The Independent UK; "Is this the Promised Land?"

[Englander]

Jewish settlers face eviction from Gaza in July.
The move has provoked outrage - and only a minority
will leave voluntarily.
Donald Macintyre hears the plans of two very different families

07 April 2005

On a grey, blustery day, when the Mediterranean breakers come crashing on to its pristine beach, Shirat Hayam, where Rabbi Pinchas Etzion set up home with his wife Anat and three small children last week, is a desolate place. The bleak ruins of the little holiday villas once used, before the Six Day War in 1967, by the Egyptian army officers then occupying Gaza, make it seem all the more abandoned. But for Pinchas, struggling today against the wind to keep his kippa in position on his head, the decision to rent the only empty caravan of the 13 embedded in the sand along the shore here was one of great political and religious significance. For at the very moment when the government of Ariel Sharon is doing all it can to cajole the 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza into moving out before they face forcible evacuation in July, the Etzions, in an act of defiant solidarity, are moving in.

Partly, their arrival in the remotest of all the communities in Gush Katif, the biggest Jewish settlement block, was dictated by family piety. Anat's parents and grandparents are long-standing Gaza settlers. "We are very related to Gush Katif," says Pinchas. "That's why we came here. We believe the evacuation will not happen. We pray that it will not happen. But we have come to empower the family, to embrace them and be with them."

Recent political events do not bear out the view of the Etzions, who have left their own (unthreatened) Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, that disengagement from Gaza "will not happen". Not only has Ariel Sharon staked his political life on dismantling the 21 Gaza settlements, but every political attempt by the Israeli far right to stop it, culminating in last month's defeat for a bill demanding a referendum on the plan, has failed. And when he visits Crawford, Texas, next week, the Israeli Prime Minister will hardly need President Bush to remind him that the US's consistently generous support for his policies is wholly dependent on the plan going ahead - and on time.

But for the Etzions, an absolute spiritual belief in the right of Israeli Jews to settle in - and control - a strip populated by 1.3 million impoverished Palestinians, leads them to suppose that the settlers may be saved before the 20 July deadline by, as Pinchas puts it, "something stronger than reality". A miracle? "Yes, maybe a miracle that will stop this happening." But if not? Pointing to the shelves of religious texts along one roughly whitewashed wall, he says: "I will take a holy book and read it. I won't throw stones. I won't fight soldiers. But if they want me to go they'll have to take me. I won't go of my own volition."

More at;
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=627008