Yonatan Bassi, the man who headed the SELA Administration for the resettlement of families who were forcibly evicted from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria in 2005, testified Sunday before the official commission of inquiry established to look into the delays in their resettlement and compensation. Bassi was emotional and spoke in a shaky voice, but maintained that the Sela Authority was not to blame for the problems with resttlement. Rather, he said, it was the evictees who refused to cooperate with the Authority.
“As time went by and the Disengagement got nearer, a disconnection formed between the Authority and the community of evacuees,” Bassi said. However, he said that he disagreed with the criticism leveled at the Authority by the State Comptroller and Ombudsman. “I think that the State Comptroller did not see things as we did,” Bassi stated. “We made a great effort to help all of the evacuee communities.” Bassi quoted the idiom: “The cow wants to give milk but the calf does not want to suckle.”
The commission’s head, Judge (ret.) Eliyahu Matza, asked Bassi if his statements regarding the Disengagement caused the rupturing relations between him and the evictees. Bassi said that “a process of grief is always accompanied by anger. People were angry at Ariel Sharon and at Yonatan Bassi… If the Administration was headed by a person without a kippah, there would be less anger.”
Commission members Bar-Ilan University law Prof. Yedidya Stern (R), retired justice Eliyahu Matza (C) and Dr. Shimon Ravid (Israel News photo: Flash 90)
Regarding the slow pace of resettlement of the evictees, Bassi did not take the blame on himself or the Sela Authority: “One can evict by force but we could not [re]settle by force. With a lot of soldiers one can evict but we were not able to forcefully [re]settle,” he explained.
“We thought at first that there would be 50 percent who would get by on their own and 50 percent in which we would have to intervene. In the end it was 80 percent who did not get by and 20 percent who did. We thought that it would not be right to build the alternative communities and only then carry out the plan, but I knew that the rehabilitation would take more than three years.,” Bassi said.
“We did everything to meet with the people, both people on the ground and leaders… meetings in hotels, in basements… we held many meetings with individuals and groups. We put up an internet website, we sent letters and they burned the letters we sent,” he complained.
The uprooting of the cemetery was “hard, painful and sensitive,” he said.
Nevertheless, Bassi also said, "The state owes this to those evicted, it has to bring them back to living productive lives. Regardless of the debate on whether the disengagement was the right thing or not, they made the greatest sacrifice."
Bassi 'lost all shame'
The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel accused Bassi of “losing all sense of shame” following his initial testimony. “Bassi was a senior associate to the greatest failure in Israel in the last generation, to a moral crime against basic human rights and to an unpardonable sin,” the Forum stated. “His blaming the evacuees for the situation that he and his masters led them [into] is the height of cynicism,” it added.
“The Legal Forum struggled, fought and begged to stop the evacuation until a communal solution was found for the evacuess, but Bassi and the Administration ran a false campaign that stated that there is ‘a solution for every resident’ – something that was proven to be a lie,” the Forum went on to state. “Had Mr.Bassi cooperated with the Legal Forum’s suggestions, he would not now be sitting as the first person to be questioned by the Committee of Inquiry.”
Judge Matza said that Bassi would appear again before the commission of inquiry.