The Last Exile

Ynet News:

Arabs and leftist activists staged an attack on Palestinian fields in a bid to accuse settlers of vandalism, an organization that claims to have documented the incident says. The photos were made Saturday by Tazpit Unit members, an organization identified with the settlers which documents news events in the territories. Tazpit says that these staged attacks were meant to falsely accuse settlers of attacking Palestinian land.

The photos, taken by members of the Tazpit Unit, were shot on Palestinian land Friday, near the Neveh Tzuf settlement. The images allegedly show Palestinians and left-wing activists cutting down Palestinian olive trees using an electric saw. Many so-called “Price Tag’ acts targeting Palestinians were recorded in the last few weeks, and the settlers now claim they were staged by the Palestinians themselves and intended to harm the settlers’ image. Tazpit photographer Ehud Amiton, who documented the vandalism act on Friday, says that this is exactly what can be seen in his images.

(…)Tazpit unit director Amotz Eyal said that “during every olive harvest season, just like this one, there are many cases of Arab farmers cutting down olive branches, later blaming it on the settlers.” “Time after time photos prove that these Arabs are not holding back; they provoke in order to tarnish the image of Jewish settlers,” he said.

Any you know, the whole strategy of crying ‘the settler cut down my olive trees’ pretty much works well for the Palestinians.

**All photo credit belongs to Ehud Amiton, Tazpit Unit

Stageleft probably wasn’t reading me in 2007, and so, for his sake I am republishing a post on the interesting twists the whole ’settlers destroyed my olive trees’ meme has taken through the years.

Inevitably, the minute one posts that Palestinians damaged the crops of Israelis farming in Samaria or Judea come cries of protest from the usual Palestinian apologistas. Apparently, a number of professional Palestinian apologists think there is some kind turnabout going on and believe it is all in the interest of fair play.

Apparently, Israeli settlers have been cutting down Palestinian Olive trees on a fairly regular basis. So much so that it has become a real growth industry among Palestinians. As a matter of fact, the Israeli daily Maariv carried a report on this unique Palestinian growth industry last December (2006). Luckily for the professional Palestinian apologists Maariv carries no English translation. Fortunately, the Israeli Insider did carry this summation of the article for the international Anglo community:

Maariv NRG reports that Palestinian youths were caught in the act as they were cutting olive trees illegally, claiming they did it at the request of the owner of the grove. Forest inspectors caught the youths axing the trees, shedding a new light on frequent complaints by Palestinians farmers that settlers cut their trees in an attempt to hurt their livelihoods.

In the past, as a result of such complaints, IDF soldiers and police have been called on to protect the Palestinians farmers in the territories during the olive harvest season. But the police suspect now that in some cases the Palestinians themselves are the ones cutting the trees and then blaming the settlers in an attempt to get compensation from the Israeli Civil Authority.
(…)
Sources in the police said that over the years the police have experienced a phenomenon of the filing of complaints to the Civil Authority regarding the destruction of olive trees, along with a claim for financial compensation. In the last year alone the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria filed claims for 350 thousand shekels ($75,000) for the destruction of olive trees.

The police said they now intend to check the complaints in detail. A senior source in the police told Maariv NRG that “most of the complaints for damage to olive trees were filed in recent years at the end of the harvest season or towards the end, something that increase the suspicion that this is a cooked deal.”

Gee, here’s a newsflash. Anyone who will not hesitate to kill you and sanctions the indiscriminate use of suicide bombing to kill grandparents, parents, babies, children, teenagers, et al at the ice cream/pizza parlours, restaurants, hotels, markets, malls or a buses will not hesitate to lie, cheat or steal.

Now I am not going to insist that every destroyed olive tree owned by a Palestinian in the disputed territories is a product of Palestinian imagination or even malfeasance…but until the perqs are actually caught – we do need to be extremely circumspect in casting blame or fault. Even more so now that Israelis setters are no longer content to remain deaf to every libel or slander.

I haven’t paid much attention to the Catholic Church and its’ hierarchy in recent months because, well, I just don’t care unless they diddling school children or screwing Jews. Apparently, screwing Jews out of their birthright still looms large. Ynet News:

Asked about the passage at a news conference, Greek-Melchite Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros, said:”We Christians cannot speak about the promised land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people. All men and women of all countries have become the chosen people. “The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,”

Why does everyone, but everyone; think they speak for G-d? As for me and mine, until we receive notice from a higher authority than a representative of Catholic diddlers-r-us advising all covenants are null and boid we will continue to believe everything is still on the table and spiritually enforceable. And that’s the real beauty of a stiff-necked people.

