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. This profile is the last of a five-part series marking 20 years since Israel’s pullout from Gaza in August 2005.
Many former Gush Katif residents believe that the massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, would have never happened had they still lived in Gaza.
Einat Bloch of Netzer Hazani believes that it would have happened—and to them. Since Oct. 7, she’s experiencing an unexpected emotion: survivor’s guilt.
“I see the expulsion as a miracle. Really. A nes galuy (‘open miracle’),” she said in a two-hour conversation in the backyard of her Netzer Hazani home. The former Gush Katif community has successfully reestablished itself in Yesodot, a moshav in central Israel.
We met after her kids’ bedtime, the only free time she has these days. Since Oct. 7, her husband, Shoham, has been on reserve duty in Gaza, often for weeks at a time.
To substantiate her unorthodox opinion, she recalled an IDF drill in Gush Katif that simulated an Oct. 7-style invasion of Gush Katif. She and her high school classmates were instructed to flee on foot to a hill about half a kilometer away and wait for helicopters to rescue them.
“Kissufim was the only crossing that we could enter and exit. One road. We had no chance to flee. No chance. If Oct. 7 had happened to us, there would have been no survivors.”
‘Losing and finding faith’
Bloch is as passionate and articulate as I remember her 18 years ago when I interviewed her about the breakdown of faith among Gush Katif teens.
Immediately after the pullout, she, like other disillusioned youth, started questioning religious-Zionist tenets of their youth, experimenting with religious observance.
After marrying her high school sweetheart, she eventually returned to religious-Zionist communal life while also defying stereotypes. For example, she wears pants (instead of traditional long skirts), ritually covers her hair in stylish fabric and works on projects to strengthen Jewish-Israeli identity among secular Israelis.
“I was very angry with God. Very,” she said. “I wanted to disconnect from Him even, but I realized I couldn’t. To run away from Him is to run away from me.”
Whereas her faith in God rebounded, her faith in state institutions never did. She describes a well-oiled machine—call it the “deep state”—set against the people of Gush Katif and what they represented.
When the disengagement plan was announced in 2003, Bloch (née Yefet) became a prominent teenage activist, appearing in dozens of Hebrew media outlets and knocking on the doors of Likud members to stop Sharon’s plan. Her pleas were intensified by tragedy.
‘Tragedy upon tragedy’
At 14, her 19-year-old brother, Itamar, was shot by a terrorist in November 2000 while on his way to expand the security fence in Kfar Darom just a day after a roadside bombing killed two schoolteachers, including Bloch’s own.
She later learned that IDF soldiers had urged their commanders to demolish a row of buildings along that road for security reasons. The request was denied. After the attack, coffee grounds and cigarette butts left by the sniper who shot Itamar were found in one of those very buildings.
“And you know why they didn’t tear it down? Because the higher-ups didn’t authorize it for legal reasons. So why should I have relied on the state that Oct. 7 wouldn’t have happened to us?”
When IDF soldiers she once cherished carried them out of their homes—the state symbols of the Israeli flag and menorah blazoned on their uniforms—she lost any remaining faith in the Israeli army. The disengagement, she believed, politicized the army, making them perform what should have been a job for law enforcement.
“If the Israel Defense Force can expel Jews—if they can reach this ‘moral’ conclusion—then I don’t trust the army.”
She and her husband had heated arguments about his army service when he was called to fight in Gaza in 2008 as part of Operation Cast Lead.
“At the end of the day, I realized I’m speaking from emotion.” The army, she said, is still the most effective engine for Jewish self-defense, and her trust in Shoham surpassed her mistrust of the state.
“I think things are changing. I’m no longer a minority who casts doubt on the political class.”
The Gaza border communities, she believes, faced the same military neglect. In the years leading up to Oct. 7, the IDF had closed down or downsized kitot konenut (civilian emergency units) in the region. Itamar’s best friend in Gush Katif was part of such a unit in the border town of Shlomit.
On Oct. 7, he rushed to save people in the secular village of Moshav Pri Gan, which was infiltrated by Hamas terrorists. He and three others from his unit were killed in the rescue effort.
Every round of conflict with Gaza since 2005—and every personal loss—revives her trauma, anger and humiliation. “You mow the lawn every time, but you don’t see the jungle around it until you disappear into it, and it controls you.”
‘You’ve got to have unity’
But it wasn’t the IDF’s military or moral shortfalls that made her foresee a tragedy like Oct. 7; it was the internal divisions that nearly brought the country to a standstill during the height of the protests against the Netanyahu government’s judicial reform plan.
“It was clear that something big would happen—something terrible.”
Her work brought her into personal dialogue with opponents of the reform. “I looked them in the eye and really talked to them. I could empathize. The panic, the hysteria, the pressure—it reminded me of how I felt at 18 in Gush Katif.”
Bloch sees the growing national unity since Oct. 7 as a kind of tikkun (“repair” in Hebrew) for the way her community was treated during and after the pullout. She still believes that Israel must resettle Gaza to keep all Israelis safe. “But for that to happen, you’ve got to have unity.”
The Netzer Hazani synagogue
The value of Jewish unity is built into her community, literally.
The rebuilt synagogue of Netzer Hazani in Yesodot features a ceiling installation that appears as 12 scattered panels (representing the 12 tribes of Israel) from afar but as a Star of David when viewed directly below.
While she sometimes longs for the home, farms and sea of her youth, she’s grateful not to be living in the heart of what was—and remains—a terror hub: Gaza. Only one shelf in her home is dedicated to those memories—photographs, seashells and a bottle of sand her husband brought from Gaza. When U.S. President Donald Trump announced in February a plan for America to take over Gaza, she wrote to her Gush Katif friends in a social-media chat that they must hire a lawyer to demand their right of return.
“It’s clear to me that even if we were to go back there, and even if I got an inheritance there, it wouldn’t be the same,” says Bloch. “It took me time to come to terms with the fact that my home will always exist in memory.”
Part I: 20 years since disengagement: How former Gush Katif residents are re-engaging with Gaza
Part II: Former Gush Katif resident Laurence Beziz: ‘We won’t say we told you so’
Part III: ‘You don’t look around for a new cemetery,’ says mother of fallen Israeli naval commando
Part IV: Jewish return advocate: Gaza must be ‘continuation’ of the Western Negev
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. The whole series is available on her writer’s page.