The people at Nitzan, a new rural settlement that sprouted on the Nitzanim dunes by Ashkelon, are having problems. Awful problems. They don’t like the water streaming from the faucets of the “caravillas” that the state built for them. More precisely, they don’t like its price. They are being charged the regular household rate, whereas back in the Gaza Strip they had paid the agricultural rate, which was a fraction of the price per cubic meter they’re now facing.
That isn’t their only woe. They complain about the air conditioner too. Because of its relative remoteness from the beach (Nitzan isn’t right on the water, it’s just nearby), they have to keep the air conditioner on 24 hours a day. In the past, when they lived in the belly of Gaza on the waterline, they made far less use of their air conditioners. Now it’s costing them a fortune, they complain, and believe the state should cover the extra cost of their electricity use.
The state is also asked to continue providing them with daycare for their children at a discount of 90%: NIS 390 a year (a year!) compared with the usual NIS 890 a month that most Israelis pay for state-provided daycare.
Air conditioner. No air conditioner
The difference between paying for the full use of your an conditioner and getting it for free is the difference between the lifestyle they had in Gaza and what they have now, inside the state of Israel.
Culture shock is the main difficulty with completing the disengagement. It is the shock of people who had been accustomed for decades to live at the expense of the public and now have to acclimatize to life in a normal country, where people live at their own expense and learns to manage alone.
The Gaza settlers had been inundated by perks from all directions. They received subsidized lands, subsidized water, assured wages from the public sector, “risk bonuses” and lower tax on their higher wages, subsidized daycare, cheap Arab labor, what didn’t they get. The benefits they received touched on every area of their lives and they became accustomed to higher standards they can’t forgo even now. So they demand the state continue providing for them.
The state, in the form of the “Sela” disengagement administration, is responsible for resettling 8,000 people, and it capitulates time and again. It paid millions of shekels to rent apartments that stand empty, after the settlers insisted on the caravillas instead. Each caravilla costs half a million shekels, ten times the cost of a rented apartment, but hundreds have been built nonetheless and hundreds more are being built. The caravilla itself has turned into a standard.
No apartment, but compensation for it
Families that moved to Ariel, where no caravillas were built, now demand the state compensate them for the difference between the cost of their rent and a caravilla. At Yevul and Yeted in the Negev, the settlers are receiving a special “Negev compensation”: the state is building dozens of caravillas plus it’s paying almost two years rent.
Hundreds of families that chose for political reasons not to accept rented apartments but to huddle in “tent cities” are also careful not to lose out. They demand the state pay them the difference between the cost of a tent (free) and the cost of staying at the hotel at which they were supposed to stay, if they hadn’t chosen to live in the tents for the sake of protest.
Remember, the caravilla requires a half-million shekel investment that will spiral down the drain in two years. Remember, it’s temporary housing, until the state builds the ex-Gazans their permanent apartments.
Capitulation at the stage of temporary housing raises the standard for the permanent homes to almost impossible heights. Sela found itself paying NIS 1.75 million per family this month, based on the principles of the law evacuating Gaza’s settlers, to whom? To the families who volunteered to leave Kibbutz Shomriya in the Negev, and vacate their places to Gaza settlers.
The flustered Sela administration says the kibbutz also has a chicken coop and cow house, but it won’t be able to drop below the standard set there. It will affect the cost of buying land for the settlers throughout Israel.
The civilian cost of evacuating Gaza, the cost of moving just 1,700 families, has already reached NIS 5 billion to NIS 6.5 billion. That is a billion shekel more than planned and it isn’t over yet.
That is an extraordinary high price to relieve culture shock, especially for a country that needs every penny to invest in its poor. Note that, Shelly Yachimovich.
[ Shelly is a well-known reporter and media person who has given all this up to join Amir Peretz and hopes to become a member of the Knesset – Dorothy @ New Profile ]
Too much money?
Unbelieveable! these people are forced to give up their lives and move to the middle of nowhere and now have no jobs or industry to support them?
They deserve to be given houses for free and not to have to pay any damned rent!
I’d like to see you move somewhere where you have no resources and no job and try to make your way with nothing other than a trailer house and some discount daycare!
Not everyone from Gush Katif can even find a job in 10 miniutes like you.These people were self supporting one minute and now they are “The Poor” without opportunity or without recourse.
You are unbelievable insulated from reality and deserve a big dose of it before you go running your mouth about subjects that are obviously beyond the scope of your understanding.
Most of the moved to Gush Katif to get away from stuck-up Euro-Snot’s who like to talk trash about things they don’t understand.
Kaiser – There are excellent replies to this article posted on Ha’aretz. Why not join that discussion if you only want to talk to people from Israel. I’d be most interested in reading your responses to comments such as “Let them show a little sense of real “self-sacrifice” and relinquish some of their more extreme demands for the good of the country. They are entitled to help in reintegrating into the country as Israelis, but not as some privileged elite.”
You’re correct. I am not from Israel. I am a taxpaying American citisen tired of subsidising the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands by an apartheid state. If these Gaza evacuees have their way with Congress they will be living much more comfortably than my fellow citisens from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
Are you familiar with the term “money pit”? It’s a venture that drains financial resources, a poor investment from the start. Not only is Israel a financial money pit it is in egregious moral arrears. You refer to Israel’s high unemployment but make no connection to the occupation and land grabs? And you say this to someone from a country that treats its own poor as a malignant disease that must be cut from the gov’t tit. Find peace for all our sakes.