Gaza settlers, warned to pull up stakes, plan to dig in

The kumquat trees planted in the sand of their front yard are still flimsy and young.

Roni and Efrat Bakshy, who planted themselves here two decades ago, insist they and their seven children will be picking the bittersweet orange fruit for years to come.

"I've been here for 20 years. I arranged every corner of this house. Every pipe, I know where it starts and where it leads. Every tree, I planted," says Roni Bakshy, a bearded man who serves on the settlement's religious council and performs ritual circumcisions.

But Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said last week that he has plans to evacuate the Bakshy family along with more than 7,500 other Jewish settlers in Gaza. That startling announcement - along with a new plan to alter the course of the separation wall through the West Bank - is apparently designed to extricate Israel unilaterally from the conflict with the Palestinians.

If the Bakshys are representative, Gaza settlers will not go quietly - if they go at all. Unlike the larger Israeli settlements near Jerusalem and in the West Bank, more than 75 percent of the settlers here are religious nationalists. The Bakshys form the ideological core of those who see this land as God-given and as much a part of Israel as the rest of the Jewish state. They live in 17 gated compounds guarded by the Israeli army and surrounded by more than one million Palestinians.

While the Israeli government is beginning to crunch numbers, calculating what it would cost to evacuate and how much each family might receive as compensation, the Bakshys insist that they - and others here - are not interested in being paid to leave.

"I don't think there's a man in the world who would give up his home, certainly not me," says Mr. Bakshy. "I will fight for my house. I am not ashamed to say it. I will fight for it with all my power."

It would not be for the first time. Bakshy was in Yammit, the lone Israeli settlement in the Sinai Peninsula on the Red Sea, when Israel returned it to Egypt as part of the 1979 Camp David Accords. At the age of 18, Bakshy went to study at Yammit's yeshiva, or religious seminary, less than a year before the Israeli army forcefully evacuated the settlement. Among the young settlers who resisted was Efrat, now his wife, who was 15 at the time.

"I held onto the door. They pulled us away and after they let us go, we went back in," recalls Mrs. Bakshy. She cannot imagine having to go through such an ordeal a second time.

The two didn't know each other then, but met later; Mr. Bakshy says that an interest in settling Gaza was one of his requirements for any future Mrs. Bakshy.

"There are some people who came for the quality of life, the view," says Mr. Bakshy, looking at the horizon of azure Mediterranean ocean stretching wide beyond Neve Dekalim. The settlement was founded in 1982 by many of the Yammit evacuees. "Most of us came for our beliefs. But each of us feels this is our home. Am I Sharon's sheep, that he can just lead me here or there?"

Prime Minister Sharon, in fact, may shepherd many of the Gaza settlers across Israel and into the West Bank, a concept that Palestinian prime minister Ahemd Qurei, or Abu Ala, decried as "totally unacceptable."

While the Palestinian leadership has shown tepid approval of Sharon's plan - it is hard for any Palestinian to argue against Israeli plans to withdraw from territory occupied in the 1967 war.

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