Welcome to the Wild West: Moshav Bnei Netzarim. One of Israel’s three westernmost communities, it lies just half a mile from the border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
About 1,000 residents live in this agricultural community, founded in 2008 by former residents of Netzarim in the Gaza Strip, which was abandoned in 2005 when Israel disengaged from the Palestinian enclave.
From the community’s entrance plaza—adjacent to the kindergartens, basketball court and swimming pool—the massive Egyptian border tower is clearly visible.
Apart from that, a tour of this tiny town doesn’t reflect its frontier location. There are single-family homes, interlocked stone sidewalks shaded by trees, ample parking and playgrounds. Only the desert sands and shrubs persistently invading every corner remind us we’re not in a suburban Tel Aviv neighborhood.
Yet the border (two, actually) is present here.
“We live with two borders,” said local resident Tzurit Yarhi. “When Islamic State was active in Sinai and the Egyptian military fought them there with Israel Defense Forces assistance, we constantly heard sounds of war. We saw mushroom clouds beyond the border, and occasionally shells even spilled over here,” she said.
“On the other hand, while our town is less than 10 miles from the Gaza border, whenever there was a round of fighting with Hamas, it reached us too. We didn’t get hit like the border communities, but we definitely experienced rocket attacks and sirens,” she added.
Yarhi said she’s less worried about the Gaza border these days.
“The IDF is now in Gaza, so we’re less concerned about that border. But it sits somewhere in our minds that what happened during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught could happen from Egypt’s direction, too,” she said.
“We saw the military’s intense deployment along the Egyptian border at the start of the Gaza war. We constantly ask ourselves, and the military, whether Israel isn’t operating under misconceptions regarding this border as well.”
Yarhi welcomed us into her bright home, which features a backyard with a large pergola and lawn. A wicker basket in the dining corner holds oranges freshly picked from the family orchard.
She’s 55, born in Ramat Magshimim in the Golan Heights (“exactly on the other side of the country”), and moved to Netzarim with her husband, Asaf, in the early ’90s. At the time it was the most isolated town in the Gush Katif bloc.
After the disengagement, the couple, along with about two-thirds of the Netzarim community, decided to resettle in the Haluza sand dunes, Israel’s southwestern corner, establishing Bnei Netzarim.
Ideals and quality of life
The memory of Netzarim never faded in the Yarhi household. About six months ago, it literally knocked on their door.
“When we lived in Netzarim, each family had a wooden sign with their name hanging outside their home, as is customary in moshavim,” Yarhi recounted. “On the day of our evacuation from Netzarim, when we had to leave our home under the disengagement plan, everything was very rushed and we forgot to take the sign.”
In February, IDF soldiers fighting in Gaza near the remains of Netzarim found the sign. After a logistical saga, the sign was returned to its owners and now sits in their living room in Bnei Netzarim. “The sign waited for us in Gaza for 19 years,” said Yarhi, “We were extremely moved to get it back.”
According to Yarhi, what occurred in Gaza following the disengagement came as no surprise.
“Everything we said back then happened, sadly,” she said. “We said if the IDF wasn’t in Gaza, Hamas would take control. We said there would be rockets from Gaza hitting Ashkelon, and they laughed at us. We said the communities near Gaza would become like Netzarim and endure constant rocket fire.”
While she expressed hope that Netzarim will be rebuilt following the current war, she said she’s staying where she is.
“I support Jewish settlement in Gaza. In my view, Gaza is part of Israel,” she said. Moreover, the best way to punish Hamas was to take land from its control, she added.
“But we built Bnei Netzarim here. This isn’t a temporary settlement but a permanent one we built with our own hands. We certainly hope Netzarim will be rebuilt, but we won’t uproot ourselves from our home again.”
Yarhi is a social worker, mother of eight and grandmother of 13.
“Among the veteran families in Bnei Netzarim, we’re considered a small family,” she says almost apologetically. “A few years ago, they checked the average number of children here, and it was 6.6 per family, double the national average.”
