A Huge Mistake

Tzvi Hendel, a former Knesset member (1999-2009) and longtime resident of the Gush Katif community of Ganei Tal until the expulsion, says he’s sure that if not for the legal threats hanging over the head of Ariel Sharon and his two sons, the Disengagement of 2005 would never have happened.

Although 20 years have passed since he was yanked out of his home, Hendel says he still feels the intense pain over what could have been. He and his family came to Ganei Tal when it was established in 1977; he lived through the area’s growth, saw the dream come to life in front of his eyes, and also saw the nightmare unfold in real time.

As head of the Gaza Coast regional council, and before that, as the executive director of the company that developed the area, Hendel was close with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

“Arik was a regular guest in our home, until he suddenly changed his stripes,” Hendel tells Mishpacha. Sharon, in fact, was the politician most associated with the settlers and who likely did the most for the settlement enterprise all over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.

Hendel first heard about the Disengagement Plan around the end of 2003, a year and a half before it was implemented.

“It was during a random conversation in the Knesset with someone from Sharon’s close inner circle,” Hendel recalls. “He spoke to me casually about a plan to evacuate Gush Katif, and I had a hard time believing what he was saying. I still think that what caused Sharon to go with the plan despite his beliefs was the political mess he was in with certain international business complications that were threatening to bring down his personal empire, which he felt could be salvaged if he ingratiated himself with the political left. Without that, Gush Katif would still be standing today. We were good friends, but as soon as the decision was made, he refused to take my calls or speak with me.”

Hendel is convinced that Sharon knew he was making a huge national mistake. Everyone with common sense understood the significance of having Jewish communities on the Gaza coast, which were actually built by the Labor government decades before.

“Sharon had often expressed to his close people, ‘We must not give up the bit that Rabin left.’ But at one point,” Hendel says, “he broke, and went ahead with it full force, turning on all the people who had been closest to him over the years.”

Hendel will never forget the morning of the expulsion. It began when a group of soldiers, led by a senior officer, knocked at the door of the Hendel home. They realized that, hope against hope, the moment had come.

“I went to the fridge and took out watermelon,” Hendel relates. “I wanted to offer them to sit down a bit, that if they’re going to evict us, at least let’s do it in a dignified manner.”

The officer came in. He first apologized and said that it was nothing personal, that he was fulfilling an order that was given to him.

“I asked him if he would obey an order if it was to kill Jews,” Hendel recounts. “After that, the officer didn’t speak to me anymore.”

In the seven months leading to the expulsion, Hendel went from house to house throughout Gush Katif to urge people not to leave until the last second. Some believed that it could all turn around, and that if the people would stay there, maybe, maybe it would cause the decision-makers to rethink it all.

In reality, it didn’t help. Sharon carried out the destruction of the Gush Katif settlements like a D9, forging blindly ahead.

Despite all the protests, when it came to the expulsion itself, most of the residents cooperated, although many refused to leave on their own and had to be carried out. Yet the expected violence never happened.

“There were elements in the government who really wanted us to be violent,” Hendel relates. “The IDF spokesperson even insisted that the media go in with the soldiers so that the public should see that the settlers are dangerous. In fact, this caused the opposite reaction. Instead of violence, the country saw the tefillot, the tears, the hugs between soldiers and settlers. It stunned them.”

Since October 7, and even soon after the Disengagement when Sderot and other nearby towns came under constant missile barrage, policymakers have grappled with the wisdom of expulsion and turnover. Can Hendel forgive those who admit to the mistake?

“It’s not up to me to forgive them,” he says. “Maybe HaKadosh Baruch Hu forgives them.”

Hendel said that he felt crushed when all the warnings that he and his colleagues had shouted out years ago were realized. “I don’t like to say ‘we told you so,’ and my heart aches for the communities surrounding Gaza that were slaughtered, those kibbutzim who had this utopian vision of peace with avowed enemies. True, they rejoiced when the government kicked us out of our homes, but my Jewish heart doesn’t prevent me from embracing them.”

Hendel says that the endgame in Gaza now has to be to reoccupy it and allow Jewish settlement in the area.

