The synagogue at Amona, after police broke in and removed activists that had barricaded themselves inside. Courtesy Arutz 7.
Hope will grow out of this difficult day and we will build a new community after the demolition of Amona’s homes. Out of the wreckage of Amona we will build children’s playgrounds throughout Judea and Samaria. As a result of the legal defeat, we will impose new rules in Judea and Samaria and legalize all the communities. – Naftali Bennett
Don’t kid yourself. It was a defeat. The Arabs and their Jew-hating European friends beat us, badly. They set us against each other, activated their anti-Zionist allies among us, played on our divisiveness and our weakness, and orchestrated, yet again, scenes of Jews dragging other Jews out of their homes in the land of Israel and then destroying those homes. The police were responsible for removing the “settlers” – horrible word – and the army will be responsible for destroying the structures, bulldozing the land so it will be difficult to tell that Jews lived there. One wonders who will be responsible for sowing the land with salt.
The Knesset may well pass the “regularization law” that will allow other communities with claims against them to pay a ransom that will keep them from being erased as well, but do you think the Supreme Court – the same Supreme Court that decided that the whole community had to be razed because about one-half acre out of 125 “belonged” to Arabs, who were given it as stolen property by King Hussein, the same court that at the last minute scuttled the compromise that would have allowed at least some Amona residents to move to a nearby location, because Arabs had claims on that land too – will allow the law to stand?
I have heard many versions of who is at fault here. The leftist Supreme Court, which has endless compassion for Arabs but not for Jews? The Netanyahu government which “didn’t stand up for” the people of Amona? The European-financed NGOs with multi-million shekel budgets, working day and night to impeach, weaken and delegitimize our country? The Knesset which didn’t pass a law with teeth to stop the flow of money to these treasonous organizations?
There is plenty of fault to go around, but it comes down to a lack of Zionist will. It is the result of not exercising the sovereignty over Judea and Samaria that was given to us both by God and international law (real international law, not the phony arguments of the Europeans who want to grant Hitler the victory over the Jews that he failed to win in the 1940s).
It’s our land, it belongs to us, the Jewish people, the original indigenous inhabitants of the land of Israel, and not to the descendents of Arab migrants of the 19th and 20th centuries, who don’t even have their own language, religion or culture (except for the culture of murder and hate that has grown up since they failed to kill or expel us in 1948).
If we don’t recognize this truth, if we keep on internalizing the Arab narrative of upside-down history in which we are colonialists that are occupying their land, in which there was no Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and in which the solution is for us to “go back to Europe,” as the mayor of an Arab village near Amona suggested, then there is no hope for the continued existence of a Jewish state.
It’s not possible to compromise with an ideology that says that we have no place here, and which more and more resorts to murder to prove it. And why should we? If a gangster knocks on the door of your house and says that it belongs to him, do you offer to give him the living room as a compromise?
Mr. Bennett may have something up his sleeve that I don’t know about, but it will take more than the passage of a law that won’t survive the next meeting of the Supreme Court to turn this around. The real solution is to do what we should have done in 1967, and take full possession of all the land that belongs to us.
May this be the last time, ever. It does absolutely nothing. Ever.
This is the comment to your two latest posts.
I am afraid that the matters are much worse.
In my opinion in last decades we observe the power struggle between the previous Israeli elite and arising new one. Speaking of elite I have in mind the political, intellectual, cultural, media, military/security and partly economical class with entangled interests, common ideological paradigm and certain population base.
We could say that the previous Israeli elite which in great extent laid the country’s foundation was secular, distinctly socialist in economic and cultural outlook and mainly of the East European origin. The Jews of this origin being then majority in Israel formed also the electoral base of the group. This generation started its activity in 20÷40 years of the XX century and gave a tremendous lot of highly motivated and very talented people in every field of the country’s life. The political and cultural monopoly of this group was in some extent shacked in 1970-ties by their also secular but more culturally conservative rivals from the Likud party which being also mainly Europeans relied on electoral support of the “mizrachim” – the Israeli Jews of the Mid Eastern origin.
As it commonly happens with the passage of time the patriotic and nationalistic drive of both the “left” (in greater extent) and the “right” group gradually decreased as they passed from the expansionist phase of nation building to the stage of retention. They formed a “system” which controls nearly all aspects of the country existence. The decline in motivation and idealism entailed corruption, hedonism and abuse of power.
Simultaneously with a degradation of the state’s “founding fathers” heirs the new, at first ideological and then also political movement appeared and started gradually to enlarge its impact on the country. I am speaking of course about national-religious Jews (the knitted kippahs). They always were a sizeable part of Israel Jewish population but politically at first contented themselves with the role of the junior partners in the ”left” or the “right” ruling coalition and did not pretend to have the independent vision of Israel’s future and destiny.
The things changed with appearance and expansion of the “settlement movement” – highly motivated ideological avant-garde within a broad segment of the national-religious population. This group nourishes much more ambitious aspirations with regard to defining of Israel borders, the relations with Arab minority and the most important of all – the nature of the Israeli state.
The “system”(call it the “deep state”, the “inner state”, whatever you say) quite early apprehended the growing ideological and political strength of this movement and defined it at first as a competing political force and at some later stage – as a political and ideological enemy who shall be destroyed by all means possible.
In my opinion this was at least one of considerations when Israeli political, security, legal, intellectual and media establishment went to Oslo. The purpose was to limit the growth of the competitor electoral base outside of the “green line” and to reduce its political aspirations. The cooperation with Arab terrorist factions – mainly FATAH – was seen as a “kosher” enough for attaining this goal. The piece agreement with a sworn enemy could become the successful by-product of this step.
In the next round of Israel internal power struggle the Jewish communities of the Gaza strip were destroyed by the state under the pretence of improving security for population and reducing the IDF overload.
The true objectives of this enterprise as well as some rationales behind the Oslo agreements are pretty well presented here an here.
And now we see the continuation of the same policy. How else could be explained two decisions of the Supreme Court of Justice which have followed one after another.
In first one the Court froze the relocation deal for residents of the West Bank settlement outpost of Amona effectively throwing them from their private homes under pretext of abiding the Arab ownership of some land in question.
In the second decision the Court overturned a Jerusalem District Court ruling ordering the eviction of Arabs who live on a Jewish-owned property in the east Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina. The court ruling said that “the home in question is the residents’ only place of residence and an eviction order would effectively mean throwing them out on the street.”
The message of the Supreme Court of Justice (which represents the “system” in all comprehensiveness) could not be more clear: the rule of low, democracy, human rights and justice are surely very important and even sacred for us but you guys have to understand who is the master here and to behave.