Greenhouse in Gaza (archive photo)
Photo: Renana Marmelstein
Settlers during Gaza evacuation (archive photo)
Photo: Reuters
Former Gaza farmers settle in Golan
Many evacuated families struggling to rebuild their lives in Golan Heights after evacuation; ‘our hearts are in Gush Katif, although we are together as a group, so it makes it much easier; it'll take time’
In an isolated community in Israel's far north, adjacent to Moshav Avnei Eitan and a 30-minute drive to the nearest major town, 23, identical, new miniature orange homes line one paved street.
Mere kilometers from the Syrian-Israeli border, the eerie quiet of the village is broken only by the sound of a baby crying, or the shuffling of a man pulling weeds from his temporary garden, or fixing a temporary pipe.
The new settlers in the village are Jewish farmers from the Gaza Strip, and, since the Israeli government ordered their evacuation from the Gaza Strip a year and a half ago, they have hardly sowed a seed.
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Their current homes are government provided, but temporary. Residents plan to build their permanent community next to the existing Avnei Eitan, a part collective, part private community of just 70 people.
Since the withdrawal, many of the evacuated families have been struggling to rebuild their lives, while living in hotels and temporary housing, and the government has struggled to meet their demands.
“It's more time and more money than the government thought,” says the leader of the new Avnei Eitan community, Maayan Yadiyu. “They're stuck, and we're stuck.”
The outcome of last summer's evacuation has left both supporters and opponents disillusioned.
Former prime minister Ariel Sharon believed conceding the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians would be a step toward peace, however, rockets continue to crash into Israel from the Gaza Strip and most of the area's 220 former farmers remain landless.
According to SELA, the Israeli government agency created to deal with evacuee rights, 20,000 dunams were set aside for the evacuated farmers, averaging around 40 dunams each (one dunam is about a quarter of an acre).
'Rehabilitation process has begun'
Just under a quarter of the evacuated farmers have received land from the government, most in the last four months. Even fewer have started new farms on that land.
According to the Gush Katif Committee, an organization founded to represent the rights of evacuees from the Gaza Strip, the farmers who have received compensation have only been covered for 50 percent of the value of their lost businesses.
However, in Avnei Eitan, the post-Gaza rehabilitation process has begun.
One of the village's residents, Ayal Chadad, is planting the community's first cabbages. He was the only one in the group to salvage his greenhouses and transport them from the Gaza Strip to the north. He is also the first of the evacuees in Avnei Eitan to restart their farms.
From the day of the evacuation, Maayan Yadiyu and her husband, Eyal, decided they wanted to resettle in the Golan Heights. Since building new, unauthorized settlements is illegal in Israel, the Yadiyus and 23 other couples decided to join Avnei Eitan.
With the new residents, Avnei Eitan now numbers just over 200, the majority of whom are young, religious families with four or more children.
Pending permission from the Israeli government to start permanent building, the families are living in government-built “caravillas,” basically sturdy four-room trailers without wheels.
Until four months ago, Yadiyu, 28, had lived in a hotel for over a year with her husband and three young children, all under four years old. Today they live in one of the caravillas.
The homes have no insulation and are skeletons of a traditional family home. Inside, each family has its own small mementos from the Gaza Strip framed on a wall or displayed in a living room. Enormous shipping crates, larger than the caravillas and filled with each family's belongings, decorate many backyards.
'We're not worried'
But Avnei Eitan's residents are united, first in their status as former residents of the Gaza Strip and second in their determination to resettle this region of Israel permanently.
“We came here half for ideological reasons and half because of the people. The people here are like what we are used to,” Yadiyu says, meaning supporters of the ideology that Jews should reside in all of the Land of Israel.
The part of the southern Golan Heights where Avnei Eitan is located, is a strip of contested land once belonging to Syria, and conquered by Israel in the 1967 War.
Yadiyu is not concerned about living in a controversial area.
“We're not worried,” she says. “The Golan Heights is similar to Gush Katif. There are good schools, it is far from the city and it is a beautiful place.”
The day Yadiyu and the others moved from their hotels to the caravillas, rockets from southern Lebanon began crashing into nearby fields.
In addition to the external dangers, the new community faces an array of obstacles, from waiting on urban planning permissions to the unfamiliar soil of the southern Golan Heights.
For farmers, moving from a dry, hot climate to a wetter and cooler climate “it is like telling someone who is an eye doctor he needs to be a different kind of doctor now,” says Dror Vanunu, the Gush Katif Committee's International Coordinator.
'It's confusing and not easy'
He says, after government bureaucracy, it is the actual land that is causing problems for many farmers, adding that reestablishing contracts with former export partners was the next challenge.
The Golan Heights’ drastically different landscape means the new arrivals will have to completely change their approach to raising produce, if they can raise any at all.
One resident, formerly the biggest pepper farmer in the Gaza Strip, is hoping to grow flowers. Another former vegetable grower has opened a clothing store in his backyard. A third farmer has opened a restaurant 45 minutes away.
For Yadiyu’s husband finding a new job at a local farm wasn't difficult. He is a hoof trimmer, mending and tending to animal hooves. However, building a new permanent home and a business will be more challenging. They can't start construction without the proper permits, but Yadiyu is not deterred.
“Morale is high right now,” Yadiyu says. “We'll start again. Big time.”
Some others, however, are just tired and disappointed.
“I simply don't have any energy, I don't even have the energy to talk about everything that happened,” says Yadiyu’s friend, Yadida Chazani, a recent widow and mother of six. Chazani claims she lost a million-dollar home as a result of the evacuation.
The majority of the families in Avnei Eitan ran major farm operations in the Gaza Strip and intend to do the same in the Golan Heights. They are beginning to dream of their first harvest, though two have already passed since the 2005 evacuation.
Within a year residents hope to have their full 40 dunams and permanent homes.
“More families are on their way,” Yadiyu says. However, “everything has been happening really, really, slowly,” she adds.
“It's confusing and not easy. Our hearts are in Gush Katif, although we are together as a group, so it makes it much easier. It'll take time.”
Reprinted by permission of The Media Line Ltd
