The most significant thing about Israel's evacuation of settlements from Gaza was not the trauma -- it was that it happened, writes Graham Usher in the Strip Last week the land of Israel packed its bags and left Gaza. Sometimes the exit was dignified -- as when the remaining 42 families from the Alei Sinai settlement in the northern Gaza Strip took the road out of their desert suburbia to head for the greener pastures of Israel. Sometimes it was surreal -- as when a settler motorcyclist threatened to ride his machine, kamikaze, through the burning gate of Netzer Hazani settlement (he swerved at the last moment to avoid the flames). Sometimes it was crazed, as when hundreds barricaded themselves into the synagogues of Neve Dakalim and Kfar Darom, forcing the police to remove them one by one. But at all moments there was a large dose of theatre, powered by the presence of thousands of journalists on hand to record every cry, every grimace, every agony. There was raw emotion. In Netzer Hazani, one settler took a torch to his villa rather than have it "desecrated" by the Palestinians. In Kfar Darom dozens took to the roof of the synagogue and then hurled turpentine, paint-bombs and rotten fruit at the police ascending the ramparts to remove them, "a hooliganism that bordered on the criminal", said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Forty-four policemen were injured in the melee, and 150 protesters were arrested. But beneath the emotion there was also reality. The settlers in Netzer Hazani are to receive between $300,000 and $500,000 in compensation as well as new homes in the occupied Golan Heights. Many of those who staged the mock Massadas in Neve Dakalim and Kfar Darom were not actually settlers from Gaza. They were interlopers from the West Bank. Nor were they protesting against the loss of their homes or at being pawns again on Sharon's grand chessboard. Their aim was simple: "to foment a struggle that will be remembered for generations and prevent all chance of another uprooting", said one. Will it work? The evidence suggests the settlers' carefully orchestrated "trauma" was a flop. Israeli Jews do not like the Nazis attempted genocide of their people being compared to anything -- not even other genocides. But here in Gaza it was routinely equated with the disengagement. In Neve Dakalim one youth marched the goosestep before the approaching police and soldiers. In Kfar Darom soldiers were abused in German while some settlers wore yellow Star of David badges. Many spat "Nazi!" at an army that has spent the last 35 years -- and lost hundreds of its men and women -- defending their oases in Gaza. "The world wants to give us to the Arabs like Europe gave the Jews to Hitler," screamed one woman, also from the West Bank. "I absolutely compare what is happening here to what happened in the Holocaust". It was one of the rare moments when the patience of the soldiers got close to snapping. One simply gritted his teeth. Many Israelis felt the same. But the most remarkable thing about the Gaza withdrawal was not the theatre -- it was that it happened. Ever since Israeli governments begun their colonisation of the occupied territories in the late 1960s, the settlements have assumed an aura of irreversibility. In the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt, the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 roadmap, settlements were always postponed to the endgame, in the belief that only peace would bring their removal. When Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994 -- and Israeli public opinion was solidly in favour of their removal from the city -- the then Israeli prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, refused to do so for fear of the precedent it would set. When Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish zealot -- and the settler movement as a whole bore the mark of Cain -- Rabin's successor, Shimon Peres, forged an alliance with it for fear of civil war or "a rift in the nation". But there was no civil war, or even a rift. In less than six days the Israeli army and police evacuated 21 settlements and 8,000 settlers without a shot being fired, barely an officer refusing orders and, in the end, with a minimum of protest. In other words, what Sharon has demonstrated is that it is possible to remove settlements, not as the consequence of peace, but as its precondition, and without causing a rift in the nation. Not that he sees it that way. "This is something you will be able to see in a short time -- that there will be no second disengagement", he said on 21 August. But for many Israelis the dye has been cast and, for Palestinians, the hope is that the disengagement from Gaza will lead to further withdrawals from the West Bank. This at least is a dynamic seen by Adam Keller, veteran peace activist from Israel's Gush Shalom movement. For the last week he has not been in Gaza. He didn't even watch the "disengagement show" from his home in Tel Aviv. He was protesting against the construction of Israel's West Bank wall in the Palestinian village of Bilin. But he believes Gaza is important for that other struggle in the West Bank. "I believe after Gaza Sharon will freeze everything for five years. But if he does -- if everything again becomes stuck -- there will be Palestinian, Israeli and international pressure for further withdrawals. And that pressure could become mass demonstrations against the occupation. It's not certain -- it's possible. After all, nobody believed it possible that Sharon would withdraw settlements from Gaza."
