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Rubble of a central square in Yamit.
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| By israelinsider staff and partners August 9, 2005 |
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| More rubble. |
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In this corner of the Sinai Peninsula, all that remains of Israel's once soaring ambitions is the synagogue, standing alone in the rubble of homes and eroded playgrounds.
In the crowded canvas of Arabic graffiti, under the blistering Egyptian sun, one word stands out: "Hamas," the Palestinian group that opposes Israel's very existence.
The slabs of concrete, smashed pavement and broken tiles offer a stark vision of what will probably become of Jewish settlements in the nearby Gaza Strip after Israel pulls out in a couple of weeks.
The Sharon government plans to do to them what they did to Yamit and 12 other settlements in April 1982: flatten them.
The silent ruins of Yamit evoke a different era. Israel had just signed its first peace treaty with an Arab neighbor, Egypt, and suicide bombings against Israelis, and two Palestinian uprisings costing thousands of lives, were a nightmare of the future.
With 600 homes and 2,500 inhabitants, Yamit was bigger than most Jewish settlements; it was a small town, built after the 1967 Mideast War in which Israel captured the Sinai from Egypt and believed it would hold the territory _ or at least its northeastern corner _ forever.
But then came the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, and three years later Yamit was history.
The clock has turned back to slow, pastoral pre-Yamit times. The Bedouins are still farming, but the land that was under Israeli occupation for 15 years is again theirs to tend.
"We'd have preferred if they'd left everything standing. But it doesn't matter now," said a Bedouin who gave only his first name, Ibrahim.
Down by the Mediterranean Sea, where Israeli planners once dreamed of building a deep-water port, a sign in English and Arabic warns trespassers to steer clear of a turtle nesting site. Men in white robes bask in the shade of tents under enormous date palms. Children, their hair thick with dust, kick around a deflated soccer ball.
A few miles away, across the Egypt-Gaza border, opponents of Israel's withdrawal are threatening to mount mass resistance, as they did in 1982, forcing troops to use water cannon and jets of foam to drive resisters off rooftops and carry them to bodily trucks.
Kamel Mohammed Suleiman, now a wiry old man of 76, watched from behind wire fences with other Bedouin.
"They took water from the sea and sprayed it all over them to get them out," he recalled.
"Some settlers would take their boats and stay out in the water, waiting for the soldiers to leave before they would come back," he said.
When all were gone, the Israeli military moved in with bulldozers and explosives to level the square mile of buildings.
The episode echoes in Israel's decision to demolish the hundreds of homes it has built in the 21 Gaza settlements slated for evacuation, though it is still in talks with the Palestinians and international mediators about what to do with the rubble.
The plan to raze the buildings was hotly debated in Israel, with some worrying it would look like wanton destruction, but some Palestinian officials backed the idea, saying the Gaza Strip needs the land to build high-density housing.
In Yamit -- the name derives from the Hebrew for "sea" -- dandelions grow between slabs of cement, and almond trees are arched from winds off the sea. The Egyptian government doesn't allow a single stone to be removed. Officials from the nearby town of El Arish say the ruins serve as a reminder of Israel's former dominance of the area and its "cruelty" at destroying what it left behind.
Chaim Erez, an Israeli commander in charge of the Yamit evacuation, said the demolition was a political decision. "The Egyptians wanted to get the area back the same way it was before the Israelis took it over," he said.
Yitzhak Gaddai was 27 when he, his wife and two daughters were forced to leave Yamit. They moved to the northern Gaza Strip settlement of Elei Sinai. Now they have to move again.
Gaddai says he won't resist. "I don't fight with the soldiers," he said. "The military includes me, I'm also in the army so it's not fair to beat the young people in the army."
The AP contributed to this report.
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