While the state makes another daily gesture toward the settlers of Gush Katif, cushioning their exit with millions of shekels and building them neighborhoods of private beachfront homes - coddling that few in the state have received - the settlers continue to spurn the decisions of the Knesset, government and Supreme Court, and to liken themselves to sheep heading to slaughter.
The ongoing opposition to the evacuation might have been acceptable had there not also been warnings - from those fomenting rebellion against the government - about an impending "rift in the people." That rift could, indeed, occur - and not because the citizens of Israel are not compassionate, but because the settlers are making every effort to remove themselves from the public. If they are not prepared to accept the decisions of the government, the Knesset and the Supreme Court, and threaten to refuse evacuation orders and to barricade themselves in bunkers in the name of holy martyrdom, then the emotional break with them will, indeed, occur.
What has grown increasingly clear of late is that the settlers are not pioneers on a state mission, as they have presented themselves, but rather self-designated envoys on behalf of their own worldview, and on behalf of some rabbi or other who ordered them to behave in this or that way. After years in which they preached to the public that they are the supreme exemplars of sacrifice and devotion for the sake of all, it turned out that their pioneering is conditional. So long as the public agrees with them, they serve the public; the moment the state decides on a different set of priorities, they are prepared to thwart a legal action by the state and to punish it for hurting the realization of their individual and collective dream.
The State of Israel is a state of immigrants and displaced people. Anyone who came to Israel was uprooted from a home, a neighborhood, a synagogue or a cemetery in his place of birth - in Europe, Asia or Africa. These displaced people, immigrants and refugees, who today form the backbone of Israeli society, saw the very absorption in Israel as compensation for the evacuation, and they did this under harsh personal and economic conditions, without money, without knowing the language, and sometimes without a shred of sympathy from the veteran Israelis. Therefore, the evacuated settlers of Gush Katif need to keep things in proportion when they talk about trauma. The evacuation from Gush Katif to Nitzanim, a distance of 30 kilometers, or to any other place in Israel they choose, is not like any displacement experience that millions of other Israelis have undergone.
When a youth reared in religious Zionism stands before a judge and says, "I am a Jew from the land of Israel" (as opposed to the State of Israel), as though he were standing before a British Mandate judge, he cannot expect any empathy. It would be preferable for the settlers of Gush Katif to emulate in their protest Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, who identified with their stance on the Evacuation Compensation Law, but when he remained in the minority, wrote in his dissenting opinion: "Now that the High Court of Justice has also ruled by a majority that there is no flaw that justifies cancelling the law entirely, all of us are obligated to obey the law, even if there are some who will be compelled to do so with gritted teeth."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/587084.html
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