Lieberman: Right, Left, Center or Consistently Inconsistent?

It's pretty hard to pin a political ideology on Israel's Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman.

Avigdor Liberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party leading a news conference at the Knesset, May 18, 2016.
(Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Over his decades in politics here in Israel he has come out with a very wide range of policy statements which jump well across the political spectrum. Besides "consistent inconsistency," they are great headline grabbers.

Often he surprises with something out of Left field, like his offer of land exchange with the Arabs. He offered some of pre-1967 Israel for some of the Land we liberated in 1967. This shocked people, since he, himself, lives in Gush Etzion, placing his address and expected ideology to the Right.  And those on Israel's Right, and even Center, don't offer Arabs land that are part of sovereign Israel since the 1949 ceasefire agreement.

Lieberman's recent statement about only building in the main "settlement blocs" is not only a Left/Center stand, but it's common in Gush Etzion, which considers itself "consensus." I've written before how dangerous it is for all that they refuse to realize that the Left and most foreigners consider their homes no more acceptable than mine in Shiloh. They are in Lala Land, because the United States State Department and the United Nations consider all of the land we liberated in 1967, including Ramat Eshkol, Efrat, Elkana etc to be the same Arab status as Shiloh, Itamar and Hebron.

Basically, even more than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Lieberman sounds more Right out of power than in power. Since the Israeli voting public leans to the Right, when campaigning, Lieberman talks the talk, but now in power, he won't walk the walk.

Travel Dangers in Judea vs Binyamin

The other week when traveling with my daughter and her daughters to Alon Shvut, Gush Etzion to see the play "Sisters," we noticed something very surprising to us. On the Gush Etzion part of Highway 60, unlike the Mateh Binyamin section of the same highway, there are bus stops.

thanks to Ruth Jaffe Lieberman

Security authorities in our area, Highway 60 from Adam to Eli, do not permit bus stops on the main road. There are trempiadas, places one can wait for rides or offer rides outside of communities like Ofra or at junctions like Shiloh and Eli, but no public bus is permitted to have stops there. We, the carless, have to decide at times whether or not to wait for a bus and possible tremp inside at a bus stop, or wait for a tremp where this is no chance a bus will stop.

In Gush Etzion, the trempiadas on the main road,  Highway 60, are also bus stops, which can make traveling easier, but there's a downside to this. Highway 60 is a popular venue for Arab terrorists. They take advantage of the lack of real protection for innocent Jews. It's very easy for them to shoot and stab, since they don't have to pass through a security check to get to the bus stop. And as we all know, many of the victims of Arab terror at the Gush Etzion bus stops had considered themselves careful since they weren't going to tremp.

I don't claim to be a security expert, and didn't serve in the IDF, but I've been living in Israel since 1970 and in Shiloh since 1981, and I'm also a terror attack survivor, injured, too. But it seems to me that life in Gush Etzion would be safer if they kept bus stops off of the road. At least it would be harder for the terrorists to reach/harm/kill innocent Israelis.

"Five" is an Awful Number of Murdered Jews

I had always liked the number five 5. My birthday is the 25 (5x5) of May, the fifth 5th month. I also have five 5 children, bli eyin haraa.

Paramedics treating victims at the scene of a terror attack in Gush Etzion on November 19, 2015. (photo credit:MAGEN DAVID ADOM)

But yesterday five innocent Jews were murdered in two Arab terror attacks, and the number five is not looking so good. It's worse than tarnished; it's splattered with blood.

One terror attack was a stabbing by an Arab terrorist in Tel Aviv, and the other was a drive by shooting in Gush Etzion.

...A Palestinian who drove from the direction of the Kfar Etzion junction, machined gunned the cars, with an automatic rifle, before hitting a vehicle. Security forces surrounded the terrorist and arrested him......Earlier on Thursday, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed three people in south Tel Aviv, killing two of them and wounding another... (Jerusalem Post)

Are we supposed to be puzzled or warned by those two locations?

