UNDER the watchful gaze of Israeli soldiers guarding the Jewish settlements in Gaza from their Palestinian neighbours, cars packed with another kind of agitator drove in unchallenged last week. The new arrivals are Jews of the extreme right, many of them Americans. They are the vanguard of a radical force building up in Gush Katif, a string of Israeli farming communities separated by barbed wire and army posts from 1.3m Palestinians who are crowded into Gaza’s refugee camps.
The Gush Katif farmers have lived in Gaza for decades and bitterly oppose the unilateral disengagement plan of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, that requires them to leave their homes this summer.
The newcomers, who include students from the rabbinical yeshivas or religious schools, have vowed to stop the evacuation which the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) is expected to carry out in August.
They are very different from the Gush Katif settlers, whose opposition to withdrawal stems from their reluctance to abandon farms they built from sand.
The hardliners pouring into Gush Katif represent the biggest threat that the IDF will face on the day of withdrawal: unlike the settlers, they are preparing to use violence.
One of the young men building a “tent city” to accommodate the influx told me that he would not fire on a Jewish soldier, but he was prepared to shoot a Druse or bedouin. Much of the police force is Druse. Many Druse and bedouin serve in the IDF.
Some of the young men have already targeted Palestinians. If they provoke them into a revenge attack, they might even derail the disengagement plan.
So far, most of them are from the Lubavitcher, a wealthy messianic Jewish sect with its headquarters in New York. Money is pouring in from New York to fund them. In Gush Katif they live in a large tent and a red shipping container at Tiferet Israel, the site of a log cabin synagogue built four months ago on the outskirts of Naved Kalim, the largest Jewish settlement in Gaza.
The bronzed, muscled farmers of Gush Katif regard the pale strangers warily and have not offered to house them. Last week a bearded young man in the black fedora, black suit and cheap black shoes of the orthodox Hassidic Jews sweated in the Mediterranean sun as he lifted tent poles in shifting sands.
He was joined by 70 young men, mostly Americans but including some Australians and South Africans, all members of a Haifa yeshiva. They will study in the morning with their rabbi. In the afternoons they will work on a “tent city” to house thousands like them.
The new arrivals’ opposition to the disengagement plan is ideological. They believe that they are doing God’s work based on his promise of Gaza to the Jews. “This land is Israel and it belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them,” said David Nathonson, 23, who arrived in Israel three months ago from Brooklyn, New York, and has spent tens of thousands of dollars on preparations for the tent city.
“God can give it to whoever he likes,” he said. “Nobody in the world can take it away.”
Such words anger the long-term residents of Gush Katif. “If they cared about Gaza so much, where were they for the past 20 years?” said Lior Fargun, 23, a farmer’s son and a former soldier who now sells an American diet plan.
Despite their unease at the new arrivals, residents feel betrayed by the government and are loath to turn away any supporters.
The IDF has little choice but to tolerate the influx for now, although it will make the job of forcing 8,500 Gush Katif residents out of their homes much more difficult. The newcomers could double the population of the Gaza settlements.
Any decision to close off the entrance to Gush Katif will be political “and no decision has been made”, said Lieutenant Colonel Dotan Razili, the 35- year-old deputy commander of the IDF’s southern Gaza brigade, who is training his men for the evacuation.
The encampment of Tiferet Israel is a microcosm of events across Gaza that will make Razili’s job harder. The synagogue at its centre was built without the IDF’s permission by Itzhak Hazut, 19, and his friends in memory of two local Israelis killed by Palestinians.
Money was tight so when the New Yorkers arrived with cash they were given the status of “guests”. But some of the black-suited ideologues from New York now have Hazut worried. “They don’t know Gush Katif,” said Hazut, a muscular martial arts instructor. “They don’t know how to behave.”
Last week he ejected three young men, two Americans and an Israeli, from the site because they had sabotaged a nearby Palestinian onion farm. A more serious incident could spark a Palestinian backlash, he fears.
Hazut’s own approach to resistance is practical rather than inspired by God. He has banned any violence. His strategy includes building concrete defences and digging traps for the huge bulldozers that Israel is expected to bring in.
Everyone has masks to protect themselves from tear gas and has stocked up on pepper to put in the nostrils of police horses. “It may sound cruel but we have consulted horse people and they say it will make them jump around but will only hurt them for a few moments,” Hazut said.
