Gush Katif: Seven Months Later, by Rachel Ginsberg
Excerpts;
What was to be a 10-day stay has turned into an odyssey of uncertainty whose provisional end will only be seen in another few months when the Zelingers and other evacuees from the community of Neve Dekalim will be settled in temporary quarters at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim. Five years down the line, the remnants of their community will be reunited in permanent housing near Kibbutz Amatzia in the sparsely populated Lachish region.
“People assume that after seven months, we’ve all gotten our lives back together, we’ve picked up our compensation checks and gone forward,” Dana says. “It’s not true. Almost no one has received compensation. Unemployment is rampant and savings are gone. No permanent housing solutions have been created yet. And those highly-touted ‘caravillas’ that some families are living in, which are really just prefab caravans with fancy red roofs, are also just temporary.”
One of the ironies of the compensation package is that to get the initial 50,000 shekels, a special government-controlled account has to be opened. Bank Tefachot, Israel’s largest mortgage bank, was about to sue the government for the millions of dollars it would lose on defaulted mortgage payments of homes that would no longer exist, until the Treasury determined that the banks would still receive their mortgage payments — from the evacuees’ compensation accounts.
State Comptroller Justice Micha Lindenstrauss recently gave the government failing grades for its handling of the 1,750 families evicted from their homes in Gaza last summer. Lindenstrauss writes, “The State and its institutions failed in their treatment of the expelled citizens of Gush Katif… We are aware of the fact that the bodies that were established for the evacuation and absorption of the residents had to work in non-routine conditions, but this report shows that there were grave mistakes in their preparation, which caused harm to the evacuees and caused them unnecessary and very painful suffering… It is obligatory to investigate in depth the failures described herein.”
Lindenstrauss slammed the Disengagement Authority (Sela) for not preparing adequate immediate temporary housing for the days following the withdrawal and longer-term temporary housing for the period until permanent housing is completed. Sela only prepared seven temporary housing centers, when in fact 31 were necessary. Hotels and campuses were to be used for a maximum of 7-10 days, but seven months later, hundreds of families have yet to be resettled.
Criticism was also leveled at the treatment of the evacuees’ property. The report notes that hundreds of families were cut off from their property for many months, due to a ruling that limited families to accessing their containers only once before having to remove them to their permanent homes, which do not yet exist. It also notes that many complaints of damaged or stolen property have still not been addressed because of unresolved disputes between Sela and the Defense Ministry.