GANEI TAL, Nahal Sorek Regional Council — At the entrance to the settlement, a huge sign is hanging, carrying a brief description of the traumatic ordeal the Ganei Tal settlement went through. It reads as follows: “Sixty-five years after the establishment of the state of Israel, 31 years after settling on the land of Gush Katif, and five years after we were expelled from our homes, we, the settlers of Ganei Tal and our descendants, with our heads high, are settling down on our new land.” On the other side, another sign reminds the local residents to register their children for the annual trip to the concentration camps in Poland.

All 65 families evacuated from Ganei Tal in the framework of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005 eventually moved to the environs of the southern city of Ashkelon, where they established a new settlement on land that had previously been cultivated as a corn field. For eight years, most of them wandered from one temporary settlement to another, waiting for the construction of their new homes in the new settlement, named after the original one in the Gaza Strip, which had been destroyed.

It is Holocaust Remembrance Day today [April 8], and the few residents who stayed behind are at home. The main streets, just paved, are deserted. In a week, they will celebrate Independence Day here, but hardly any of the residents hung the Israeli flag outside the window or the balcony. They feel that the state has betrayed them. Yitzhak Amergi, outraged at the “expulsion,” as he calls it, from Gush Katif, has deliberately refrained from flying the flag of Israel since he was uprooted from his home about eight years ago.

Amergi, an industrialist who did well in his business before being displaced, still finds it difficult to get used to his new life. In his eyes, the expulsion of Jews from Gaza is no different from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain [in 1492] or the expulsion of the Jews from Europe. While then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon coined the term “disengagement” with reference to the evacuation of 8,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip, the settlers themselves interchangeably use the terms “expulsion” and “uprooting” to show their hard feelings about Israel's withdrawal from Gaza after nearly four decades of Israeli control over the area.