Twenty Years Later—Remembering the Uprooting of Gush Katif 

 

This summer marks twenty years since the Israeli government evicted close to 10,000 Israelis from their homes in Gush Katif, a block of twenty-one communities in the Southern Gaza Strip, but some former residents are still mourning their loss. 

 

“Leaving [Gush] was the hardest challenge I ever faced,” says former Gush resident Anita Tucker. Even twenty years later, her memories of that final day remain fresh in her mind. 

“[On the day of the disengagement], my son, wearing his IDF uniform, tore keriyah. Then he bent down on his knees and kissed the ground. We sang ‘Hatikvah’ and ‘Ani Ma’amin.’ Everyone was in tears.” 

Like many of her neighbors, Tucker couldn’t wrap her head around the government’s plan. As a farmer, the former Brooklynite and her husband developed hothouses for growing the region’s famous bug-free vegetables. She and her family were hopeful to the very end. 

“We planted until we were forced to leave,” says Tucker. “We called it ma’amin and zorea [believing and planting].” Even as they were evacuated, they insisted on leaving the water on to water the crops.  

After being forced from her home, Tucker’s first stop was the Kotel, where she arrived alongside several busloads of fellow evacuees. “If you don’t have a home, you pray for the everlasting home,” she explains.  

There, thousands of their supporters were waiting, dancing with them in a kind of defiant joy, as they held tight to the Torah scrolls they’d taken from the communities set to be destroyed. 

Starting again was an uphill battle. The Tuckers had been among the Gush’s 400 families—roughly a quarter of the 1,700 evacuated families—who supported themselves through agriculture. Tucker had been known throughout the Jewish world as the “celery lady,” though she points out that she, and her husband and partner in farming, Stuart, a biology teacher and musmach of Yeshiva University, also grew other vegetables including the region’s iconic bug-free cabbage and cauliflower as well as cherry tomatoes and flowers. They grew vegetables in inert sand, using drip irrigation.“That final year we were there, we grew twenty tons of vegetables per dunam. 

 

 

“We had beautiful houses. We had a beautiful town. It was immoral and unethical to take 10,000 people out of their homes with no plan,” she says. 

After they were pulled from their homes, the Tuckers and their neighbors ended up in hotels, youth hostels and kibbutz guest houses, mainly in Jerusalem, Ashkelon and Eilat. 

‘We spent seven years in caravans waiting for our new homes to be built . . . some families with six kids had to live in those caravans.’ 

As with the October 7 refugees, trying to make a permanent home out of what was meant to be a vacation spot was anything but enjoyable. Basic needs weren’t accounted for. “There was nowhere to do laundry and no activities for kids,” recalls Rabbi Yosef Zvi Rimon, a well-known rabbinic figure and posek who serves as the chief rabbi of Gush Etzion and community rabbi of Alon Shvut South, rosh yeshivah of Machon Lev and president of World Mizrachi. In the aftermath of the disengagement, Rabbi Rimon visited the evacuees and helped get them back on their feet, a process that took many long years.  

 

\Photo: Eddie Gerald/Alamy Stock Photo

After living for a year at the youth hostel of Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, near Ashkelon, the Tuckers moved to a caravilla (caravan home) on the agricultural fields of Ein Tzurim where they remained for years, living on land the government leased from the kibbutz. 

“We spent seven years in caravans waiting for our new homes to be built,” Tucker recalls. “Some families with six kids had to live in those caravans.”  

Eventually Tucker moved, along with ninety of her former neighbors, to a new home, named after her old home, Netzer Hazani. Her new community is located on agricultural land that she and her neighbors purchased from Moshav Yesodot in central Israel. 

 

 

“Today Netzer Hazani is a beautiful thriving town with a shul, a simchah hall and a youth center. “It took time and effort and help from people all over,” she says. 

Tucker says that by the time the government allowed them to buy farmland in 2012 (seven years later), they were in their mid-sixties and had aged out of farming. Further, she says, the compensation for rebuilding was calculated according to Gaza prices, which didn’t match the cost of living in the lowlands (the Shefelah), where they now lived. As independent farmers, the Tuckers lacked a pension to fall back on, so despite his age, Stuart returned to teaching—he continues to teach today at age eighty-two. Anita became a volunteer fundraiser, raising money to help her former neighbors.  

The Tuckers were the lucky ones. Others never got over the shock. “We had fatalities. Within three years of the disengagement, a number of people were diagnosed with cancer,” recalls Dr. Sody Naimer, a family physician and Ben-Gurion University medical school professor who practiced family medicine in Gush Katif.  

