Grandma's army

  Two days ago, I stood with my family, and former residents of Gush Katif in the pouring of rain, at the graveside of my son-in-law, Gideon Rivlin ז"ל . 19 years ago, he was murdered by terrorists in Gush Katif. Gideon’s youngest son, Gilead was one of the speakers: “I began to write, but had no idea in which direction the text would lead me. What should I speak about? On the grief, the war and death? Or on the new life and about our Alma?   At Alma”s birth I was confronted by a whirlpool of feelings because of this dissonance. A moment ago, I was at my army base preparing my   soldiers and equipment for going into Gaza. Suddenly Noa phones. I leave everything and travel straight   to the hospital.    I am sitting in the hospital and Alma is sleeping peacefully on my chest when, at the same time, I read on my cellphone of one soldier killed and others wounded. This dissonance has accompanied me for 19 years. Since you were killed I live and fu...

At the height of the election campaign in 1977, the Labour Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, visited the first moshav (Netzer Hazani) to be set up in Gush Katif.  In a symbolic gesture, Rabin affixed a mezuzah at the entrance to the home of the Yefet family and declared: “This is a big day for the State and the settlement movement, a day which symbolizes the foundation of our attachment to the region which, since the Six-day War, has become an inseparable part of the State and its security.” Nine years later, when Rabin was Minister of Defense in the National United Government Peres-Shamir, he made a return visit to Netzer Hazani and declared, almost word-for-word, the same speech he had made in 1977. When the Herut party won the 1977 elections for the first time, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, had to uproot close to twenty young settlements in the framework of the Camp David Accords. However he strongly opposed the proposal to return Gaza to Egypt. He promised that the preceden...