Richard Falk is right and it has been something I have been telling people for years – maybe people will finally believe it since Falk is saying it rather than me. Jerusalem Post:

Israel’s West Bank settlement construction has made the formation of a Palestinian state an almost impossible task, said Richard Falk, a UN representative on human rights in the Palestinian territories, on Friday, AFP reported. A Palestinian state “seems increasingly problematic as a solution because it would require a substantial reversal of the settlement process,” said Falk.

Falk reported to the UN General Assembly that it would also be very difficult to make east Jerusalem the capitol of a potential Palestinian state. “The extension of the Jewish presence in east Jerusalem by way of unlawful settlements, house demolitions, revocations of Palestinian residence rights, makes it increasingly difficult to envisage a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem.” “You have to disconnect between an inter-governmental peace process and an illusion that at the end of this process is an independent sovereign Palestinian state,” Falk told reporters.

The Israelis removed under 10,000 Israelis from the Gaza Strip and have yet to fully re-house or fully compensate everyone so realistically how will an Israeli government removed nearly 500,000 million Israelis from the disputed territories?

Speaking of East Jerusalem…if the presence of Jews in East Jerusalem is ‘unlawful’ what was it when the Jordanians cleansed Jews out of East Jerusalem in 1949?

One more little point to ponder. The Israelis proclaimed western Jerusalem as their capital in 1950 but to date it is not recognized by almost any other government in the world as the capital of Israel…and yet, the same world bodies insist only the Palestinians have the right to claim Jerusalem as their capital in and for their non-existent state – now just why is this?

Last night, I had one of those annoying conversations with a friend wherein you wish you had never bothered to call. We didn’t argue per say but it was like everything we had to say to each other just rubbed the wrong way. Okay, true confession time – the Mid-east came up and I was challenged when I began a statement which started like this – ‘After the re-birth of the Israeli state’…he got stuck on the whole concept of ‘rebirth’ when applied to ‘Israel’. The conversation went downhill from there.

Now my friend isn’t particularly political and could care less what happens in the Mid-east as he is far more rooted in living out his day to day life to bother with what is going on tens of thousands of miles away. In most things, this is a relief. It occurred to me afterwards that much like the Palestinian narrative – my friend really didn’t quite grasp the fact that the modern state of Israel was the ‘rebirth’ of a state rather than ‘birth’ of a state.

I don’t think we emphasize enough two salient facts concerning the Israeli-Arab conflict in the Israeli narrative which is that Jews are an indigenous people to the region and the establishment of the modern state of Israel represents the ‘rebirth’ of a nation-state. This confusion appears to come from the fact that being Jewish is not just a matter of religious conviction like being a Buddhist, Christian or a Muslim but a distinct ethnicity as well. One can very easily be Jewish and not religiously observant or even anti-religious. Lord know, there are enough Jews around who are distinctively anti-religious and it is one of the few religions where ethnicity plays a vital role in maintaining religious identity.

Even in the conversion process to Judaism, it is not enough to adopt the religious rituals or a matter of learning the appropriate prayers but one has to intrinsically join Jewish nation as well. The conversion process becomes a marriage to the entire Jewish nation wherein the concept of divorce should be an impossibility. Off the top of my head, the only other religion which I can think which blends religious observance with ethnicity is the Druze. Of course, the Druze refuse to allow conversion. One is born a Druze and no choice is ever allowed.

The Palestinian-Arab narrative deliberately denies the indigenous nature of Jews to the region and the fact that the modern state of Israel represents the rebirth of the ancient Israeli state rather than the ‘birth’. It takes a special kind of arrogance to insist on a building freeze in land which has historically been called Judea for millenniums or to refer to Israelis as ‘colonists’ or ‘occupiers’.

If I can accept the fact that Palestinians have been living in Eretz Yisrael for generations and made a home there; why cannot the Palestinian narrative accept the indigenous nature of Jews and the relationship to their homeland? I suspect no amount of peace talks or even any piece of paper proclaiming peace will end the war against the Jews until there is widespread acceptance of the indigenous nature of the Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael by the Arab narrative.

I actually meant to post this yesterday and I got distracted with the endless possibilities for me to practice goodwill….much like I have already been this morning.

For millenniums, Jews have practiced some form of ostracism and/or banishment from the Jewish community to deal with those individuals whose behaviour has crossed red lines in any given community’s standards. I have a friend whose father sat shiva (ritual mourning for the ‘death’ of a loved one) when she was impregnated by a non-Jewish man. One can argue till the cows come home whether the practise is feasible, practical or even humane, but regardless, the practice is a valid tradition and/or custom in Judaism when an individual infringes the community’s standards.

