"Olmert, the Disengagement has turned me into a vegetable," their sign says.
The two men, Avraham Ben-Hamu and Herzl Elazri, owned farms in the community of Bdolach (Crystal), just a few kilometers south of N'vei Dekalim. "I had 25 workers under me," Elazri told Arutz-7 today, "with 15 dunams [almost four acres] of a special type of yellow cherry tomato grown for export to Europe and the U.S. My wife also worked. And now? - there is no work, no solutions, and no one wants to talk to us. It's one thing to be thrown out of your home - but we could live with that, if only they would make good on their promise to give us back our livelihood."
Elazri said many of his Bdolach neighbors are in the same situation as him:
"We are living here in Nitzan, just south of Ashkelon, and yet the government
has offered us plots of land all the way down in the Halutza Sands area [along Israel's border with Sinai, south of the Gaza Strip]. In Bdolach, we worked two minutes away from home. At age 48, I can't start a totally new business from scratch in a place that's 45 minutes away!"
Elazri said that he has received a portion of his government-promised compensation payments, "but it's not anything near what we were promised. I need something to do! Our monthly expenses are very high, including buying totally new furniture and kitchen equipment, and yet I spend my days doing absolutely nothing. It's terrible for me, and it's bad for my children to see me this way."
Elazri's partner, Avraham Ben-Hamu, said he hopes that other displaced residents will join them in their initiative to stand in protest at the intersection.
Elazri said he is even considering writing to UNRWA - the United Nations Relief and Works Agency - to ask for its help in alleviating his suffering as a refugee.
Another family, thrown out of Moshav Katif and slated to live in Amatzia, was told to split up into two caravans. Contrary to promises given by the government's Sela [Aid to Gaza Evacuees] Administration, the family was assigned a 75-square-meter [807-square foot] caravan - instead of the 110 meters to which they are eligible. The mother of the family, Tammy, told Katif.net, "When we refused to take the 75-meter caravan, they wanted us to split up into two - half the family should sleep in one caravan, and half in the other."
This offer was made on the eve of the Passover holiday, when the family was told it had to leave the Shalom Hotel in Jerusalem. The family had been housed there for the past several months. After predictably refusing the split-up offer, the family was told it had to move to the Gold Hotel, "where we received three small rooms, with no place to put our stuff. We asked for another room, but were refused."
Tammy said that the government has "promised us that they will start enlarging our caravan this week; we have been promised many things, and can only hope that they will really finish it within a month and that our whole family will be able to spend the night together in one place."
Atty. Yossi Fuchs, of the Land of Israel Legal Forum that has been volunteering its legal services on behalf of the uprooted residents for more than a year, said in response:
"The State is not fulfilling its promise to provide temporary quarters for the evicted residents until their permanent homes are ready. The government is already talking about plans for another uprooting, but is unable to deal properly with those it uprooted the first time."
Meanwhile, after a short delay caused by the government's failure to live up to contractual agreements with Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, construction on temporary housing for evicted Netzer Hazani residents in Ein Tzurim continues. Some 60 families from N'vei Dekalim have already moved into the site, and several dozen more from Netzer Hazani are hoping to move in within a month or so. "We were promised that it would be ready for Passover, and now they're saying it will be before Shavuot," former Netzer Hazanite Aviel Tucker told Arutz-7. "Maybe this time it really will be ready."
Tucker said that he and his neighbors hope to build their permanent community outside Yesodot. "We will be pretty close to Yad Binyamin," he said, "where there is a large concentration of former Gush Katif residents, and Chafetz Chaim - where the uprooted residents of Ganei Tal hope to settle - is also close by. In addition, a larger bloc of new settlements of former Gush Katif people will be built in the Lachish region, near Kiryat Gat - and we hope that the new Highway 6 will be extended southward to that area so that we will be just a few minutes' drive away. But that's all for the future..."