The Soldiers Weeping in the Doorway of the Neve Dekalim Synagogue

Fifty-seven years after the State of Israel was founded. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Israeli families had begun settling the sand dunes along the southern Gaza coast — a strip of land known biblically as the western edge of the Land promised to Avraham, and empty of population when they got there. Over three decades, twenty-one communities grew up there. They called the whole area Gush Katif — 'the Harvest Bloc.' Nine thousand residents built greenhouses in the sand and produced a big share of Israel's bug-free vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers. They built yeshivot and girls' schools and a mixed religious-Zionist and Chassidic society on a coast where their grandparents would not have believed a Jewish flag could ever fly.

In 2004, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — the general who, more than anyone else, had championed the settlement movement for four decades — announced the Disengagement Plan. Israel would pull all Israeli civilians and soldiers out of Gaza, and out of four settlements in northern Samaria, on its own, without any agreement with the Palestinian Authority. A bitter national argument followed. Families were split. Coalitions collapsed and re-formed. Rabbis ruled both ways. The Knesset approved the plan in October 2004. Legal challenges to the Supreme Court failed.

The evacuation orders took effect immediately after Tishah be-Av 5765. Soldiers of the IDF and police officers — many of them the residents' own sons and nephews, many of them religious Zionists themselves — went into the homes and synagogues of Gush Katif that week to remove nine thousand Israelis from communities their own families had built.

In Neve Dekalim, the largest of the communities, the congregation held its last Ma'ariv in the synagogue. When it was over, they kissed the walls. They hugged the Aron. Then soldiers lifted them off the floor, one at a time, and carried them out. Some of the soldiers, witnesses said, were crying harder than the residents. In Kfar Darom, families and young people from around the country climbed onto the roof of the synagogue and had to be pried off with hoses and cranes. In Kerem Atzmona and Shirat ha-Yam, entire families sat shiva on the floors of their emptied homes.

Within days, the abandoned synagogues — which the Israeli cabinet had at the last moment decided not to demolish — were burned to the ground by Palestinian crowds as Israeli forces pulled out. The greenhouses, bought and handed over intact through money raised by American Jewish donors, were mostly looted and destroyed. Two years later, Hamas would take control of Gaza in a violent coup and turn the evacuated territory into a launching ground for tens of thousands of rockets against Israeli civilians, ending in the massacres of Simchat Torah 5784, the seventh of October 2023.

For many people watching, the timing — the days of mourning for the Temple — was not a coincidence. Twenty centuries after the ninth of Av became the calendar of Jewish exile, it still had that power, even in the age of a sovereign Jewish state.