All of which brings me to this Arutz Sheva report on the Israeli authorities attempting to interfere and intimidate religious leaders on matters concerning Jewish law.

Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, head of the Temple Institute in Jerusalem, and Rabbi Dov Stein of the nascent Sanhedrin initiative,  a rabbinic court  modeled after the supreme religious judicial body of sages that meted out justice during the Temple period, were arrested for over two hours of questioning today. The issue: Religious rulings they handed down a year ago.

The rulings in question concerned a teenaged girl, Tzviyah Sariel, who was arrested a year ago during the eviction of residents of a Jewish settlement outpost in southern Binyamin named Ramat Migron. Though normally such arrests end after a few hours or a day, in this case the girl refused to recognize the authority of the  court. She stood by her belief that in the Land of Israel it is incumbent upon a Jewish court  to render verdicts according to law rooted in Jewish tradition. She therefore refused to speak in court or defend herself in any way.
A religiously observant police investigator, Chaim Toledano of Ofra, asked that her remand be extended time after time, and a religiously observant judge, Miriam Prives Lifschitz of the Jerusalem Magistrates Court, complied. The two of them were ostracized to varying extents in their respective communities because of the way they treated the young girl.

The Honenu legal rights organization and the girl’s mother, Mrs. Ruth Sariel, turned to the Sanhedrin on this matter. Acting as a religious court, the Sanhedrin summoned Judge Lifschitz to a hearing, but she did not appear. The Sanhedrin’s court later ruled that the public must relate to Toledano and Lifschitz in accordance with the rulings of the Shulhan Arukh [the traditional Jewish Law Code] regarding those who do not abide by religious court rulings, trample Jewish Law, and cause harm to fellow Jews.

Rabbis Ariel and Stein, who signed the rulings were recently questioned by Israeli authorities on the suspicion of having shown contempt for the Israeli law system. Let us forget about the folly of attempting to establish a new Sanhedrin without the consent of the majority but what I more or less know to be true is that you can pretty much get multiple of conflicting rulings on any given point of Jewish law as long as you keep your pool of rabbis large. To launch a police investigation hinging on whether or not a rabbi has contempt for Israeli system of laws is simply beyond the pale in any free society and for the state of Israel to attempt to subvert or intimidate religious leaders for issuing psak din on any given issue is simply unconscionable in the homeland of the Jewish people.

Less than 24 hours after the Israeli Prime Minister left Israel to go the United States to participate in the ongoing peace talks four Israeli civilians were murdered in an ambush as they drove on highway 60 outside the Hebron area.

Their deaths were inevitable. It is a cycle, a pattern, we have seen it play out over and over again as peace negotiations begin. Every time it happens, there are official announcements from all interested parties that the participants will not let these deaths deter them from continuing negotiations which lead nowhere quickly.

Why this time should be different from any other talks when the Palestinian leadership is represented by the weakest leader the PLO has ever produced, a leadership camp which fractured and fraught with competing and conflicted interests should produce a different result than all the other xxx times peace talks have commenced; beyond my ability to engage in irrationality. And the Americans this time around are no better. Ynet News is quoting US Assistant Secretary of State Phillip Crowley as saying:

“We also are cognizant that there may well be actors in the region who are deliberately making these kinds of attacks in order to try to sabotage the process,” he said.

All of which goes to prove he just doesn’t get it. These aren’t actors, actors pretend to kill people, but are instead Israel’s neighbours and alleged peace partners except they are not prime for peace but war.

As a show of …good faith – the Palestinian Authority has rounded up 200 suspected Hamas members in the West Bank. Personally, given the area and its’ history, I would suggest rounding up the Palestinian security forces for interrogation would be a far more fruitful endeavour for appending the murderers. Colour me cynical, but using the ambush as a pretext for jailing one’s political proponents doesn’t strike me as taking one for Team Justice and Peace.

Ha’aretz is reporting Labor Minister of Defense Ehud Barak is suggesting Israel is willing to cede part of Jerusalem ahead of negotiations – and this after the murder of four Israelis. It just might be in Israel’s best interest to cede Barak to the Palestinians instead. It certainly couldn’t hurt.

What Bibi needs tell Obama is simply this; He is ready to meet the Palestinian leadership after the Palestinian have worked out their internal matters, and the Palestinian people are prepared for peace, real peace, which includes painful compromises on their part - as otherwise there is simply not anything to negotiate or even say. Time to go home and bury the dead and fortify Yisrael for the next round.

