Talking tough in Gaza (Part 2)

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'I never trusted Sharon. I always thought he was unpredictable. I don't trust anyone now. I used to run a restaurant on the beach. I was 12 hours a day with an Arab worker, and I said that if there was a terrorist attack, I was sure he would protect me, but today there has been too much blood. Something has broken, there is too much distrust. I'm not running around shouting, 'Death to the Arabs', but when they killed my friend's husband I stopped wanting to know." I told Vicky that I thought that the Gush Katif settlers seemed different from the West Bank settlers. "That's true," she said. "Revolutionaries always come from the hills, never from the beach - Castro came from the hills, not the coast."
The Gush Katif settlements even have their own ethnic minorities: foreign workers from Thailand and the Philippines who, at the time of the first intifada, were brought in to replace Palestinian workers in the hothouses which grow organic produce such as tomatoes, green peppers, lettuce and houseplants they say is bound for Marks & Spencer. There is also a small community of Shinlung, Indians of Burmese origin who, in the 1990s, were discovered by a rabbi in possession of a fragment of something that resembled Judaism. He believed that the Messiah would not return until the 10 lost tribes of Israel were rediscovered and brought back to their country of origin. Thousands of Shinlung were plucked by the rabbi from their educated, professional jobs in India and settled in the occupied territories.

Yoshua Binjamin, a Shinlung, came to Israel from north-east India in 1995, because, he says, "it was very difficult to live a Jewish life. We had no rabbi, people laughed at us. My economic life was very good, but my religious life was not OK and I didn't want my children to grow up where there was the influence of bad children, with liquor and drugs. At the beginning, I felt very awkward and out of place, but when you get to know the people here, they welcome you into their society. I knew it was occupied territory, but I didn't know the terrorists would carry out those acts. The intifada was very unexpected, but we are not afraid. I voted for Sharon and he turned out to be something different - politics is politics all over the world. I believe the disengagement won't happen. I have a very strong belief in God, but I'm not one of those who will fight to the death."

The longer you spend at Gush Katif, the more you understand what really bothers the settlers about the disengagement plan. You see that what lies beneath all the bluster is disbelief, denial and its next stage, anger and a gradual sense of resignation. You have to accept that though the settlers are living on occupied, stolen land, though their presence in Gaza has gouged into an already overcrowded strip of earth and separated its inhabitants by checkpoints, walls and fences, though they seem oblivious to the suffering that surrounds them, though they have no political solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians because they are part of the cause of it, though you know all this, it is also true that they are a people in deep trauma about the loss of their homes and businesses, schools and community centre. There is enormous distress that their houses might be turned over to the very Palestinians who had bombarded them with mortars. Local Palestinians told me that there is no chance that the settlement houses will be given to them; they are likely to be handed out as rewards to senior Palestinian Authority officials.

All the settlers know about the future is what they hear on the radio: the screaming, the threats, the hysteria. They live with perpetual uncertainty. "And beyond that is a feeling that we have been abandoned," said Roni Bakshi, a 40-year-old father of seven who works as an ambulance driver. Bakshi's father and his nine brothers fled Baghdad when the state of Israel was born. On their way, they went to Iran and invested their money in carpets, but were cheated by an Iranian partner. They arrived in Israel with nothing. At 18, Bakshi was a yeshiva student in Yamit when the army came to evacuate the settlement. His wife's father, from Syria, was one of the ideologues who went there to be part of the showdown with the army.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1348920,00.html