Jewish Russian Telegraph received this letter from Israel from a Russian Jew, member of peaceful resistance, who asked us to publish it on our site. Here it is:
72 Hours in the Struggle for Gush Katif
by Yehudah Frumkin
(click to enlarge)
Tuesday, August 2, 2005
14:00 I arrived in
the town of Sderot for the big demonstration against the disengagement. By 19:00, tens of thousands of people were
there, milling around, or sitting on the ground in the Sderot park, listening
to speeches. The plan for the
demonstration was to move on that evening, in cars, to nearby Ofakim, where
everyone would spend the night and the next day.
18:30 Word came
that Daniella Weiss, head of the Kedumim Local Council, was organizing a group
to attempt to reach Gush Katif on foot from Sderot. The goal was to show the government, and ourselves, that we could
get into Gush Katif against what we considered to be an illegal order making it
a “closed military zone”. I joined this group, together with several of my
friends from Ma’aleh Adumim. Altogether, we numbered about 200. We kept the plan secret in order to sneak out of Sderot without being
detained.
20:00 With Daniella
Weiss in the lead, we started walking, unobserved, toward the edge of
Sderot. We ran across a lighted road
and began scaling a fence that stood between us and the open field beyond. While part of the group was still waiting to
climb the fence, two army buses of soldiers came along the road. I was already over the fence, but I learned
later that the soldiers detained the last members of our group.
21:30 With the aid
of cellphones, we regrouped and started out together. Our goal was Kibbutz Sa’ad, a distance of about 10 kilometers.
There we were supposed to spend the rest of the night and the heat of the next
day, before continuing on our journey in the evening. We started out as one
large group, trudging through fields in the dark, backpacks on our backs. We
had to stop constantly and hide to avoid being seen by search helicopters from
the sky and army vehicles on the ground.
22:00 An army jeep
passed us. The soldiers told us to
stop, but we ignored them and kept walking.
22:30 Soldiers
ahead of us, clearly waiting for us. We
scattered in all directions to escape them. They tried to surround groups of us
to capture us. I managed to run around
the soldiers at first, while others got trapped right away. I and some other people approached some
soldiers that had already encircled a group of us. One woman, a 50-year-old
schoolteacher, protested to them that they were detaining peaceable citizens
illegally, and demanded their names and I.D. numbers (unlike police, who are
required to wear badges with their names, these soldiers carrying out police
functions had no identifying badges). One soldier gave her his name, but eventually she gave up trying to free
that group, and a group of about 25 of us continued on.
1:30 After a
confused detour into Kibbutz Mefalsim, our group finally approached Kibbutz
Sa’ad. Here we had to cross a lighted road to reach the gate, and a police car
immediately spotted us. A few minutes later, several buses drove up and
discharged about 200 soldiers who locked arms to surround us with three rings.
Again we protested that we were being detained illegally. A grey-haired policewoman, apparently in
charge of dealing with us, told us that two hours ago, this area had been
declared a “closed military zone” and that we were violating the law. We demanded to see the order, but she told
us that she could not produce it because it had been torn up by Daniella
Weiss. Indeed, we learned later that
when soldiers had surrounded Daniella
Weiss’s group and handed her the order, she had torn it in pieces.
The policewoman
and our leader, the schoolteacher, hit it off immediately. The teacher said that she has been in the
school system for 30 years, and the policewoman responded that she has been in
the police force for 25 years. The two women began negotiations, with the
result that the soldiers, while refusing to let us enter Kibbutz Sa’ad, agreed
to bring us to Ofakim. There we rejoined the main demonstration.
Wednesday, August 3, 2005
6:00 After going
to sleep at 4:00, we were already awoken by the light. Heat and flies prevented us from sleeping any
more, so we just spent the day resting with the other demonstrators in a small
grove of trees at Ofakim.
19:00 Loudspeakers
announced that several groups of “good walkers” were organizing to try to walk
through the “closed military zone” to Kesufin, the checkpoint at the entrance
to Gush Katif. I signed up with my name
and cell phone number, with the understanding that I would be called when it
was time to meet and start on our way.
20:00 I hadn’t yet
gotten any call, so when I saw some young guys who looked like they were
packing up to go somewhere, I asked if they were in the group of “good
walkers”. They were suspicious, but one
showed me a message on his cellphone instructing everyone to meet at the park
immediately.
20:30 With backpack
on, I met up with the group. This time
we numbered about 100, with ages ranging from teenagers to mid-fifties. The group included one man who had brought
along his teenaged daughter and his clarinet. We were divided up into four groups of about 25 each, each with a
commander who had some experience in orienteering.
21:00 We began
walking to the edge of Ofakim. Once
more we had to scale a fence to reach the open fields beyond, but this time we
went undetected. Again we started
walking across fields in the dark, diving for shelter to avoid detection by
helicopters and ground vehicles. Our
commander, Elchanan, started the process of forming a tight military unit out
of our ragtag group. To that goal, he
trained us in following his commands. A
lifted right hand meant, “Drop to the ground – army vehicle” and two arms
spread meant, “Take cover behind a bush – helicopter overhead”. The first time he commanded us to drop, it
took 8 seconds before we were all on the ground, but eventually we had it
shaved down to half a second. We also counted off periodically, army-style, to
make sure that we were all together. We all knew that number 14 was missing – a
woman in her 40’s who was left behind when she could not keep pace with the
group.
