Director : Joel Blasberg

Film Summary
On August 15th, 2005, the Israeli government began the evacuation of 8500 people, 1800 families, from 21 Jewish settlements (known collectively as Gush Katif) in the Gaza Strip, and four settlements in Northern Samaria. The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was an event of major significance to Jews around the world, but was also of such import to the rest of the world that 4000 journalists applied for press credentials to cover it. In one of the harshest tests ever faced by any modern Democracy, young Jewish soldiers and police were faced with the extraordinary task of having to remove fellow Israeli citizens from their homes and synagogues and schools, forcing them to dismantle their farms and industries, uproot their graveyards, in the hope that this unilateral act of giving would serve the Israeli national interest.

The arguments for and against the withdrawal split Israeli society and made it one of the most painful events in the history of the State of Israel.

Withdrawal From Gaza lends perspective and history to the issue of Gaza and Gush Katif, by showing to what lengths the Jewish people would go to enable peace, the risks they would be willing to take, the price, in heartbreak, they would be willing to pay. This is less a political film than a chronicle of the last days of a world, a community, and a way of life that was destined to vanish, and disappear into the desert from which it sprang.