The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

The Israeli public experienced much confusion during the removal of Israeli settlements from the Sinai Peninsula. The author discusses this confusion and its sources: problems and contradictions related to the society's concept of peace and its value, and the conflict between Israel's desires for peace and recognition versus fears of reversing the settlement process and of losing Israel's identity through integration with the Arab states. The evacuation proceeded as scheduled and without civil war, according to the author, because Egypt's offer was highly desirable, because those opposing withdrawal were not as powerful as the government and military and were unable to attract a broad cross-section of the public, and because the government made a firm decision to negotiate with Egypt and offer territory for peace.

In discussing the removal of Israeli settlers from Sinai before its return to Egypt this article examines the sense of place with respect to a general perspective and the Israeli context. The author examines loss of place, placelessness, and rootlessness, humiliation, distress, and alienation; losing one's past, present, and future sense of place; attaining a sense of place; and continuity and change in the sense of place. Sixty families of evacuees were interviewed, with interviews held in 1980 and 1982 before the evacuation, and interviews with more than one-third of the subjects held in 1984, nearly two years after evacuation. The author concludes that the Sinai settlershad created a world with a vivid spirit of place, which some tried to replicate in their new communities with only partial success. The major obstacle to the continuity of a sense of place is hypothesized to be failure in the economic domain.

This article discusses the evacuation of Ofira, an Israeli settlement in Sinai as a condition of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The authors were members of a group of mental health specialists brought in shortly before the withdrawal to act as consultants and therapists. They describe the dynamics of the community and its inhabitants, different reactions to the with-drawal and avenues for addressing the evacuees' psychological plights. Although the authors find they did not have sufficient time to do all they wished to help the Ofirans, their experience has led them to suggest guidelines for assisting other groups undergoing forced removal from their homes.

This article analyzes the Movement to Stop the Withdrawal (MSW) and its efforts to provoke controversy in Israeli society over the evacuation of Israeli settlements from Sinai a condition of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The authors present the MSW as a messianic movement and discuss its context and ultimate aims, especially regarding the geopolitical conflict between traditional Judaism and modern Zionism. The article addresses the MSW's background, links with Gush Emunim -a movement seeking to restore the "greater Land of Israel" promised in the Bible-and environment. The authors note that the case of the MSW high-lights divisions in Israeli society between "hawks and doves" and especially between the secular and religious segments of the population.

This article discusses individual and communal responses to the stress an Israeli cooperative agricultural settlement in Sinai underwent as it faced disbandment required by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The authors belonged to a team of five mental health professionals who studied 40 families, beginning more than a year before the evacuation to shortly thereafter Using both direct observation and interviews, the team studied sources of and responses to stress. They found the main stressors to be acute changes in the settlers' expectations, roles, and identities, and responses to be both adaptive and nonadaptive. The authors report that although most of the settlers coped with the evacuation welt they generally suffered damage to their abilities to sustain communal relationships, which may have lasting effects. The article presents preventive measures that may have aided these evacuees and could prove useful for others who are to be uprooted in the future.

This article discusses the relationship between protest activity and news coverage, focusing on three major groups that resisted the Israeli government as it evacuated Jewish settlers from Yamit, Sinai to fulfill the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Two of these groups-the business persons and the farmers-consisted of long-time Yamit residents seeking compensation for their losses; the other, the Movement to Stop the Withdrawal (MSW), consisted of persons from outside Yamit and had ideological motivations. From participant observations and interviews with group leaders and news reporters during the resistance (December 1981-April 1982) and one month later, the author obtained several lessons and conclusions. In particular, the author found that a symbiotic relationship exists between the press and action group leaders, that groups more sophisticated in dealing with the news media have more experience, resources, and organizational structures, and that groups with ideological goals rather than materialistic ones devise different strategies for exploiting the press and must decide between political expediency and substantive considerations.

This article discusses the political conditions allowing the Israeli government to negotiate a peace treaty with Egypt, which led to the evacuation of Israeli settlements in Sinai. This evacuation had no precedent in Israeli history, yet the author finds it did not create a trauma for most Israelis, so the Israeli government was able to implement the peace process with little public debate or resistance. The author states that most Israelis avoided analyzing the ideological framework of the evacuation because of dissonance with either their religious or political beliefs, and because at that time the majority sought relief from the Arab-Israeli conflict, even through territorial compromise. The article concludes that the long-term implications of the evacuation include changing Israeli attitudes toward settlement removal and compromise with the Arabs, and predicts that only a strong coalition government dominated by the Alignment will likely be able to begin serious negotiations concerning the West Bank.

This article reports an informal study of six human services professionals who conducted research and practice in Israeli settlements in Sinai during the settlements' evacuation, which was required by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The author presents a model of three strategies of professional behavior that can guide human service professionals and social researchers during instances of extreme community turmoil (1) disregarding the crisis and following one's usual professional routines, (2) relinquishing one's professional stance and becoming personally immersed in the catastrophe, or (3) modifying one's behavior to suit the abnormal conditions. From retrospective interviews with the professionals, the author finds that the practitioners chose the first strategy and the researchers the third Professional, situational and personal circumstances for these choices are analyzed, and the author recommends further elaboration of the model and an assessment of the comparative productivity of alternative strategies.

This article discusses the nature and meaning of the removal of Israeli settlements from Sinai as required by the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. The author considers the removal an ambiguous resolution of a basic existential conflict over whether Israel is a secular, "legal-rational " state versus a religious, traditional one, with the key issues being the relative importance of two Zionist values: territorial expansion and peace. Speculating that those conducting and resisting the removal actually collaborated somewhat in the protest so as to signal that the removal was not a precedent for future Israeli withdrawals, the author finds that Israel's existential conflict has only deepened and predicts that a bitter struggle will occur when peace negotiations involving the West Bank begin The article concludes with comparisons of the Sinai removal to other forms of human migration, indicating its lack of true historical parallels.