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Commentary :: Israel / Palestine
"You are not our brothers." Current rating: 0
23 Jan 2004
Editorial on the evacuation of an illegal West Bank synagogue from Ma'ariv, a mainstream Israeli newspaper which has just started an English edition on the web.
Not our brothers

Yael Paz Melamed

The signal was given. Hundreds of IDF troops and police officers, with a full complement of heavy mechanical equipment advanced towards the synagogue on the crest of the hill. Opposite them stood a small band of teenagers, trying to protect the abode of their Torah scrolls. The outcome was a forgone conclusion, there was no way they could hold off the army for long. Within three hours the building was in ruins, the dismantling of Tapuach Maarav complete.

Was this a victory for brute force over the human spirit? No way, within three hours hammers were refashioning the pile of wooden beams into another building. Tapuach Maarav had arisen from the dead.

This is a story of the worst show in town. The hard core of extremist settlers have leaned that the most effective tactic is to talk the line of the underdog when on primetime, and then, when the cameras have gone, act like veritable Samsons.

Whose heart would not go out to Orit Struk, young and attractive, with a small brood of children around their mommy? She seems soft-spoken until she begins a vitriolic outburst, berating the soldiers for evicting Jews from the land of their forefathers, reminding them of what the current day Amalekites are doing to the Jewish settlers of Hebron.

What merciful Jewish heart cannot identify with the settlers of Migron, surrounded by their adorable blue-eyed blond haired kids, pleading not to be evicted from the homes they have toiled so hard to build. “ Have pity on us, merciful Jews, we are brothers, how can you let them hurt us like his”, they cry out. One could think we were talking about Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof, about to be banished from his village of Anatevke by Tsarist police. The truth is that we are talking about a group of illegal squatters, who have been told to move by the army of the sovereign Jewish state.

The truth is they have no problem with hurting, as long as they are on the giving end. Beating up Arab traders in the Hebron market and destroying their livelihoods is fine, and to make it a complete mitzvah they will do whatever they can to ensure any decision by the government to compensate the Arabs will never be implemented.

A chasm divides these settlers from the Rabbi whose name they take in vain. As far as they are concerned it is their God given right to drive the local Arab population from the land. They believe that the violence is kosher, as long as Jews perpetrate it against Arabs.

Rabbi Kook would never have tolerated such behavior. In a letter he wrote to the principal of a school whose students had behaved rudely towards Arabs, he said “I was hurt and insulted by what I saw, both as a Jew and a human being. Our way is the path of peace and neighborliness”.

Any similarity between Rabbi Kook, and these self-proclaimed pupils of his is purely coincidental. These settlers would build their villas and gardens in the midst of an oppressed and hopeless Palestinian population, and keep thousands of their involuntary and unwilling Arab neighbors under constant curfew, so they can stroll at will along the deserted streets of Hebron.

It’s time to look them straight in the eye, and tell them as it is. “You are not our brothers, nor even our cousins once removed. You are trampling on our Declaration of Independence, and making a travesty out of all the values it stands for, human dignity, freedom, equality and justice.

So maybe you can do us all a favor. Leave us alone. Free us from the odious obligation of having to protect you so you can make mischief with impunity. In the name of Jewish solidarity you are making us party to acts we do not want to commit, in the name of an ideology that is repugnant to most of us.

Be gone, let us alone. We do not want you to be part of the collective "us" anymore.

(c) 2004, Maariv

@%<
See also:
http://www.maarivintl.com

Copyright by the author. All rights reserved.
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