Twelve years…how could it be twelve years since that fateful, horrible summer when Israel acted unilaterally, stupidly, naively believing that if we made a grand gesture, peace would follow. No, to be honest, I really don’t buy the “naive” part. No one believed, even then, that peace would follow. As to why, knowing what would happen, did we do it? I can’t answer that.
With my husband and two friends, we ventured into the Jewish communities of Gaza in the wake of the forced expulsions. Our goal, our hope was probably naive. We thought that maybe we could save a synagogue, something precious from Gush Katif that would comfort the families, comfort us.
We went community by community. Our emotions were all over the place. Anger was there, pain, tears. We pushed on from community to community. My friend, Devra, wrote it down, place by place. I took pictures. Her words are here. Devra wrote about the stones I took from the synagogues. Here, Rachel Saperstein wrote about Paula’s Stones.
Of all the songs that I remember from that time, there was one that I knew, even then, was our unavoidable future if we evacuated, destroyed, erased those amazing communities. We did…and the song has come true. We live the nightmare this song so correctly predicted.