Postcard From Gaza

This article was written by Michael Bronner, who has covered the Mideast for CBS News.

Young orthodox mothers stood in the surf in skirts, shepherding children and watching for jellyfish. Boys in kippahs and shorts erected whole new settlements of excellent sand castles. Bigger boys were busy nailing together wooden frames for a tent city to house the thousands of religious nationalists they say will come join them in blocking the "transfer" of the Gaza settlers into mainland Israel.

In his bungalow on a dune overlooking it all, David Matar, a Manhattan-born pediatrician, sat gazing into the sun wishing for a ship.

"Wouldn't it be great if there was a boat called 'Exodus 2005' loaded with Jews who wanted to come live in the Land of Israel and were prevented from doing so not by the British Navy but the Israeli Navy? That would be a poignant thing, wouldn't it?"

Indeed, the minyan of Israeli troops and border police massing at the Gaza gates to carry out the "evacuation" of roughly 1,600 settler families – and to prevent the further influx of more radical protesters like Matar who, with his wife and six kids (along with perhaps 2,000 other religious nationalists), have moved into the Strip recently to hamper the pull-out – is startling.

Tractor-trailers loaded with Merkava tanks line the roads, and the trees a hundred yards on either side are caked white with fine Western Negev dust kicked up by thousands of jeeps, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers and police cars. By August 15, when residents will be given official notice that the term of their service in worship, agriculture and armed entrenchment on behalf of the State of Israel is complete, there will be some 43,000 troops and police on hand to escort them out.

Thus the stage is set for a wrenching, dramatic and much-advertised clash between Israeli soldiers and Israeli citizens. The protagonists on both sides have been busy rehearsing their lines.

"What you're doing is immoral and illegal and it's something you'll regret bitterly until the end of your days," David Matar (who will be "chained to something") plans to tell the soldier who comes to remove him. "And I may remind him that 60 years ago somebody may have come knocking at his grandparents' door."

His wife, Nadia, who is organizing the tent cities, instructed me not to miss the nuance in her views on invoking the "N" word in referring to soldiers. "One thing has to be very clear: we do not compare Jews to Nazis. We compare Jews to the collaborators with the Nazis."

Several of the long-term settlers spoke in softer terms, emphasizing that they'd never physically harm the soldiers, who have, after all, protected them all these years. Still, the strategy is the same: to guilt-trip as many troops as possible into refusing the pull-out order.

"I have no problems about forcing psychological trauma onto soldiers," David Matar assured me.

Down the road, in a dusty melon field where troops are bivouacked just outside Gaza, Nir Yaniv, a bespectacled, 23-year-old Navy lieutenant, gathered his 12 cadets into a small circle.

"You will hear very cruel things," he told them, speaking softly. "Do not engage them," he said of the settlers. "Do not speak to them at all."

Lt. Yaniv fingered a stubbly beard. His soldiers call him by his first name. In mixed teams of army and police, they will be part of the "first ring" – the troops who will have the most intimate contact with the settlers – assigned to go door-to-door, unarmed, beginning August 17 when the settlers' grace period for leaving on their own concludes.

"It is a difficult mission. It is difficult for all of us here," Yaniv tells his men. "But we live in a democracy and these are legitimate orders. We have to do our job and carry out the mission."

Lt. Yaniv says he trusts his troops to do their job, but the prospect of soldiers copping out en masse on game day is a contingency the IDF is taking seriously all the way up the chain of command.

To help prevent that, army psychologists designed a series of messages and training exercises for commanders to impart to conflicted troops. It's a box-set, actually – the "Preparation Kit for the Disengagement" - a four-color, fold-out laminated cardboard suitcase that opens to reveal two CD-roms, a VHS tape and a tabbed binder of lesson recommendations: 10 minutes: 'Conflicts & Democracy in Israel'… 10 minutes: 'The Prohibition of Soldiers Expressing Their Political Views' ... "20 minutes: 'The Media as a Tool that Influences Public Opinion ...'

