Foundations: Karen, holding Hagai, at the Sroussis' home site in Gan Or Photo: Courtesy of Sroussi family

Karen's route to Zionism was more haphazard. Born in New York in 1956 and raised in California in what she describes as "a very assimilated-American family," Karen never thought about Israel until her senior year of high school. To get away, to do something unusual, something rebellious, she decided to spend a year there studying before college. Karen grew up without a father in the house and with a mother who, though a Holocaust survivor, was a "Yom Kippur Jew," attending synagogue only once a year. When Karen decided to leave home, however, her mother, Lillian, unlike many American parents whose children moved to Israel, was supportive.

Karen's initial impression of Israel was unambiguous. "I hated it, and I went back to the States." She had been at California State University in Los Angles for five semesters when she decided to try Israel again. Why? "I don't know. I just came back. I went on a kibbutz. I did an Ulpan [an intensive language program] there, and I started studying in the university. I don't know if it's because I got married that I decided to stay here. The language the second time around was easier for me. And I began to understand the Israeli society. I was comfortable here."

Illustrations: Gail Pheister

Karen began what she called "a long process" of becoming more religious, "not a quick or a fanatic changeover." She experimented with keeping kosher, observing the Sabbath, studying more Torah. "Eventually," she said, "I married my husband, and that helped me change over." While early life in Gaza was difficult even to Nissim, Karen, a fair-skinned California suburbanite, felt like a greenhorn in the nineteenth-century American West: "I used to always joke that I came from the Wild West, and I moved to the Wild West."

Karen spoke to me about her commitment to Israel in very uncertain terms. "I could never say that I was Zionist. I never felt that, sitting here, living here, I was taking some sort of stand. It was just, at the time, a place to live." After pausing for reflection, Karen concedes that perhaps they were pioneers.

"Maybe I can say I am a Zionist. I'm living here, and I've been here for over twenty-seven years now. But at [first] none of that entered my head. It wasn't the reason for us living here."

Romantic Beginnings in Gaza

Before Nissim's group could move into their permanent houses in Gaza, they lived for three years on the army base of Netsarim. The group of fifteen lived as a kibbutz, which meant that instead of farming separately, they worked together, growing tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, squash, eggplant, and flowers. Each family lived in a thirty-square-meter, two-room hut, in which power outages were common and the water supply was unreliable. Nissim's recollection of 1980 sounds like my grandfather's description of 1930--no refrigerators, only ice-chests; no real roads; never-ending hours of work. "I think the community got more hours [of me] than my wife," he jokes.

The group always had at least one or two Arab workers, sometimes as many as eleven or twelve. Karen remembers having tea with them on the Sabbath and inviting them to drop by during the week. Nissim laughs about their friend Abu-Sitah. "I think nobody can understand it. And if I tell it now, it looks like a fairy tale: The babysitter of my daughter was an Arab. He used to come in the car in the morning with his camel, take my daughter--she was five, or four years old--and bring her back at noon, because I was working and her mother was working." For years, even after Nissim and Karen moved away from Netsarim, Abu Sitah would take the children on camel rides around the settlement.

I asked Nissim whether there was any hint at this time of animosity between the Israelis and their Arab neighbors. He said there was not. "I'll tell you something. Even now, if you take all the politics from there and from here, let the people live, we'll live in good friendship."

But the simplicity of relations then, in contrast to the current complexity, reminds me of the famous political cartoon of two Native Americans in San Salvador in 1492. One says to the other, "You think it's okay that these foreigners are coming to live with us?" And the other says, "How bad can it be? It's only three ships."

In 1983, Nissim, Karen, eight other families from Netsarim, and ten new families moved into Gaza's third permanent settlement, Gan Or, "Garden of Light." Twenty-five years later, the Gaza Strip would house twenty-one settlements spread over a third of the land.

Native Gazans

In the intervening years, deaths have defined and punctuated Gan Or's history--and no topic came up more in my oral-history interviews than the souring of Arab-settler relations. For Hagai, one of the four Sroussi children born in the Gaza Strip, now a twenty-four year-old student at the Technion University in Haifa, the violence was inseparable from settlement life.

In 1985, one of Gan Or's residents, Aharon Hazut, was stabbed while shopping in Khan Yunis in what his friend Gershon Perlman, who witnessed the attack, tells me was "the first terrorist incident in Khan Yunis ever." Hagai was four at the time. When he was six, the first intifada broke out, during which tensions expressed themselves mostly in the form of rock-throwing and small-scale vigilante activity.

Oddly, in his interview, Hagai didn't speak about the violence of his childhood. Instead, he remembered an idyllic youth: sliding down the sand-dunes on plastic garbage-container tops, playing basketball, walking by himself around the settlements where, to this day, most doors are unlocked. "[It was] like growing up in a greenhouse," Hagai says, using the Israeli idiom for growing up in a bubble.