As the Jewish settlements of Gaza empty out, the instant community built frantically for evacuees in a watermelon field next to Moshav Nitzan fills up. The site, on the coast north of Ashkelon, is still under construction, but already features sidewalks of interlocking red stones, new grass, stubby trees and traffic circles studded with petunias, all thrown together in less than three months. Families pull up outside identical yellow-walled pre-fabs with roofs of red shingles, unloading crates and children and parking cars flying faded orange ribbons.

Sara Tal-Yosef got here an hour ago, and stands in silver sandals appraising the pre-fab that will be her home until a permanent house is constructed nearby. Two of her children are here; the other three and all of the family's belongings are supposed to arrive later this evening from Rafiah Yam, a secular community of 25 families at Gaza's southern tip, where they have lived for 20 years. Her 90-square-meter (990 sq. ft.) pre-fab is brand new, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, bright tile floors and sliding doors that open onto a small red-brick patio. All in all, Tal-Yosef admits, it could be worse. But she left behind a two-floor, 300-square-meter (3,300-sq.-ft.) house with 13 bedrooms and a jacuzzi, she says, sending a dubious glance toward her compact new home.

Like the rest of the 350 families arriving here, Tal-Yosef and her children will remain until the new communities planned for Gaza evacuees in this area are approved and built. With their compensation from the government, they will be able to buy land at a 50-percent discount and build homes. This will take two years, at least. "If I believed the prime minister, I could be more calm about this," she says. "After all we've been through, I don't." As of today, Tal-Yosef, who is in her 40s, is unemployed. She worked for the Gaza Coast regional council, the local government of the settlements in the Strip. The local government and the settlements, she points out impassively, do not exist anymore.

In the pre-fab that serves as the Nitzan site's offices, families mill around the entrance, eventually making their way to the room marked "absorption" and then to the room marked "contract signing." The 1,350 other Gaza families are being put up by the government in hotels, in kibbutz guest houses, and in 900 rented apartments in nearby cities. Another pre-fab neighborhood like this one is under construction at Yad Binyamin, a half-hour drive north of Nitzan.

Outside the office, white-shirted employees of HOT, a cable TV company, are giving out red lollipops to the new arrivals. A cheerful sign advertises cable and broad-band Internet, proffering an oblivious invitation to "add to your dream house an entire world of home media." The sign depicts a young and optimistic family - not, apparently, displaced by a forced population transfer of any kind - unpacking boxes in a bright and generic new home.

Thirty miles to the south, in the Gaza settlement of Ganei Tal, Janice and Zvi Joseph eye their empty house from plastic chairs on the lawn. All of their belongings are now in a metal shipping container outside. "It's just a house," Janice says, her voice tight. "It's just concrete. I don't care. If the people aren't here, the house has no meaning at all."

The story they tell of their lives here, on the eve of their forced move, is recognizable, after dozens of conversations with the Jews in these settlements, as a typical narrative of the Gaza settlers. Janice and Zvi moved to Gaza in 1978, to Moshav Katif, and came to Ganei Tal - in Gush Katif, between the Palestinian towns of Khan Yunis and Dir el Balah - seven years later. Both had moved to Israel from the United States. When they came here there was nothing, they remember, only white sand dunes. The ramshackle Arab construction that now crowds the road through Gush Katif did not yet exist. They enjoyed cordial relations with those few Arabs who did live nearby. They thought their existence here had importance for Israel's security, that Ganei Tal and its sister settlements guarded the cities inside the Green Line. They were pioneers, which is what they wanted to be when they came to Israel.

Beginning with the first intifada in the late 1980s, they watched the quiet in Gaza turn to stones and bullets, and finally, over the past five years, to rockets and mortar shells. More than 5,000 have landed on the Gaza settlements since 2000. Having spent three decades inside the consensus, the Gaza settlers suddenly found themselves outside. The rationale for their being here was increasingly questioned, and then ultimately abandoned by Ariel Sharon's Likud government. They became not a security asset, but a liability, tying down three army brigades and mandating the country's control of 1.4 million hostile Palestinians who were a threat to Israel's endangered demographic balance. They were, they both say, betrayed by the leaders who sent them here. "One day - pop! - we were told that our presence here had no value at all," Janice says.

Most of the residents of Ganei Tal are planning to relocate to a new community that will be built near Kibbutz Hafetz Haim, northeast of Ashkelon. Until that happens, they will live at the second pre-fab site at nearby Yad Binyamin, but that site isn't ready either, so they will stay at Hafetz Haim's guesthouse in the interim. Zvi and Janice, however, will not be joining the rest of the group. Unsure about the plan's chances of success and unwilling to live indefinitely in temporary conditions, a few weeks before the mid-August deadline they bought a house in Elazar, a settlement in Gush Etzion, outside Jerusalem.

A week before the deadline the Josephs began packing up. They waited in their empty house until August 16, when the members of Ganei Tal held a ceremony in their synagogue marking the end of the moshav's 26 years of existence. When it was over, they got into their car and left Gaza for the last time.

The adults of the Gaza
settlements were in grim spirits as they finally came to terms with the end. While the campaign to save Gush Katif reached a desperate crescendo outside Gaza, the people in whose name it was waged seemed more subdued than defiant. For the settlers here, this was not the end of a struggle or the demise of an idea. It was the end of their homes, communities, schools, synagogues, and of lives they had known for decades. Some who had always been happy to speak with The Report now said no. A few days before all the members of the tiny settlement of Pe'at Sadeh picked up and moved to Moshav Mavki'im, near Ashkelon, Viky Sabaj, a salty and usually talkative resident told me in a tired voice that she no longer had anything to say.

