Plans for permanent housing for Jewish settlers removed from Gaza, after over ten months of bureaucracy, are now beginning to come to fruition, the Jerusalem Post reported yesterday.
As JPost reports:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged on Tuesday to start building new homes for 400 Gaza evacuee families in the Lachish region, between Jerusalem and Beersheva within six months.
“There is no limit to the area’s potential,” said Olmert as he visited the empty construction site in the South.
“I would like, not in one year, but already within six months to come here again to see the tractors working and to breathe in the dust, to see the foundations being poured and the buildings rising,” he said. “There is no reason that this will not happen.”
Government plans call for creating seven new communities in Lachish with approximately 4,600 housing units. About 400 of the units have been earmarked for Gaza evacuees still living in temporary homes.

This is great, however, as Arutz Sheva reports, at least a few residents are skeptical the governments’ plans of permanent housing will ever be carried out, with their representative saying, “our faith will return when we see the tractors at work.”
However, one can not gloss over the glaring discrepancy in numbers:

According to the Disengagement Authority, only about 200 of the 1,350 Gaza families who plan to build new homes have received building lots from the state. The lots in Lachish have yet to be formally assigned.

So let us do the math: 200 of the original 1,350 families have received building lots from the state. An additional 400 lots will be assigned in Lachish. Even if we will assume that all of the housing is two-family housing, this would still be housing only for 1,000 families. This would still potentially leave 350 families still without lots to build homes on, still in trailers or hotels, still without permanent housing, 18 months after the Disengagement.
And, remember, we are talking about lots, not one new home has been actually built for the evacuees.
Some residents want to be relocated into communities resembling the communities they left — they want to be relocated with their neighbors, leaving social ties intact. It is highly unlikely that all residents with such feelings will have their requests met.
Housing and Construction Minister Meir Sheetrit adjoined his own feelings to PM Olmert’s pledge for housing:

“There is absolutely no justification for this. With all due respect, this is not the way to run things. This could have all been approved in a day,” he said.

Could have? Only history will verify the veracity of that statement. But one thing is for sure, it definitely should have. Relocating over one thousand families with no destination, no plan B, and no talks of a destination (as there is over a half-year gap between the Disengagement and the beginning of the talks which led to this Lachish project) is irresponsible at best, a crime against the humanity of one’s own population at worst.
In addition, even with these new construction plans, many of the evacuees’ needs will still be left sorely unfulfilled. Disengagement Administration head Zvia Shimon noted that while the construction is welcome, “alongside construction we need to find solutions for employment, education and welfare.” “Still need to find a solution for education” — does this mean that hundreds of kids are still without permanent schools?
Is Olmert’s “new vision” too little too late for the relocated settlers?