23:00 We were
crawling through a tunnel under a road when suddenly a civilian car stopped on
the road. Two police officers got out
and shone their flashlights on us. We
were sure that we would be caught, but one just said, “Watch out – there are
helicopters flying over here. Good luck!” They got back in their car and drove away.
3:00 It was
planned that we should get to a deep cave where some supporters were supposed
to have left us a supply of water and possibly some food. When we finally got to what we thought was
the spot, however, it turned out that the commander had erred by a kilometer or
more. After some discussion, we decided
just to camp out in a nearby wadi during the heat of the day and continue on at
dark the next day. Again, we slept
about 2 hours until we were awakened by light and flies. Later we learned that if we had gotten to
the place where the water had been left, we would have been caught, since that
spot was heavily patrolled by soldiers.
Thursday, August 4, 2005
8:00 Our
commander managed to get us some water, and we settled in for the day, finding
the best shelter we could from the heat and flies.
10:00 Suddenly a
military jeep drove up and we were sure that we would be caught. A single soldier, from an elite army unit,
got out of the car. But, to our amazement, he just handed us water and food and
went on his way. He had apparently
stolen the food from the base kitchen, most likely with the tacit approval of
his commander.
12:00 The Yesha
council brought us more water and sandwiches.
14:00 An officer in
a jeep came up to us and told us that we were on the edge of a closed military
zone. He told us that if we crossed the
road, he would arrest us. However, he allowed us to stay where we were, and in
the end left us with more water and food.
16:00 The army knew
where we were, and undoubtedly expected us to start the next leg of our trek
under cover of darkness. Therefore, our
commander decided to fool them by leaving while it was still daylight, and we
packed up to leave. The ruse worked,
and we left undetected, although the walking was made more difficult by the
heat, even though the sun was beginning to wane. We continued walking through fields, again diving to hide from
helicopters and vehicles.
1:00 We had
walked for hours across settlements and plowed fields. We were getting close to
Kesufin, and we were surrounded by vegetable fields. We walked through a field of sunflowers, as high as our heads,
and in the dark it was easy to mistake a sunflower for a person with bowed
head. We had been told that the last field before we reached Kesufin would be a
pepper field. We finally reached that
field, and I thought that perhaps I could eat a pepper to ease my thirst, since
my water had run out. Unfortunately,
they turned out to be hot peppers.
3:00 Now we were
near the checkpoint at Kesufin. We were
walking through the pepper field in order to get around the checkpoint and
reach the road where some settlers were supposed to pick us up and take us into
Gush Katif. At some point, we saw some
people ahead of us. At first I thought
that they were settlers coming to help us, but then I realized that they were
soldiers who had ambushed us. They were trying to catch us and we had to jump
over pieces of barbed wire to get away. We tried to hide among the pepper plants,
but then they spotted us so we had to start running again. In this last desperate dash, I lost one of
my shoes among the pepper plants. I came out of the field, saw soldiers waiting
there for me, and decided I couldn’t run away any more.
3:15 I asked the
soldiers for some water, which they gave me, and then they put me in a jeep and
drove off to catch more of my friends. Listening to their two-way radio as we
drove, I learned that the police had already detained the group of settlers who
were supposed to meet us, and were now rounding up all the members of our
group.
3:30 The officer
took me from the jeep to a police car. The police officer asked me for my
teudat zehut. He looked at it and then
put it down. I asked, “Did you write
down the number? Can I take it?” He
responded, “What number?? You’re a tzaddik!” His partner said, “We’re on your side,” and handed me a cup of coffee
and two sweet rolls. The police officer said that he would arrange for a car of
settlers leaving Gush Katif to take me towards home. He went out and flagged down the first car that came by. The “settlers” turned out to be my friends
from Ma’aleh Adumim, who had somehow managed to get to Kesufin by car and were
now heading home. Just then another car
pulled up with two more of my friends. I announced to them, “I lost a shoe and I ran out of water. I
surrendered.” I started laughing so hard that I was crying, and there we were
all laughing together.
Those three days and nights felt like a few years for
me. I came away from my adventure with
a feeling of strength from remembering how our commander formed an efficient
military unit out of a group of random Jews. I felt more sure than ever that nothing can break the Jewish people. I
also saw for myself how much individual soldiers and police officers support
the resistance, and how wrong it is that Sharon is forcing them to fight their
own people. This is why I am sure that Sharon will lose the battle for Gush
Katif.
posted by: jrtelegraph
Reuters - Tens of thousands of rightist Israelis flocked to Judaism's holiest shrine on Wednesday, begging God to stop a government plan to quit the occupied Gaza Strip that has passed almost all political and legal hurdles.[link]
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