Wake Up!

(This blog will be updated roughly once a month. Please remember to return in four weeks' time.)

Don't the settlers see the writing on the wall? When will they wake up?

Every time a settlement is destroyed, every time an Israeli prime minister promises to surrender biblical land to the Arab enemy, "radical" Israeli settlers promise to... build another settlement.

But this campaign is absurd and is more obviously absurd with each passing year. If the Israeli government wishes to destroy settlements and surrender land to the Arabs, no amount of settlement building is gong to stop it. The ruins of Gish Katif is incontrovertible proof of that.

Netanyahu, it appears, will soon impose a settlement freeze. (For all intents and purposes he already has.) It seems clear that once Netanyahu sets this precedent, all future prime ministers will follow suit.

And what are the settlers doing to save their land, their country, their destiny? They let bulldozers destroy their outposts and then proceed to build them all over again -- until a few weeks or months later when those same bulldozers return and destroy them once again.

In a 1989 article, Meir Kahane said all that needs to be said on this topic. The (condensed) article below concerns the JNF, burned trees and Arabs, but just replace every mention of the word "tree" with the word "settlement," every mention of the word "Arab" with the words "Israeli government," and every mention of "JNF" with the words "settlement leaders" and the article all of a sudden becomes relevant on a whole different level:

I was depressed yesterday. Very, very sad. For I knew that they had burned my trees. As a child I had saved my money so carefully so that I could buy those trees and know that they were planted. And now they are burned....

Every week I would come to school and bring a nickel. And with that nickel I would buy a special stamp. A Jewish National Fund stamp. And every week I would paste that stamp on the figure of a tree which was part of a JNF poster, and which had twenty "leaves" on it. Each week I would paste my stamp on a leaf and at the end of twenty weeks, I had a tree! My tree! And I did this for years because I was a good boy -- a good Jewish boy. And I bought many trees. My trees. My Jewish trees.

And now they burned them. The Arabs and their intifada. Last year, within the sovereign State of Israel, that independent State which makes me so proud because it does not let anyone push it around -- the Arabs burned 1.15 million trees.... And I was sad.

But then I saw an advertisement by the Jewish National Fund which made me happy again and made me proud to be a Jew, knowing that the Jewish National Fund does not let anyone push it around. The JNF placed an ad that let the Arabs know that we are not the Jews of old. No one burns our trees. Well, not exactly. What the JNF said was that if the Arabs burn our trees, we will show them: We will plant even more trees than they burned. Anything they can burn, we can plant better. If they burned 1.15 million, we will plant that much and ten million more -- fully 11.5 million!

I was so happy. I ran to the bank to convert my money into nickels to buy leaves each week and plant new trees. I was so happy that the JNF had this wonderful idea until I met my neighbour. I never liked him. He is always so cynical and a killjoy. When I told him of the brilliant JNF idea to plant ten times the amount of trees that the Arabs burned, this dour wet-towel said:

"And what if they burn those? Will we plant 110 million trees the next time? And why should Jews have to pay again and again for trees that Arabs burn? Why not throw them out of the country? Why do we allow them to stay in the country if we know that they will burn our forests?... If the JNF wants money from me, let them demand that the Arabs be thrown out so that I will know that I pay for a Jewish tree once."

I never liked my neighbour. He is so cynical. He is so logical.

Please understand the message of this article as it pertains to settlements. The response to the destruction of settlements is not to build another settlement or to burn Palestinian olive groves (which is an altogether insane and cowardly policy) but to get rid of the government responsible for destroying them.

If the settlers don't change their approach, they will eventually witness Disengagement II. Impossible to uproot 200,000 settlers? That's what all right-wing "extremists" said about the 10,000 settlers of Gush Katif. If the only fight settlers put up consists of new settlements, bullhorns, tears, and passive resistance, they are doomed. Mark my words, they are doomed.

My dear friends: Please realize what's happening. Look around you, review the events of recent years. Matters are getting worse, not better. The Israeli government is increasingly becoming your enemy, not your friend. You will wind up in a compensation government trailer in Tel Aviv one day (whether it be 10, 20, or 50 years) unless you fight the entity destroying you. Please, wake up!