Gush Katif settlers are widely regarded even in Israel as fanatics. They are consequently clannish and suspicious of the press. However, I spent last week living with a family there and the stereotype is far from the truth.
They are observant Jews but, unlike the newcomers from America, they have no religious agenda. Indeed, they call the new arrivals “fanatics”. Now on their third generation, they are fanatical only about the farms they have built up.
Many of the younger people are secular Jews who go clubbing in Tel Aviv at weekends.
Their unforgiving views on their Palestinian neighbours shock liberal Israelis. But they speak Arabic and employ Palestinian workers. “We want peace because we never will reach our own potential while we are always worrying about survival,” said Fargun.
Most of his customers’ diets were going well until the current crisis. “Now they are eating all the time because of the stress,” he said. “Everyone’s getting fatter.”
Among the farmers there is an air of paradise lost that seems strange in a place where the only route in and out is called “Blood Road” because so many settlers have died on it.
Ahron Fargun, Lior’s father, sitting up late on his veranda looking over a garden of hibiscus, recalled coming to the community of Bedolach 24 years ago “when I was young and beautiful and looking for a nice cheap place to work and raise my family”.
The government was giving out discount mortgages. He learnt to grow tomatoes by drip irrigation in greenhouses. Miriam, his wife, carried jerry cans of water until they were hooked up to the mains.
The Gush Katif settlers feel betrayed, not least because the architect of their loss is Sharon, whom they call “the father”. In years past, Sharon was the only senior politician who would come and speak at their rallies on Independence Day; now they feel that they are his sacrificial lamb.
The trauma of leaving cuts deep. Ephraim and Ricki Sfira lost their eldest son Asaf, 18, two years ago when he was killed by a Palestinian worker at their greenhouse. Ricki has built an eerie shrine at the site of the murder — a stone marker, a small olive tree and the car seat in which Asaf was shot, now little more than a grey metal frame with pieces of stuffing.
“I will leave behind this olive tree if we have to go. Maybe it will make the Palestinians think of peace,” she said. But at home she is inconsolable. She shows Asaf’s room, still with his newly washed six pairs of jeans in the cupboard and his Electra sunglasses on his sound system.
None of her five other children is allowed in. She clutches his 3ft long iguana, Shoshe, to her chest and says that she was afraid of the reptile when Asaf was alive but now talks to it as a reminder of her son.
“I will tell the soldiers when they come: how can Jews take a Jew from the place where her son shed his blood? I will destroy this house if we have to leave it. I can’t bear that a terrorist will live in Asaf’s room.”
The Sfiras buried Asaf in Ashqelon, outside Gush Katif. They did not want to leave their son’s bones behind in the event of a withdrawal.
But Moshe and Miri Gobi, 57 and 50, face the dilemma that their son, Elkana, 23, is buried in one of 48 Jewish graves in Gush Katif.
Elkana was killed by the IDF when he shot back at Palestinians firing on Blood Road and Israeli soldiers mistook him for one of the attackers.
Fears that the graves would be desecrated by Palestinians prompted Sharon to rule that the burial sites should be moved to within Israel’s borders. “I will do the maximum any mother would do,” said Miri when her husband left the room. “I will kill myself on Elkana’s grave if anyone touches it.”
Other protests are more prosaic. Gush Katif farmers have objected in court that under the disengagement law they will get only 60% of the value of their property. Many have already lost income because clients are unwilling to renew contracts. Ronit Balaban, 49, faces catastrophic losses. She grows potted plants, mostly for export to Europe, and employs 15 Palestinians. Last week, walking through her hothouses of gardenia and jasmine dressed in a fashionable black suit and sandals, she spoke about the plants as irreplaceable creations after 21 years of work. The government has refused to move her business. “I understand the Palestinians have problems — but why transfer me?” she said. “They will have to carry me out in the chair I am sitting on.” What will happen on disengagement day? However angry, the long-term residents of Gush Katif are unlikely to attack soldiers. “About 98% of the settlers are against violence,” said Ahron Fargun. “If there is a mess, it will come from the outsiders. They are willing to go to extremes.” These ideologues are restrained for now because they believe there will be a miracle on the day of disengagement and God will intervene. The fear is of what they will do when God does not step in.
Additional reporting: Aviram Zino