But the young were energized. In the final, strange days of its existence, Neveh Dekalim, the largest settlement in Gaza, took on the air of a summer camp. The lawns at the center of the 500-family community were crawling with teenagers who had arrived from all over the country, defying the army's declaration that the settlements were closed to non-residents by hiding in trunks of cars, forging ID cards and overstaying visitors permits. Clumps of them hung out at night near the settlement's supermarket, enjoying the hormonal charge of the mixing of the sexes and the electricity of impending conflict, operatives on a mission against a hostile government. Not far away, on the beach at Shirat Hayam, the scene was younger and more bizarre: teenagers and kids who looked as young as 10, in enormous knitted skullcaps and long sidelocks, stretched out in tents on the sand with no parents in sight. The year-and-a-half-long fight to save Gush Katif was ending in a blaze of adolescence.

At dawn on the August 15 disengagement deadline, Neveh Dekalim's gate was blocked by a crew of barefoot girls and boys in dirty T-shirts who had clearly been up all night. They were waiting for soldiers to arrive with the government's evacuation orders for every household. Later that day, the kids tried to prevent moving trucks from coming in to remove the possessions of the settlement's families.

Hundreds of dramas were playing out inside the homes of Neveh Dekalim. Most homes now housed, in addition to their usual inhabitants, grown children who had returned to to help their parents, and a few young "guests" from outside. The dilemma was whether to start packing. This was a question of faith. Packing meant coming to terms with the end. It meant you no longer believed, as the community and its leaders had maintained for so long - and as some continued to maintain until the end - that a miracle would occur, that Sharon's evil decree would be canceled, and that everyone would laugh about this next year in Neveh Dekalim.

In the days before the deadline, it became clear that only a small minority of settlers, concentrated mainly in hard-line settlements like Netzarim and Kfar Darom, still believed that. I spent some of the lead-up to the pullout with a family in Neveh Dekalim; they sent a crate of books and photo albums out of Gaza in the trunk of my car, their first acknowledgment that the withdrawal might, in fact, happen. By August 15, cardboard boxes were visible through the windows and doors of many homes in Neveh Dekalim, though moving trucks were still rare.

The family's teenage son, like most of the settlement's young people, resented his parents' pragmatic moves, which he thought showed weakness. His 20-year-old sister, who had also lived her entire life in Neveh Dekalim, did not want to be around at the end. She thought her family should pack up and leave. Their parents, though, couldn't leave before the very last moment, before the soldiers knocked on their door and told them to go. They made no living arrangements for after the withdrawal. They would pack before they were evicted, and had no intention of making soldiers carry them out of the house, but they would not be able to live with themselves if they didn't hold out until the very end. Their father decided that when the soldiers came, he would invite them in and ask them how long it would take to evacuate the family if they resisted. Half an hour, he imagined them saying. Sit on the couch for half an hour, he would tell them. Have a cup of coffee. I will read Psalms. Then we will all leave together.

Jewish Gaza was always a more complex place than it seemed from outside: more pragmatic and less devout, on the whole, than the settlements of the West Bank. Many residents were Sephardi Jews from the development towns and moshavim of the south, giving the Gaza communities a different social and cultural feel than the
ideological settlements of Judea and Samaria, which are almost entirely Ashkenazi. Most of the people I met in a year and a half of covering these settlements were adamant that they were part of the Israeli mainstream and uncomfortable at being mixed up with the extremists who have rallied to their cause, even though their sense of betrayal since the advent of the disengagement plan had radicalized some, especially the young, and made nearly everyone bitter and angry.

In the protests inside the Strip before the pullout, the teenagers and adults who regularly called IDF soldiers Nazis were not from Gush Katif. The rightists who holed up in a hotel on the beach until they were evacuated by the army were not from Gush Katif, and the young men who tried to murder a Palestinian nearby were not from Gush Katif. One of the sons of my Neveh Dekalim hosts, a 23-year-old who lives in a West Bank settlement and who came home before the pullout to help his parents, was on his way to a protest at the isolated settlement of Kfar Darom a week before the deadline. At an army roadblock, he found a group of black-hatted Lubavitch followers, outsiders, screaming at the soldiers, one of whom was from Neveh Dekalim. Disgusted, he turned around and went home.
Susan and Mike Shaul now
live in a new pre-fab at Nitzan. But a week before the mid-August deadline, their home in Gan Or is still furnished, and Susan sits on her couch, her feet tucked under her, the living room walls covered with photographs of weddings and children. Outside, with their four sons, Mike Shaul is busy taking apart the greenhouses where he grew two decades' worth of cherry tomatoes.

"We have to get through the next two or three months, and quickly start planning a new community," says Susan. "We have to preserve something of the atmosphere that we had here." The Shauls and the rest of the 60 families of Gan Or are planning to recreate their settlement as part of the permanent construction supposed to begin in the coming months near Nitzan. The government has promised to help.

The steady trickle of Gaza families into Nitzan became a flood once the August 15 deadline passed. The Shauls have moved into a pre-fab on the site's southern side. On the northern side, Sara Tal-Yosef has given away most of the furniture and bedding from her Rafiah Yam home and squeezed her family into 90 square meters. "Right now I can't think about the future," she says, managing a wry smile. "Right now I'm just depressed."

The cable TV salesmen are doing a steady business. There are problems with some of the air-conditioners. Kids ride bikes up and down on asphalt covered with the dust of construction, past cars still resolutely bearing anti-pullout stickers. A snack stand has opened at the entrance to the site, and demand for sandwiches and popsicles appears high.

Inside Gaza the pullout continues. Here, a few miles to the north, their homes empty now and their communities gone, these Israelis begin to succumb fitfully to life's irresistible tendency to go on.

The Jerusalem Report, September 5, 2005 issue