By David Bedein
October 12, 2005
Over the past few years, our news agency helped to facilitate news stories from Katif for the news media.
The media reported the human face of these thriving communities, many of whom had been welcome to there by their Arab neighbors.
Arab leaders in Gaza would tell the media that they had no interest in the arid dunes along the beaches of Gaza.
When the Muktar of Gaza welcomed the Jews to Netzer Hazani in 1975, he greeted them with the message that "Nothing has grown here since Isaac plowed the fields of Gerar. Welcome back to what we have always called Gerara".
What happened to the people of Katif has been their loss of dignity.
What happened to the government of Israel has been a loss of decency.
People who had worked their whole lives to replenish were been robbed of any way of making a living, of entering into their destroyed homes, of touching their material possessions, or davening in the out shuls which they had built, now burnt shells.
The people in Katif were able to cope when hundreds of PLO rockets were raining down upon them.
They prayed hard and felt that their prayers were heard when those who hated the people of Israel were thwarted in their attempt to destroy their Jewish community with mortars, Kassam missiles and drive-by terror attacks.
However, when the Israeli army began to lay siege to Katif in mid-July, what the people of Katif could not cope with was the fact that the government of Israel had declared war on them.
Even worse, the PLO announced on July 25th that they would divide the possessions of the people of Katif among the terror organizations that had been trying to kill them.
Despite clause seven of the Disengagement Plan which forbade the government of Israel from handing over any assets to terrorists, the government of Israel handed over warehouses, schools, sports clubs, community centers, greenhouses, shelters, water resources and the electric grids of Katif to terrorists.
Meanwhile, the unkindest cut of all emanated from the news reports that Jews around the world supported the efforts of the government of Israel to decimate their lives, accompanied by Rabbis making pronouncements in their Rosh Hashanah sermons that Ariel Sharon has made a "courageous step on the road to peace."
Yet Clause One of the Disengagement Plan stated that the reason behind the plan was that "there is no peace partner".
However, embassies and consulates of the government of Israel distributed a multicolored glossy brochure on how the disengagement plan would lead to peace.
The text of the plan enclosed in that brochure deleted Clause One.
Meanwhile, Jews around the world believed the statement of Sharon's closest adviser, Dov Weisglass, who on September 16th told the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations that every evacuated family had been fully compensated, while he neglected to say that compensation would only be given to families only a full 60 days after they had filled out paperwork, at a time when the municipal council of Katif no longer existed to help each family get necessary legal documents that the government insisted that they submit.
Jews evicted from their homes now wallow in temporary shelters and in temporary mobile homes, in a state of shock that their privately owned property has been turned into Arab terror bases. Like a man watching his wife and children being raped by marauders ... with the agreement of the government of Israel.
The government of Israel, and its supporters around the world, rabbis and community leaders, who now stand idly by, while the Katif expellees suffer, owe these people an apology, and an explanation.
Before Yom Kippur.
It is a matter of dignity, and decency.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
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