In recognition of 20 years since the Gaza pullout, JNS is featuring a series of articles reflecting Israel’s disengagement, speaking with an array of former Gush Katif residents to find out how they perceive the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the Trump plan for the Gaza Strip and the prospect of returning.
About two months into the Israel Defense Forces’ invasion into the Gaza Strip as part of “Operation Swords of Iron” in retaliation of the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Aviel Tucker, a former resident of Gush Katif, Gaza, got a call from his son, Dan, a Golani fighter who had been serving there since the start of the IDF ground offensive.
“I’m coming home,” Dan informed him.
“‘When are you coming?” Aviel asked him. “We’ll prepare for your arrival.”
“No,” his son said. “I’m coming … home.”
At that point, Aviel knew exactly what he meant. “Home” was Netzer Hazani, an agricultural settlement in Gush Katif where Aviel was born and raised, and which they were forced to leave on Aug. 15, 2005, as part of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan, which saw the IDF uproot and destroy 21 Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip.
The “original” Netzer Hazani, which consisted of 65 religious-Zionist families, exists today largely as a humanitarian zone sprawling with tents to house Arab refugees from the nearby towns of Khan Yunis and Dir el’Balach. In an earlier round of fighting, a friend from the army had sent Aviel a photo of the town, asking if he could recognize his hothouses.
Unlike their homes (and contrary to the belief that every greenhouse was destroyed after the Jews left Gaza), some of the Jews’ hothouses still stand, thanks in part to international funds that had purchased them for the benefit of Arab locals who couldn’t repeat the success of the Jewish residents. Gush Katif agriculture had been a multimillion-dollar industry, with about 400 farms selling their famous bug-free lettuce, herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, pineapples, flowers and more.
Aviel proceeded to give Dan detailed instructions toward their former community. Dan was only 3 when they were forced to leave; he had just had his upsherin, the ritual first haircut for observant Jewish boys, so Dan’s memories were sparse. Nevertheless, the longing and love for Gush Katif have been transferred to the second and third generation of the evictees. Aviel directed him to an Arab flour mill that stood at the former intersection of Netzer Hazani.
JNS’s interview with Aviel took place at the home of his mother, Anita Tucker, a native of Brooklyn, N.Y., who made aliyah back in 1969. At 79 years old, this Gush Katif farmer has become the public face of her community. Having volunteered for the job of spokesperson, she continues to give interviews and lead groups through her displaced village, which has rebuilt its synagogue, schools and social clubs named after Netzer Hazani’s fallen in central Israel. They’ve even replanted olive trees salvaged from the settlements with the help of the Jewish National Fund.
“I can take my grandkids to Germany and Poland, but I can’t take them a few kilometers to see where I lived for 30 years,” Anita said in front of kitchen blinds specifically designed with the Gush Katif shore adorned with the resilient “Lily of the Beach” (chavatzelet hahof), whose seeds had produced a wax protective layer to save them from destruction by the high tide. Pictures of Gush Katif, as well as Jerusalem, are omnipresent, as if Anita’s seeking to envelop herself in “the Gush,” as they often call the region.
Dan, her grandson, went on with his unit to capture the Hamas parliament in Gaza City, where he held up the Israeli flag with his comrades. Out of Aviel’s six sons and one daughter, two are in active duty; one was injured fighting in Kibbutz Be’eri on Oct. 7. Whether or not Anita’s grandchildren—and now, great-grandchildren—will visit her adopted hometown as more than soldiers in her lifetime is a question that burns within the entire family.
The dream of going back
Three months before Aviel received Dan’s call, he hung up a huge orange sign that read in Hebrew, “Gush Katif: Going Back Home,” on the outskirts of hothouses of the rebuilt Netzer Hazani. That was on Tisha B’Av in August 2023, when most Gush Katif residents commemorate the destruction of their communities, which they see as one of the many historic Jewish tragedies that should be mourned on the official Jewish day of sadness marking the destruction of the two ancient Temples.
The sign, in the symbolic color of their struggle, appears in miniature on his mother’s wall. Aviel had also rolled up a version of the sign for Dan’s army bag. Dan had unrolled it—deep in Gaza.
“All these years, we dreamed about going back,” Aviel said.
About a year after putting up that sign, he made a YouTube video to remind that the people of Gush Katif had warned Israelis that the Arab population would feel emboldened to pursue a path of Jewish genocide.
“They silenced us,” he said in the video, going on to say that to correct it, “we have to remain there.”
Aviel is part of a parliamentary lobby made up of former Gush Katif residents, “Mateh HaGush,” founded after Oct. 7 to unify efforts of those already working to return—from a place of pain more than politics.
Despite Gaza continually being in the headlines and despite the 20-year mark since the disengagement coming up this August, the Gush Katif community has largely kept a low profile. The movement to return to Gaza is being led publicly by the Nahala group, headed by Daniela Weiss, the former mayor of Kedumim in Samaria. In conjunction with other right-wing organizations, Nahala has held several conferences since Oct. 7 on the need to resettle the land as a matter of national honor and security. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in addition to several other Likud cabinet ministers, were among the speakers.
Their first conference in January 2024 stirred some controversy. For now, polls show that Israelis are sympathetic to U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement on Feb. 4 of a plan to have the United States take over the Gaza Strip and resettle Arab residents elsewhere; however, they are split on the issue of resettlement.
