Grandma's army

  The area known today as the Gaza Strip was allocated in the 1947 UN Partition Plan for a prospective Arab state. Its borders were based on the ceasefire line that ended the fighting after the 1948 War of Independence. The failure of further diplomatic efforts to end the Arab-Israeli conflict turned, what was intended to be a temporary armistice line, into a de-facto boundary, and the Gaza Strip into a distinct geopolitical entity. L ocked in one of the world’s most densely populated areas, along with unsettled political status, Gaza has always been a focal point of the Israeli-Arab conflict. It has also been, perhaps, the most controversial and   divisive issue in Israel itself. In the 1956 Suez War, David Ben-Gurion, who was then the Defense Minister, ordered the IDF to capture the Gaza Strip and most of Sinai. His own Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan, opposed the plan to take over Gaza. Because of international pressure, Ben-Gurion felt forced to give up his plan to incorporate th

From the burning of the fields in 2018 in kibbutz Be’eri,  to burning families in kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 th , 2023 .                                                                                                   In 1978, when Simcha my oldest daughter got married, she and her husband went to live in the second moshav (agricultural settlement), Gannai Tal, to be established   in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip . Since the houses had not yet been built, the other married members lived together as bachelors in one building, in order to work on their farms. On weekends they went to their respective homes. Simcha and her husband, Gideon, were newly-weds so they started their married life living in Gush Katif in an old caravan, which was too small for Gideon’s long legs. Their next “home” was an ancient bus from the time of the British mandate, which Gideon picked up from the Tel-Aviv old bus station. There was still a notice stuck up from that time “beware of pickpockets”. It happe