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Commentary:
The State Commission of Inquiry formed to probe the treatment of “evacuees” has begun hearing testimony. This blog has referred and will continue to refer to the former Gush Katif residents by the more accurate terms, the expelled, the evicted, the former Gush Katif residents, rather than the regime politically correct term of “evacuees from the disengagement” because what happened in Gush Katif in August, 2005 was NOT a disengagement and the former residents were NOT “evacuated”, i.e. “evacuated from danger.” The people of Gush Katif had made homes, communities, had built businesses, society, communal and religious life there and had made a disaster area BLOOM.
The regime, to this day uses sanitized terms like “evacuees,”
“disengagement, ” “evacuation” to gloss over the vilest, ugliest manifestations of harrassments and persecutions of Jews, be they religious or secular, since the Shoa by a minority of political elitists holding inordinate and dictatorial governmental, informational and endoctrinational power over the masses of Israel.
This sanitation also manifests itself in the continued cover-up regarding the truth of what the former Gush Katif residents have endured during the time leading up to the expulsion as well for the nearly 4 years subsequent to it.
Below, this blog has excerpted reports in which the former and present heads of the Disengagement Administration (SELA) have testified before the State Commission of Inquiry.
In their testimony, the former and current SELA heads make obvious what has been known for roughly 4 1/2 to 5 years, that the 8,000 former Gush Katif residents were expected to be supplicants… or else.
What is conveniently omitted by the reporter who penned these 2 articles is that the former residents were evicted for purely prejudicial, political reasons, anti-Jewish reasons — the beginning of divorce from anything of any Jewish spirituality — by the political elitists holding inordinate, centralized and dictatorial power over Israel’s governance, institutions and judiciary. The expulsion did not occur as the sanitized language would have one believe years later — “evacuated for security reasons from a dangerous area.” The Rocket attacks which, heretofore, were localized within Gush Katif with an occasional rocket falling in Sderot. If one views the charts [ here and here ], they will see that attacks, the blitzes of Kassams, Grads, etc. only began in earnest after the expulsion.
The people of Gush Katif saw themselves fighting, not only for their own doorsteps, neighborhoods and land, but for the entirety of Israel for they knew that their expulsion would inevitably lead to designs on expelling 10s of folds more Jews. The regime expected the former Gush Katif residents to be supplicants, to not fight for their homes, land and communities, against the very psychology of human nature. The regime’s expulsion plans had/have adversarial overtones by their mere actualization, which they, the regime themselves created.
What is also omitted by these articles’ author are the ultimatums; i.e. “sign in 48 hours or no compensation”, the trickeries; i.e. SELA encouraging the evicted to falsify signature dates knowing full well that they would the reject the documents afterwards for false dating, the prejudicial, unrealistic demands for decades of justifying utility and telephone billing documentation to prove the length of time each family lived in Gush Katif when such documentation as to number of years could have easily been obtained from Bezek, Chashmal, etc., the persecutional demands made by SELA of S’fardi parents for DNA testing to prove that their children were theirs and more.
Also, the current head of SELA asserts that all of the Gush Katif families have been fully compensated and that many either have their funds “tied up” or “have been using it to live on over the three years and nine months since the unilateral withdrawal.”
Firstly, the last time this author spoke with representatives of the former Gush Katif residents, a mere few months ago, it was ascertained the vast majority of former Gush Katif residents had NOT been fully compensated, many to-date have received little, if any compensation.
And so the white-wash, the cover-up, the punitive trickery of a dictatorial regime and it’s SELA goes on to this very day. MB
‘Evacuees Didn’t Know What They Wanted’, by Dan Izenberg (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts:
Bassi had ignored three reports published prior to the establishment of Sela in 2004 dealing with the resettlement of the residents.
The most important one was prepared by Gideon Witkon, former head of the Israel Lands Administration, and included a list of communities in areas of national priority that could absorb the evacuees.
“The main thing that was lacking in Witkon’s report is that you can use force to evacuate people, but you can’t use force to resettle them,” Bassi said on Sunday. “There is no point in preparing plans to resettle people without their agreement.”
He added that Lindenstrauss had failed to understand this.
