Grandma's army

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...

Jews and their Israelite ancestors have lived in Gaza since Biblical times. A historic Jewish community existed in  Gaza City  prior to its expulsion by the British, for safety reasons, during the infamous 1929 riots by the city's Arabs. Land for the village of  Kfar Darom  was purchased in the 1930s and settled in 1946. It was evacuated following an Egyptian siege in the  1948 Arab-Israeli War . Gush Katif began in 1968, when  Yigal Allon  presented an initiative for the founding of two  paramilitary settlements in the center of the Gaza Strip. He viewed the breaking of the continuity between the northern and southern Arab settlements as vital to Israel's security in the area, which had been captured the previous year in the 1967  Six-Day War . In 1970, Kfar Darom was re-established as the first of many Israeli agricultural villages in the area. Allon's idea was ultimately designed with five key areas slated for Israeli presenc...