Pain of Israels Withdrawal From Gaza Strip
Is Felt by American Jews, Too

Starting this week, American Jews are likely to see wrenching scenes of Jewish soldiers expelling defiant Jewish settlers from their homes and farms in the Gaza Strip, as Israel begins its pullout there. The experience for many Americans will be almost as painful and perplexing as it will be for Israelis, because the two societies are so interwoven, with the Gaza settlers’ ranks made up of many transplanted New Yorkers and other Americans.

Still, like most Israelis, Jews in New York and across the nation largely support the government of Ariel Sharon in its plan to pull the 9,000 settlers out of Gaza.

Practically every secular American Jewish group has lined up behind disengagement, as have major Reform and Conservative Jewish organizations, though their support has been in the muted form of op-ed articles and newspaper ads, rather than demonstrations.

Even the more left-wing Jewish-American groups that have long favored disengagement say they have seen no need to pound the drums for it, since the Sharon government, the Bush administration and American and Israeli public opinion are overwhelmingly behind it. “There’s really not a lot of convincing to do,” said Lewis E. Roth, assistant director of the Washington-based Americans for Peace Now.

As in Israel, however, there is fierce opposition to the move, and much of it is centered among the Orthodox, particularly the same ardently Zionistic adherents of modern Orthodoxy and members of Lubavitch Hasidic synagogues who make up much of the settler movement in the dominant Gush Katif string of settlements in Gaza.

“Nine thousand people moved into the Gush Katif area at the behest of a Labor government and other governments,” said Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice president of the National Council of Young Israel, a Manhattan-based group made up of 150 Orthodox congregations. “For years they lived under fire and they wake up one day and are told, ‘You’re history.’ It’s never happened before in Jewish history that Jewish people exile Jewish people.”

(The Israeli government did evacuate resistant settlers once before – when Israel completed the return of the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in 1982.)

Still, some Orthodox rabbis, often thought of as fiery activists in American Jewish politics, have taken pains to admonish Jews not to encourage Israeli soldiers to disobey army orders and urged them to cease comparing the evictions to the Nazi deportations.

“Both the left and the right must guard their language,” wrote Rabbi Avi Weiss of the Bronx, who opposes disengagement, in an op-ed article in The Forward, the 108-year-old Jewish weekly. “The settlers are not ‘occupiers’ and Prime Minister Sharon is not a ‘fascist.’ While a word is a word and a deed is a deed, words lead to deeds.”

At midnight last night, Jews protesting the Gaza withdrawal and fasting for Tishah b’Ab, the traditional day of mourning for the destruction of the First and Second Temples, were to gather at the Israeli Consulate, on the East Side of Manhattan, for a vigil. Today, there is to be a rally at the consulate and a march to the United Nations. The marchers are to be joined there by a caravan of Lubavitch Hasidim from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. An even larger rally is scheduled for Tuesday across from the United Nations.

On Friday, in the heavily Orthodox Midwood neighborhood of Brooklyn, streamers and ribbons in orange – the color of support for the resistant Gaza settlers – dangled from car antennas and side mirrors.

Sharon Rudolph, a 46-year-old receptionist shopping for fruits and vegetables, wore an orange shirt that said, “Let My People Stay.” She had just returned from a visit to Gaza. “We can’t be giving it back – it doesn’t belong to the Arabs,” she said.

Mitchell Orlian, a professor of Bible at Yeshiva University, made sure to buy lettuce, parsley and dill imported from Gush Katif, as he always does. “If I were there, I would let myself be dragged out,” he said.

There has not been an equivalent outpouring of vocal support from those who agree with the pullout, beyond op-ed articles or sermons like one given just over a week ago by Rabbi Donald Goor of Temple Judea, a Reform synagogue in Tarzana, Calif., who said, “those who are questioning the withdrawal are not only questioning this government but questioning government itself.”

One leader of a major national Jewish group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sharp differences among his members, said that while his group supported disengagement, “there’s no great enthusiasm” for it. He said there were worries that Israel’s unilateral gesture would “be rewarded with more violence,” and that a seaport and an airport in Gaza that may someday be reopened would become gateways for weapons to be used against Israelis.

A problem for more than a few liberal Jews is that the disengagement is being pushed by someone who was regarded as their archenemy in the theater of Israeli politics: Mr. Sharon, who promoted and built settlements as a government minister. Mr. Sharon has in recent years decided that it no longer makes sense to have Israeli soldiers protect so few settlers in an area that has more than 1.3 million Palestinians.

“The honest-to-God liberals who would be enthusiastic are so suspicious of Sharon that it would take a lot of wooing to get them out in the streets, and nobody’s wooing them,” said J. J. Goldberg, editor of The Forward.

There is ambivalence within the multicolored world of Orthodoxy as well. Avi Shafran, a spokesman for Agudath Israel of America, a leading traditionalist group, said that while most of its members were unhappy with the withdrawal, they recognized that the move was being made by an elected Israeli government.

Many settlers were influenced by rabbinical and philosophical champions of a greater Israel that embraces Gaza and the West Bank, leaders who contended that giving up territory was a sin. Most Hasidim, according to Mr. Goldberg, have never accepted this thesis.

Still, opposition to disengagement is a minority view. An annual survey by the American Jewish Committee found support for unilateral disengagement running 65 to 28, with the remainder unsure. David A. Harris, the organization’s executive director, said “our business is not to second-guess decisions of war and peace made by democratically elected Israeli governments.”

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism and a supporter of the pullout, has criticized the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, of which he is a member, for failing to lobby more effectively for disengagement. Malcolm I. Hoenlein, the conference’s executive vice chairman, denied that the support has been lukewarm.

But he acknowledged that many members are upset not just about the removal of settlers but also about the uprooting of 30 synagogues, six yeshivas, and several cemeteries, and they fear that withdrawal from Gaza will shift terrorism to the West Bank. “People feel pain,” he said.