[In our home in the Gush,] my room was painted orange My sister had painted hers red My mother had painted the kitchen purple Now it is all mixed together upon the sand. by Yael (Cohen) Haramati
Atzmona residents crying shortly before the evacuation begins. Courtesy of the Israel Government Press Office/ Mark Neyman
life; two days earlier, my father had mowed the lawn. This attitude united the family and enabled us to get through the terrible devastation together, embracing each other. The churban actually began for us three weeks earlier, when my aunt and her husband, Rachela and Dov Kol, may their deaths be avenged, spent a Shabbat with us. On Motzaei Shabbat, while they were driving home to Jerusalem, terrorists shot at their car and killed them. It was the night of the Seventeenth of Tammuz, and the pain was
It was simply impossible to believe that the government of Israel really intended to expel me from the only home I had ever known, a place that the State itself had created due to its strategic importance.
overwhelming. Tragically, throughout our years of living in the Gush, we had lost friends in terror attacks, people who had died in order to enable us to continue to live here. But with the death of Rachela and Dov, the frustration was overwhelming, because we knew that they were murdered on this holy land, but in another month there might not even be Jews living here! Within the thirty-day mourning period, the day of the expulsion arrived. The idea that the terrorists who murdered our loved ones would soon receive this piece of Eretz Yisrael, drenched in the blood of Rachela and Dov, was unbearable, a feeling of total surrender to terror and evil. Two months after the expulsion, I gave birth to my daughter and we called her “Tal” to commemorate the spirit of our home that was destroyed. During the expulsion and afterward, I wrote poems and stories that described the situation from different perspectives. Some of them were published in newspapers, like the story “There Are No Orange Toilet Tanks” that deals with the difficulty of building a new home. Two years after the expulsion, I wrote a book of poetry called Orange Boy that describes the period [of the disengagement] through short poems from the perspective of the children of Gush Katif. At the present time, a playwright is writing a play based on my writings that, please God, will be performed during the tenth anniversary of the expulsion. The play, A Time to Plant, deals with the rehabilitation after the expulsion and the terrible conflict most evacuees experience between the desire to settle in a new place and the dream and the desire to return home. Today my family and I live in the rebuilt moshav Ganei Tal in the Nahal Sorek region. It is called by the same name as the original community so we will never forget where we came from. Every year on the day of the expulsion we drive to a lookout place in the direction of Gush Katif and we declare that we will return. If we will not be privileged to return, then, God willing, our children or our grandchildren will once again build their homes there. g Home Game is a powerful film produced in the aftermath of the disengagement. The film tells the compelling story of the disengagement through the eyes of the Gush Katif youth of Netzer Hazani who were involved in the 2005 annual Gush Katif summer basketball tournament—a tournament that took place at the same time as the implementation of the disengagement plan. Home Game can be viewed at israelvideonetwork.com/must-see-home-game-the-movie-on-gush-katif/.
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