Difficult, But Not Impossible

Driving south of Tel Aviv on Israel's coastal highway, you can't miss them: hundreds of single-family homes with red-tiled rooftops, built among green fields. Getting closer, you notice the temporariness of the neighborhood. There are only few shops or community services, mostly housed in trailers. Parking-lot graffiti pledges to "return to Gush Katif," Israel's former settlement project in Gaza, evacuated by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in August 2005.

The "caravillas"—a local portmanteau word for mobile villas—were built in a crash program to serve as temporary housing for the Gaza evacuees, following their forced removal from their former homes. Although the government promised to put their resettlement high on its agenda, move them as quickly as possible to permanent housing, and conclude the "disengagement" process, they're still there. And today, they're as good a barometer as Israel has for what would happen in an evacuation of the West Bank's most intransigent settlers. If the debate today is about where to freeze settlement construction, the debate tomorrow could be about how to clear them, how traumatic it would be, and how quickly they could resettle and reintegrate into Israeli society. The former Gaza settlers at Nitzan show that settlers, albeit with difficulty, can be resettled.

Israel moved 1,940 families—around 9,000 people—from 25 settlements in Gaza (and the northern West Bank). They were offered generous compensation packages, totaling about $2 billion. One fifth of the evacuees took the money and resettled on their own initiative. But 80 percent chose to remain within their former community and resettle together. And here came the problem. Failing to anticipate the demand for communal resettlement, the government had not prepared new villages and neighborhoods for the evacuees, who were mostly farmers.

Thus the need for caravillatowns like Nitzan. By the spring of this year, Nitzan was supposed to return to its previous status as a cornfield. But time passed, and most evacuees still live in their halfway houses, waiting for resettlement. Rabbi Kobi Bornstein just received the lot where his future home will be built, a mile away from his caravilla. His friend and fellow community leader Lior Kalfa just moved into his final destination: a nice, middle-class home by Israeli standards, overlooking sand dunes that remind him of the lost home on the Gaza beach. "If we're lucky, all of us will be out of the caravillas by 2011," he says. Kalfa spends his days pleading with government bureaucrats to connect high-speed Internet for the community, issue tenders for sidewalks in their newly built streets, and hasten the construction of a new synagogue.

Their old days of high-profile protest against the evacuation are long forgotten. Rabbi Bornstein waited a couple of years before he could change his official address, from the ruined Neve Dekalim settlement to Nitzan. It was too painful. He spends part of his time guiding visitors to the local Gush Katif memorial, and like others on his side of politics, names the Gaza pullout "the expulsion." But the fervor is gone. Bornstein wants to be part of the mainstream. So why hasn't it happened yet?

The stereotype of Israelis is that they excel at invention and improvisation. (According to the title of a new book about the Israeli economy, it's a Start-Up Nation.) But they're less adept with long-term projects, and the Gush Katif resettlement is a good example. When Sharon was in charge and kicked the bureaucrats around, the caravillas were built in no time. But then the pullout was over, Sharon fell sick, and the country's attention turned to the next crisis. The resettlement project was delegated to midlevel officials and became just another budgetary line item. A couple of miles south of Nitzan, road signs marking newly planned neighborhoods, bearing the names of former Gaza communities, point to empty fields with abandoned concrete foundations. There is no work in sight.

The evacuees contributed to the foot-dragging by making demands, while facing growing difficulties. According to government statistics, 16 percent of them are unemployed—double the national rate. People in their 50s find it hard to get jobs. Others ate away their compensation and have no money left to build new homes. Public opinion is beginning—seen in op-eds and in my reporting—to view the evacuees as insatiably greedy. They hate the image: "We're not trying to become real-estate millionaires," says Bornstein. "All we want is normal life."

Meanwhile, some Israeli politicians have adopted the evacuees as a pet issue. Right wingers from the settler lobby sought to help their constituents and deter the government from a future settlement evacuation. Left wingers wanted to use a successful Gaza resettlement as a positive precedent for a similar move in the West Bank. Sharon's successors, Ehud Olmert and the incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged to put resettlement high on their agenda, to no avail.

In September, a Knesset-appointed commission of inquiry on the treatment of evacuees published its initial findings. Faulting both the state and the former settlers for the time lost, it called to turn resettlement into "an urgent national mission." In a recent cabinet meeting, Netanyahu showed his knack for PR by deciding to change the name of the evacuee rehabilitation agency to "Momentum Administration."

But the big question looming over the resettlement project is the possibility of a future evacuation of West Bank settlers. Creating a viable Palestinian state will demand the evacuation of tens of thousands of Israelis from its territory. Can Israel sustain the financial burden? Resettling 80,000 people might cost $20 billion—approximately one 10th of the annual GDP. With President Barack Obama pushing for a two-state solution, can Israel handle this burden.

Throughout its existence, Israel has absorbed millions of new immigrants, supplying them with housing and jobs. Absorbing evacuees from the West Bank—many of whom work in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, and could keep their jobs—pales in comparison to these past efforts. But more important, the Gaza experience has shown that the state is stronger than its citizens, and bureaucratic processes can quell even the most ardent revanchists, who eventually care more about their welfare that about their cause. "I have many friends in West Bank settlements, but I'm not involved in their politics," says Rabbi Bornstein. Indeed, evacuees have been strangely silent in the current struggle of West Bank settlers against Netanyahu's decision to freeze new construction for 10 months. That's why the next evacuation may be more difficult (given the larger number and the stronger ideological zeal on the West Bank hilltops), but it's hardly impossible.