Word: stripped
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Beginning this week, their hamlet of Netzer Hazani and the other 20 Jewish settlements that occupy more than one-third of the Gaza Strip will be ghost towns, the Hilburg home of 26 years reduced to rubble, the very purpose of their lives stripped away. Under the controversial policy Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls disengagement, some 8,700 Israeli residents in Gaza and another 674 in the West Bank must leave their homes or face removal by force. The plan has the support of the international community, including the Bush Administration, which sees the withdrawal as a small but vital...
...devoted few, including Gaza residents like the Hilburgs, the abandonment of the settlements represents a shameful, even sinful betrayal of the ideological foundations of the Jewish state. As the date for the pullout has neared, activists from outside the strip have blocked highways, spread nails on roads and sought to crowd into the settlements to thwart the evacuation with their bodies. Israeli police estimate that more than 2,500 have smuggled themselves into Gush Katif; some plan to test Sharon's vow to use the army to remove any who try to resist the evacuation, pressing their slogan, "Jews...
...Americans in Gush Katif, the disengagement marks the bitter climax of an odyssey that spans a generation, one that has taken people like the Hilburgs from the streets of Brooklyn to the dusty farmland of the Gaza Strip. I spent a week with the Hilburgs and other U.S.-born settlers in the enclaves of Gush Katif as they prepared to uproot again. Their saga provides a glimpse of the honest dreams that inspired the struggle to realize the Zionist vision of Israel--and why even harder changes are required if that vision is to survive...
...shoes for the kids, so I said, O.K., we'll look." As new immigrants in 1972 who wanted to live away from the city, they were given two choices by the Israeli agency that oversaw the absorption of newcomers: the Golan Heights or the Gaza Strip, captured territories that the Labor government of the time wanted to cement under Israeli control. "They said, Do you prefer cows or tomatoes?" recalls Bryna. "We decided, tomatoes. It was a practical decision. We found work, a house, a community we could help build...
...settling every corner of Greater Israel was the only way to ensure the nation's survival. But that has left them feeling betrayed and increasingly isolated from the Israeli mainstream, which backs Sharon's argument that security can come with separation from the Palestinians. Yet withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is just one hard step along that road, leaving unresolved the vastly larger intermingling of Arab and Jew in the West Bank, a place even more sacred to religious Jews. So the struggle over Gaza may only be a preview of far more divisive and fundamental fights to come...