Gaza Dispatch: 'Sharon is Going to Destroy This Place'

A crew of Palestinian laborers chops the long green stems from Michael Goldschmidt's amaryllis bulbs in his stuffy hothouse. Goldschmidt, 57, sells the bulbs, grown in the Ganei Tal settlement in the Gaza Strip's Gush Katif bloc, for a dollar. After export to the U.S., the plants go for almost $70. With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza set for next month, Goldschmidt is taking as many of his 300,000 bulbs out of the ground as he can, in spite of his desire to stay in the place he's lived for 28 years. I absolutely refuse to deal with the government, but I have lawyers handling negotiations, he says. A little apologetically, he adds: If I didn't, the government would eat me alive.

Goldschmidt's pragmatism is far more representative of the views of the almost 10,000 residents of Israel's 21 Gaza settlements than the headline grabbing protests of a few. Like many others, he is reluctantly making a compensation deal with the government. Indeed, government officials tell Time the turning point may have been a series of clashes earlier this month that convinced many settlers that resisting the pullout would inevitably lead to violence. I don't like to admit it, but it's clear that Sharon is going to destroy this place, says Debi Rosen, who works at the municipal council for the Gaza settlements.

Still, the leaders of the settler movement haven't given up. They planned a massive protest march this week from Israel to Gaza. Sharon last week ordered the army to shut the entry checkpoint to Gaza to prevent protesters secreting themselves in the settlements in advance of the pullout. And by Monday, when the march began, police had already banned it, although settler leaders vowed to press ahead.

Settler activists and their supporters among religious Zionist rabbis have urged soldiers to defy orders associated with the pullout, and appear to have had some success in isolated cases. But the authorities don't expect any significant mutiny, and the army soon begins two-week training periods for special house-evacuation teams of 17 soldiers each.

The most aggressive protesters against police action in Gaza so far have largely been imports from West Bank settlements. Some of these outsiders now populate an abandoned seafront hotel, which police reckon may be one of the toughest spots to evacuate. The Palm Beach Hotel is a dilapidated, low, white building, surrounded by portable toilets and topped by a camouflaged army guard post. The militant ethos of the hotel squatters has less in common with the prevailing attitudes in the Gaza settlements than it does with the atmosphere in the northern West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur, where military officials believe the evacuation is most likely to turn violent.

That's not to say it isn't a wrenching moment for the Gaza settlers. The pullout strikes at the heart of their religious beliefs. Sharon's plan has caused a crisis in religious Zionism, the messianic movement that has driven Israel's massive settlement expansion of the last three decades, by shattering its basic tenet — the secular Israeli state is no longer serving as a vehicle for restoring Jewish possession of the Biblical Land of Israel, which they believe is an essential condition for the coming of the Messiah.

When Sharon, a longtime proponent of the settlements and a key figure in the founding of Gush Katif, announced that Israel would cede some of that Biblical land, religious Zionists questioned whether the great redemption was coming, after all. It's an ideological and spiritual crisis, says Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, a religious Zionist leader. All this faith in redemption is collapsing. Goldschmidt, the Ganei Tal farmer, resolves that quandary simply by asserting that Sharon's not a Zionist any more.