Sadly, what awaits our "heroic brothers" from Gush Katif is not one trauma, but two. , Many tears and words have already been shed, like water into the sea, about the first trauma - the disengagement itself - but nothing has been written as yet about the second trauma. In the aftermath of the disengagement, the evacuees will undergo another trauma as they encounter the reality of Israel. For decades, they lived on another planet where they enjoyed privileged, envy-arousing conditions. The encounter from close-up with life in Israel will shock those who are returning to their borders. The "shock of coming home" will not go away quickly. It is time to sound the alarm regarding the "second trauma," in order to assuage the shock which can undermine even heroes.
The evacuees, who were "disengaged" far too long, will very quickly discover that many people in Israel have no work and are unemployed. As Southerners themselves, they will immediately notice that the unemployment rates are particularly high in the South of the country and that the majority of those who work for a livelihood, receive a minimum salary.
This was not the case with the settlements, where life was very different from that in Israel. Ofir Pines, Minister of the Interior, recently declared that 60% of settlers in the Gaza Strip, are supported by the Government. The latter feeds them and supports them financially out of its pocket, out of our pockets, and there are few unemployed in their ranks. In their new surroundings, they will discover that their country ceased to be a social welfare state long ago and has become a capitalist state, where justice has been replaced by charity.
A surprise also awaits the farmers among them: they will discover that slaves willing to kiss their hands for a bowl of soup no longer dwell in their neighborhoods. Fewer and fewer Palestinian serfs are allowed entry into Israel, and even those with permits do not always get in. Although Thai, Chinese and Philippine workers are taking their place, they are hard to get today and cannot always be bought by bribes. It's not for nothing that the Gaza Strip became a refuge for them in recent years, for in Gush Katif there was no need to obtain work permits for them and no obligation to pay a per head tax on foreign workers. Even the immigration police recognized Gush Katif as lawless territory.
Lawlessness and anarchy also reigned there in the field of planning and construction. The evacuees should know that in Israel one is still obligated to obtain a permit in order to build. Even a balcony which every house needs is not easy to build, let alone an entire settlement; here, one is not allowed to get up in the morning and erect an outpost on a neighbor's private land, and if the neighbor calls the police, the police usually arrives and does not always take the side of the robber; it sometimes takes the side of the robbed.
Parents among those returning will be told, in the framework of the "guide for evacuees," that they will be responsible from now on for the education of their children: no more free education for everyone and for every age; they will be obliged, for instance, to pay a huge sum, not at the disposal of the majority of the country's citizens, to send their toddlers to daycare centers. It is well known that very few Israeli children have access to a long school day worth its name and to hot meals for all children. The evacuees will find it hard to believe when they see with their own eyes hungry boys and girls.
Greater Israel is a country which is eaten up by its inhabitants, while Israel is a country which eats up its inhabitants. As equal citizens finally, the evacuees will not be able to lick honey here for long.
The government and the Knesset have already proved there is no intention, God forbid, to discard them following the disengagement. Everyone understands that the process of weaning the settlers from the land of milk and honey will be long and painful. The settlers' way home is therefore paved and cushioned with bribes. But the public is not envious: it too understands that the hills are higher on the return journey.
In his TV program, Rino Tsror gave us a shattering statistic: 20 families are evicted from their homes every day in Israel for lapsing on their mortgage payments. 20 families put out onto the streets, approx. 100 families a week, making that 5,000 families a year (deducting Shabbat, religious holidays and days of unemployment) - that's many more than all the families from Gush Katif. But who talks about them, who weeps for them, who takes interest in their trauma, who assigns them psychologists and caravillas?
From the time our "heroic brothers" went out to settle in the occupied territories, Israel changed character completely. The settlers became the "salt of the earth" and Israel was covered in wounds. The clash between the wounds and the salt will be traumatic for everyone.

Based on the article published in Haaretz on 18.07.2005

Together with the flourishing settlements of Gush Katif, its wonderful communities, highly successful agriculture and educational and spiritual institutions, central elements on which the State of Israel was founded were also destroyed this past summer. Israeli democracy was trampled on, the ethos of settling the land was shattered, the spirit of the Israeli Defense Force was destroyed, and the deterrent power of the tiny Jewish state and the fundamental justification of its existence were torn asunder.