In a section titled "Wisely, Sensitively and Determinedly," the stakes for keeping the troops on task – carrying out their controversial orders – are clearly spelled out: "The responsibility for preventing refusals falls to the commanders" (so far, more than 70 soldiers have refused to participate in the disengagement, with at least 16 sentenced to prison for directly disobeying orders).

The kit also provides an exercise in role-playing: "My name is Yoav. I'm 18 1/2 and I'm about to finish basic training … I don't see any reason to protect communities which I think aren't part of the country …"

Under the hot sun, among the troops in the melon field, however, fictitious qualms were superfluous.

"I think all the talking doesn't make a difference. It's what's in your heart," a cadet from an army captains' course said of the training. His family is religious and supports the settlers.

A young medic was more blunt. "I don't want to be here," she said. "I'm glad I'm here as a medic, not as a [regular] soldier. I couldn't do it. I think most soldiers here don't want to do it…but they have no choice."

"I'm worried about violence," an MP in a tank unit confided. "I'm worried about myself becoming violent. I have a very short fuse."

"It's really awkward," Lt. Yaniv agreed. "I come from a conservative family. It's really hard to see the settlers' pain."

Israeli Defense Forces brass anticipate "several dozen" soldiers may refuse orders in the heat of the evacuation, but feel confident their plan of flooding the zone with troops will more than compensate for even larger defections.

"Six or sixty or six hundred cases – this is not something we cannot deal with," Brigadier General Uzi Moskowitz told me in an exclusive briefing at the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. "Six thousand – this is another thing."

Moskowitz, who's in charge of evacuating the northern portion of the Gaza Strip, says he's prepared to order drastic measures to ensure cohesion. "If you have a unit in which you have such an extent [of refusals] that you have almost a mutiny and we have to dismantle a unit, yes, we'll dismantle a unit, because the day after the disengagement, if we don't punish the refusniks, we'd have two, three, maybe ten armies."

Back in the melon field, and at their base before that, Lt. Yaniv and his men have spent an hour or two a day for more than a month talking out doubts. They also screened archival footage of the 1982 evacuation of the Yammit settlement in the Sinai, the only precedent for the Gaza withdrawal. In the film, Israeli troops can be seen wrestling settlers and protesters from window sills and rooftops, fulfilling a crucial clause of the peace deal with Egypt. "You see real violence – people screaming, trying to get you to refuse orders," Yaniv said.

The "people screaming" part he and his men would see for themselves the day I met them.

In the first of several large protests staged by settlers and their supporters beginning last month, what was scheduled to be a two-day march to the Gaza settlements swelled to nearly 30,000 people. Lt. Yaniv and his troops were ordered to block the protesters from reaching Gaza. They left their M-16s in a pile, coated themselves in sunscreen and made some last-minute practice linking arms (part of the blocking methods they'd been taught).

The protesters came in droves.

"Tell your chief of staff that this is what criminals look like, us peace-loving people who love you, you soldiers! Why did they send you on this mission?" a bearded 40-something in tallis and slacks addressed Yaniv.

A teenage girl, her hair covered in the orthodox fashion, stopped to hand him a fruit candy with a note attached: "With God's help the people of Israel live. Soldier! Police Officer! Despite all the difficulties we still love you! The people of eternity don't fear the long road." She carried on ethereally.

"A cop! A soldier! Refuse an order!" (which actually doesn't rhyme in Hebrew) was the principle protest chant.

At some point, a commander somewhere squelched the walkie-talkie and clarified the orders: the soldiers' response to protesters should be "like a stone."

A Hassid in a black hat walked by blowing a shofar. Another stopped to point his finger: "Yehudi Lo Megaresh Yehudi! (A Jew doesn't deport another Jew!) Elohim Yishmor Aleinu! (God help us all!)"

In the blood-orange light of sunset and dust, Lt. Yaniv broke ranks and echoed back flatly: "God help us all." Surprised, the man in the black hat shuffled on.

So far, the protests have all ended relatively peacefully. And that night – in Lt. Yaniv's area, at least – no one leveled the "N" word.

By Michael Bronner