By Shifra Shomron Thursday morning, January 23rd, we checked to make sure we were each wearing Gush Katif orange, the color of the anti-Disengagement campaign before we hurriedly set forth. I had forgotten to wear anything of that bright, vivid color, so I quickly tied an orange ribbon around my wrist and borrowed an orange Gush Katif shirt from our offices. It was Gush Katif Education Day!
After months of hard work, 800 State-Religious schools were participating in the Gush Katif Committee and Katif Center joint program for remembering Gush Katif and using it as a platform for instructing core values. Several of my colleagues from the Gush Katif Committee and I were on our way to the “Dvir” school in Holon, to see first hand a school partaking in Gush Katif Education Day.
This would be my first time in a school during Gush Katif Education Day since joining the Gush Katif Committee. I wondered whether these children, who weren’t from Gush Katif families, and many of whom were born after the expulsion, would manage to identify with the material we’d sent. 
Upon arrival at the school, I found that I needn’t have worried. My eyes lit up at the sight of the orange balloons at the school gate, and my spirits rose with every step down the school corridor. The school’s energy and initiative had clearly gone beyond putting up the colorful posters and the photos we’d sent them; they had every classroom engaged in learning about Gush Katif and the sounds of films, lectures and arts and crafts echoed into the hallway. At the end of the corridor they’d even thought to include a touching memorial for Gush Katif’s terror victims.
We decided not to disturb the classes engrossed in viewing Gush Katif films, and instead entered a talk. A quiet young man from Netzer Hazani was telling the fifth grade girls what his life had been like in Gush Katif: his father’s hothouses, the mortar that exploded by the youth center, the many miracles and the campaign against the Disengagement. The girls listened and asked intelligent questions, such as “were people injured despite the numerous miracles?”, and “were there Israelis that didn’t like you living there?”
I left another talk to interview for Arutz -7’s Yoni Kempinsky who was providing media coverage (Hebrew, English). Then it was time for the impressive school assembly. On the way there, a young girl looked at my orange ribbon with envy and politely asked me for it. She couldn’t believe her luck when I gave it to her, and she quickly fastened it in her hair and ran to join her classmates who all had orange ribbons in theirs. I hope that the Gush Katif Education Day annual tradition will help her associate orange ribbons and “orange” in general with Gush Katif. She and thousands of others of this new generation – whenever they see this color, they too will think of Gush Katif.
And we must help keep it real for them. One young student looked at me and asked with awe in her voice and eyes “are you really from Gush Katif?” And I smiled and said “yes.” I think she believed me, but I’m not sure. I hope Gush Katif hasn’t become so wrapped in myth or shrouded by age that young students can’t imagine that I, a former Gush Katif resident standing before them, truly lived there.
Shifra Shomron is PR Assistant for the Gush Katif Committee and is the author of Grains of Sand: The Fall of Neve Dekalim (Mazo Publishers, 2007).
