Postcard From Gaza

CBS News Producer Michael Bronner: Settlers And Soldiers Brace For Pullout

(CBS)  This article was written by Michael Bronner, who has covered the Mideast for CBS News.

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It was a beach day in Gaza, and from the diversity of activity on the shore on a recent weekend, you’d be hard-pressed to guess it’s one of the last, at least for the 9,000-some seaside settlers of Gush Katif, the main Jewish enclave in the Strip.

Young orthodox mothers stood in the surf in skirts, shepherding children and watching for jellyfish. Boys in kippahs and shorts erected whole new settlements of excellent sand castles. Bigger boys were busy nailing together wooden frames for a tent city to house the thousands of religious nationalists they say will come join them in blocking the “transfer” of the Gaza settlers into mainland Israel.

In his bungalow on a dune overlooking it all, David Matar, a Manhattan-born pediatrician, sat gazing into the sun wishing for a ship.

“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a boat called ‘Exodus 2005’ loaded with Jews who wanted to come live in the Land of Israel and were prevented from doing so not by the British Navy but the Israeli Navy? That would be a poignant thing, wouldn’t it?”

Indeed, the minyan of Israeli troops and border police massing at the Gaza gates to carry out the “evacuation” of roughly 1,600 settler families – and to prevent the further influx of more radical protesters like Matar who, with his wife and six kids (along with perhaps 2,000 other religious nationalists), have moved into the Strip recently to hamper the pull-out – is startling.

Tractor-trailers loaded with Merkava tanks line the roads, and the trees a hundred yards on either side are caked white with fine Western Negev dust kicked up by thousands of jeeps, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and police cars. By August 15, when residents will be given official notice that the term of their service in worship, agriculture and armed entrenchment on behalf of the State of Israel is complete, there will be some 43,000 troops and police on hand to escort them out.

Thus the stage is set for a wrenching, dramatic and much-advertised clash between Israeli soldiers and Israeli citizens. The protagonists on both sides have been busy rehearsing their lines.

“What you’re doing is immoral and illegal and it’s something you’ll regret bitterly until the end of your days,” David Matar (who will be “chained to something”) plans to tell the soldier who comes to remove him. “And I may remind him that 60 years ago somebody may have come knocking at his grandparents’ door.”

His wife, Nadia, who is organizing the tent cities, instructed me not to miss the nuance in her views on invoking the “N” word in referring to soldiers. “One thing has to be very clear: we do not compare Jews to Nazis. We compare Jews to the collaborators with the Nazis.”