“It’s possible that not everyone will understand it now, but in the end,” he says, “there will be no other choice. In the end, we’ll have to reestablish Gush Katif in order to secure our future. Today, people are asking me, ‘When will you return?’ I don’t know if we’ll return now or if it will take some time, but we need a broad consensus among Israeli society first, so that there is no fighting about this. Ultimately, though, there’s no other solution.”

Love Did Not Prevail

Until the last minute, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, rosh yeshivah of Ateret Cohanim and one of the veteran spiritual leaders of the Religious Zionist camp, hoped that a grassroots protest would erupt and prevent the Disengagement, yet he took a rabbinical stance that soldiers deployed to the scene should not refuse orders. When he saw that public opinion was not on their side, he understood that it was all over

If there is one significant event considered to be the breaking point of the struggle against the expulsion, it was the mass protest at Kfar Maimon with which Rabbi Aviner is automatically associated.

A year before the pullout, 150,000 people formed a 90-kilometer human chain that stretched from Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip all the way to the Kosel in Jerusalem. But despite public sentiment, the plan was moving ahead full-force. On July 18, 2005, a month before the expulsion, an estimated 50,000 protesters in the ubiquitous orange shirts with the slogan “Yehudi lo megaresh Yehudi (a Jew doesn’t evict another Jew)” gathered in the courtyard of the tziyun of the Baba Sali in Netivot. They had made their way there from all over the country, in all kinds of ways, after overcoming numerous roadblocks and obstacles. During the tefillah rally attended by rabbanim and public figures, Rabbi Aviner stated, “This is the biggest obstruction in the history of the country. We are not battling against the police and the army. They are us, our own flesh. The battle is against our prime minister.”

From there, the huge crowd headed toward Gush Katif in what was to be called the “March of Engagement.” Their first stop was the small town of Kfar Maimon, where the demonstrators lay down for the night on every inch of dirt and grass that was available. The protesters believed that Kfar Maimon was just a temporary stop on the way to Gush Katif, hopeful that the government would capitulate to the tens of thousands who had amassed there, and that Gush Katif would not be evacuated. Instead, they were hit with a cold dose of reality.

At dawn the next morning, this group of tens of thousands of men and women who left their homes and their jobs found themselves surrounded by 20,000 police officers and soldiers, deployed in seven circles around this small community, with helicopters, surveillance aircraft and even a blimp monitoring from above. For the next 48 hours, there would be a standoff that looked like the beginnings of a civil war.

Border police tried to push back the protesters as right-wing activists called on the police and soldiers to refuse to obey orders in what was perceived as a battle for the future of the state. Two days later, settlement leaders and other prominent figures who had previously encouraged the protesters to continue on their march — the most prominent of whom was Rabbi Aviner — called on the demonstrators to disband. In the end, they left Kfar Maimon with a very bitter sense of lost opportunity.

Some of the demonstrators are convinced to this day that if they had only applied more force, even a bit of force, the Disengagement would have been prevented. “Sharon was near the breaking point,” one of them told Mishpacha this week. “If the leadership would have allowed it, and would have encouraged us to break out of Kfar Maimon, the Disengagement might not have happened.”

Until the day of the expulsion, Rabbi Aviner was the moderate voice that led the line of grassroots, nonviolent protests. He even opposed burning tires or mild expressions of violence. In that capacity, he worked toward an agreement with the police and the IDF when the protesters in Kfar Maimon wanted to break out to Gush Katif.

“It could have gotten to some not good places,” Rabbi Aviner tells Mishpacha. “Jews would have fought with one another, and we would have seen some very difficult things there. Civil war is wrong at any cost. That there should be blood and fire between brothers? Chalilah. That is something abominable.

“I thought then, and I still think today, that only a grassroots popular protest could have prevented the prime minister from advancing with the expulsion. The more we could capture the emotions of regular citizens, the higher the chances that the Disengagement could have been prevented. But in reality, most of the general public was not swept up by the idea. We thought love would prevail, but although I spoke to people with a broken heart, it was evident to me that a large part of the population was disconnected from the whole matter.”

