On Friday, Alan and I drove south to the bike trails around Kibbutz Be’eri, just outside Gaza, to go biking. We heard of field upon field of kalaniyot in the hills situated between the Mediterranean coast and western Negev, so we decided to go check it out for ourselves. Unfortunately, looks like we missed most of the kalaniyot this year, but there were still open fields full of many other wildflowers to admire.
En route to the bike trails, the familiar road signs for “Kissufim Junction”, “Gush Katif” and “Neve Dekalim” began to appear. How odd that over a year after the disengagement, all of these road signs were still there as if these places still actually existed. As if we could take a turn at Kissufim and end up at the entrance of Neve Dekalim. It felt like a dream.
I wondered what Alan was thinking. In my head, I could see the red lights in the sky at Kissufim Junction that spelled “Ahuva” in the sky and then the sand dunes would come into view, I thought, and the verdant greenhouse upon greenhouse filled with Israel’s lushest, most exotic flowers and the kids and playgrounds and the shuls full of men and women swaying in prayer, pleading to G-d not to let this awful thing happen, not to let their land and livelihoods and homes be taken away, and the neon electric orange that pierced and screamed through everything that whole summer, that whole year really. But none of this existed anymore. The shuls and homes and playgrounds were burnt to the ground and razed by bulldozers. It was all a lie, like the sign at the bus stop in Ashkelon that still says “Gush Katif.”
It is New Year’s Eve 2004. I am at the Y’s home in Atzmona, 500 yards from the Rafah refugee camp. Like most places always on the news that I have come to visit, I am surprised by its ordinariness. C and A are both American olim who came to Israel as teenagers with their families. They have eight children, C, age 3 and R, age 15, with six boys in between. None of the kids speak English. For ideological reasons, the parents have chosen not to speak English in the home. They are generous and warm and kind and of course want to make Aviva and I, both young Americans in Israel for the year, understand their love of Gush Katif and share it with our friends.
They unfold a map of the area from the early 1980s. A bloc of undeveloped land along the Mediterranean coast, a vast pit of sand, the Labor government offered incentives to young, religious couples to settle the Katif bloc and plant the land, the Y’s among them. Here they would build homes and plant gardens and bring children into the world. They would also construct an elaborate network of greenhouses which would house Israel’s largest and most exotic flower collection. Among their flowers and peppers and cows they sought a peaceful, pastoral life, reaping the miracles of the land and studying Torah.
The Y’s quaint, modest home is surrounded by pink, white, and purple flowers and decorated with prints of paintings of the tehillim by my cousin’s chevruta and close friend, Moshe Tzvi Berger, who started painting tehillim when he saw an article in the New York Times reporting that most Jews surveyed thought that the psalms were a Christian text. As someone who deeply loves psalms, he was very troubled by this, and went to his rav with the article, asking what he could do. The culmination of this conversation is his Museum of Psalms, which houses a painting depicting his interpretation of each of the 150 psalms.
By the time of the First Intifada, when the violence really began, C’s mother came up with a new name for Gush Katif: Gan Eden in Hell. And so it felt like this on the dawn of New Year’s Day 2005, when shells from Rafah started to fall and C pulled everyone in the house out of bed and into the living room, the only room of the house with reinforced walls. Aviva and I asked all the usual, naïve, and undoubtedly painful questions for the family: Do you think the evacuation will really occur? What will you do if the army comes? Where will you go? Their answer to every question was the same, and it was not answered with resentment or anger or any degree of uncertainty: This won’t happen to us, because in the last moment, Hashem won’t let it. Because it’s impossible.
After Shabbat ended, the Y’s took us for a car ride to show us around. At Kissufim Junction, they pointed out the red lights that spelled out “Ahuva” in the sky. “Her aunt lives next door to us. She was shot by terrorists on the way home to her husband and children, a real tragedy,” said A. I realize he is talking about Ahuva Amergi, the name on my bracelet, and that is where my second story begins.
My sophomore year at Wellesley, we ordered a bunch of victims of terror bracelets from One Family Fund. In the end, Hillel decided not to distribute them out of fear that it was biased and politically divisive to only recognize Israeli victims of terror (this was obviously very upsetting to me and a classic illustration of how truly crazy Wellesley Jews can be) and Friends of Israel inherited them instead.
The name on the bracelet I randomly pulled out of the bag was Ahuva Amergi, wife and mother, shot and killed in her car near Kissufim in February 2002. For three years I never took the bracelet off. I had always wondered about her, and as disengagement seemed imminent and the question of what would happen to the bodies of those buried in the Gush Katif Regional Cemetery became relevant, I thought about whether I could somehow visit her grave. Now I had the missing link I needed.
