In mourning, resisters picked up, carried out

In mourning, resisters picked up, carried out
Amid tears and denunciations by settlers, Israel's evacuation of the Gaza Strip's largest Jewish enclave takes shape with little violence

By Joel Greenberg, Tribune foreign correspondent. Rafael D. Frankel contributed to this report

Published August 18, 2005

NEVE DEKALIM, Gaza Strip -- Adiel Grossmak, his shirt torn in a traditional Jewish sign of mourning, couldn't walk out the door.
Asked to leave his home by a squad of Israeli army officers, Grossmak, 24, requested that he be carried.
"I can't go out," he told the officer in charge, sitting on his living room couch. "I'm not angry with you, but what can I do?"
"I know, brother," the officer replied.
"I pity you," Grossmak said before he was picked up and carried to his car by four officers, as neighbors cried and shouted at the soldiers: "Shame on you."
So it went from morning until night in the neighborhoods of Neve Dekalim, the largest Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip, which was slowly emptied of many of its 2,600 residents Wednesday.
A pall of grief hung over the settlement as teams of officers and police went door to door, guided by aerial photos showing every house in the community and by briefings on the families inside
Wearing vests and hats displaying the Israeli flag and state emblem, the security forces went house to house, negotiating and persuading settlers to leave their homes. In most cases they succeeded. When they didn't, resisters were picked up and taken to waiting buses.
The day passed with little violence but great emotion. Women and children wept as they were led out of their homes, and some officers also shed tears.
"How can you do such a thing? You are our brothers," sobbed Tova Elia when the evacuation team stepped into her living room. "You are the Israel Defense Forces. You are Jewish soldiers. You are supposed to defend the country."
As the teams made their grim rounds, they came under a barrage of protests by settlers who urged them to refuse orders.
"Robots! Aren't you ashamed to expel a Jew from his home in the Land of Israel?" one man shouted. "Where is your heart? What will you tell your children?"
Face to face with an officer outside the house where he grew up, Roi Tanami, 24, rejected an offer of assistance in arranging transportation out of Neve Dekalim.
"We want to stay here," Tanami said. "This is our house, and we are being expelled. Why? I haven't heard an explanation."
The officer replied: "I'm doing it for the good of the state."
"You think so?" Tanami asked. "Do you and I deserve this? They've made us enemies, and it will be hard for me to forgive that."
On a sidewalk, a young woman offered children's toys from Neve Dekalim homes to a group of border police. "Take a souvenir of the lives you have destroyed," she said, in tears. "Their childhood is over. Dear soldiers, how can you? We are one people."
The officers pulled their caps low over their eyes and looked away.
Residents embraced and cried, and angry youths turned over garbage bins and set the refuse on fire, sending up plumes of acrid smoke.
Loudspeakers on the roof of the main synagogue broadcast a message of encouragement: "They are trying to expel us from our homes, but our spirit is strong, and we will continue together the whole way."
Inside the synagogue, girls sobbed as a rabbi eulogized the Israeli settlement enclave in the Gaza Strip, known as Gush Katif. "We are building the state of Katif," the rabbi said. "If they don't want us here, we will be everywhere."
There were also moments of physical struggle.
At the home of Shimon and Dikla Cohen, 25 extended family members who had barricaded themselves in the house were removed in a two-hour confrontation that left several officers in tears and one soldier so distraught that he shouted: "What are we doing, taking people from their homes?"
It took nine soldiers to restrain the Cohens' oldest son, Haniel, as he was carried from the house.
As Rabbi Eldad Sharabi left his home with his family, his 17-year-old son, Akiva, prostrated himself on the ground, racked with sobs. "I won't go," he cried, "I won't leave the land of Israel." A group of soldiers carried him to a bus.
At day's end, hundreds of youths gathered at the synagogue singing and waving the Israeli flag from the roof. Ranks of police gathered around the building in what looked like an imminent confrontation.
But an agreement was reached to hold off further evictions, and the police were called away.
"The army has agreed to freeze the situation," said an announcement on the synagogue loudspeaker.
"The expulsion will resume tomorrow."

©2005 The Chicago Tribune