While on our campsite, we became a bit friendly with the family camping adjacent to us. It was a large group - the grandparents with all the children and grandkids - from the Ohr Yehuda/ Yehud region of Israel. They were not religious, but were traditional, and the grandfather wore a kippa.

One day, the grandmother comes over to us and offers the kids candy, showing us the package that it had a Badatz hechsher on it, and asking if it was kosher enough.

When chatting with her and her daughter, she asked if we had been "disengaged" as part of the hitnatkut. As we discussed it with her, explaining and re-explaining where we were from and just because we are religious does not mean we live in the "settlements" or in Gush Katif.

She really seemed ignorant, in a sense, about what the disengagement was and who are the "mitnachlim" - settlers - and who support them. Even after telling her that we live in Bet Shemesh, and lived there at the time of the disengagement, she had a difficult time understanding that we were not evicted from our homes, though we protested against it. And it was not just the grandmother - you could then say she is old and did not understand. Her daughter understood our explanation quicker, but she just as unsure as her mother.

I wonder if most people, from the hamon am, did not understand it, and still do not, and perhaps that is why they were not outraged by it. Yes, some supported it and thought it was a good idea, but I think a lot of people were ambivalent about it saying it did not really affect them, so they did not pay attention to the details.
It is hard to imagine, considering how much it was in the news, but this family showed me that they had no understanding, not even a basic understanding, of what had happened. And I wonder how prevalent that ambivalence and ignorance was.