Tel Aviv and Gush Etzion-- until not all that long ago, both locations (the residents of them of course) felt supremely confident that they were not in danger. According to the wisdom of Tel Aviv, the Arabs only wanted land "conquered/occupied" sic since the 1967 Six Days War. That meant that places like Tel Aviv were immune, because in mind/mentality of the Israeli elite, Arabs could be convinced that they (the Israeli elite) are their allies in establishing a Palestinian sic state. And for the longest time, residents of Gush Etzion considered themselves much safer in the diplomatic sense at least, because they claimed a "consensus" of approval by successive Israeli governments that they would always be part of the State of Israel, unlike the Shomron, Binyamin or Hebron etc.

This recent so-called "Third Intifada" has proven these two myths to be lies. The percentage of deadly Arab terror attacks in pre-1967 Israel and Gush Etzion is very high, and I wonder if the residents and Israel's movers and shakers are willing to comprehend and absorb the bloody lesson the Arab terrorists are teaching.

The aim of the Fatah, Hamas meaning  PA-Palestinian Authority is the total destruction of the State of Israel replacing it with a Palestinian terror state. As far as they and their international supporters are concerned, there's no difference between Tel Aviv and Tel Tzion, Afula and Eli, Hebron and Hadera.

For the State of Israel to survive we must cease all support for a State of Palestine aka the "Two State Solution." And all of the Land still in Israel's hands must be fully annexed and put under full Israeli Sovereignty. The Death Penalty must be the only punishment for Arab terrorists whether they succeed in murdering or not. No more second chances!!!

The Real Danger to Israel

It seems like Arab terrorism against Israelis, Jews and non-Jews alike considering that one of the recent victims was a Druse, has again become a daily occurrence.

Photo Credit: Smiley Hafuch / Rotter.net

The IDF soldier, Almog Shiloni, who was stabbed by an Arab terrorist in Tel Aviv earlier today has succumbed to his wounds.
The attack happened around 12:15 PM on the bridge near the train station entrance on Hagana Street.
The terrorist from Shechem (Nablus) tried to steal the soldier’s weapon. During the altercation, he stabbed the soldier multiple times. (complete article n Jewish Press)

Scene of stabbing in Gush Etzion . (photo credit:MOSHE MIZRAHI- NEWS 24)

Palestinian stabs three people at hitchhiking post outside Alon Shvut settlement; attack comes hours after IDF soldier stabbed and critically hurt in Tel Aviv. (Complete article Jerusalem Post)

Yesterday there were two fatal attacks, a stabbing in Tel Aviv and a stabbing in Gush Etzion. Yes, Tel Aviv isn't immune to Arab terrorism. As I have said many times, the Arab Terrorists aka Palestinian Authority want Tel Aviv more than they want Shiloh. Stabbing is a much more personal type of killing than the recent fad of running over innocent people at crosswalks and bus stops.

As awful and dangerous as these Arab terrorists and their terrorism are, they aren't the cause of the problem to the State of Israel. They are the symptom.

The cause is the misguided Israeli "peace ideology," the claim that under the right circumstances, the right "deal" we can, in exchange for Land liberated in the 1967 Six Days War, make peace  with the Arabs.

The nicer we get, the more we offer the Arabs the more violent and dangerous they become. There won't be peace for us until we truly practice "zero tolerance" for all levels of violence against Jews and we state without any weakness that there will never be a Palestinian State and the level of autonomy the Arabs now enjoy will be reduced.

There must be automatic death penalty for all Arab terrorists and security forces must execute terrorists on the spot. Do not let them live and enjoy legal rights, education, medical care, room and board (prison) paid for by Israeli citizens.

• The State of Israel must expel all the ambassadors of countries that have recognized Palestine.
• And we must transfer our embassies from capital cities of all countries that don't recognize Jerusalem as our capital. 

Only simple reactions like these will show that we mean business. And only policies like I've listed will bring us true peace.

South of Jerusalem

We live north of Jerusalem, in Shiloh. South of Jerusalem is Gush Etzion. Even though the earliest of the post Six Days War returnees to our precious Land were similar, whether moving to Ofra or Alon Shvut, today there are enormous differences between Gush Etzion and Mateh Binyamin (the Benjamin Regional Council, where Shiloh is.)

There are many more Jews in Gush Etzion, and the housing values are tremendous. That's not just because the average home is larger.


Before I became an English teacher, over ten years ago, I worked "in advertising" for the regional phonebooks. There was no comparison. The Gush Etzion book was full of ads, large expensive ones, many from local businesses. My area's book was much tougher to fill, even though there were many more communities.


