By Rachel Saperstein
December 29, 2005
We are still in the hotel room that we call home. Little by little, families are moving out to join their friends and neighbors from N'vei Dekalim already living in the Nitzan trailer camp. We watch the hotel trolley carrying out the last of the valises, the plastic drawers on wheels, the children's clothing thrown into supermarket bags, the Shabbat dresses still on hangars.
The contents of the ship container have already been unpacked and placed, a bit askew, into the small trailers. Larger pieces are stored in a backyard shed. The cars are loaded, the children pile in and we wave goodbye.
The hotel dining room seems emptier, the lobby has less youngsters running about. The corridors are quieter, the welcome signs on the doors are almost gone. The elevators arrive more quickly. Only the families whose trailers are still not in place, and those going to the soon-to-be-built trailer park at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, remain in the hotel. And some are like us.
Our trailer, with our name pasted on the door, stands waiting for us. We, as many others, do not get the call: "Come and get your key." Each day our friends greet us in the dining room with "What's with you? Did you get your key yet?" We shake our heads, "No. No key. I guess we're not loved by the Selah Expulsion Authority."
No precious key. No advance on our compensation. No word. No word at all.
I spoke at a Root and Branch Society meeting this month. The room at the Israel Center in Jerusalem was filled and many good friends from every period in our lives were in the audience. My topic: "On Being a Displaced Person". Towards the end, I asked the people, "How many of you would like to live in a trailer?" No show of hands.
So, how does a government manage to make people -- people who owned large, spacious homes -- grateful to receive the precious key to a trailer? To look forward with relief that they will soon be residents of a large trailer park? That, if refused a key, they will beg and plead in order to receive that oh-so-precious key?
The government has played with our heads and emotions. They have demanded an endless number of documents before letting us receive this cardboard housing. And we rush to comply. They have separated families by disallowing a child from renting a trailer even if the child was born and raised in a Gush Katif community, but as a married person, had lived in a privately rented home. Only those who had owned or rented from public housing authorities are entitled to a key.
They arbitrarily call people to come and get the key while leaving others in limbo, even if their trailer is ready for occupancy, wondering, always wondering, if they will actually be allowed to receive a key. The grand smiles on the faces of a family leaving for the trailer camp leave the others with a sense of despair: "Perhaps I'll be left out, never to be with the community again. But why? What did I do? I thought I handed in my phone bills, electric bills, water bills, bank receipts, proof of residency, payments of municipal taxes, our ID cards, our children's report cards. What could I have left out?"
Harassment, psychological warfare, playing with our heads. The communities want to live together. This was our cry to the government. Please do not disperse us. We are people who lived through five years of bombardment, of seeing our friends killed or injured by Arab terrorists. We experienced the trauma of expulsion from our homes and communities. We've watched our synagogues burn, our farms destroyed, our businesses in ruins, our children scattered in makeshift schools around the country. Nowhere in the history of modern Israel has this happened to the Jewish people.
All we ask is that we remain together. Even this we are refused.
And so, we wait for the government-built cheap housing. We long for a trailer with a red roof. We are thankful for even a temporary solution.
What have we become? We are oh-so-grateful for that oh-so-precious key.
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