Until then, let’s shelve the two-state peace talks and explore the possiblity of a one state discussion.

Update: The Jerusalem Post carries an interview with this young man.

In a place where there are no men, strive to be a man. (Avot 2:6)

I found this cool graphic for my side bar from My Right Word and shamelessly commandeered it. Basically, it’s a show of soldarity/support for Israel’s Naval Commando Unit 13.

This is one of those posts in which I don’t have a great deal of comment (I wish to share at this time). I have been following this story as it developed (dig deep in the archives). This post serves as a benchmark for me but its a story which should be told. Yoel Zilberman’s gave this address to a Jerusalem conference recently and Arutz Sheva was good enough to translate it. There is a video but its in Hebrew and its without subtitles. I think its an incredibly important speech, perhaps even the most important one any Israeli will give this year. I don’t want to shorten it or attempt to summarize it. I will leave the contact details at the bottom.

Three and a half years ago, just after the operation in Lebanon, for those who remember – the Second Lebanon War,  one could say even during the course of the Second Lebanon War, when missiles were falling in villages in the Galilee and an Arab girl was killed by a Hizbullah missile that hit her village, her father called his daughter a shaheeda (martyr). In the Galilee. Not in Judea and Samaria or anywhere else in the world. At that time I was a combat soldier in that operation, in the army. And there was a feeling that we’d lost the war. The main feeling was that the nation felt weak; the nation felt that it was not making it. Ehud Olmert summed it up when he said: “we are tired of wars.” 

A short time later – my father, who has a herd of cattle on a 5,000 dunam area north of Tzipori in the lower Galilee, sits us down to Friday supper and tells us: I am bankrupt. There is a tribe of Bedouins that has been cutting my fences for many years, invading my territory, threatening to murder me, slaughtering cows on my property and generally doing whatever they want. I have filed 240 complaints with the police. And nobody even looks in my direction. He simply told us, his family: ‘I have decided to abandon 2,500 dunam. I can’t hold on to this territory any more.’

At the time I was at a crossroads, about to start an officers’ course in the army, and I told my father ‘over my dead body, this is not going to happen.’ We organized, me and several friends from my army crew, we bought an old Renault Express, and started visiting the territory. There are some dignitaries here who have already visited me there to see the container-on-wheels we lived in for two years. In the past year we upgraded it to a caravan. Everything is legal, the authorities signed the paperwork, because we understood that in the Galilee, the laws are a little different.

We put up an Israeli flag and we brought some books – only books on Judaism and Zionism. And we started going to the fields every day after operations and training, to guard the land, fight the Bedouins and make them leave. When we would call the police, the policeman on duty would tell us: ‘if you call me one more time I am coming to arrest you.’     

There are 15 authorities in the country – police, Border Police, JNF, et cetera – that do not have the guts to do their job on the ground. Now, in the course of this process three and a half years ago, I learned that when one talks to the youth in the Land of Israel – by the way, I am not religious and I come from a nonreligious social background, like most Israelis – when you talk to young people in this society, and ask them ‘what story to you know?’, they can tell all of you the name of the brother of the cousin of the grandmother of Harry Potter; but when you ask them ‘who is Rambam?’ [Maimonides] – they can’t even tell you if it is the name of a hospital; and if you ask them if they know what the names Berl Katznelson or [Yitzchak] Tabenkin or [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky stand for [early Zionist leaders, ed.] – the best case scenario is that they will say ‘a street in Tel Aviv.’

And you come to understand that this generation’s oxygen and strength are mostly ‘Survivor’ and ‘Big Brother’, the ‘reality’ TV shows – that is what gives them their insights and  thoughts and connection to the Land of Israel. And that is why in the end, when cracks form, the vacuum [is filled by] the other side. I don’t care about the Arabs per se. They could have been Filipinos or any other nation. There are  Israeli Jews do not feel that the Land of Israel belongs to them, and that is our story. 

And from my father’s story, as I started guarding the territory and living there, I start hearing dozens of stories about kibbutzim and moshavim that have already abandoned their land, after Bedouins made their lives miserable for dozens of years.

Three  years ago, Kibbutz Kfar HaNassi abandoned 4,000 dunams. Simply left the territory. The Bedouin village Tuba-Zangaria has already invaded the territory and is building illegally. Kibbutz Amiad – 13,000 dunams. Moshav Alonei Aba – 2,000 dunams. And the stories continue.

