Word: sharone
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...green stems from Michael Goldschmidt's amaryllis bulbs in his stuffy hothouse. Goldschmidt, 57, sells the bulbs, grown in the Ganei Tal settlement in the Gaza Strip's Gush Katif bloc, for a dollar. After export to the U.S., the plants go for almost $70. With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza set for next month, Goldschmidt is taking as many of his 300,000 bulbs out of the ground as he can, in spite of his desire to stay in the place he's lived for 28 years. ?I absolutely refuse to deal with the government...
...compensation deal with the government. Indeed, government officials tell Time the turning point may have been a series of clashes earlier this month that convinced many settlers that resisting the pullout would inevitably lead to violence. ?I don't like to admit it, but it's clear that Sharon is going to destroy this place,? says Debi Rosen, who works at the municipal council for the Gaza settlements...
...Still, the leaders of the settler movement haven't given up. They planned a massive protest march this week from Israel to Gaza. Sharon last week ordered the army to shut the entry checkpoint to Gaza to prevent protesters secreting themselves in the settlements in advance of the pullout. And by Monday, when the march began, police had already banned it, although settler leaders vowed to press ahead...
...That's not to say it isn't a wrenching moment for the Gaza settlers. The pullout strikes at the heart of their religious beliefs. Sharon's plan has caused a crisis in religious Zionism, the messianic movement that has driven Israel's massive settlement expansion of the last three decades, by shattering its basic tenet - the secular Israeli state is no longer serving as a vehicle for restoring Jewish possession of the Biblical Land of Israel, which they believe is an essential condition for the coming of the Messiah...
...When Sharon, a longtime proponent of the settlements and a key figure in the founding of Gush Katif, announced that Israel would cede some of that Biblical land, religious Zionists questioned whether the great redemption was coming, after all. ?It's an ideological and spiritual crisis,? says Rabbi Yehuda Gilad, a religious Zionist leader. ?All this faith in redemption is collapsing.? Goldschmidt, the Ganei Tal farmer, resolves that quandary simply by asserting that ?Sharon's not a Zionist any more...