Talking tough in Gaza (Part 1)

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Ariel Sharon has won the first vote in the Israeli parliament for his plan to evacuate the settlements in the Gaza Strip. There have been accusations of betrayal and even talk of civil war. Are the Gaza settlers really considering taking up arms to resist eviction? Linda Grant went to their towns and villages to find out

At 8.30 in the evening, two-and-a-half weeks ago, the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, voted with a sizeable majority to evacuate Israeli settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip. Around the world, people watched on television as an angry mob of baying protesters outside the building screamed abuse and waved the yellow flags of the banned far-right organisation Kach. Framed by the TV screen, they seemed to number in their thousands, a fanatical army determined to thwart the will of their elected representatives with dire warnings of civil war, assassination of the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and cries of "Death to the Arabs". But on the ground another picture was visible, a thin line of no more than 100 or so who were outnumbered by press and police. Few were from Gaza itself.
Much earlier in the day, the children of the settlers bussed into Jerusalem by their teachers had mounted an exuberant teenage demonstration, but they were long gone by the time the vote came in. All but a handful of settlers were sitting at home watching the vote on television, the same as everyone else. I had spent the whole of the previous week with the Gaza settlers, shopping for food at the same supermarket, eating a sandwich at the same coffee shop, waking at night to the sound of Palestinian mortars and Kassam rockets thumping to the ground. I saw the moments pass as they woke up to history. They could not believe God would do this to them, and they felt betrayed and abandoned by their leader, Sharon, the man who, as minister of housing in the early 90s, had presided over Israel's largest settlement-expansion programme, who had come to visit them only a year before and called them heroes. They watched the television news reports and did not recognise themselves. They saw camera crew after camera crew seek out the tiny number of messianic American settlers (perhaps no more than a dozen in Gaza, out of an estimated total of 8,500) and allow them to be the strident voice of a complex social fabric of overwhelmingly working-class Israelis whose families had immigrated from Tunisia, Morocco, Iraq, Syria and France. No one remembered any more, they felt, why most of them had come to Gaza: because 22 years ago the government had sent them there, offering them cheap mortgages and business loans to settle the land.

The Gaza Strip is a territory of about 360 square kilometres, running up the Mediterranean coast towards Tel Aviv, bordered to the south by Egypt. It's a strip of land no more than 14km across at its widest point, six at its narrowest, and is said to be the most densely populated piece of earth in the world. It is home to more than a million Palestinians. Until 1948, Gaza was part of British-run Palestine and was intended to be included in a new, contiguous Arab country under a UN plan for partition. That plan foundered in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49, and Gaza came under Egyptian control. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were ethnically cleansed from Israeli areas, and wound up in Gaza refugee camps. Nearly 20 years later, in the Six Day War of 1967, Israel gained Gaza and occupied the adjoining Sinai peninsula, a desert area of Egypt stretching to the Suez Canal. Settlements were soon established in Sinai but, under the terms of the 1978 peace treaty with Egypt, the land was handed back in 1982 and the settlements dismantled. A violent conflict took place between the Israeli army and the lone, hold-out settlement of Yamit, where settlers had to be dragged from their homes by soldiers.

Some of the Sinai settlers then moved on to Gaza, and the government encouraged Israeli civilians to settle there, too, offering them tax breaks and cheap mortgages. The area was popular with working-class North African Jews who liked the coast and small-town life. Better a house in Gaza and a job in the nascent Gazan agricultural sector than a cramped apartment in Bat Yam, the Israeli equivalent of a dull commuter town; and if you wanted, you could commute from Gaza to Tel Aviv, only an hour or so's drive away. There are three settlement areas; the largest in the south became known as Gush Katif ("harvest block").

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1348623,00.html