On Wednesday, 12 Av, August 17, the day that Neve Dekalim was cleared out, there were two separate tefillah rallies, one for men in the Sephardic shul and one for women in the Ashkenazi shul. After the men and boys were expelled from the shul, Rabbi Aviner was asked to lead the tefillah in the Ashkenazi shul. After saying Tehillim in the presence of armed forces who came to evict the women, the moment came when the crowd was supposed to disperse. Among rivers of tears and cracked voices singing “Tefillah Le’ani,” Rabbi Aviner tore his shirt and made the brachah of Dayan Ha’emes.

“The girls were shrieking when I tore my shirt, as if right now, in those very moments, I was deciding that the decree would come true. In their eyes, it was a feeling of total despair, that I was telling them there’s nothing left to do. And that was really the case. After the tefillah ended, it was clear that it was all over.”

Brainwashed

A year after the Disengagement, State Comptroller Justice Micha Lindenstrauss gave the government failing grades for its handling of the families evicted from their homes, stating that grave governmental mistakes and failures caused unnecessary and very painful suffering.

He slammed the Disengagement Authority for not preparing adequate immediate temporary housing for the days following the withdrawal and longer-term temporary housing for the period until permanent housing would be completed (when he wrote his report, he had no idea that even a decade later, many families would still be living in caravans on the outskirts of several kibbutzim).

Furthermore, he noted, hundreds of families were cut off from their property for many months, due to a ruling that limited families having access to their shipping containers until they found permanent housing, which for the most part wouldn’t exist for years. Families who eventually did open the containers of all their worldly possessions found extensive and often irreparable damage due to the intense heat inside those metal containers languishing in the sun, rat infestation, as well as widespread theft and vandalism.

Personal loss notwithstanding, what the dazed evacuees, and a nation watching from the sidelines, couldn’t understand was how soldiers — some of them friends and relatives but all Jewish brothers — carried out the expulsion without a scratch on their collective conscience.

“The residents thought they had a secret weapon,” said clinical psychologist Dr. Amira Dor after releasing a 200-plus page study entitled “The Mental Preparation for the Disengagement and its Aftermath in the IDF,” detailing the systematic manner in which the army was transformed from a protective fighting force against an outside enemy into a force that could dismantle part of its own country. “They were sure they could convince the soldiers not to follow orders. They would spend the whole night at the Kissufim checkpoint talking to the soldiers. They thought they would speak to their hearts and the soldiers would refuse orders. They didn’t realize they didn’t have a chance. The soldiers were inoculated.”

Beginning a year before the Disengagement, soldiers and officers at every level received IDF kits entitled “Mental Preparations for the Disengagement Mission,” which essentially created a new ideology being taught in the army. Some excerpts include: “Democracy is the most important ideal; the State is democratic more than it is Jewish; the Disengagement is democratic and legal; the IDF is the protector of the democratic regime and therefore may legally be used against civilians; failure to carry out the mission of evacuation will be a failure of democracy; the sovereignty of the State of Israel is expressed by the ability of the IDF to carry out the decisions of the government, and this is what is being tested in this mission.”

According to the researchers of the study, the soldiers were told that if the army did not succeed in the mission of expulsion, the result would be tantamount to the destruction of the Third Temple. And there were many types of threats, both overt and covert. Soldiers who refused to participate would be expelled from prestigious courses, army career personnel would be fired, jailed, or suffer in their civilian jobs. At the same time, there was an intense mental preparation that involved neutralizing emotions and cancellation of personal responsibility.

A lot of that involved creating a narrow mission-oriented language that would allow those with difficulties to participate in the mission. The “newspeak” included such phrases as “a mission within the family,” “contributing to the community,” “sensitivity and determination,” and “a solution for every resident” — terms for defusing inner conflict that allowed the soldiers to say to themselves, “We came to support and not to destroy,” and not to think about the day after. The eviction forces were painted as friendly, considerate, weeping, noncombatant, and embracing.

