Dil Se From Vimla Patil Lifestyle World Watch Bookreview Events Maratha Voices Health & Fitness Children Story Beauty Tips Prev Issue Next Issue

An Israeli soldier looks over the houses of the northern West Bank settlement of Ganim
© AFP Eitan Abramovich

GANIM SETTLEMENT, West Bank (AFP) - A month ago, 30 families lived in Ganim: today around a dozen.

Ten minutes away in Kadim -- the second of four settlements Israel is to dismantle this summer in the northern West Bank -- four families have left.

Sitting on the porch of his Ganim home, overlooking rolling fields and Palestinian homes, Aaron Yarden wants his family on a truck heading to a new life in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967, early next month.

With only five families left in his street and tired of living on top of Jenin, a bastion of Palestinian militancy during the nearly five-year intifada, Yarden is not sorry to leave.

"Anything I can do here, I can do in the Golan and I don't need to be armed to do it," said the 40-year-old, complaining about having to jump up during dinner to grab his gun when Palestinians open fire towards the settlement.

Living within 300 metres (yards) of Palestinian homes, he reels off a murder, a stabbing, a neighbour who had his legs shattered by gunfire, another shot in the shoulder and various shrapnel injuries since the uprising began in 2000.

Yarden signed and sealed his state compensation agreement in early June and is adamant that he, his wife and son will leave before the military declares Ganim a closed military zone in mid-August.

An Israeli settler walks past a painted cement barrier in the northern West Bank settlement of Ganim
© AFP Eitan Abramovich

Kadim settlers, flute teacher Sarah and her husband Joseph Scheimann are leaving next week for a newly renovated duplex in a neighbouring settlement, where the couple expect to be joined by another seven Kadim families.

Describing their 12 years in Kadim as a "great blessing", the retirees chose their new home last December and have already paid for the bricks and mortar.

Over the past few months, friends have gone from incomprehension at their willingness to abandon a sinking ship to making similar arrangements.

"The government is like a steamroller and you don't mess with a steamroller," said Joseph.

Law-abiding settlers to a fault, no one in Gadim has joined radicals using violence to resist expulsion. Instead they are resigned to the inevitable.

The only ones still clueless about the future are ideological Zionists opposed to the pullout or those in dire straits, like Efim Vayntraub, whose daughter was killed by Palestinian militants four years ago.

His eight-year-old grandson witnessed the murder on the road around Jenin and his wife is handicapped. Even the thought of deserting the home where his daughter was so happy tears him apart.

"There are 40 days to go and we don't know when or where we'll go. We have absolutely no money to rent somewhere else," said the 55-year-old grandfather, saying he has received no response to his application for compensation.

Ety Aradji and her daughter outside their house in the northern West Bank settlement of Ganim
© AFP Eitan Abramovich

A founder of Ganim 22 years ago, Ety Aradji can scarcely believe the government is forcing her to leave the home where she mothered five children and the garden where she planted five trees in their honour.

"In a week we'll be alone ... The neighbourhood has become sad. No one's here and I am profoundly depressed. I don't understand them for leaving, for me it's the most beautiful part of the country," she said.

Her husband, a policeman, is torn between a wife refusing to leave and his duties to quit the settlement before evacuation. She has twice delivered him an ultimatum: leave her or support her.

In at least one household, the flat-pack cardboard boxes brought over by a neighbour to encourage departure remain untouched on the table.

© 2005 AFP. All rights of reproduction and distribution reserved. All information displayed on this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

View and Post comment on this article