Insisting that until Oslo relations with local Palestinians were fine, she just doesn’t believe disengagement will ever happen. That analysis runs counter to that of many Palestinians who believe, with encouragement from the pronouncements of Mr Sharon, that the disengagement plan is an alternative to, rather than a precursor of, a much larger withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories.But it is echoed by a settler, Anita Tucker, 58, another former New Yorker, who runs a highly successful vegetable business exporting organic produce to Europe and the US. But asked whether he envisages the wholesale transfer of Palestinians from what he sees as greater Israel he retorts: “As long as they don’t try to kill us, I have no objection to their living here.” He adds that it is “not just a matter of 8,000 people who live in Gush Katif. If we go, all of Judaea and Samaria [the West Bank] will follow as will [the Jewish settlements around Arab] East Jerusalem”.

Intercutting bucolic scenes of community life in Gush Katif with sombre shots of the intifada, it features, with bitter if unspoken irony, film of Mr Sharon, the grandfather of the settlement movement, visiting the settlements in May 2001, promising that they are integral to “the defence of the state of Israel.” In another section a pro-settler Israeli theologian proclaims that the settlements in Gaza ­ illegal under international law ­ are an inseparable part of “Eretz Israel” and that “the forefathers Abraham and Isaac were active here”.Mr Saperstein makes no bones of his view that the Palestinians in southern Gaza could easily be sent to the Egyptian Sinai “a few kilometres down the road where they would find a paradise and be well looked after”. And his wife has taken part in a slick and professional propaganda video sent to each one of the 193,000 Likud members eligible to vote on Sunday. Whatever the outcome of the vote on Sunday, says Mr Saperstein, their fight will only just have begun. And if the ­ to them ­ unthinkable “yes” vote happens, that fight will include civil disobedience and “non-violent resistance”.Mr Saperstein has just returned from a highly successful fund-raising tour of right-wing Jewish organisations in the US. That is a statistical impossibility which can’t be explained by luck. If someone can provide a non-theological explanation I would be happy to listen. But I believe that because we are carrying out the biblical injunction to settle the land of Israel we are being protected.”Such faith against Qassam rockets and mortars, however inefficiently launched by Palestinians inside Gaza, is in the eyes of the Sapersteins, more than proof against a mere political plan of Mr Sharon’s.

“There is a Talmudic saying that the person who benefits from a miracle doesn’t recognise that he is benefiting from it.” He adds: “Gush Katif is 15 miles long and a mile wide There have been 4,000 explosions here and no deaths. Mr Saperstein survived a rocket attack in the Yom Kippur war in 1973 which left him badly wounded and, in 2000, a shooting attack by a Palestinian militant on the road to Ashkelon. Even more miraculous than her husband’s survival, however, says Mrs Saperstein, is the fact that some 4,000 mortar attacks since 2000 have not killed a single settler. “Something is happening in Gush Katif,” she says.Her husband goes further. And to say they have no plans to leave ­ despite the regular rockets and mortar attacks launched on the community since the beginning of the intifada three and half years ago ­ would be an understatement.For the well-educated Sapersteins, although proclaiming themselves entirely rational, believe they are under divine protection in return for settling in what they insist is as much part of Israel as Tel Aviv or Haifa. So as a reaffirmation of their belief in “greater Israel” and in response to a Hamas bombing on a Jerusalem bus on which their daughter was travelling, they left their comfortable and culturally rich life running a classical record business in Jerusalem and headed for Gush Katif. We are proud Jews and now our government was handing the country to murderers”.

And at the heart of it is Moshe and Raquel Saperstein’s home, adorned with many of the Brooklyn-born English teacher Raquel’s paintings, in the community of Neve Dekalim.The couple came to Gaza after the Oslo accords which envisaged most of the West Bank returning to the Palestinians. Gush Katif, where 70,000 demonstrators rallied earlier this week in opposition to the Sharon plan, is the spiritual nerve centre of the “no” campaign. And a low turnout could only boost the much more fanatical opponents of the plan at the expense of the, in many cases, lukewarm supporters.But to understand just what Mr Sharon is up against, you have to come to Gush Katif, a central block of Israeli settlements ranged in well furnished houses and gardens along the southern strip of the Mediterranean Gaza coast line and surrounded, behind electric fences, by the 1.3 million inhabitants of dusty, overcrowded, and impoverished Palestinian Gaza. Because much of this basketball-mad country would be glued to Maccabi Tel Aviv’s game against CSKA Moscow in the Euroleague semi-finals last night, it was thought the turnout would be low.