Public discourse concerning the possibility of evacuating settlements in Yesha and on the Golan Heights focuses mainly on the political reaction to such a step: how severe it is likely to be, who constitutes the potential for danger, etc. This seems to be characteristic of a society that is far more interested in dealing with political issues than social ones. Perhaps this can be justified by Israel’s history, in which political tensions threatened to rend society more than social tensions. Or it may stem from the assumption of the opinion-makers (politicians and the media) that while political issues threaten the entire society, social straits threaten only those who are directly involved. Either way, the evacuation of the Sinai settlements proved that in the long run, the emotional anguish of the evacuees was no less significant than the political trauma caused to the entire society during the period of the evacuation.
As the study by the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University cited previously concluded, the social ramifications of evacuation are also determined according to whether the evacuees are quality-of-life settlers or ideological settlers. In the social context, as difficult as evacuation may be, the ideological settlers will be able to cope with it more easily than the quality-of-life settlers. This is because the ideological settlers are a cohesive, unified group led by inspiring leaders, factors that will anoint the personal and communal crisis with an ideological outlook that gives significance to the crisis. On the other hand, it is clear that the more a person considers his dwelling in Yesha as the fulfillment of ideology, the more difficult the ideological crisis will make his ability to cope emotionally. In general, evacuation will likely be harder for individuals in the ideological camp than those in the quality-of-life camp, but a cohesive ideological community will make coping easier than a non-cohesive community.
Many of those who deal with the evacuation issue also attribute importance to religious identification as a factor that facilitates coping on both the emotional and social levels. This may be because religious identity itself lends ideological significance to life and thus bestows on the individual a sense of hope even when faced with the crisis of evacuation. Additionally, the communal cohesion of the religious community is especially great, since the members generally meet in the synagogue at least once a week, and many even congregate there every day. Therefore we can rate the emotional difficulties of coping with evacuation on the following scale: inhabitants of the cities will suffer most since their communal cohesion is minimal; following them are the residents of the secular settlements; and finally, the inhabitants of religious communities. This graduated scale was true of the way the Yesha settlements have coped with the trauma of terror over the last few years. And indeed, significant emphasis has been placed on reinforcing the communal and emotional strength of the secular residents of the towns and settlements.
If we temporarily ignore the distinctions between the various types of settlement, the experts identify two opposing population groups that are most likely to suffer from the evacuation crisis. The first consists of older adults, who are more likely to encounter difficulties in starting their lives over somewhere else. (An exception to this may be “white collar” professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, who can work anywhere, though even these may have difficulty in building up a new clientele.) The second group is comprised of the young, who are most at risk of traumatization – not in terms of their personal futures but because of the risk of permanently shaking their trust in the “Establishment” and the various authorities that have disappointed them on so existential a level as evicting them from their homes.
Dr. Mooli Lahad, an expert on crisis and stress who established the Stress Prevention Center at Tel Hai College, enumerates the following risk groups in an evacuation crisis:
• The over-fifty group, who will have difficulty in creating a new life for themselves in an alternate location.
• Intensely Zionistic persons, who will face a serious ideological crisis.
• Those who enjoy high status in their evacuated communities, who will find it difficult to come to terms with their loss of status and the necessity of starting over somewhere else at the bottom of the totem pole.
• Children and teenagers, whose tendency is to focus on their immediate pain and not on hopes for the future. Dr. Lahad claims that this is especially true for adolescents who tend towards an extreme and one-sided view of the world.
Regarding teenagers, Dr. Shifra Sagy’s study (cited in chapter one) compared the trauma of youth in Yamit just prior to the Sinai evacuation with that of youngsters in the Golan Heights during talks of possible evacuation in 1993. Her conclusion was that the reaction of teenagers is greatly dependent on the worldview and attitudes presented by their parents specifically, and the older generation in general. This finding creates a Catch-22 situation for both the parents and the settlement leaders: it means that the more that the parents struggle against the withdrawal and portray it as a catastrophe – whether to achieve a better compensation package or as a true demonstration of their feelings – the greater will be the dimensions of the family and community crisis. Thus, social and familial interests collide with ideological and economic interests.
Moreover, according to the Sinai model, there are a number of possible stages in a social crisis created by an evacuation. First, internal tensions within the settlements regarding the division of the collective property or negotiations on compensation are anticipated during the waiting period. Second, previously existing tensions within families are likely to become exacerbated by the evacuation. While each and every family will have to go through an extended post-evacuation rehabilitation period, those families that were fundamentally strong will succeed in overcoming the trauma, and those families that were already in crisis before the evacuation are likely to be sucked into the depths of the crisis as a result of evacuation trauma. This same principle applies to settlements: those settlements that enjoyed communal cohesiveness and robustness will survive the evacuation crisis better than those settlements that were already weak and prey to internal strife.
Professor Nurit Kliot of the Department of Geography at Haifa University was one of the prominent researchers of the social aspects of the Sinai evacuation. One of the main conclusions of her study was that settlers should not get direct monetary compensation – certainly not for alternative housing, as opposed to compensation for emotional distress caused by the evacuation. Instead, they should be given housing in alternative settlements prepared ahead of time. Kliot claims a number of salient advantages to this solution: as far as the state is concerned, compensation packages for purchasing apartments on the free market is far more expensive than public housing construction. As far as the settlers are concerned, they will be spared protracted and humiliating haggling over the size of the compensation packages and will not become victims of shady dealers in the free market who will charge exorbitant prices, knowing that these people had just received generous compensation packages. But mainly the alternative settlements will enable the evacuees to continue their lives where they left off, with the same people they lived with before and in the same lifestyle. They will live with people who endured similar traumas and can provide a supportive community, thus avoiding having to go to a big city as individuals who have sustained a difficult trauma.
Kliot’s recommendations were brought to the members of Rabin’s government when they discussed the possibilities of a peace settlement with Syria and the evacuation of the settlements in the Golan. It seems that a process in this spirit was initiated at the time, at least for the settlements in the Golan. In September 1995, the Yedioth Aharonoth daily newspaper revealed that the government started developing new settlements alongside existing settlements in the Galil and new neighborhoods meant to accommodate evacuees from the Golan. The locations of the new settlements were not randomly selected. Yavniel and Kfar Tabor, for example, were selected as locations for new neighborhoods in the wake of an internal survey among the Golan settlers themselves, in which the respondents indicated a preference for these settlements as alternate sites. In other words, the settlers themselves indirectly lent a hand to the evacuation process.[17]