I have to concur with much of what Eliakim wrote, except for one critical point. Every Shabbat our home is filled with youth. My children who are still in High School and their friends; older children serving in the Army or studying in college ... and their friends. In all our contacts we hear optimism and a kind of resignation to a long and difficult struggle, but no hatred. Sometimes frustration, often anger at certain violent actions of the police or abuses of the justice system, but never hatred.And what did Sharon's cronies imagine? Did they think that you can turn pioneers into refugees overnight, or the nation's best into dust without causing a severe emotional reaction? The Chief of Staff showing the same arrogance that he has shown ever since he was appointed to be the commander of the "disengagement", has not absorbed, and it seems, is not capable of absorbing, the full significance of the disengagement-the disengagement within the Jewish camp, disengagement from settlement, Zionist and Jewish values-disengagement from the land of Israel. This Chief of Staff threatens to close the Hesder Yeshivot, to throw out soldiers from the army, and to refuse to recruit youth who refuse to accept the fact of expulsion. One could think that he is so inundated with idealistic high quality youth that he can waste them. Just like the young men, advisors of King Rehoboam, he does not see how he tragically and irrevocably divides and destroys the kingdom.
Young girls and boys who saw how, in North Neveh Daniel (Sde Boaz), the police fired tear gas into a small narrow building into which youngsters had crowded and barricaded themselves, and the shocking result, are lost to the state forever. Try and explain to them the difference between the state and the government when they see the representatives and servants of the state mobilized against the very enterprise that they have been taught all their lives to believe as being the essence of Zionism. There is no cure for this rift.
One who sees, again and again, acts of destruction carried out by the government itself in the outposts and in the settlements - the abuse of a widow, her property and her babies in the middle of a cold night on Hill 26 in Kiryat Arba, the policemen's violence, the monstrous steel bulldozers demolishing intimate family dwellings, soldiers and officers hitting people with their rifle-butts what do they do to his soul especially if itÂ’s a young tender soul that has not yet been formed? Are the Mofazes and the Olmerts still capable of understanding what they are doing, how much destruction they are sowing in hundreds and thousands of young souls? Their advisors, the same glowing Ahitofel-like psychologists who with satanic efficiency prepared the psychological background for the expulsion, who knew how to change Jewish youngsters in uniform into robots and other youngsters, their victims, into crying rags; all these professionals are not capable of understanding the connection between the masked faces in the Hebron market and the souls that have become "masked" against the state, its laws, its rulers, its institutions and security forces.
What do the leftist "Israel haters", those who publicly long for the "Altalena" and for the "Holy Cannon" want? Do the want the cannon to fire upon and kill some of us and return the Leftist "hegemony" and rule for another couple of generations? If so, what should right-wing religious Jews who do not get killed by the cannon do, go away from here? Should they hide in rat-holes? The Left understands and knows so well to describe the process of "one who sows a breeze will reap a storm", in relation to the Arabs. The Left knows very well how to point out the hatred an Arab family feels when an Arab house is demolished and the expected natural reaction that must come as thunder follows lightning; the violence, especially violence which in the eyes of the victim is seen as being random, evil, unjustified and inhuman. What do they think, the wise-guys, Weisglass and "Abuvillainan? Do they think that Jews have no soul, no feelings, and no reactions, including irrational reactions? No anger and no grudges and loathing? No desire for revenge and even hatred?
I have seen the hatred of the Left for decades and have been left wondering how the national- religious do not hate, on the contrary, they keep on pathetically trying to capture the hearts of those who hate them. "Ahavat Hinam" (unconditional love) is the expression they have coined. No more. After the expulsion and with the shadow of more expulsions looming over us, I feel, for the first time, deep hatred on the part of the right-wing national religious. And there is no other certain recipe for destruction of the nation than the internal hatred syndrome, when Jews hate each other more than their common enemy. At the time of the Second Temple, the Romans were the enemy, now it is the Arabs before whose wondering eyes, the police and the army destroyed 25 settlements and is about to destroy Jewish dwellings in the market-place in Hebron where in the past Jewish blood flowed from the knives and the axes of the Arab pogrom.
It is only a step away before the Jewish police open fire on young Jews with rubber coated bullets and the next step will be the first Jewish fatality, G-d Forbid, from this side or the other, what's the difference? Its only a short distance. This can happen today in Hebron or tomorrow in Amona. At the beginning everyone will be shocked and in fear but they will get used to it and the civil war, (lit. war amongst brothers) will become something routine like it was in the days of the Sikirikin and in the days of Kamtza Bar-Kamtza, when in the end, the internal fire consumed everything.
Brakes were installed in cars to prevent sliding or rolling downhill out of control. Brakes and checks are built-in in society and government, especially in a democracy, to prevent events from going out of control. These checks consist of opposing forces in the system which can stop or at least slow-down unwanted events. The Americans have installed checks and balances in their system. To our regret, Sharon's one-man rule has neutralised the internal forces, which from the time the state was formed, during very stormy times, managed to check and control any internal destructive forces. Sharon installed new "diskettes" in the heads of the General Security Services, the Mosad, the Police, the Army and the bureaucracy and has turned them into robots. He has destroyed the Likud and the N.R.P., neutralised the settlers' leadership, dismantled Shinui, trimmed down the Labour Party and if the public opinion polls are to be believed, G-d Forbid, the country will be ruled by an unstoppable regime; a monstrous party called "Kadima" with no purpose, no logic and certainly no heart, empty of ideals, power for the sake of power. And the use of force will bring more force as a reaction until we Jews will be so sick of each other that the Arabs will have only to finish us off as the Romans did.The only question left to ask is: is there no one left among the elite, the academics, the rabbinate, the giant bureaucracy, the heads of the GSS and the Police, lawyers and the intelligentsia, who sees that destruction of the settlements is the beginning of the destruction of the state?
I cannot see my children raising a hand against another Jew. I know they have had to "defend" themselves against brutal police, but as well as I know them, I cannot see them willingly participating in a premeditated action to physically harm another Jew, even those Jews that deny their Jewishness (the black uniformed, skin-headed shock troops of the Israel Police, for instance).
Tell me kids , you read these musings of mine, am I simply naive?
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