Guest post:
About two hours ago Israeli forces entered Kochav Hashachar where I live in order to destroy again the outpost of Ma'oz Esther. Ma'oz Esther is named after our former neighbor, terror victim Esther (Etti) Ge'alya hy"d (may G-d avenge her blood), who was murdered at Rimmonim Junction during the intifada of the early 2000s. When the Youth for Eretz Yisrael, kids from Kochav Hashachar and elsewhere, set up the outpost, they named it after her. Like many outposts it suffers the fate of being destroyed repeatedly. But the wonderful youth of Eretz Yisrael , whose love for the land has no bounds, continue to build it up and resettle it again and again, and like it many other outposts. They don't take no for an answer.
Tonight our dear daughter Rachel Tehiya, who is named for Rachela Druck hy"d, murdered in a terrorist attack in 1992 while on a bus on the way to a demonstration against concessions to those terrorists. Our Rachel never gives an inch and rallies others to the cause of the outposts. So when she heard that military vehicles were coming into our community, she called on us to go out to the main circle at the entrance to protest the approaching destruction of a Jewish settlement by a Jewish army. "Go out and yell, make some noise, let them know that there is opposition," she told us. Our dear daughter has this way of being right remarkably often. My wife went out to lie down on the road. They picked her up and carried her off from the road and proceeded onward. I walked into the street to yell at the drivers of the vehicles. I didn't have a chance to protest much.
The soldiers bodily shoved me off the road. I was pushed against a low wire fence surrounding gardening on the side of the road. The wire scraped my leg into an ugly mess. I have chronic cellulitis, which means the skin on one lower leg is not normal, has circulatory problems, does not heal easily and is subject to infection if the skin is broken. I insisted that my doctor be called. She came and examined me while a miltary medic applied first aid. The doctor insisted that I be brought to an emergency room and be examined by specialist in blood vessels. The military (Mishmar HaGvul, border patrol) had plenty of personnel and vehicles to destroy an outpost and manhandle people, but no one available to transport an injured civilian to the hospital. The medic, wearing a kipa, put antiseptic on my wound and dressed it temporarily, all the while apologizing profusely for everything. He reported that he had repeatedly tried to transfer out of the unit but to no avail. He still has half a year of service left and is still trying to transfer. There are many good boys and girls like him in the service, often used as foils while others do the dirty work. So it was seven years ago in the expulsion from Gush Katif.
As I was sitting there getting bandaged, I told the medic and another boy about the brainwashing that preceded and accompanied the expulsion of 2005. Nothing has changed. It can happen again because the same regime is in power, the same followers of orders are following orders, the same leftist media brainwash the people, and the same leftist shrinks are shrinking heads for the defeatist agenda. Obama and Romney both agree that Jonathan Pollard should never see the light of day, and our Prime Minister licks it up and asks for more. I told them they should see the excellent film "Zohar Harakia", fictionalized story based on the well-documented preparation of the forces of expulsion.
You should all see the film. If it is not subtitled in English, it soon will be. It has already started to win prizes in festivals.
Meanwhile a medical student who lives in the community began to ask questions of the soldiers about the stuff being sprayed on the settlers in the outpost. It turns out that it was not teargas but pepper spray. The doctor joined the discussion as reports arrived vis cell phone of kids with burning skin and eyes. They were told that water and soap would wash is away.
"What about the eyes?" they asked. They were told that the kids should keep their eyes closed.
"They already have it in their eyes!" No answer. This is what they do to kids camping out in Eretz Yisrael.
We should all search our souls. It is not enough to merely protest, or even to disobey orders. They ruling oligarchy can always find willing accomplices while good men and women stand on the sidelines and protest while doing nothing to stop the evil. Others do even less. What have you done today to stop the dismantling of Eretz Yisrael?
As much as my leg bleeds, my heart bleeds even more. I don't know what to do except cry out to G-d and man. I wish I knew how to do more. Let us all get together to block these engines of destruction. Let all those Jews who sit in their gilded ghettos in foreign lands make aliya and join the struggle as soon as possible. Let those who are learning Torah learn a little more. Let those who are not learning start with a small and sustainable beginning and build up from there. Let those who are able to settle the land settle it. And may a redeemer come to Zion soon, speedily in our day. Amen.
