Rachel Saperstein: Five years after expulsion from Gush Katif,

Gush Katif Viewpoint 165:Five years after the expulsion. My speech at the OU Center, Jerusalem


by Rachel Saperstein
Neve Dekalim/Nitzan

My name is Rachel Saperstein. I am almost seventy years old. My husband and I have three children and twelve grandchildren. We lived in Jerusalem for close to thirty years, in Gush Katif for nearly nine years, and now we live in a plasterboard caravilla in the refugee camp of Nitzan between Ashdod and Ashkelon. During the Cast Lead war we were bombed by missiles coming in from Gaza. The missiles and rockets followed us from Gush Katif to Nitzan. There is no escape from enemy assault.

In the evening I take power walks. I also observe life in our refugee camp slum. Most of the gardens are overgrown with weeds. People are slowly moving away. It doesn't make sense to keep a garden growing. After people leave for their permanent homes up the hill, flat-bed trucks arrive. First, the red tiles on the roofs are removed. The caravilla is then cut in half, loaded on the trucks and taken somewhere. We don't know where. Perhaps to a new site being prepared for the next victims of expulsion. We do not know what plans Obama and Netanyahu have for the people of Judea and Samaria. What is certain is that these plasterboard structures will be used again.

I visit the construction site of the new "permanent" homes, especially when we go to the attaching-the-Mezuzah ceremony. We wish the new occupants well. We "ooh" and "aah" at the up-to-date shower stalls, the new kitchen, the lovely floor tiles. The occupants invariably admit they have used all their funds on the house. Some have taken bank loans to finish the house. Many of our friends are in their late fifties and sixties. They worry about how they will ever pay off the loans, much less how they will live from week to week on their meager salaries, if they are lucky enough to be working. There is a tragedy waiting to happen.

Some cannot build at all. They have been living on their compensation money as they have had no livelihood since the expulsion. Some of our people were renters in the private market in Neve Dekalim, and though they lived there for fifteen or twenty years are not entitled to any compensation at all. Some have lost their money to swindlers, some have lost their money in bad investments. Others see building here as the final nail in the coffin of hope - the hope that they will return to Gush Katif.

In one community families had built and moved into permanent homes. They breathed a sigh of relief. At long last each family had a proper home. But something strange happened. Their children, who as pre-teens had lived through the expulsion, went berserk. They began drinking, smoking, vandalizing public property. The professionals who were called in declared the children victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The children felt betrayed by their parents. By building elsewhere their parents had admitted they would never return to Gush Katif. This betrayal had brought on a violent reaction.

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