The Settlers' Lament

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Deep in the heart of the Gaza Strip, the Hilburgs are pretending to have a normal day. Life in the Jewish settlement bloc of Gush Katif is out of the ordinary at the best of times, but this is the worst of times. Yet Bryna, 55, defiantly acts as if nothing has changed, washing the dishes, tidying the living room, settling down to write end-of-year reports on her speech-therapy students. Out in their nearby hothouses, her husband Sammy, 56, is resolutely prepping the sandy soil for the next vegetable crop. But their bleak eyes, full of anger and pain and loss, tell the real story.

Beginning this week, their hamlet of Netzer Hazani and the other 20 Jewish settlements that occupy more than one-third of the Gaza Strip will be ghost towns, the Hilburg home of 26 years reduced to rubble, the very purpose of their lives stripped away. Under the controversial policy Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls disengagement, some 8,700 Israeli residents in Gaza and another 674 in the West Bank must leave their homes or face removal by force. The plan has the support of the international community, including the Bush Administration, which sees the withdrawal as a small but vital step toward the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state--even though Sharon has defined it strictly as a strategic move to shorten Israel's defensive lines. A majority of the Israeli public, too, believes it's time for the Gaza settlers to go, not least because the rest of the country's sons in the army keep dying in order to protect a few thousand families occupying a sliver of congested, hostile territory.

But for a devoted few, including Gaza residents like the Hilburgs, the abandonment of the settlements represents a shameful, even sinful betrayal of the ideological foundations of the Jewish state. As the date for the pullout has neared, activists from outside the strip have blocked highways, spread nails on roads and sought to crowd into the settlements to thwart the evacuation with their bodies. Israeli police estimate that more than 2,500 have smuggled themselves into Gush Katif; some plan to test Sharon's vow to use the army to remove any who try to resist the evacuation, pressing their slogan, "Jews don't deport Jews." The opposition--which is dominated by an assortment of far-right settlers from the West Bank, messianic rabbis, religious extremists and restless teenagers--has virtually hijacked the disengagement issue from the Gaza residents, who voice their dissent in acts of denial. Whether they succeed in disrupting the evacuation, the protesters are intent on turning it into a test of Israel's very identity. In this showdown, Sharon's detractors--including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who resigned from the Cabinet last week to side with the opposition--claim the higher power of divine right is on their side: the land God gave to the Jews cannot be given away by any state. The issues raised for the country are cosmic. Will a minority of settlers who have long enjoyed an outsize ability to set the national agenda continue to shape the country's destiny? Will Israelis live by the laws of the state or under the authority of religion?