Last night the army sealed off Gaza. No one but security forces and people helping with the eviction can go in now. It’s finished. Jews who have lived there for thirty years have to leave. Their presence became illegal overnight.

Today they were served eviction orders.

The policy set forth by the army and the police was to be empathetic with the settlers today and tomorrow, sympathetic and kind while serving them their eviction orders, offering them as much help as they need to pack their belongings and leave within forty-eight hours. Then on Wednesday, the mood will change. While the forces will continue to show restraint, the settlers that remain will be forcibly evicted, still sensitively, but with great determination.

There were heart wrenching images on TV all day: A woman crying on the shoulder of the army officer who had just served her with her eviction order; the tough looking commander of the famous Golani regiment listening compassionately to the passionate monologues of demonstrators, including a very tearful ex-officer of his, and then hugging them; a lovely young couple in a very modest home receiving their eviction order sadly, telling the young soldier boy and girl quietly that they wouldn’t be leaving of their own accord. But you could see that they would not be violent. Such a sweet, quiet young couple. You could see that they had no violence in them. You could see that when the time came, the soldiers would just carry them out.

Even if you are pro-disengagement, this is not a happy time; this is not the time for satisfaction or a feeling of victory. These people’s whole world is collapsing around them. I watched on television as an army troop marched into the almost completely deserted settlement of Nissanit. You could see an army jeep roll by. Watching those soldiers marching in reminded me of other pictures you often see on the TV, and that’s when it hit home. Suddenly I could understand what the settlers have been saying again and again in recent days.

What will be happening in the next few days is that the Israeli army will become an occupying force in villages where loyal, law-abiding Israeli citizens live, and the Israel army and the Israeli police will be turning these loyal, law-abiding citizens out of their homes.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you know I believe we have to go through with this, like it or not, whatever the consequences; you know that I have long believed we would have had to do this sooner or later, that it is inevitable; and you know I do not believe in tolerance for law-breaking, and I think these people should just pack up and go by themselves.

But I’ve had this big lump in my throat all day.

Suddenly I find I have this niggling admiration for those who will not leave on their own, even though it is so worrying. And I realize that there is a lesson for all of us here.

No Israeli has the right to turn his head away, to turn off the television, to pretend it isn’t happening. We must see it all. See without judgment.

We owe it to the settlers that we see them holding on to their beloved homes till the very last minute, at the price of losing a large part of their compensation, at the price of mentally scarring their children, even though it means that the evacuation will be so much more difficult and perhaps prolonged. We owe it to the brave young soldiers and police men and women to witness them evicting the settlers, as kindly but as determinedly as possible, doing our dirty work for us.

We must watch the settlers making their last stand. We must hear what they have to say, even if we don’t like them, even if we think they should never have been there in the first place. And most important, we must look inside ourselves at that lump in our throat. We must not try to avoid it or ignore it or pretend it isn’t there, however difficult and unpleasant this may be. And if we can’t feel it, the lump, we must ask ourselves why not.

Because that lump in our throat is who we are and what we are doing here.

We Israeli bloggers writing in English often discuss what it means to be Israeli. Perhaps this is what it means.