_a.jpg "Photo: Gil Yohanan")
Evacuating the wounded in Amona
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Tragic day for Israel
Amona riot was a long time in the making – on both sides
To call yesterday's violence in Amona "regrettable" would be the understatement of all time. The sight of Jewish mounted police attacking Jewish teenagers, and the hail of rocks, eggs, paint and whatever else the kids could find that came in response might be the lowest point, not just in Israeli history, but in Jewish history.
But as the dust settles and the injured tend their wounds, it must be said that yesterday's riot at Amona was not created yesterday, or at the beginning of the week when the army declared the area a closed military zone, or even last summer during demonstrations against GK. Yesterday's outburst was the product of many years of cultural disengagement, incitement and a failure to self-evaluate on both sides.
No, instead of admitting humbly that "maybe we moved too fast," or even, "maybe we were wrong," Oslo personalities like Shimon Peres, chief negotiator Ron Pundak and long-time Rabin aide Eitan Haber continued (and still continue) to brazenly insist they were right all along, without a hint of irony or doubt.
Andrew Friedman is opinion editor of Ynetnews and a resident of the West Bank city of Efrat
Violent Evacuation
Hanan Greenerg
(VIDEO) Police officer tells Ynet following evacuation of illegal West Bank outpost, ‘I have been targeted by more rocks today than anywhere in Gaza or the West Bank’; IDF official: What we saw today was exaggerated, severe, and very worrying
Gun-toting radicals
For many, perhaps most, "green line" Israelis, Jews living in Judea and Samaria (and until last August, Gaza) are little more than gun-toting, violent, settler-terrorists. One need not turn to the hate-filled Amos Oz, the award –winning author and Peace Now activist whose venom for those (Jews) who differ from him drips from his political writings.
Even ordinary Israelis were unmoved by the Gush Katif operation, and the subsequent abandonment of 8,000 people that lost homes, jobs and communities has been of little interest to the country at large.
But long before Gush Katif, the Israeli left has tarred anyone daring to question the Oslo process, on either ideological (Complete Land of Israel) or practical (don't give barely repentant, and in some cases wholly unrepentant, terrorists guns) as far-right extremists, enemies of peace, radicals, and a million more epithets.
In the view of people such as Yossi Beilin, Chaim Ramon, Shulamit Aloni and others, there is simply no legitimate right-wing view, and no legitimate path to present that view. It's our way or the highway.
Unrepentant
And even when the right's warnings came to pass in September, 2000 there was little, if any, admission from the Oslo choir that maybe, just maybe, they should have paid just a bit more attention to the gun-toting radicals who warned against giving the PLO guns in the first place, and who called to reign in the process when it began to blow up in our faces as soon as the PA was established.
Amona Clashes
Border Guard officer injured lightly during Amona clashes says from Hadassah Mount Scopus Hospital, 'we encountered harsh resistance; settlers acted with force similar to that of IDF infantry unit. We are not the enemies of the people at Amona'
More recently Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remained true to his nicknamed and bulldozed not only the Gaza settlements, but anything and everyone in his way on the way to doing so. But rather than speaking TO the settler community that formed Sharon's main support base and with whom he shared more than 30 years of building and ideology, he chose to make an enemy out of his political opponents.
Sharon once said "The fate of Netzarim will the same as the fate of Tel Aviv," but when he decided to tear down the project, he never visited the towns he'd build and supported with his own hands to offered an explanation as to what changed between January, 2003, when he was elected on an anti-disengagement platform by a landslide majority and January 2004 when he adopted that very program.
Democracy-as-club
And while the pullout crowd screamed "democracy" to justify the Gush Katif pullout, there is a strong feeling amongst the anti-pullout crowd that Israeli democracy is little more than a club with which to bash opponents of a so-called "consensus."
Strictly speaking the process may have been legal, but the tricks and twirls Sharon was forced to do to make the plan come to fruition – firing government ministers who objected to the plan, refusing both early elections and a national referendum to decide the issue, and ignoring the results on his own Likud survey on the matter - made a mockery of that phrase.
And so along came Amona, along with the frustration, the fear, the anger and the helplessness of more than a decade of being outcasts from Israeli society, for little more than voicing a belief in the Jewish right to live in the Land of Israel and questioning the wisdom of dealing with terrorists.
On the other hand…
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine anything doing more to cement secular Israel's negative image of the settlers than video footage of 15-year-old kids cutting school (or worse, on officially sanctioned school field trips), stoning IDF soldiers and calling them Nazis, all in the name of The Complete Land of Israel.
And what about learning the lessons of evacuations past? It's nearly 25 years since Yamit was destroyed, and the scenes from that trauma – teenagers barricaded on the roof, struggles with security forces – have repeated themselves with appalling regularity at West Bank outposts, Gush Katif, Hebron last week and now Amona.
But have any of them got the idea that maybe, just maybe, this script isn't doing much to save the Jewish settlements they are supposedly meant to help? Yamit is gone, Gush Katif is gone, Amona is gone. Could it be time to reconsider the methods, if not the goals?
What about God?
And what about God? They can rail about those damn lefties all they want, but at the end of the day the largely-observant settler community is left with the most basic of all religious questions: If, as many residents claim, the settlements are an essential feature of a Divine plan that must be preserved at any and all cost, why, then, is God doing this, or at least allowing it all to happen?
The prophet Isaiah addresses this point: "Your new moon and festival celebrations have become disgusting to My soul" says God (Isaiah 1:14) – in other words, everything seems to be "going right" for a community in which people observe the Shabbat laws, keep kosher, pray thrice daily and give charity – but yet God seems to have rejected the mitzvot, and has handed the community defeat after humiliating defeat.
But, no, it's got nothing to do with us. Sure, we supported the bulldozer Sharon when he was bulldozing other people, we just didn't expect him to turn on us. People can complain about corruption in the Likud (and now in Kadima) Party, but the party was just as corrupt in elections past, and it never stopped the settlers from singing "Arik, King of Israel". Just keep the money flowing, King.
What a sad, sad, sad day.