Indeed, large families are the backbone of Bnei Netzarim. The small founding nucleus has been joined over recent years by more and more families, all from the Religious-Zionist community sector.
“New families are absorbed here every year,” said Yarhi, who serves as the moshav’s unofficial spokesperson. “To live here, you need to be accepted into the community association, and if you want to farm you need to join the agricultural association. Most families are absorbed into the town after renting for a year, then they need to decide whether to build a house here.”
People are attracted to the town mostly for ideological reasons, she explained.
“These are people who want to live in the border region because it’s the border region, want to live in the town because it’s the town, and want to live in the Negev because it’s the Negev,” she said.
“But within that ideology, they choose to live here because it’s a religious, Torah-oriented … community. There aren’t many such communities in the Negev.”
The voting data from the last elections reinforces her words: About 92% of Bnei Netzarim residents voted for Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party.
Kindergartens are plentiful in the tiny town. About 60 infants under age 3 attend private daycare centers, and beyond that, Bnei Netzarim operates four Education Ministry kindergartens for ages 3-6.
The vast majority of Bnei Netzarim youth enlist in the military or national service.
Across the road from the Yarhi family lives the Ozen family.
The father, Eliyahu, greeted us in a buttoned shirt and work pants, wearing a large kippah and sporting a thick beard. On the bookshelf in the dining corner sat a Talmudic tractate, and on the table were cookies baked by his wife, Rivka.
He’s 63, father of 10—the youngest being 18-year-old twins—and grandfather to 34. He was born in Netivot, a city opposite the Gaza Strip, and is among the founders of both Netzarim and Bnei Netzarim.
After the disengagement, he was among the first to push for resettlement near the Egyptian border. “The disengagement was an unimaginable loss, like losing a child, a hole in the heart beyond measure,” he said.
“But one of the most beautiful things that happened was that about a week after the disengagement, when we could barely breathe, the Netzarim community asked itself what its next mission would be—and established Bnei Netzarim. Looking back, we were larger than life then,” he added.
After sampling the cookies, Ozen takes us to his greenhouses, where he grows lettuce, cabbage and cherry tomatoes. His pride and joy in his field’s yield is evident. Behind one of the vegetable beds, Thai workers were busy harvesting.
“I support Hebrew labor, wish that was the situation here,” Ozen said, scratching his beard, “but if I want to harvest tomatoes, I have no choice but to rely on Thai workers.”
Ozen was the first to establish a greenhouse in the town.
“The soil here is pure gold,” he explained, drawing a line in the sand with his foot. “It’s aerated soil that’s neutral in terms of minerals. Some soils have excess nitrogen, others excess salts, and as a farmer, you have to struggle to balance that. Here, I determine exactly what goes into the soil with a computer keystroke.”
Ozen looks proudly at his greenhouses. “This is my mitzvah,” he said. “When you grow cherry tomatoes here, your sins are forgiven.”
The vegetable supply grown by Ozen and his fellow farmers in Bnei Netzarim was affected after Oct. 7, 2023. “It’s no coincidence that vegetable prices rose at the start of the war. The western Negev produces 70% of Israel’s potatoes, 40% of its onions, and that’s just a partial list. We’re essentially the country’s vegetable storehouse,” he explained.
On the morning of Oct. 7, the town was bombarded, with missiles hitting inside it and the nearby greenhouses. While Hamas terrorists did not reach Bnei Netzarim, they did infiltrate the nearby communities of Yated and Pri Gan.
Bnei Netzarim residents evacuated that evening along with all communities in the area. “There was an order for everyone to leave, partly because there were concerns that attackers from Gaza would infiltrate Israel through Egypt,'” said Ozen.
Asked if he was concerned about living so close to the borders, he replied, “I don’t know that feeling—concern. My daughter says I’m the only person in Israel who didn’t experience a crisis on Oct. 7, that everyone’s traumatized except me. Maybe I’m in denial. Could be. I haven’t delved into my own psychology.”
Originally published by Israel Hayom.
