History foreshadows Gaza pullout

"My heart is with them. It'll be worse for them because they've been there for 30 years, but I still think the disengagement is dictated by reality," says Yosefi, who lives on a "moshav" agricultural cooperative, Netiv Haasarah, named after the cooperative he founded in Yamit. It's so close to Israel's border with Gaza that Palestinians laid claim to its land this week.

"The evacuation was so difficult that it stays with us until today. There's an anger at the government that for years they misled us with ideals that couldn't be implemented," he says.

In building homes and greenhouses in the remote sands of northern Sinai during the 1970s, Yosefi and his Yamit neighbors fancied themselves as new Israeli pioneers who were securing the country's borders. Like the Gaza settlers, they believed Israel's prime minister opposed uprooting settlements. But after Mr. Begin sealed their fate at the Camp David peace summit, the settlers say they were demonized as enemies of peace.

"We told Begin, whoever concedes Yamit will concede Jerusalem," says Aliza Wiessman, a Yamit veteran and a resident of Netiv Haasarah. "He was very upset with us."

The move was humiliating for the evacuees. Some lived for months in military dormitories. Others were derided as motivated by monetary compensation. Marriages collapsed and, although settlers received financial aid, the government ignored any psychological counseling, Eldar says.

Sarita Maoz remembers when the government cut electricity and water to her home in Yamit. A teenage girl whose father insisted on remaining behind after most of the residents had given up, she spent her last day playing amid the rubble of destroyed buildings.

Ms. Maoz is waiting for the soldiers again. A 12-year resident of the northern Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai, the lawyer says she will remain in her house until the final moment. A banner hangs outside her home, "this house is not for sale." But her children will be with their grandparents.

"I won't leave my kids here. I won't let them see the sights that I saw or experience a soldier's coming to move them," she says, her voice trembling at times. "I never would have come here if I thought it would be evacuated."

Back at Netiv Haasarah - just inside Israel's border and three miles from Elei Sinai - Yaacov Ben Yaacov watches a home movie of the Yamit evacuation while debating the Gaza withdrawal. Israel eventually should leave Gaza, he says, but only as part of a negotiated accord.

"It might be in another 50 years, they'll say that this was the chapter that returned the region to normalcy," he says. "But we don't have that vision."

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