Now, with the start of a new year, thousands of evacuees are in the throes of having to rebuild their lives. Three decades of building and soul-devoted work in the sand dunes of Gaza by the settlers who were sent there by the State, with its blessing, were crushed to smithereens before our eyes, and are as though they never existed. Hundreds of families, even ones who negotiated with the expulsion and eviction authorities as requested, have been left without a home and without means of livelihood.
Most of those who opposed the eviction, that is, half the Jewish population of Israel, are undergoing feelings of heartbreak and loss. "Only those who saw the glorious days of New Orleans can understand the meaning of this loss," declared a broadcaster of Army Radio in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. It seems that only those who saw the glorious days of Gush Katif, only those who witnessed from the inside the lives of the "settlers" of Israel, can understand the meaning of the loss of Kfar Darom, Atzmona and Neve Dekalim.
During the last two years, the leftwing-secular elite waged an ugly battle in which every means was considered legitimate as long as the "settlers" met with a bitter defeat. They knew that a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip would promote terror, endanger the security of the sate and even harm the Palestinian population, and yet they supported it. They could see that Ariel Sharon was promoting his plan through dictatorial, power-based corrupt methods such as dismissal of ministers, political bribery and violation of his promises to his voters, and yet they defended him. All their lofty values fell apart in the face of this totally uninhibited contractor of destruction who came suddenly to their side.
It is hard to forgive, it is hard to forget and it is hard to overcome the trauma, but the hardest battle is not about what took place but about what will happen in the future.
After the destruction, after the disengagement, which involved the uprooting of a substantial part of the population from the roots of our ancient people in the land of our forefathers, Israeli society must now undertake an in-depth examination of its identity and its goals: who are we, for what reason did we come to this piece of land in the heart of the Middle East? By what right did we take over part of this land in 1948, and by what right did we take over an additional part in 1967? Is our right to the territories within the Green Line greater because we conquered these areas when we were homeless survivors of the Holocaust? Do men - not just suffering men, or homeless men - have the right to take over someone else's home, or is our right to this land based on other arguments which also apply to the territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza?
And why do we insist on settling across the entire land of Israel? Maybe those who say we did the right thing to leave Gaza and that "we have no business being there" were right. Maybe Israel should withdraw unilaterally from other places where "we have no business being," dangerous places, uncomfortable places and places from which the Arabs would like to expel us, such as Judea and Samaria, the Galilee and the Negev where there is also an Arab majority and where the Jewish minority is stuck in their midst like a bone in their throat and endangers itself for nothing.
Perhaps the best and most logical thing to do would be to withdraw and destruct, withdraw and destruct until we are all confined to the area Gush Dan; we will then be left with a small but secure Jewish state stretching from Rishpon to Tel Aviv, surrounded by a state-of-the-art wall and defended by the great United States.
Israeli democracy also needs re-defining, as in these pertinent questions: will every prime minister henceforth be allowed to dismiss ministers who do not agree with his policy? Would it not be simpler to appoint, at every critical governmental juncture, a special government whose members would promise the boss beforehand to vote in favor of his policy? And can a prime minister adopt a policy in total contradiction to his party's platform, but in absolute accord with the platform of the country's three major newspapers?
With the best will in the world, it is impossible to hide the plight of the Palestinians behind any wall. It is wrong to place millions of people under military rule, particularly when the majority are refugees who have been left to rot for four generations in dreadful, overcrowded camps because of the refusal by Arab countries to absorb them in the way the State of Israel absorbed four generations ago the Jewish refugees who fled from Arab countries. The time has come to strive for an international agreement which will include the annexation of the territories in Judea, Samaria and Gaza to the State of Israel, recognition of the permanent Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza as citizens of the Palestinian State of Jordan, and the re-settling of the 1948 refugees in Jordan and other possible places. Israelis who dismiss such an agreement and claim that the "Palestinians would never agree to it," should remember that the one solution to which Palestinians agree today includes the right of return of the refugees to Haifa and to Ramat Aviv and the destruction of the Zionist entity.
The sight of Israeli soldiers expelling their brothers from Gush Katif and destroying their communities, strengthened the belief of the Arabs that the Jews, like the Crusaders and other nations, are just temporary dwellers in the land of Israel. The Israeli people must rise up now from the ruins and ask themselves if the Arabs are right.