Gush Katif: seven months later

From Aish.com

Dana Zelinger's children used to think their fantasy vacation was staying in a hotel. Not anymore. Now they dream of a living room, a kitchen, private family meal time, a patch of floor to bounce a ball. The Zelingers are one of hundreds of families still stranded in hotels, youth hostels, vacation villages and tent cities seven months after the evacuation of their Gush Katif communities last summer.

What was to be a 10-day stay has turned into an odyssey of uncertainty whose provisional end will only be seen in another few months when the Zelingers and other evacuees from the community of Neve Dekalim will be settled in temporary quarters at Kibbutz Ein Tzurim. Five years down the line, the remnants of their community will be reunited in permanent housing near Kibbutz Amatzia in the sparsely populated Lachish region.

Yet Dana Zelinger is hopeful, and grateful. At least her family has a proper roof over their heads; evacuees from Atzmona are living in the tent city they pitched on the outskirts of Netivot called Ir HaEmunah (City of Faith). Many of those expelled from Elei Sinai are living in Ohalei Sinai, a tent park set up on a lot outside Kibbutz Yad Mordechai close to the northern Gaza border..........................................................................

One of these men is Moshe Shalva, 54. With his long bushy beard, tucked-out flannel shirt and flying tzitzit underneath, he's out of place in the subdued elegance of a hotel lobby. For 23 years, Shalva ran a successful Judaica business in Neve Dekalim. He's still waiting for compensation for both his home and business. The 50,000 shekel ($12,000) advance that families received after evacuation, given to help get families back on their feet in the interim, is being depleted by daily expenses to sustain his large family -- after the mortgage payments on his destroyed home are deducted every month.

One of the ironies of the compensation package is that to get the initial 50,000 shekels, a special government-controlled account has to be opened. Bank Tefachot, Israel's largest mortgage bank, was about to sue the government for the millions of dollars it would lose on defaulted mortgage payments of homes that would no longer exist, until the Treasury determined that the banks would still receive their mortgage payments -- from the evacuees' compensation accounts.

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I know, I know, we're all supposed to be commenting on the illegal immigrant demonstrations today. I just thought this was interesting and very sad - especially people having to make mortgage payments on houses that have been taken and destroyed by a hostile foreign entity (I hesitate to use the word "government" when referring to Hamas). Though I suppose a similar thing could happen to Americans in the Southwest if Aztlan and La Raza have their way.