Gush Etzion is concentrated in a much smaller area, and most of the communities are just a few minutes from Jerusalem, while Mateh Binyamin is enormous, and the closest Jerusalem neighborhood, Pisgat Zeev is an outlying one, far from the city center, which can't be accessed by a simple sidewalk.

Within minutes most residents of Gush Etzion can travel to a local shopping center and visit the various yishuvim. Mateh Binyamin is spread between Latrun, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the Jordan Valley and Samaria. Our "shopping center" is an isolated spot in southern Binyamin, north of Pisgat Zeev. There's a big discount supermarket, health clinic, clothing store and a few others.


Many of our Gush Etzion friends built their large homes rather cheaply with local Arabs, even in some of the more ideological communities. Quick, easy access to Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh mean that the simplest homes are worth more than ours.

Egged bus company seems more "forgiving" than they are by us. When we were waiting for the bus to Jerusalem in Elazar, after the Bar Mitzvah, I was amazed to see the bus stop unlabeled and blocked off by a large garbage bin and cars.


If we would dare do that, we'd get hell from Egged and no bus.

All in all, I'm not sorry that we didn't move to Tekoa or Efrat, the first yishuvim we had seriously looked at. Shiloh is where I'm meant to be.

South of Jerusalem is...

Let's start with a very simple geography lesson. You've heard of Judea and Samaria? I live in Samaria, the Shomron, in Hebrew. It's north of Jerusalem. And Judea, Yehuda, which includes Gush Etzion and Hebron, is south of Jerusalem.


I like to keep things simple.


That means that Ofra and Efrat are not nearby, nor are Shiloh and Hebron.


I don't know that the custom is in other parts of the world, but in Israel, at the end of the school year, the school staff, in ours it includes maintenance as well as teachers and administrators, go on some sort of trip or walking tour and end up with a "dinner."



That's what I was doing yesterday afternoon, evening, actually until pretty late. We, the staff of Yeshiva High School Mateh Binyamin, went south of Jerusalem to Kever Rachel and Gush Etzion.



For me, the most complicated thing was just getting to the bus, since it was leaving from Beit El. I made a whole bunch of useless phone calls to try to arrange a ride. But since I was determined to get there and have a good time, I finally just left my house and hoped for the best.



After waiting a bit for the Egged bus to Jerusalem to show, I caught a ride with a school bus going to Ofra, on the way. I exchanged pleasantries with the driver, an old friend. Suddenly a felt the bus swerve a bit and a little white car bounced in front of us, hitting the heavy bullet-proof bus and flew away, towards the rocks on our right.



Ooop! The driver slowed down carefully and backed up to see what had happened. Other cars had already stopped. The car was on its side in the ditch/shoulder, and it seemed that the passengers had been able to get out. The bus driver told me that he had seen the little car trying to overtake us, though we were in a "no pass" area. Cars were coming in the other direction, and the little white car had no where to go, but fly like it did. We couldn't stop safely without causing cars to crash into our rear.


The cars behind us and going the other way had already stopped and the emergency team from Ofra, arrived within seconds, so I caught a ride to the Beit El T junction. I tried contacting the school to tell them to pick me up there, when another teacher stopped in a car and told me to get in.



So in the end I was about the first to get on the bus in Beit El. We picked up various teachers on the way. The first stop of our tour was Kever Rachel. Many of the teachers hadn't been there for years and were horrified by the wall which surrounds it.



One told me:

"It's a good thing I read your blog or I wouldn't have been prepared for the shock."

From there we went to Gush Etzion, where the guide told us that it's even higher than Beit El. The winds certainly were the worst.


From there we went to the "Alon Haboaded," a large tree which had been visible from Jerusalem during the 19 years between the destruction of Gush Etzion and the rebuilding after the Six Days War. I found the incongruity of the Arab vineyard next to it with the claim of "return" very disturbing.




Next we experienced the well-produced Sound and Light Show in Kfar Etzion.



After that we had dinner at the "foot" of Efrat, in a rustic setting, catered by "Shifon," Neve Daniel. Of course, we're all familiar with the original "Shifon Bakery" in Adam, near us.


Then a neighbor drove me home, straight to the door.

Baruch Hashem and Shabbat Shalom.