“As a service to Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, here is a list of some of the organization’s members, as they appear on its website: Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel, Rabbi Yeshayahu Hollander, Rabbi Dov Stein, Rabbi Mordechai Rabinowitz, Prof. Hillel Weiss, Yitzhak Shadmi…”.
The quote is taken from the latest Haaretz column of Akiva Eldar, who is asking for an investigation about “an organization called “Neemanei Eretz Yisroel” (‘Land of Israel Loyalists’), which", he says, "is based in the West Bank settlement of Elkana”.
Eldar writes like a Stalin’s informer during the Great Purge.
He belongs to those Israelis who are now champing at the bit to see violence between the IDF and “settlers”. The extreme Left, which is in a tiny minority in the Knesset but has a majority in the media, harps on the threat of “Jewish civil war” and it is supporting the idea that the IDF might have to open fire on settlers. They believe that the army’s most important mission in Judea and Samaria today is to fight Jews, not the terrorists.
Three months ago, a Jewish father and son, the Palmers, were killed by a Palestinian stone hurled at their car near Hevron. But the media and establishment shock the following day was akin to a slight tremor compared to the earthquake-like reaction we saw following the “hilltop youth” assault on the IDF’s Ephraim regional division.
Recommendations like the one made by Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who called for shooting 'settlers', or political incitement like the one made by Akiva Eldar, will do nothing to quell the flames; such moves will merely add fuel to the fire.
This is the source of the Israeli Machiavellian ideology, which hates the 'settlements' and the 'settlers': “Let them fall and waste away by themselves, the more their lack of security increases, the faster they will themselves abandon their homes,” they say.
Sadly, Israeli democracy has yet to recover from the Rabin assassination and the Oslo obsession. That is when the hysteria against the national religious camp began.
Even the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was accused of disseminating the “betrayer, murderer” slogans hurled at Rabin in public.
The Left, who is now so diligent to spur the Attorney General and to perform a cynical dance on Rabin’s grave to incite against Israel’s majority which opposed Oslo and which paid the price in blood for that agreement, did not organize a single demonstration against the Arabs who murdered young Jews in the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv, in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, or in the Maxim restaurant in Haifa.
Neither did the Left organize a demonstration against the Palestinians who cruelly murdered the Hatuel family from Gush Katif, a pregnant mother and her four children, the Fogels in Itamar or the Palmers in Kiryat Arba.
The majority of the media downplayed those killings, since they are motivated by disdain for “the settlers”.
In the same context, it is not surprising that New York Times columnist Tom Friedman last week asserted that the ovations US Congress gave Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu were “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby”. I
f a gentile had written such words, evoking the horrible canard of a Jewish conspiracy manipulating US policy, he would have been accused of anti-Semitism. So, who is inciting against whom? The religious Zionist rabbis or the sophisticated journalist Friedman, who is a Jew and can therefore can only be accused of narcissistic self-love and of hatred for those who do not hold his stupid ideology?
Who is leading Israel into chaos? A few Jewish hooligans from the hills, who may have lost relatives in terror attacks who saw their friends and families expelled from their homes, and are spraying nasty slogans on mosques and military camps, or an entire Jewish camp who is asking to open fire on other Jews?
Who is verbally inciting? The Arab hatred, which has spread like a plague to all the Arab countries and has reached a peak surpassed only by the Nazi propaganda of hate against the Jews, or the "settlers", who are defending with their bodies the front lines of the state?
Who is threatening Israeli democracy? A handful of “price tag” guys or the partisans of a peace of shame, one in which Israel’s enemies dictate the terms of surrender to the Jewish state, like the Munich agreement, in which Czechoslovakia was forced to accept the terms of its surrender and destruction?
Who are endangering Jewish lives? Those who are rightly obsessed about Jihadism or those of the slogan “you only make peace with enemies”, used by the Jewish propagandists to sell Yasser Arafat to the public as a partner, in the same way as British journalists stood up for Hitler in the Thirties?
Who’s threatening the IDF? Some Jewish nationalists or the cynical left-wing guys who exploit the deaths of soldiers and their malicious “body count” mentality, which was for so long injected like a virus into the thinking of Israeli army?
Who is threatening you, Jews of the Diaspora? The idealistic and Zionist "Neemanei Eretz Yisroel" group or the whispers from the plethora of left-wing “peace envoys” who preach that Islamism must be appeased and Jews sacrified in the altar of assimilation?
Sadly, the Oslo Accord died the moment it was born. But its legacy of paranoia, tribalism and obsession continue to haunt the Jewish conscience.