By Rafael D. Frankel
NEVEH DEKALIM, Gaza—Bulldozers are no strangers to Gaza, but even during the last intifada they did not scar the earth like this.
Despite all that was predicted by the settler movement, religious Zionists, and anti-disengagement activists from around the country; despite the prayers and the predictions of miracles, the fact is that by the beginning of Shabbat today, the bulldozers, brought here by “The Bulldozer,” will have finished the job they came here to do: destroy all the Jewish homes the modern Gaza Strip has ever seen.
In what was the largest of the Jewish settlements in Gaza, the job here was already done. Black tar still coated the streets, red bricks still tiled the sidewalks, and power lines ran up and down the white sand dunes as they have for more than two decades.
Though devoid of life, the municipal buildings, sports gym, and all the structures which housed businesses remained intact. And from the Gush Katif highway, the dozens of greenhouses and the Star of David shaped yeshiva provided the familiar view for anyone accustomed to traveling here.
Yet where homes once stood for more than 500 families, only mound after mound of crumbled concrete, twisted metal, and busted stucco remained. Once manicured lawns were overrun with the rubble, and pits two meters deep and three across lay testament to uprooted palm trees crated off for replanting in new soil.
“It’s like a movie, a bad dream,” said Rashbi Cohen, 39, a bus driver from Beit HaGedi who was in Neveh Dekalim Thursday. With an uncle who lived here and a job in which he often drove groups from Gush Katif on trips around Israel, Cohen was familiar with the tranquil suburban town this once was. “You can’t imagine something like this, what we did here.”
What little traffic remained—mostly trucks moving heavy machinery and army and police vehicles augmented by the occasional car of a resident who received special permission to visit—dodged random debris strewn across the roads. Palm fronds mixed with a refrigerator here, a set of chairs and a table there.
In the parking lot and town square, which hundreds of youths made their hang-out during the town’s last days, dozens of unused, still flattened boxes were scattered across the concrete along with two mattresses.
On the barbed wire fence still ringing the settlement, orange ribbon was tied around metal wire to read: “Gush Katif forever.”
All the while, perched above the methodical destruction, tattered “Chof Aza” and Israeli flags fluttered from still-standing lampposts.
Such was not the case at the site of the Gush Katif cemetery. Where just over two weeks ago thousands gathered for a final visit that doubled as a tearful Tisha B’Av service, the sand dunes were well on their way to regaining their former domain.
With the last of the 48 graves removed Thursday, only stone from the cemetery’s concrete foundation and the occasional plastic water pipe protruded from the sand which was marked by fresh bulldozer treads.
It took five days to remove all the graves, Brigadier General Orna Barbibai said, as she stood with a unit of soldiers who just completed the job. Each coffin was escorted by a former Gush Katif rabbi on its way to its revised final resting place.
“Wherever the families asked us to move them, that’s what we did.” Barbibai said, adding that 15 people will be reburied on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Though various settler and religious groups are petitioning the high court to spare the Gaza synagogues, not even a memorial plaque is planned for the site of the cemetery. But whether by chance or purpose, a compact disc stuck up from a dune in front of the former site. “Memory” was engraved on its gold surface.
Meanwhile, from the Gush Katif highway, the dilapidated shacks and grey apartment buildings of Khan Yunis stood as they always have. Though testaments to Jewish life in Gaza will remain—the greenhouses, the roads, perhaps the synagogues—38 years later, the Arabs are once again alone with this land.
©2005 Rafael D. Frankel and The Jerusalem Post
No comments:
Post a Comment