6 comments:
goyish, thanks for posting
refuah shleimah
our youth has great energy, and great love for israel.
we destroy them when we teach that it is ok to build sans permits. get the permits, and build without end!
we have so much energy, lets focus it in an area where we can do some lasting good, instead of setting our youth against other jews and our state.
Very, very heartbreaking situation. After much thought, my belief is still: we can't be angry at sworn officers who are following legal orders. Otherwise, the situation becomes like Somalia. Even the Zealot government had cops who did what they were ordered to do. "Passive resistance" is still viewed (by the cop who now has to carry you) as getting in his face while he does his job. You can hardly contradict that it is a flavor of resisting a lawful order to disperse. And he has been (correctly, I think we agree) trained that resisting a legal order is in itself a crime. He thinks he's showing you mercy for not actually arresting you for the crime you just committed. Magavnikkim might be arsim or sachim, but if you didn't have arsim in the Magav, you'd get post-zionists or Leftists. At the end of the day, their (& soldiers) willingness to follow orders IS THE ONLY THING that makes Israel a State. To a cop, your attempts to resist an order to disperse put you in the same category as a hit-and-run driver. We all understand that it is not only the surgeon who has the duty to break the sabbath to save a life, but also guy who washes the floor of the operating room. So if you want better magavnikkim.... send your children to the Magav. In real life ONLY a leadership-by-example works. Writing things like, "the kind of people who join the Police" will not change the Police; it will only make them think you are stuck up. Of course, to STAY in the Magav, you might need to obey some (lawful) orders that you disagree with; for all we know, the Magavnikkim in this story WERE crying inside. But they did their job. Fasting on a fast day isn't fun either; you don't do it because you love to fast. You do it because you believe that otherwise the system falls apart.
Yeh, Alan. We shouldn't have been angry at Germany's Nazi soldiers for following orders, either.
Sure.
Thanks, Batya, for your words of encouragement, and Anonymous, Alan and Shy Guy for your comments. Civil disobedience is a tightrope, a "very narrow bridge". According to the IDF code of conduct for soldiers, it is forbidden to carry out an order which is immoral. The conscripted soldier, who is only in the army for a limited time and then returns to civilian life, has a broader perspective and can, if an independent thinker, ask the hard questions about what he has been told -- maybe. The career soldier, with years of training behind him designed to turn him into as much of a robot as possible, as well as the fear of losing his salary and livelihood, is much less able to achieve freedom of will in this regard. More specifically, these soldiers, policemen and guardsmen are specifically trained to dissociate, to fuzz out of real response to the humanity of the Jew who is being removed from his or her home and to work automatically. So this group is not likely to have such a heavy heart while carrying out such orders. They are also brainwashed into believing that the settlers are misguided people who put themselves and Israel in harm's way and they are doing us all a service by taking them out. As we saw from what happened in Gaza and we most likely will see soon from what will happen in Sinai, the policy of withdrawal is misguided at best. But you can't expect all soldiers to be wiser than Menachem Begin.
>> the humanity of the Jew who is being removed from his or her home and to work automatically
the day before, he may have been removing Beduin squattors from THEIR illegally-built homes in the Negev, or an Arab family squatting in E.Jerusalem. And believe me, all of the above had no real place to go afterwards. Those homes were also not "legal", but they also were homes. Full of children. Would you have preferred the Magav to sit around and "think about" whether removing those folks from their illegal home was "right to do", whilst removing you from yours was not to be done? See, you're already thinking like a Somalian militia war-lord.
Please note that at no time or no place did I advocate withdrawals. I completely share your belief that they are gigantic political mistakes in every way. I just don't think we need to diss the Magav. They were not established as a political police nor do they act as one. They are the Shock Force of the police. Every country has such a squad. Try rioting in Singapore or Switzerland, you'll be kissing nightsticks in no time. You didn't even get anything more than a baby bodycheck. They ==did== go more gently with you than they did with the Anarcho party animals in Tel Aviv a few weeks back.
Post a Comment