Jerusalem Post Editorial Slams Disengagement Authority

2005-08-22

Tears and red tape

The Jerusalem Post

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Whatever one's opinion about disengagement, there's little doubt that those uprooted from their homes and lives are undergoing upheavals of the sort that shouldn't be wished on anyone. From their personal vantage point, they were dealt a very raw deal. The last thing they should encounter now is institutional callousness, bureaucratic run-arounds and official hardheartedness.

The attempt by Disengagement Authority Director Yonatan Bassi, when confronted with settler relocation problems, to differentiate between those who cooperated and left their homes ahead of time and those who waited to be removed isn't borne out by the facts. Both categories sound near-identical complaints.

Sigal Barda's family resided in Elei Sinai for 15 years. Her husband is a policeman, which tipped the scales for her decision to cooperate with the Disengagement Authority and thereby also spare her three children the scars of forcible expulsion. However, the housing Sigal was promised in Kibbutz Or Haner isn't ready. The family was instead sent to a hotel in Ashkelon, where the Bardas arrived exhausted and emotionally drained. Yet there was literally no room at the inn. They were told to find other accommodations.

Worse still for Sigal, as she told The Jerusalem Post yesterday, was being made to feel as though she's seeking to rob the state coffers. Bassi's assessors haggled over every single detail of her claim, including declining to take into account the size of her Elei Sinai balconies, so as to award less compensation.

The content of the house was going into containers for which the state demanded she shell out NIS 7,000 or have it deducted from her compensation. It did her little good to note she hadn't initiated her eviction. Eventually she bargained down the price. This is not an honorable way for a state to conduct its affairs.

A similar story comes from Kadim in Samaria, from another family that cooperated, left early, and is now in a Netanya hostel. They were asked to pay rent for their containers. The cost until October was NIS 3,500, exorbitant considering that such containers could be bought outright for NIS 4,000. "Is the state trying to make money off our misfortune?" asked the mother. She noted they had to pay fees "for every request filed, for every form, as if this were a routine, voluntary procedure." The Electric Corporation even billed them for shutting off the current.

This family has adolescent sons and the officials demanded proof they resided with their parents, who were instructed to provide old envelopes addressed to their children from 2004. Few families keep such scraps. Without these, though, the compensation would be trimmed.

This kind of bureaucratic behavior must be regarded as superfluous insensitivity.

Disengagement could certainly proceed without treating citizens who only yesterday were well-off hard-workers as freeloaders out to exploit the taxpayer. At the very least, it's an attitude that adds insult to injury.

So do the declarations that the settlers can easily rent alternative accommodation.

This is patently disingenuous in many cases. The $450 allotted monthly for rent might have been realistic once, but price-gouging now makes it laughable. Rents in remote areas outside Ashkelon have climbed higher than the poshest Herzliya pads. We haven't even mentioned the plight of those, moved from Gaza to various hotels, who have been evicted from hotel rooms near the Dead Sea and in the Golan in the last day or two. In certain cases, it turns out, the hotel rooms had actually been booked by Israeli tourists and weren't available for the full 10 days, minimum, the evacuees were promised. Bassi's authority should have known all this ahead of time, and ensured that it booked hotel rooms for the full period necessary.

The Disengagement Authority should also have made sure that "non-troublesome families," who moved into much-touted mobile homes in Nitzanim, wouldn't find pools of sewage on the floor. These avoidable hitches are embittering even those settlers who cooperated and left early.

It matters little if the functionaries in charge of the settlers' resettlement are technically right in some of the cases where they are being acutely pedantic. A bit less red tape and more compassion - just a little, that is, of the extraordinary sensitivity shown by the security forces when carrying out the evacuations - could prevent needless pain on top of a wrenching trauma in which some families are being left without livelihood, home or much of an idea of how they'll cope in the coming years.

Some, moreover, are forced to start life over at an age when they should be planning their retirement. Because what is happening to them stems directly from government decisions, it behooves the government to be uncommonly understanding, and certainly not to paint those compelled to rely on its goodwill as extortionists and crybabies.

Source: IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis