Monday, March 12, 2012

I Know a "Settler" Family


I Know a "Settler" Family

These people are heroes, like the earyly pioneers who drained the swamps and built the foundations of the land of Israel. They are the builders.
From Giulio Meotti
They are the target for the arrows of Israel haters, both domestically and from abroad.


The media paint them as being separate from klal Yisrael. Their villages are branded “illegal”. They are vilified as a needless burdens on the “defense budget”. 

Successive Israeli governments offered them money to leave, like the anti-Semitic stereotype promoted by Joseph Goebbels, who predicted that if the Jews get a state they will sell it for money.

They have been chosen as Israel’s scapegoats, the ever-guilty, the Jewish State’s Jews. Their houses have been demolished, their children traumatized, their businesses ruined. They have been portrayed as those who take advantage of all those benefits the government threw at them: low taxes and subsidized housing. Their lives have been condemned to be reversible. A sinister equivalence has been created between their caravans in the wilderness and suicide bombers. Their human and democratic rights are trampled underfoot, their democratic rights disregarded. A blood libel has turned their houses into something even more urgent to dismantle than the Iranian bomb. 

Recognizing the “settlers”, Judea and Samaria’s Jewish residents, for what they really are – heroes – is the most difficult endeavor for any observer of the Middle East conflict. They are the Israelis who choose their place of residence by what’s best for the country, rather than where it’s more comfortable or stylish to live.
They are normal people, just persevering and tough, who see themselves as part of a work in progress: Israel. Their lives are a living statement: this is home and for this land we are ready to fight and lay down our lives. Whether in agriculture or industry, education or social services, their commitment is not just to themselves but to the land and people of Israel.

They are the salt of earth. They have lovely faces, glowing with solidarity and community spirit, and make the most daring soldiers in the army, just like the left-wing youth from the kibbutzim used to. 

They believe in Eretz Yisrael and not just in the stock exchange. The memory of friends and relatives who paid with their lives is almost everywhere around their towns. 

The hilltop teenagers, with their long hair flying in the wind, their yarmulkes askew, and their fringes peeking out from under faded t-shirts, are outstanding individuals, instilled with ideals that their government ministers can only envy.

Many of their mothers could be residents of any North American suburb: well-dressed, well-read, articulate, loving their children, and looking wonderful. They are resisting those who would like to make Israel like the “Hong Kong of the Middle East” and “a new Benelux”. They are the sentinels, the watchmen, of Israel.

They are heroes, because living across the Green Line never became a mainstream thing to do in Israel. They are like the early pioneers who drained the swamps and fought malaria as they built the foundations of Israel’s land. "Settlers", as their name really implies, are those who have planted the seed of Jewish rebirth in the land that Jews had been forced to leave uncultivated for centuries. They are the builders.

Mordechai and Shalom Lapid, who literally gave their lives to build Kiryat Arba and Elon Moreh, are like the four families who in 1891 made their way from Russia to take home in Hadera. They are the real promoters of peace. Because "settlements", not the so called diplomats, have tipped the balance of time against Arab rejectionism. 

Via an idiotic process of rationalization, some Israelis convinced themselves that they can cede what is “undesirable”. But no within-the-Green- Line community is immune. In Arab parlance, Petah Tikva too is a settlement. 

In 1948, the heroic resistance of isolated settlements - Mishmar Ha’emek, Ramat Yohanan, Negba and Yad Mordechai - held back the invading Arab armies from attacking the heartland of the newly formed and beleaguered Jewish state. Today this role is played by communities such as Itamar, Elon Moreh, Sussiya, Carmei Tzur and the 126 outposts built during the last ten years. 

They achieved agricultural breakthroughs by planting tomatoes in the sands of Gush Katif. They endanger their lives traveling to work or going to the dentist. On the Golan, they keep the roads open and the children of the Jordan Valley out of bomb shelters.

What other word is there for people who have lived where most Israelis even fear to tread, not only with little recognition, but increasing vilification from part of their own society? They arouse hostility for the same reasons Jews throughout history have been reviled - an unwillingness to compromise on issues of Jewish principle. 

I know a "settler" family living in Tel Rumeida’s Hevron, the round-the-clock Jewish target of terrorism and sniper fire. They have six children, the wife is studying about disabled children, the husband wants to become a rabbi and he takes care of the graves of Ruth and Yishai. This woman is a hero. She is a living, wonderful reminder to the world of what a Jew is. 

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/11379#.T10FL3JSR0U

No comments:

Post a Comment