Signs of protest: orange settler flags amid Israeli flags Image: Courtesy of Sroussi family

The Opportunity

In the fall of 1979, Nissim Sroussi, newly married and fresh out of a master's program in agriculture at the Hebrew University, traveled from Rehovot to Jerusalem to the offices of the Jewish Agency. He went just as his brother had gone four years before, just as young patriotic Israelis had been going for dozens of years, to speak with government officials about building a new settlement. Nissim was interested in a moshav, a cooperative for farmers in which individuals owned their own land but lived together communally, something akin to the better-known kibbutz but based on different assumptions about individualism and human nature.

Growing Crops In The Desert

Menachem Begin was prime minister. His right-wing Likkud government succeeded a string of Labor governments that had held power since Israel was founded in 1948. Nissim met with the Jewish Agency not long after the signing of the Camp David Accords, which returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, but during a time when the Israeli government, paradoxically, was promoting the strategic development of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip.

Nissim, a specialist in arid-land farming and committed to the Zionist ideal of building something from nothing, hoped to settle in the unpopulated Negev, a desert region that makes up almost two-thirds of Israel-proper. "You can go to the Negev," Nissim recalls being told. "We'll give you the property, the land, and you do all the rest. We will not help you with facilities or anything like this. But if you want to go to Gaza Strip or Judea and Samaria or the Golan, of course, we'll help you very much."

The Sroussis: Nissim, front, and, from left, Hagai, Karen, Clila, Ronen, son-in-law Dovi, Oded, and Nirit Image: Courtesy of Sroussi family

Help would come in the form of greenhouses, land, and equipment, an offer Nissim felt he should accept. He knew the area from his army service as a paratrooper. He knew that farming conditions in Gaza were similar to those in the Negev, vast stretches of barren sand, and he remembers the beckoning emptiness: "Clean air. The dunes were like gold--pure and empty. And it was a big challenge for us to make this a green place."

The challenge appealed to him, but the decision was complicated. Nissim had promised his wife, Karen, who grew up in the U.S. and considered herself liberal, that they would never live over the Green Line, the pre-1967 border. Karen, though admittedly uninterested in and uninformed about Israeli politics, was not comfortable living in disputed territory. Whether the two actually argued with each other about the principle of moving over the Green Line is unclear. They reflect on their "pact" in much the way my parents debate the circumstances of their first encounter--whether my father, perched atop his 1974 Chevy Malibu, hit on my mother, or my mother, asking the time, hit on my father.

Today, Nissim laughingly acknowledges that there may have been a loose agreement, but quickly reminds me about the nature of living in Gaza at the time. "She didn't know exactly--even I didn't know exactly--what it means to go to live in Gaza. Gaza was empty. All this area, all where we live now [was] dunes and dunes. There was a small town named Gaza, a small town named Rafah, a small town named Khan Yunis. [Gaza was] a small place," he says. "It was like coming to the moon and starting to live." The decision, the two claim, seemed innocuous. Both felt supported by the government and people of Israel. "It wasn't political," says Karen. "It was just an opportunity."

Nissim and Karen began looking for members to join their new moshav, going from synagogue to synagogue to recruit. They drew heavily from B'nai Akeevah, a religious youth movement still active today and known for its connection not just to Judaism but to the principle of Judaism in the land of Israel and inseparable from it. Of the forty people initially interested, thirty-six backed out, some for personal reasons, many after seeing the harsh weather conditions of Gaza, the heavy winds, the scorching heat, and the isolation. But the four who remained became the gar'een--the seed from which the community would spring--and by the summer of 1980, the group had swelled to fifteen.

Paths in Zionism

While the financial support the government offered to the Sroussis was helpful, the true incentive was the idea the money represented--that settling the occupied territories was the most important thing a Zionist could do. The definition Nissim offered for his own Zionism was two-pronged: living in Israel and making decisions with Israel in mind. After his meeting at the Jewish Agency, Nissim says he felt that what was important for Israel "was to build the settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. So we went."

In this way, his decision was almost identical to a decision his father, Baruch, made more than twenty-five years earlier to settle in the Negev on Moshav Beit Hagedi. "At that time," Nissim says, "the importance of developing this country was to build the moshav and [inhabit] the Negev." Nobody spoke of this need more passionately than former prime minister David Ben-Gurion: "If the state does not liquidate the desert," he would say in 1955, "the desert may liquidate the state."

Although both of Nissim's parents were Tunisian, they came to Israel from different religious and cultural milieus. Devorah, his mother, grew up in Tunis, where the Zionist movement had taken firm hold. She immigrated to Israel with her parents, Zionists themselves, once the state was declared. Baruch, on the other hand, spent his childhood far from the epicenter of Zionism on an island in the southeastern Gabes region. He knew nothing of the movement until the age of sixteen, when he first heard of Israel. "He immediately decided to make aliyah [immigrate]," says Nissim's brother Izzy. Without his parents' knowledge, he left for a machaneh hachshara, a Zionist camp in Marseilles, France, which taught young people skills like farming and Hebrew and served as a launching ground for illegal immigration to British-controlled Palestine.

After a few months in Marseilles, Baruch left with other maapilim (illegal immigrants) on what would prove to be an unsuccessful voyage to Palestine. The British intercepted his ship near Haifa and sent all aboard to Cyprus, where Baruch would live for several months. After the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State on November 29, 1947, Baruch made it to Palestine and joined the Palmach, an elite unit in Israel's makeshift army in the years leading up to and during the War of Independence.

"We got from him the spirit, the dedication, the love of this country, the importance of this country," Nissim says. "You cannot describe Zionism more than Palmach and maapilim." Both have become an ineffable part of Israel's founding mythology, like the Boston Tea Party in our own narrative. And they were deeply influential on Nissim and his six siblings, who all settled in either the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. "Zionism is something in your blood," Izzy says. "You should run a blood test on us, and you'll find that we all have Zionism deep in our blood."