Mental preparation didn’t end the day Gush Katif was bulldozed. After the operation, soldiers got raises in salary and allowance, and promotions in rank and positions. The IDF even posted video clips that showed the joyous camaraderie of soldiers after the successful mission. Those videos were soon removed, however, because of their jarring juxtaposition to actual real-time news clips showing soldiers collapsing from the emotional strain and breaking down and crying.

One of Ours

This tactic of making residents feel the army was really on their side was one reason that Major General (res.) Gershon Hacohen was appointed as commander of the division that was responsible for carrying out the Disengagement.

Hacohen’s father, Rabbi Yedayah Hacohen, was one of the founders of Yeshivat Ohr Etzion, and his brothers are roshei yeshivah and community leaders in the Religious Zionist sector. When he received the order to be the one responsible for implementing the expulsion, it went against both his ideology and political sense.

He called his father to tell him about the mission he had received. “Oy, what a broch,” his father said. “But there’s no choice.”

To this day, there are expellees who feel he betrayed them. But Hacohen is sure that the Disengagement would have happened in any case. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been through someone else. “It was good that I was there,” he says today. “It could have ended awfully.”

But the communities’ residents felt that Hacohen had been sent to them intentionally. As if to deceive them, or perhaps lull them into compliance by having one of their own carry out the decree.

“There is hardly a day when I don’t think about that Tishah B’Av,” Gershon Hacohen admits. “Those cursed days, when thousands of Jews were uprooted from their homes due to caprices of outside interests, under the guise of delusions and self-deception, to the gleeful crowing of our enemies, both from within and without.

“At the same time,” he qualifies, “I believe that had I not been there, it would have ended in bloodshed. The Disengagement would have happened even if another hundred soldiers would have refused orders.”

Hacohen says that the fact that there was no violence was a blessing, because the next stage of the plan was to be the eventual evacuation of Judea and Samaria.

“The idea was to push the residents to the brink,” he says. “They wanted to see blood, the more the better, and from their standpoint, anything was kosher to make that happen. Therefore, they trampled on citizens’ most basic rights, humiliated them as if they were dirt, and set the date of evacuation right after Tishah B’Av, to offend them and hurt them as much as possible. They wanted to see the events get out of control, so that there should be no sympathy for the settlers. They tried to cook up a process of delegitimization, and that would have enabled them to later expel the residents from the big blocs in Judea and Samaria without a public outcry.”

Hacohen’s entire family was vehemently opposed to the Disengagement, and many were among the demonstrators. And at the General Staff headquarters, everyone knew that he, too, was opposed to the plan. And yet, they specifically chose him.

“The minute you receive an order, it doesn’t matter what your personal opinion is,” Hacohen says. “Whatever your heart thinks, you don’t operate on emotions — you’re a soldier and you carry out orders, otherwise the entire security apparatus falls apart.”

Not every soldier had a clear conscience, though. A few years after the Disengagement, a female soldier discussed her feelings of shame and guilt in a public forum on Radio Kol Chai.

“I took families out of their homes forever, I put them on buses that took them to nowhere,” she said. “I’m sorry that as a soldier in the IDF, I took an active part in removing Israeli citizens from their homes. I want to ask forgiveness from you, the families who were removed; forgiveness from the precious women who I, with my own hands, removed ‘with determination and sensitivity’…

“I want to ask forgiveness for my stupidity and ignorance, for the fact that you spoke and explained and cried and screamed and I didn’t listen, didn’t even try to listen….

“I’m not shirking the responsibility for my actions, even though I did these things not as a private individual but as a representative of the government of Israel. When I put the evacuated residents on buses, I believed that they had somewhere to go… I am ashamed that I didn’t check these things, that I didn’t know that my friends and I were putting them on buses to nowhere….

“How did I dare — I, a little person who never built anything in my life — come destroy with my own hands entire lives that people built with such great effort and grit? I understand that I was a young and confused soldier, eager to carry out orders, and when it was over, months later, I was shattered. We were all shattered. All of my friends, even my commanding officers, we were devastated. Only when I returned home and I began to absorb what I had done, did I allow myself to cry… I don’t forgive myself. I hope that you, dear evacuees, will forgive me.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1072)