 

Long-Term Effects 

Dr. Naimer points to a study conducted by one of his medical students and published in the Israel Medical Association Journal comparing Gush Katif evacuees with a control group that didn’t undergo the disengagement, which revealed unusually high rates of both diabetes and hypertension among the evacuees (Ronen Kory, Alon Carney and Sody Naimer, “Health Ramifications of the Gush Katif Evacuation,” Israel Medical Association Journal, vol. 15 [March 2013]: 137-142). 

Given the trauma surrounding their departure, it was no surprise that many evacuees also experienced a dip in their mental health.  

“The emotional repercussions were devastating. Lots of us were weeping [on the day of the evacuation],” Dr. Naimer recalls. Dr. Naimer held himself together by jogging. “Instead of having a nervous breakdown, I jogged thousands of kilometers each week.” 

Thankfully, Dr. Naimer eventually found his way, but he says not everyone was similarly blessed. “Some of my then-teenaged children’s friends didn’t do well,” he recalls. 

“There was a lot of religious fallout. Some entered a state of insecurity and confusion and never got their act together. Not an insignificant number never got married or raised families,” he says. 

But they weren’t the majority. It took years, but in the end, most Gush Katif teens and adults did rebound, says Dr. Naimer. He says that many of the teens, even those who spent a year protesting the disengagement, and claiming they will not don IDF uniforms if the disengagement goes through, eventually served in the IDF, and most remained religiously observant. The strong religious faith endemic to that region was key to softening the blow.  

 

When Communities Scatter  

Also of critical importance was the powerful community feeling that survived even after the communities were destroyed. “Our strength was in staying together,” said Lior Kalfa, who served as an official in Neve Dekalim, the largest town in Gush Katif. Staying together required a great deal of planning, says Kalfa, who is today a government official tasked with handling Bedouin affairs. Before the disengagement, he was very active in the protests against the disengagement, and afterwards, he acted as a liaison and negotiator between the displaced residents and the government, lobbying for their right to stay together. Members of Kalfa’s own community of Neve Dekalim were scattered among ten hotels in Jerusalem and Ashkelon. “And that was before social media, but,” he recalls, “we worked hard to stay in touch.”  

 

 

Sadly, it was this need for community that the government officials failed to take into account. “They [the government] rented empty apartments in the south, in Be’er Sheva, Ofakim and Kiryat Gat, with the idea that these would be the permanent homes for the evacuees,” says Professor Miriam Billig, associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ariel University, a researcher on Gush Katif’s residents and the disengagement.  

For the evacuees, this was like a second death. “We couldn’t give up on the community. Our strength was in staying together,” says Kalfa.  

They won. In the end, most of the Gush’s communities relocated together in whole or in significant parts. For some, however, staying together didn’t work out. 

Billig relates the tragic story of one Gush community, Kfar Darom, which relocated en masse to Ashkelon. 

“The government pressured them to decide quickly,” says Billig. Community leaders went along with the move to two twenty-story high-rise apartment buildings overlooking the Mediterranean, which was, ironically, a similar view to that which they had enjoyed in their former homes. 

Of critical importance was the powerful community feeling that survived even after the communities were destroyed. ‘Our strength was in staying together.’ 

 It was, says Billig, a “community disaster.” Families with six or eight or ten children—who were accustomed to living in private homes and “face-to-face relationships”—were moved into apartments scattered on different floors and buildings where they were disconnected from one another.   

“In the yishuv, the children were free to run around. Now, instead of sending their kids out to play, one of the parents had to lock the door and take their kids down in the elevator just to see their friends. . . . It didn’t work—most of the time, they preferred that the kids stay at home,” says Billig. 

For many of these families, Shabbat was no longer a spiritual oasis but lonely and socially isolating.  

“The community was allotted a mildew-infested basement space for a synagogue. No one wanted to be there,” says Billig.  

The most challenging holiday was Sukkot. Though a few families built their sukkot around the towers, most abandoned the towers to celebrate the holiday with relatives in other parts of the country, leaving those who remained feeling forlorn during what should have been a time of joy. 

Billig also says the move devastated the evacuees’ mental health, with adolescents—vulnerable even in the best of circumstances—hit hardest. 

“The youth hated the building. Some didn’t want to come home from yeshivah,” says Billig. It wasn’t long before the evacuees pulled up stakes and moved on—sometimes as a group, sometimes on their own. The last holdouts, a group of thirteen families who remained for six years, relocated together to the new village of Shavei Darom, named after their destroyed town.  

