My photographer,
Rebecca, and I drive down the long winding highway
leading from Gush Etzion to Masmia, the crossroads
at which people from Efrat will join the chain stretching
from Gush Katif to the Cotel. I lean back and enjoy
the late afternoon sun on the fields. There are sunflowers
and wheat, and, as we reach further south, cacti bristling.
Most of the foliage is still lush, for this is a road
bordered by evergreen trees. Junctions in the road
are punctuated by teenagers hitchhiking in the same
direction. I try to analyze the comfortable feeling
I have on this warm July day, on this road, by these
fields, with my friends, passing these young people.
And one word comes to mind: home.
This is what
the struggle for Gush Katif is all about. The people
of Katif can quote security officials and army officers,
chapter and verse, who have warned that the Palestinian
reign of terror will only get worse if Israel leaves
Gaza. As a matter of fact, almost no one, so far,
has claimed that it will get better. But at the end
of the day, we, as Israelis, must ask ourselves: What
do we call home? It is not just a political or a military
question, but an existential one. And it is not just
about Gush Katif.
As we near the
chain, and drive along the route, I am astonished,
not only by the numbers - 200,000 according to the
organizers, 130,000 according to the police - but
by the human make-up. Entire families have turned
out, up to four generations. There are babies in porta-cribs,
children and adults, elderly men and women, a few
in wheelchairs. With backpacks filled with snacks
and water bottles, in baseball hats or sunhats, their
hands holding flags and each other, a human cacophony
winds along 56 miles of highway and hills, coincidentally
(or not), like the 56 years of the existence of the
State of Israel.
The afternoon
is replete with biblical analogy. Statistically, not
one person in this chain has been untouched by terror.
I am reminded of Ezekiel's vision of the dry bones
that will gather flesh and breath and stand up and
live again, after the horrors, death and exile that
accompanied the destruction of the Temple. It is no
coincidence, I think, that this is happening on the
cusp of Tisha B'Av.
The faces in
the chain are of every flavor of religious and secular
Jew. There are young men with spiked hair on motorcycles
and people I recognize from hi-tech. Girls pass out
bags of Katif-grown potatoes; a black-hatted Chabadnik
shouts "Mashiach!" as he grabs the hand
of a man next to him, dressed in sandals and shorts.
Men and women who don't want to hold the hand of the
opposite sex, for religious reasons, put a child in
between, or an Israeli flag.
I ask my own
children later, "What moved you the most?"
Ephrat, a student of the behavioral sciences, says,
"All the cars honking in support as they passed
us." Matanya, our 14-year-old drum-playing jock,
says, "I loved the sight of the families saying
Tehillim (Psalms) together."
I ask Bracha
Moshe, a petite pre-school teacher of Sephardic heritage,
who has lived in Katif for 27 years, "What moved
you the most?" She says, "To see the bright
orange shirts in every direction, and the people,
another link, and another and another, all the way
to Nisanit, all the way to Jerusalem…"
Further up the
chain, the orange background is specked with all the
colors of the rainbow, but in the section that Bracha
is standing, they are all Katif residents who are
wearing the trademark orange that they have taken
for their own since Ariel Sharon's announcement that
he would expel them from their homes. Not black, as
in mourning, but orange - the color of joy. Their
shirts bear the epithet "Gush Katif - a Link
in the Chain". Among their numbers is a man who
survived the Holocaust and is a wheelchair. A friend
from Gush Katif tells me, "He's the one who said
we should all put posters on our doors saying, 'We're
not going anywhere.'"
The human chain
is marked by their attitude toward life and their
homes. Fishermen and farmers, professionals and scholars,
the 8,500 people of Katif are idealistic, but pragmatic.
Realizing that their low profile was working against
them, they began to appear on street corners in major
cities, giving out cherry tomatoes - introduced to
Israel by a man from Katif - and spices- exported
in enormous quantities to Europe. Quietly, unobtrusively,
for three decades, they have provided food and flowers
to the Israeli public and abroad - peppers and pesticide-free
strawberries, and bug-free lettuce, used today by
every restaurant in Israel that wants to obtain a
kashrut certificate.
When Sharon
said he would hold a referendum of Likud members,
on May 2, to decide the future of Gush Katif, they
mobilized, like for the chain, with military precision,
canvassed Likud voters throughout the land, and they
won. But Sharon said, "I will expel you, anyway,"
and fired two ministers who disputed his decision.
Stunned, they mobilized, once again. This time, they
said, we will create a human chain that you cannot
ignore. This time, they said, we will show you that
Am Yisrael is standing with us, all the way to Jerusalem.
This is our way. We will show you our power.
I visit Gush
Katif often. I sense that their message is, "We
came to Gush Katif to build. We plant, we harvest,
we grow, we thrive. We have created a microcosm of
what Israel should be - a vibrant, productive, diverse,
tolerant, self-supporting society. We have roots in
the Bible and in history. We were sent here by every
Israeli government of the last thirty years. We won't
let you turn us into monsters."
Rebecca and
I, and the teens who are with us, continue our drive.
There are expressions of support painted on cardboard
and old sheets, and as we draw close to Jerusalem,
we see signs made of silk.
There are no
speeches, just the thousands of people holding hands
and singing Hatikva at 7PM; some adding "Ani
Maamin". Silver trumpets - reminiscent of the
shofars - are sounded at the Cotel, where six-year-old
Yael Bettar is placing a note between the stones.
Her grandfather, Yitzhak Shamir, is sitting at the
other end of the chain, at Nisanit. He was one of
the settlers of the first incarnation of Kfar Darom,
dispersed when the Egyptians captured the region in
1948.
I speak to some
people in the chain, and later. Amy Davidovitch made
aliya from Denver 10 years ago. "When it came
time to sing Hatikva, I couldn't," she says.
"I was crying."
Jonathan Kopelowitz,
a water engineer from Rehovot (see photo), who was
there with his family, says, "We wanted to be
part of the chain, to help as much as we can…
I was very impressed by the good spirits, the good
atmosphere…I hope it will have influence on the
right people."
Marilyn and
Joshua Adler and their son, Itai, 7 (see photo), live
in Efrat. Marilyn says, "For me, the most moving
moment was when we found out, at 7 PM, that the chain
had succeeded, that we were connected from Gush Katif
to the Cotel, and then we all raised our held hands
high and sang Hatikva. Itai then looked up and said,
'Abba, we won. I knew we would win. We saved Gush
Katif!' "
The Adlers are
not newcomers to struggle. Josh says he and Marilyn
met in the tomato fields of Sinai in 1981. "I
was one of the last people forcibly removed from the
rooftops of Yamit on its final day," says Josh.
"The bulldozers started working early in the
morning before the army was able to remove us... I
always thought that that was very cruel, and never
forgave Arik Sharon for not waiting one more day to
destroy the town. The trauma stays with me till this
day."
A friend calls me this morning, Tisha B'Av, and tells
me she has found two lines in Eicha (5:1-2) that remind
her of Gush Katif. "Recall, O Lord, what has
befallen us; behold, and see our disgrace. Our heritage
has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens."
"Not yet,"
I reply.
At night, when
I can't fall asleep, I sometimes visualize the waves
of the ocean rushing on to the pristine beach at Gush
Katif. My daughter's wedding took place there, overlooking
that beach and those waves, at sunset. It's a calming
vision, and I'm asleep in seconds.
But I now have
a new vision to add to my image bank - the sight of
thousands of Israelis, winding over the hilltops and
along the highways, holding hands and singing of hope
and faith.
I have to believe
that G-d has heard their voices.