One of the first practical goals of these groups is to cancel the disengagement law that forbids Israeli civilians in Gaza. It has already been canceled for the four towns in northern Samaria that were also uprooted: Ganim, Kadim, Sa-Nur and Homesh. Today, these towns are gradually being resettled. The groups advocating for a Jewish return to Gaza have drawn maps and even plans for how it could be partitioned into recreational, agricultural and residential zones, including, of course, a coastal promenade, or “riviera.”
Pain versus politics
The Gush Katif Commemoration Center (Merkaz Katif) is a state-funded museum honoring the Gush Katif settlements by showcasing the lives of the residents and their legacy. It does not take overt political positions; rather, it seeks to influence the public narrative toward more sympathy for and understanding of the once maligned “settlements.” The center took care not to explicitly connect the Oct. 7 massacre to the withdrawal from Gaza, despite the warnings of residents that disengagement would lead to disaster.
“The Katif Center did what it could not to talk about it during the war because it lacks derech eretz (‘respect’),” said Micha Haddad, CEO of the center, displaced from Neve Dekalim, the largest and most urban of the Gush Katif settlements. Located in the coastal town of Nitzan, on the sandy plains that once served as the “caravilla” camp for the Gush Katif refugees, the modest center is adorned with original signage and monuments from Gush Katif. Just a few hundred meters away is the “rebuilt” Neve Dekalim housing its well-known ulpana (all-girls high school) and a variation of its iconic Star-of-David shaped synagogue.
“Now, everything is political, but at the end of the day, you have massive pain,” Haddad said.
For the nationalist camp, the 19th commemoration of the disengagement plan, which fell about a month before Oct. 7, 2023, is a much more apt annual demarcation. Nineteen years is also the period that separates the 1948 War of Independence and the Six-Day War in 1967.
“Nineteen years have passed since Gush Etzion and the Jewish Quarter fell in 1948, and the Six-Day War. Nineteen years. That’s an interesting number,” said Haddad.
But there’s a major difference, he added: “The Six-Day War came with a lot of honor and glory, and here, it comes with a lot of pain and brutality.”
While polls show that most Israelis now reject the “land for peace” formula that led to the expulsion from Gush Katif (as they and their supporters call it), Haddad has not personally experienced a collective sentiment of remorse about having to forcefully leave Gaza.
As evidence of such remorse, several interviewees for this article series pointed to a video in which a resident of the largely left-wing Kibbutz Be’eri, Avida Bachar, who lost his wife, son and leg in the Hamas attack, told the media: “Luckily, the massacre happened in Be’eri … because had it happened in Gush Etzion, what would I have said at that moment? I would have said: ‘Why are they living there?’ I would say: ‘Maybe they deserve it.’ … Luckily, I paid a very high price for this lesson.”
These days, Aviel markets industrial agricultural turf for farmers, and he conducts business in the Gaza Envelope with kibbutzniks who were once his ideological adversaries. He recalls the people of the Gaza Envelope holding up signs at the entrance of the Kissufim crossing into Gush Katif saying: “Die l’kibbush; Die l’Gush.” (A Hebrew rhyme for “End the Occupation/End the Gush.”
He, too, has not experienced overt remorse from this population, though he has sensed a shift. Many with whom he’s spoken now believe that Gaza must be cleared out of its hostile population. “There are many people who wouldn’t dare say it out loud, even in the kibbutzim, but they understand we made a mistake.”
And yet, he doesn’t expect or ask for an apology: “They don’t ask for forgiveness. They’re not in that place.”
The Trump plan
A few hundred meters away from the Heritage Center are leftover, scattered “caravillas” inhabited by Gush Katif residents, or their children, who never managed to invest their compensation money in a new house or who couldn’t manage to get back up on their feet. The majority of the displaced, however, have largely settled in permanent homes throughout Israel, rebuilt with a mixture of private funds and government compensation money. The communities fought to stick together, but only a fraction of the Gush Katif farmers returned to the physically laborious agricultural industry. At middle age, most didn’t have the energy or the funds to start new farms. A return to Gush Katif would constitute yet another major personal rebuilding effort.
Among the few farmers of Netzer Hazani to rebuild their farm is Isaac Cohen. His son, Elad Cohen, followed in his father’s farming footsteps, spending four years building a successful sprouts business. He took JNS through the farm where alfalfa and bean sprouts—sold all over Israel—grow in large trays and vats with the help of Thai workers. His face turned wistful at the mention of returning. He was 18 years old at the time of the “expulsion.”
“It has nothing to do with Trump or Bibi,” Cohen said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “It’ll happen because it’s ours. Politicians can change their minds. And if it’s not us, then it will be our kids.”
Anita Tucker’s extended family all hold American citizenship. Believing that Trump would be more sympathetic to Israel, Aviel’s father, Stuart (a native of Cleveland), conducted a personal ballot harvesting campaign within the family, sending in more than a dozen absentee ballots for Trump in the last election. Mateh HaGush even wrote a letter to the current American president, making its case for a Jewish return to Gaza. Aviel credits Trump, in part, for helping to change the conversation.
“When we hung up the sign, people laughed at us,” he said. “But now, at least it’s something we can discuss and argue about.”
As much as Gush Katifers to this day miss their homes and farms, the majority to whom JNS has spoken don’t want to go back as renegades, against the will of the people of Israel.
“We want to go back, not like we were, as ‘settlers,’” Aviel said, “but as the entire nation of Israel, so that they understand that this is what we have to do.”
Orit Arfa (www.oritarfa.net) is a journalist and author based in Berlin. At the time of the IDF’s 2005 pullout from Gaza, she was based in Gush Katif and covered it extensively. Her first novel, The Settler, follows its aftermath through the eyes of a young American-Israeli evacuee who “resettles” in Tel Aviv.