergi, a young woman with two children, was killed on her way home two years ago — I never once thought about leaving.
And now they want to force us out of our homes. Just from a humane perspective, it’s monstrous. Michael said to me: “I’m 55 years old. What do they expect me to do, start over again from scratch?” It wasn’t easy for us here. We went through a lot of rough years. We didn’t come here for money, and we’re not going to leave for money. I’m 53 and I don’t want financial compensation. They should take the compensation money and use it to help all the poor families in Israel, and let us stay where we are.
Sharon has become weak. What most of us think is that the Americans and Europeans are pressuring him all the time for not doing anything about the peace process, so he’s going to show them — he’s going to transfer the Jews! When he uprooted 5,000 Jewish settlers from Sinai after the peace treaty with Egypt, I saw it as a stain on his record. But now he wants to do it again to 7,500 settlers in Gaza.
I’ve never felt dread like this and what makes me most scared is that Sharon is leading the charge. This is a man who, when he wants to do something, he does it.
Well, i think that this is a really selfish and irrational reaction to the Gaza withdrawal plan. If it ends up being beneficial for Medinat Yisrael as a whole, and actually has postive effects on Palestinian policy, then what has this woman got to whine about?
I can empathize slightly however, considering her prediction about Gaza becoming a 'terrorist hothouse' for the world, but really, its not much of a sacrifice to be moved to a more secure, safe, newly built and payed for home inside Israel proper is it?
I do agree with her about Sharons political opportunism - even if i do think withdrawal from Gaza is a good idea.
I read on Haaretz that Israel will continue to provide petrol(gas), electricity, water etc to the WHOLE of Gaza even after withdrawal. The Pals are bleeding Israel dry while they send kids to commit mass murder against innocents of the country that props up their lifeblood. All this while poor Israelis struggle to find decent homes and employment (in jobs that Pals probably do).
Irony isnt the word...
Betrayed in Gaza – I can’t believe Sharon is evicting us
Rivka Goldschmidt, a pioneer settler of the occupied territories, is outraged by last week’s decision
Everything around here changed last Monday, when our prime minister Ariel Sharon said he was going to uproot all the Jewish settlers from Gaza.
Everyone here in Gush Katif is in shock. When I heard that sentence of his — “In the end, there will be no Jews living in Gaza” — I felt somebody had just taken my stomach and twisted it. He’s talking about making Gaza Judenrein — off-limits to Jews.
My teenage daughter Dafna started to cry when she heard the news on the radio. My grown-up son Yoav, who is usually very unexcitable, phoned me from Tel Aviv and said: “Ima, we’re going to have to fight to save our home. This time they really mean it. On the news they’re talking about it as if it’s a fait accompli, that it’s not a matter of if, only of how.”
And that’s all I’m thinking about now — how to stop this from happening, because it is madness. If we’re evacuated, and if the army withdraws, Gaza is going to become the biggest factory for terror in the Middle East, and it’s going to explode not only in Israel but in the rest of the world, too. I’m not going to break the law, but if they want me to leave this place, my home, my family’s home for 27 years, they’re going to have to drag me out of here.
I am a high school English teacher and I had a religious upbringing. My parents were from Hungary and they were in Auschwitz for a year. My father lost his first wife and seven children there. He and my mother met and married after they were liberated, and they tried to go straight to Israel but the British, who occupied the country at the time, wouldn’t let them in, so they had to wait until independence in 1948. It was the fulfilment of their greatest dream. They taught us to love Israel, to help build it up, and that’s why my husband Michael and I decided to make our life here in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip.
Michael left a wealthy upbringing in Johannesburg and emigrated to Israel as a young man. We met at a kibbutz where I was doing my military service and he was studying Hebrew. After we married, we got jobs and a big apartment in the city of Rehovot.
Materially we were very comfortable, but we wanted to be pioneers. So we took our two little boys, Eli and Yoav — Avigail and Dafna would come later — and moved into a bungalow in a transit camp for new Jewish settlers in Gaza, and that’s where we lived for two years, waiting to start the farming community of Ganei Tal in Gush Katif.
When we got here there was nothing but sand dunes — not a tree, not a bush, not a house. The Arabs here would tell us: “Hair will grow on our palms before anything grows out of this place.”
And now we have this house that we built by ourselves, little by little, and Michael, who knew nothing about agriculture when he started, is growing hothouse flower bulbs — beautiful red amaryllis, three acres of them, that he exports to Europe and America. We have 15 Palestinians from Khan Yunis, the refugee camp a half mile away, working for us.
They’re telling us that Israel has gone mad, that we can’t leave this place, that we’ve brought them a livelihood. And who is it that wants us to leave now? Ariel Sharon! I always admired him. He was an Israeli hero.
I remember when they had the cornerstone-laying ceremony for Ganei Tal in 1979. He flew in on a helicopter and told us we had to build the land of Israel for the people of Israel, that we were pioneers. Three years ago when he became prime minister the terrorists were running wild. I really believed the only person who had the strength to save Israel was Sharon.
I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen, where I’m going to go if they really do evacuate us, even though I probably should think about it. There’s no other place I want to live. Even when the shooting from Khan Yunis was like a nightly concert, even when mortars were falling on the greenhouses when Michael was at work, even when we were living under siege, even when our neighbours were shot at — and one, Ahuva Emergi, a young woman with two children, was killed on her way home two years ago — I never once thought about leaving.
And now they want to force us out of our homes. Just from a humane perspective, it’s monstrous. Michael said to me: “I’m 55 years old. What do they expect me to do, start over again from scratch?” It wasn’t easy for us here. We went through a lot of rough years. We didn’t come here for money, and we’re not going to leave for money. I’m 53 and I don’t want financial compensation. They should take the compensation money and use it to help all the poor families in Israel, and let us stay where we are.
Sharon has become weak. What most of us think is that the Americans and Europeans are pressuring him all the time for not doing anything about the peace process, so he’s going to show them — he’s going to transfer the Jews! When he uprooted 5,000 Jewish settlers from Sinai after the peace treaty with Egypt, I saw it as a stain on his record. But now he wants to do it again to 7,500 settlers in Gaza.
I’ve never felt dread like this and what makes me most scared is that Sharon is leading the charge. This is a man who, when he wants to do something, he does it.
Well, i think that this is a really selfish and irrational reaction to the Gaza withdrawal plan. If it ends up being beneficial for Medinat Yisrael as a whole, and actually has postive effects on Palestinian policy, then what has this woman got to whine about?
I can empathize slightly however, considering her prediction about Gaza becoming a 'terrorist hothouse' for the world, but really, its not much of a sacrifice to be moved to a more secure, safe, newly built and payed for home inside Israel proper is it?
I do agree with her about Sharons political opportunism - even if i do think withdrawal from Gaza is a good idea.
I read on Haaretz that Israel will continue to provide petrol(gas), electricity, water etc to the WHOLE of Gaza even after withdrawal. The Pals are bleeding Israel dry while they send kids to commit mass murder against innocents of the country that props up their lifeblood. All this while poor Israelis struggle to find decent homes and employment (in jobs that Pals probably do).
Irony isnt the word...