(IsraelNN.com) Almost four years after Israel "disengaged" from Gaza, evacuating over 8,000 Israelis from their homes, an official state committee begins its investigation on Sunday into the government’s handling of the evacuees ever since.
Prior to the August 2005 Disengagement in which Israel destroyed the 24 Jewish communities in the Gush Katif region of Gaza and northern Samaria, the government invested in a public relations campaign claiming there was a "solution for every settler." Almost every family found itself in temporary housing and/or hotel rooms, with the State Comptroller following up with two published reports stating that the state continues to fail to adequately provide for the evacuees.
In his first report, released in March 2006, State Comptroller Micha Lidenstrauss found that the Sela Authority, which was responsible for resettling the evacuees, had seriously failed to find permanent housing solutions for them.
This past January Lindenstrauss released a second report, stating that since his first report, “Three and a half years have passed, and unfortunately the state of affairs is still very difficult.”
The Comptroller said that of the 1,113 families waiting for permanent homes, only 605 had received plots of land. Of those, only 130 had begun construction, and a scarce 50 had completed a new home. The evacuees are dependent on the government at every step of the process towards building their new homes.
Jewish Home Knesset Member Zevulun Orlev spearheaded the Knesset initiative to establish an official state committee of inquiry into the handling of the evacuees. The committee, which is to be headed by retired judge Eliyahu Matza, is set to hold its first meeting Sunday in Jerusalem.
The first witness to testify before the committee is the former head of the Sela Authority, Yonatan Bashi. The committee intends to publish its conclusions within a year.
(IsraelNN.com) Yonatan Bassi, who headed the SELA Disengagement Authority, said Sunday that Jews who were evicted by the government from Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005 were to blame for the failure to rehabilitate them because of their refusal to communicate with the government. In his first round of testimony before a state commission of inquiry on those failures, Bassi also said, "The state owes this to those evicted, it has to bring them back to living productive lives. Regardless of the debate on whether the disengagement was the right thing or not, they made the greatest sacrifice."
The evictees were not ready to point their fingers at Bassi, who took a lot of abuse as a result of his assignment, but insisted on receiving the rehabilitation due them. One of the evictees, who claimed to have made contact with the government, said, "If the situation is such that less than 20 percent came back to work this means a total failure!”
(IsraelNN.com) Yonatan Bassi, the man who headed the SELA Administration for the resettlement of families who were forcibly evicted from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria in 2005, testified Sunday before the official commission of inquiry established to look into the delays in their resettlement and compensation. Bassi was emotional and spoke in a shaky voice, but maintained that the Sela Authority was not to blame for the problems with resttlement. Rather, he said, it was the evictees who refused to cooperate with the Authority.
“As time went by and the Disengagement got nearer, a disconnection formed between the Authority and the community of evacuees,” Bassi said. However, he said that he disagreed with the criticism leveled at the Authority by the State Comptroller and Ombudsman. “I think that the State Comptroller did not see things as we did,” Bassi stated. “We made a great effort to help all of the evacuee communities.” Bassi quoted the idiom: “The cow wants to give milk but the calf does not want to suckle.”
The commission’s head, Judge (ret.) Eliyahu Matza, asked Bassi if his statements regarding the Disengagement caused the rupturing relations between him and the evictees. Bassi said that “a process of grief is always accompanied by anger. People were angry at Ariel Sharon and at Yonatan Bassi… If the Administration was headed by a person without a kippah, there would be less anger.”
Regarding the slow pace of resettlement of the evictees, Bassi did not take the blame on himself or the Sela Authority: “One can evict by force but we could not [re]settle by force. With a lot of soldiers one can evict but we were not able to forcefully [re]settle,” he explained.
“We thought at first that there would be 50 percent who would get by on their own and 50 percent in which we would have to intervene. In the end it was 80 percent who did not get by and 20 percent who did. We thought that it would not be right to build the alternative communities and only then carry out the plan, but I knew that the rehabilitation would take more than three years.,” Bassi said.
“We did everything to meet with the people, both people on the ground and leaders… meetings in hotels, in basements… we held many meetings with individuals and groups. We put up an internet website, we sent letters and they burned the letters we sent,” he complained.
The uprooting of the cemetery was “hard, painful and sensitive,” he said.
Judge Matza said that Bassi would appear again before the commission of inquiry.
(IsraelNN.com) The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel accused former Disengagement Authority head Yonatan Bassi Sunday of “losing all sense of shame” following his initial testimony before a state commission on the condition of Jews evicted from their homes in Gaza and northern Samaria in 2005. During his testimony, Bassi blamed the evictees for their plight.
“Bassi was a senior associate to the greatest failure in Israel in the last generation, to a moral crime against basic human rights and to an unpardonable sin,” the Forum stated. “His blaming the evacuees for the situation that he and his masters led them [into] is the height of cynicism,” it added.
“The Legal Forum struggled, fought and begged to stop the evacuation until a communal solution was found for the evacuess, but Bassi and the Administration ran a false campaign that stated that there is ‘a solution for every resident’ – something that was proven to be a lie,” the Forum went on to state. “Had Mr.Bassi cooperated with the Legal Forum’s suggestions, he would not now be sitting as the first person to be questioned by the Committee of Inquiry.”
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