“My children have become forlorn, because the enemy has prevailed.”  Lamentations 1:16

Prayers marking the fast day of the Ninth of Av, known as Tisha B’av, are being held in a tent erected opposite the Knesset in Jerusalem.

Farmers who once worked the fields in the destroyed region of Gaza known as Gush Katif are sitting in their tent to protest the government’s failure to compensate them for their lost businesses.

For the farmers of the Gush Katif region of Gaza the day carries a special significance, underscoring not only the loss of the central institutions of the Jewish world thousands of years ago but also the loss of their personal livelihoods and homes.

It has been two years that they and their families have been without their farms, since the 2005 Disengagement from Gaza and northern Samaria during which approximately 9,000 Jews in 25 communities were uprooted from their towns and expelled from their homes.

The Book of Lamentations as well as other holy texts will be read in the tent, as elsewhere in the Jewish world, to mark the destruction of the First and Second Holy Temples in Jerusalem, as well as a number of other tragedies in Jewish history.

The fast lasts from Monday, 18 minutes before sundown, until approximately one hour after sundown Tuesday night, and special prayers are said, mourning the destruction and looking ahead to the time when the Temple will once again be rebuilt.

Terrorist training camps and rocket launching sites now multiply where fruits, vegetables and flowers once grew for export and domestic consumption in the region of Gush Katif, located on Israel's southern Mediterranean coast.

Now the farmers have “settled” in a tent opposite the Knesset to protest the fact that the government has yet to compensate them for the farmland that was taken away and given to the Palestinian Authority.

Several politicians visited the farmers’ protest tent last week, including party chairman and Knesset opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu, who called the expulsion of Jews from Gaza a “double tragedy.”  Netanyahu voted in favor of the expulsion in the Knesset.

The expulsion itself caused “suffering and pain,” he said, noting that “today, on your farms, rockets are stationed against Israel.”  During his visit, Netanyahu called on the government to “act to fix this injustice.”