Then cattle herders and agriculturalists start coming to me and saying ‘Yoel, save us.’  Amir Engel of Tel Adashim who survives an attempt to murder him. Motti Peretz of Har Tur’an in Beit Rimon who survives an attempt to murder him. And you suddenly realize that these people are truly alone out in the field. And on that same day we decide to organize and form a group. [Former President] Yitzchak Ben-Tzvi wrote in his book ‘The History of the Haganah’ that when the state abandons its citizens – and by the way, it is not just abandoning them, it is torturing them and making sure that they lose their strength – he says, those citizens have no alternative but to unite and learn to defend each other.

And at that moment we decide – the whole group of guys. And they are all guys who served in the army. Most of them were in special units. And they all love this country. They are all happy to live here. None of them is confused. They all know the [Talmudic] phrase ‘know from whence you came.’ They know their story and know where they are going. And from this we decide that we will form something called the New HaShomer. Because we are not inventing anything. Because 100 years ago there was the same group of Jews here that arrived in the Land of Israel and the same type of government was torturing them too. And we understand that at that moment we are renewing the concept of mutual responsibility. Of people who come together to save a person.

We have more than 600 volunteers now. Guys who give between 7 and 20 days of reserve duty annually. Who come up to the agriculturalist or cattle farmer and say to him – ‘go sleep at home with your wife tonight, we are guarding the territory. Because it is true that you are making money off of it but it is ours. It is our story. And when you meet these cattle men who tell you: ‘my wife says, either we divorce or you leave the land,’ you simply save these people.

We have seven pre-military academies and yeshivas whose students regularly come to these lands and guard them. Young people who join these agriculturalists and work with them day to day.

Last week we made history. Maybe you have heard of pre-military academies like Eli or Atzmona and such, or the pre-military ’service year’ for guys who finish high school. We have over 230 candidates, boys, for whom we held very difficult training, to find the twenty or thirty guys who will live like King David, as we like to say. Every group of 8-10 guys will live on an outpost and be in charge of a flock of sheep.

They will study Torah in the morning. They will study Zionism in the evening. They will learn Arabic so the [Arabs] will understand we do not delude ourselves that we live in France or Holland; they must realize they are in the Middle East. And these guys with the flocks of sheep, and the Full Contact training and running and training, will bring back the courage of the Jew in the Land of Israel. The Jew who observes more commandments and the one who observes less, they are all the same to us. And in the end you see deep, long term processes. People join. By the way, some people come to do guard duty and some contribute – either their money or their assistance with equipment of some kind.

Everybody feels that they want to be a part of this thing. And this thing keeps growing: every week at least 60 people join. We hold three to seven lectures a week. We get 3-6 requests for help every week. A guy called Oz Davidian from the Negev called me a year ago. He told me – ‘Yoel, three weeks ago, three Bedouins came. They found me alone in my ranch and they beat me half to death senseless with metal rods. Why? Because. Because he holds 1,500 dunams and they want him to stop holding them. Three weeks later, he says, the same Bedouins come and steal all of his sheep too. He says to me: ‘If you do not come here tonight, these guys will murder me.’ In this situation, I bring along three volunteers from the North. We do not have a car, we hitch rides at 2:00 AM and arrive at his field. I find a person who is a pile of bones. Anorexic. He hasn’t left his farm for four months. He couldn’t leave his farm. He has a court order forbidding his young daughter from visiting him there because it is dangerous. In the Negev.

I sit with 20 pilots in the Negev. At Nevatim Air Base, between Arad and Be’ersheva. 20 pilots. Arrowheads. They tell us that their base commander forbids them from traveling on the road from Arad to Be’ersheva. Why? Because Bedouins throw washing machines and boulders on the road, the cars stop suddenly. They take the soldiers out of the vehicles and they beat them up. So they are told to drive to their base a roundabout way, through Dimona.

I always say that the fortified walls that protect our land are the open spaces. The fortified walls of Jerusalem are the cattlemen and agriculturalists with the 4 million dunams of state land. That is what protects our country. Whoever thinks that ‘the state of Azrieli [a Tel Aviv shopping mall]‘ will save us is confused.  

And from all of this we see that by 2015 we will have more than 2,000 guards, at least 6,000 total volunteers, and at least 30 nucleus groups like I described of 8-10 pre-army guys with the sheep on the land, going back to the roots, and relearning their own story, and not being confused by anyone, and then there will be no cracks and confusion, and the entire world will know who this belongs to. This includes the Arabs by the way. They are simply waiting for us to tell them – ‘this is ours.’ They haven’t understood this yet. They are waiting and with the help of G-d, long term processes will make this happen.       
        
HaShomer HaChadash can be contacted through Philip Bar-Yosef at bigshraga@hotmail.com.