A goodbye to Gaza

Settler from Brooklyn rages at being thrown from her beloved home

I set the table with my best china. The guests were not invited, but I knew they were on their way.

When the Israeli Army soldiers showed up at my door Thursday, I told them I had cooked for them, expecting them to take seats and join my family.

But they had other plans. The soldiers led my family from the Gaza home we have known for 29 years straight to a bus, which delivered us to a tent city at the Western Wall.

So today, I am a refugee in my own country. As the 80 families of Netzer Hazani, Gaza Strip, approached the tent camp, we ripped our shirt collars as a sign of mourning.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s order to dismantle 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four small ones in the West Bank after a 38-year occupation has forced me to leave the home I have known since 1976.

The evacuation is immoral and unnecessary. I do not believe that it will bring peace.

Sharon’s unethical and cruel decision directly undermines a different promise, one made by the settlers to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a promise to make something of this land. Rabin encouraged us to come to the Gaza Strip and take a look. Settle here, he said. And build houses. Build farms. But all I saw were empty sand dunes. There was nothing blossoming, nothing alive. I wanted to leave. I wanted to return to Beersheba, where I settled in 1969, after leaving Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where I was born 59 years ago. But my children saw the sea, and they didn’t want to leave.

So we came.

One of the first people I met was the mayor of a nearby Arab village. He trudged across the dunes with bread.

He said, “We’re so glad to see you. Maybe there will be some work. This is a cursed land where nothing has grown since Abraham and Isaac were here.” So I learned of my Jewish roots in this place from the mayor of a Palestinian town.

Then we planted. I was growing annually in my greenhouse almost a million heads of organic celery, which were exported to Europe.

Today, I do not know how I will make a living. The government offered me 60% of the value of my greenhouse. And no place to stay. Just a one-way bus trip from the place I have cultivated and loved.

“True, [settlers] had a dream, and I did, too, that we can hold on to all the territory, or most of the territory, but things have changed,” Sharon said.

And now the dream has turned into a nightmare. If any other country were throwing its people out of their homes, world leaders would voice their outrage. Where is Amnesty International? Where is the Red Cross? We are alone.

So I have left my home for a tent in Jerusalem to be with others like me, refugees displaced by a policy we didn’t have a voice in. And I will wait.

I will wait for God to give me and my family a new home, since I can no longer trust the government to do the right thing.

Tucker and her husband, Stewart, are living in a Jerusalem tent city with five children and five grandchildren.