The reason Sela did not know in advance where the settlers would agree to move, how many of them wanted to continue living in the communities they had lived in in the Gaza Strip, and how many wanted to rent apartments as their temporary solution and therefore did not need hotel rooms in the first days after their evacuation was because the settlers refused to talk to Sela and say what they wanted. For example, “the head of the Gaza Regional Council, Avner Shimoni, did not believe there would be a withdrawal and prevented us from contacting families,” Bassi said.
The fact was, he continued, that all the residents of the four settlements that were evacuated from the northern part of the West Bank – Ganim, Cadim, Homesh and Sa-Nur – had all been resettled without problem and were not part of the state commission’s investigation.
Even in the Gaza Strip, at least one community, Pe’at Sadeh, had been resettled without problems.
Before the withdrawal, Sela did not know how many families would want to move as communities and how many would resettle individually.
Because the families would not tell it, Sela made the assumption that half would want to live as communities and half would resettle individually. In the event, 80 percent of the families chose to settle communally and required temporary housing solutions together.
In response to questions about what efforts Sela made to communicate with the settlers, Bassi said they had mailed letters and made phone calls to the settlers, and established an Internet site where settlers could find out how much compensation they would receive for their homes without having to deal directly with Sela or identify themselves.
One of Lindenstrauss’s criticisms had been that Sela did not establish a call center for settlers to phone and receive information until just before the evacuation. But Bassi said he did not believe this was an effective measure compared with the ones employed by Sela.
Sela Head: Gaza Evacuees Could Have Been in Permanent Homes By Now, by Dan Izenberg (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts:
Zvia Shimon, head of the Disengagement Administration (Sela)…. served as head of Sela since July 2, 2006. She was the second witness to be called up before the State Commission of Inquiry into the Handling of the Evacuees from Gush Katif by the Authorized Authorities.
“On many occasions the evacuees did not agree to the [government] proposal,” Shimon told the commission, headed by retired Supreme Court justice Eliyahu Mazza.
“I told them hundreds of times to build their houses right away, but first they wanted the government to grant their other demands in the written agreement.”
Another member of the commission, Prof. Yedidya Stern, asked Shimon if the evacuees’ additional demands were reasonable.
“Sometimes they were, other times they were exaggerated,” replied Shimon.
The law did not provide for some of the demands they made, she added in response to another question by Stern.
Shimon said all the evacuees have received compensation payments for the homes they lost in the Gaza Strip. Of 1,090 families who want to live within the same communal structure as they did in Gush Katif, 741 also have their plots of land, including the infrastructure needed to build their homes.
That means there is nothing stopping them from building today, she added. But not all of them are.
For example, 190 families from Nitzan received their plots of land in October 2008 and 70 are currently in the process of building their homes, she continued.
“Why are only some of them building?” asked one of the panel members.
“An evacuee told me that one of the most difficult days he has experienced since the evacuation was the day he started building his new home, because on that day he gave up his dream to return to Gaza,” replied Shimon.
However, she added that the psychological reason was not the only one. Some of the evacuees had tied up the compensation money they had received and others had been using it to live on over the three years and nine months since the unilateral withdrawal.
Disengagement Committee Probes Endless Wait for Homes
by Yehudah Lev Kay (Israel National News)
Bassi: Evictees Were ‘a Calf that Does Not Want to Suckle’, by Gil Ronen (Israel National News)
Official Report: State Failed in Housing Gush Katif Expellees, by Hillel Fendel (Israel National News)
State Commission of Inquiry to Probe Treatment of Evacuees
Psychologists Cited for Helping Brainwash IDF, by Hillel Fendel (Israel National News)
Gaza Evacuees: Government Throwing Sand in Settlers’ Eyes
Gush Katif Evacuees Suffering Financial, Medical Problems
Lead Highlights;
Maagar Mohot survey shows 81% of evacuees still in temporary housing, 50% unemployed; Evacuees flunk government, SELA Administration in handling pullout, claim their youth reluctant to join IDF.
The Sinister Idea Behind the Evacuation Compensation Law [Planned in Advance of Any Possible Future Expulsion], by Dr. Aaron Lerner (IMRA)