***
The Body Transfer
My mom calls to tell me about an article
in the Boston Globe:
A young woman, shot dead
on her way home from work, two small sons;
When Israel withdraws from Gaza
they will have to dig up the body.
“So sad,” she says,
“I cut it out to send you in the mail.”
And I know right away
she is talking about Ahuva Amergi,
wife and mother,
the name I wear etched
on a bracelet against my skin.
I can see the red lights at Kissufim Junction
that spell out her name in the sky.
I can see baby Chana sitting on my lap
as the car speeds through the dunes
towards the Gush Katif Regional Cemetery.
Ahuva was talking to Sarah
on her cell phone about the new house
and all the things she wanted to have done inside.
Then Sarah heard shots and
she didn’t hear her sister’s voice again.
Rafi took the kids to Spain,
and found a new wife.
It was just too much.
Kneeling on the floor,
I open up the envelope with the article.
“We’re not thinking about
where to transfer the body
because we don’t believe
we’ll have to leave this place,”
Sarah says to the reporter.
“I thought you might be interested,”
my mom wrote on a post-it.
In the picture, the grave is surrounded
by smooth white stones along the edges.
She does not know I put them there.
***
After a couple months of summer research in Boston, I arrive back in Israel on July 31. K, my old roommate from the dorms at Hebrew University, a talented aspiring photojournalist, calls me as soon as I land. She is camping out in the tent city in Kfar Darom. Of course I worry for her, at seventeen she is somewhat of a kid sister, and I wonder how she even charges her cell phone out there. A few days later is the first day of Israel’s disengagement from Gaza.
K’s picture is the front page photo of the New York Times. In the picture, a young boy, bawling and furious, soaked in sweat and tears, pushes against a soldier no older than twenty. The soldier does not resist or look angry. Instead, he slumps in shame, his muscles slack. And he shirks back a little, arms drooping, transformed into a young boy in the millisecond before bursting into tears. No one told him the world would be this unfair. He is very sad and very confused, as much so as the little boy, no older than ten, who shoves him and resists him and bawls with flailing legs and flailing arms.
I am volunteering at the MDA station every day, doing the day shift. In between calls, I spend most of my time watching Channel 2 in the break room. My Hebrew isn’t even good enough to understand what most of the people are screaming, but I spend many hours on one of the hard plastic chairs watching people lose everything they have on TV.
They show buses driving off full of families, leaving only great clouds of dirt and dust in their wake and then they pan back to more people screaming and hysterical with fire and smoke in the background. Lots of other people come to watch too, and mostly we sit in silence until an announcement goes off over the intercom for an ambulance.
On my way home from the MDA station every night I pass by whole families sitting outside of the central bus station, huddled together with some suitcases, their vacant, alien eyes stunned and confused, as if they’ve just arrived from another planet and have never seen Jerusalem before and they are not quite sure why or how they are here.
**
I am back at Wellesley for my senior year. The army has finished evacuating all the people of Gush Katif. The hype has died down and the evacuation is hardly mentioned in the mainstream news anymore. Then I read a little article, it is no more than a paragraph really, about how the Arabs have begun to enter the area to loot and set everything on fire, including shuls. I imagine the shuls as once living entities with souls, now empty hollow shells, like so many dead bodies burning.
I sit in my dorm room and cry silently. It seems like everyone, at least Jews in America, has forgotten already. I wonder why I am so sensitive and I feel a sense of guilt in my sadness; I still have a home, I don’t even live in Israel – this awful thing did not happen to me directly. I wonder if maybe I am indulging in sadness, in a loss that is not my own. Later that week I take out my paints and I paint and paint on a huge canvas. I paint Gan Eden in Hell, just like C’s mom said, an image still seared in my head.
Many surreal things happened to me in Gush Katif. Things that I am still not yet able to fully comprehend over a year later. What I do intuitively understand is that these events are part of something larger, and I wonder whether I will ever be able to piece them together to make some sense of what I saw. But, still, even now, I feel only a loss, the loss of something that I was never truly really part of, but something that I was still able to feel very deeply and appreciate both for its beauty and its potential. I may have been an outsider watching from the side, but I was up so close to the front sometimes that I could almost fool myself into thinking that I was a part of it.
I still look back on the summer of 2005, and the events in the months leading up to it, with great shock and confusion, as if just the thought itself revisited each time in my head is a huge surprise, one to which I still do not know or admit to know the outcome; one hot, crazy summer during which the line between the good guys and the bad guys blurred, a time when our protectors became our enemies and our enemies were ourselves.