 

 

An idealistic and intensely Zionist group, the evacuees wanted their new addresses to reflect their deepest beliefs. There were two schools of thought in the Dati Leumi world about how an uprooted community should rebuild. One focused on the need to create a new community, preferably in border or outlying areas. This approach followed the ideology of Yeshivat Har Hamor, a Religious Zionist yeshivah in Har Homa, Jerusalem, founded in 1997 as an offshoot of Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav, that defined their role as “replanting,” which meant establishing new communities mostly in border areas.  

As an example of successful “replanters,” Billig points to evacuees from the Gush Katif town of Atzmona who made their homes in an abandoned secular kibbutz called Shomria, which they transformed into a thriving moshav that now houses nearly 900 people. “They got to live in a large space with community structures similar to what they had in Gush Katif,” says Billig. 

Another group took a different tack. 

Reasoning that their fight against the disengagement failed because the Gush Katif communities were perceived as having distanced from the rest of the country, they felt that the antidote was to “reconnect with the nation” by adding their strength to existing cities, villages and towns.  

Billig cites the Netzarim evacuees who formed the nucleus of Ariel’s Garin Torani (a group of young Religious Zionist families who move together into a neighborhood to effect social change and strengthen Judaism). They established a new Torah-based community within that secular bastion.  

“They transformed Ariel,” says Billig. “Before them, the town . . . had nothing to do with the surrounding communities of the Shomron.”    

Thanks to their efforts, today Ariel boasts ample kosher food establishments and eateries, stores selling modest clothing, religious schools and a decidedly more Jewish flavor. 

Both strategies worked, says Billig.  

 

Changing Jobs, Changing Lives  

Finding employment was another major hurdle for evacuees. Because of the disengagement, most Gush Katif residents had lost their jobs—they had worked in the region in agriculture, tourism or education.  

“I went to see them in their hotels,” recalls Rabbi Rimon.“Eighty-five percent of them were jobless.” Raising funds for seed money and corralling professionals into mentoring, Rabbi Rimon started an initiative called JobKatif to help evacuees pivot into new employment. Now renamed La’Ofek, the organization is dedicated to helping Israelis find employment and rehabilitating marginalized populations, including Ethiopian-Israelis, needy soldiers and at-risk youth.  

“You had to think out of the box,” says Rabbi Rimon. Oftentimes, the pivot was into another profession. Rabbi Rimon recalls a former cherry tomato grower, now too old to farm, who became an advisor to young farmers, helping them do their work, get their crops to market, and make decisions on how to get the best and most profitable yields. “He now works with other farmers, which brings him joy.” 

Another tragedy turned to triumph was Eitan, a former security guard whom Rabbi Rimon and JobKatif set up as a bicycle store owner. “It all started with a simple question: I asked him, ‘what are you good at?’” the rabbi recalls. It turned out that Eitan was a bicycle aficionado skilled at taking bicycles apart and fixing them. Using seed money from donors, JobKatif helped Eitan open a bicycle store. JobKatif provided Eitan with professional mentoring for a whole year, making Eitan’s bike shop one of 280 businesses the initiative helped open. Amazingly, the vast majority of those businesses are still up and running and doing well, a fact which Rabbi Rimon attributes to siyata d’Shmaya and the mentoring program.  

Not only did JobKatif save individuals, it saved entire families.  

Rabbi Rimon recalls a teenaged girl who related that her parents, both unemployed as a result of the evacuation, were about to divorce. Then JobKatif stepped in and helped them find work. “Now that both my parents are working, we have a happy family,” she told the rabbi. 

 

It’s Not Over 

That happiness is not complete. Though most have started a new and fulfilling chapter in their lives, many of the former residents long to return.  

“Our kids grow up with the tradition that Gaza is home,” says Tucker, echoing the sentiments of most of her former neighbors.   

Now seventy-nine, Tucker is currently negotiating with a company that runs assisted living homes to get them to build one in or near Gaza—“so older people from Gush Katif can move there,” she says. 

“At the right time,” says Tucker. “We are going back home.” 

 

Carol Green Ungar is an award-winning writer whose essays have appeared in Tablet, the Jerusalem Post, Ami Magazine, Jewish Action and other publications. She teaches memoir writing and is the author of several children’s books.   

 

More in this section:

Twenty Years Later—Remembering the Uprooting of Gush Katif by Carol Ungar 

Debbie’s Story by Debbie Rosen, as told to Toby Klein Greenwald 

From Gush Katif to the Rebuilt Ganei Tal by Moti and Hana Sender, as told to Toby Klein Greenwald