Dear Settlers

w w w . g u s h . s h a l o m - o r g

Uri Avnery
27.8.05

Dear Settlers --

"Dear" in the most literal sense.

At long last it must be spelled out, without hypocritical pity, without "if" and "but".

We have paid billions of shekels in order to settle you in the Gaza Strip. We have paid billions to keep you there, and most of you have lived there at our expense. We paid billions to defend you, and dozens of soldiers, male and female, lost their lives doing this. Now we are paying billions (Eight? Ten? Twelve?) to get you out of there and pay you generous compensation.

But all this is not enough. Again you are shouting. Again you are being robbed. Again we owe you much, much more. Whole stretches of the country, preferably on the sea-shore, to be especially reserved for you, so that you can resettle "as whole communities". So that you can live separately. So that you can have your own separate schools. So that you can draw government salaries as employees of the local council, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Defense.

I don't know whether the Guinness Book of Records awards a title for champions of impertinence, cheek, impudence - in short, good old Jewish chutzpah. If so, you should win it hands down. In the past we only owed each of you a luxury villa for next to nothing, as well as a source of livelihood, land and water, now it seems we owe you everything. It is your right to help yourselves from the money needed for the sick, the elderly, the handicapped, the children, the unemployed. Because you are the best of the best. Because you are holding on to the beard of the Messiah. Because you were personally chosen by God.

I might have some sympathy for your plight, if you had uttered one word of compassion for the inhabitants of the 1500 Palestinian homes that were destroyed because of you, a greater number than all the homes of the settlers that are being destroyed now. If you had expressed any compassion for the children that were evicted from their homes within half an hour, without compensation, without hotels and psychologists. For the thousands of trees uprooted in order to supply you with "security".

As the good Rabbi Hillel said 2000 years ago, when he saw the skull floating down the river: "Because you have drowned others, you were drowned?"

And please remember: the bill is not being paid by "the State", an anonymous body, but by me and the Israeli readers of this column, out of our own pockets.

( Read more... )

Suffer the children

It’s so strange…. Is this some sort of liberal Jew zeitgeist? Why is Ayelet writing column after column addressing the same things I have been pondering? She is trying to win me over. It’s working though – read this one. Plus she was in HABONIM-DROR, and originally from Toronto, so I am going to guess…

Gesher, once, Gesher twice, holy jumping Jesus Christ!
Shit, hell, God-damn, son-of-a-bitch, SHIT!

Ah, the halcyon days of summer…..

http://www.salon.com/mwt/col/waldman/2005/08/29/gaza/index.html

Suffer the children

I was disgusted last week as I watched some of the Gaza settlers using their children as pawns. Then I realized that I fill my kids' heads with dogma too.
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By Ayelet Waldman

Aug. 29, 2005 | When one settler family was forcibly removed from their home in Kerem Atzmona in the Gaza Strip last week, the patriarch put a sign on the door: Judenrein. His wife instructed their children to walk with their hands raised above their heads. She had sewn orange stars on their lapels. Their dramatic and scripted exit was clearly meant to evoke the famous 1943 photograph of the little boy surrendering to the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Some of the members of the Israeli army who were supervising their removal wept. Had I been there, in uniform, I'm not sure I would have been able to refrain from hauling the parents of those children out of the house by their hair, and giving them a klop on the ass for good measure.

The treatment the settlers received from those Jewish soldiers was so thoughtful, so judicious, so tender. The officers in command of the evacuation spent hours negotiating with the settlers, listening to their ravings, before gently escorting them away. And yet, over and over again we heard the settlers analogizing their suffering to the massacre of millions during the Holocaust. Dikla Cohen of the settlement Neve Dekalim said, "I feel that today was a pogrom."

Are these people so blinded by their fanaticism that they believe that the trauma of relocation can be compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar? Are they so benighted that they believe that being given a quarter of a million dollars in compensation for your house is akin to watching a Nazi soldier spear your newborn child on the tip of his bayonet? ( Read more... )