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Women protest in Mea Shearim
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Hanoch Daum
Photo: Rafi Deloya

So who is more obsessed?

Op-ed: Hanoch Daum takes a look at radicals of different kinds, including leftists, rightists

So who’s more obsessed – the haredim in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim who block women who wish to enter the neighborhood, or the secular women who organize group protests and plan to walk into the neighborhood for spite?

 

I watched some video footage online last week: It showed a young woman trying to enter Mea Shearim, and a wannabe security guard preventing her from doing so. They started to argue. The woman wanted to know which legal right he was relying on to prevent her from entering. She arrived prepared, with a camera and some good arguments.

 

The security guard, a man with some sense of humor, told her that his neighborhood is like Iran, and that he knows this is precisely what she came to hear and also to create provocations, so she should just leave him alone and go home.

 

I looked at the woman and at the security guard. He represents dangerous fundamentalist ignorance of the worst kind; an anti-democratic doctrine replete with biased aggressions against women. Meanwhile, she represents the loudness of those who seek to fight and argue any way they can, thereby arriving at Israel’s most radical neighborhood just to pick a fight.

 

It’s a little difficult o decide who’s more obsessive (of course, objective justice, in terms of the arguments used, is not on the side of Mea Shearim’s residents.) Yet one thing is clear: It wouldn’t be a great pleasure to be stuck on a desert island with either the haredim of Mea Shearim or with the woman who arrived there for the purpose of picking a fight.

 

Idealists who went too far

So who’s more obsessed – Peace Now’s Dror Etkes, who keeps on monitoring at any given moment who built a new balcony at some remote hill, or the radical Right, which conducts its affairs through screaming and yelling (as opposed to the Yesha Council, who worked to allay tensions)? As if 2,000 housing units here or there would determine historical questions and the fate of the entire Zionist enterprise.

 

On the one hand we see a group of idealists; wonderful people who got carried away with their settlement narrative, and in their view the issue of caravans is more important than anything else: For the sake of these caravans it makes sense to topple governments, embark on wars, and quarrel with our best friends in the world.

 

On the other hand we have an idealist who views the settlements as the root of all evil and the reason for all the Jewish people’s troubles. He is convinced that if we only stop building homes in Maale Adumim, the Arab world would turn into a sweet pile of kindness and friendship, making the IDF obsolete.

 

Etkes dedicates his life to monitoring the settlers on Samaria’s hills. He runs after them, photographs them from helicopters, and walks around carrying aerial photographs at all times The settlers on the hills, on the other hand, provide him with the material: They dedicate their lives to building huts on more and more hills and isolated mountains.

 

It’s hard to know who is more deeply captivated by their conception, yet one thing is clear: It wouldn’t be much fun having dinner with either Etkes or Michael Ben-Ari.

 

 


פרסום ראשון: 10.03.10, 11:07
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