(quoting Amos Oz on Gush Emunim)
(Editor's note: The following article, by Arie Stav, editor of Nativ, Israel's premier literary and political journal, indicates the depth of despair felt by many who have struggled hardest for Israel's dignity, historical rights and simple survival.)
The outpouring of hatred for the settlers which filled the written and electronic media after the murder of Rabbi Shlomo Ra'anan in Hebron and of Harel Ben Nun and Shlomo Liebman in Yizhar can only be compared to the wave of hatred that flooded the press after the murder of Arabs by Baruch Goldstein in the Cave of Machpelah. This apparent paradox is a tragic illustration of the national crisis and depths of demoralization in which the Israeli public finds itself.
It's true that there is a huge gulf between the public and the media that widens as it becomes clearer that the media is a tool in the hands of the radical left that serves the enemy. But like a drug addiction that kills
The Hebron settlers and the settlers of Yitzhar are the true heroes, and maybe the last ones, of the Jews.
There are those who argue that this well orchestrated hatred for the settlers is an intentional operation by the Jewish Department of the Israel Secret Service (remember agent provocateur Avishai Raviv) intended to create an "appropriate atmosphere" whose purpose is to facilitate the expulsion of the Jews of Judea and Samaria....But the truth is different. Placing Jews who have been murdered, the victims of Arab terror, on the bench of the accused and morally identifying with the Arab hangman, who is portrayed as the victim, represents more than a total loss of moral scale. These phenomena are testimony to the draining away of the will for national survival in a public that no longer can bear to face the message and hence wants to kill the messenger. And after all, as the government crawls on its belly before the worst of its enemies, the little group of Jews of Hebron that sacrifices itself for a traitorous nation is the only living organ that still survives in the spiritual cadaver that Israel has become. And for that they shall not be forgiven.
The Hebron settlers and the settlers of Yitzhar, whose weapons were seized by a Jewish government which imprisoned them in ghettoes surrounded by a bloodthirsty Arab rabble, are the true heroes, and maybe the last ones, of the Jews. They hold up to us a broken mirror from which a deadly sick nation looks out, one that denies the purposes of its existence. And when those who want to annihilate it conduct a slaughter, they call their own murder a peace process. Therefore the settlers are not only a victim of the Arab murderer, but a sacrificial offering by their brethren; they are subjected to a Jewish anti-Semitism that permits their blood to be spilled. The collaborator, the informer, the traitor, who hover like an evil dark shadow on the margins of Jewish diaspora history, has risen from its hellish past and the settlers are its victims. They are declared outlaws and their blood can be freely spilled.
And how could it be otherwise? After all, they are the last normal people in the ship of fools that sinks to the accompaniment of dance music. Indeed it is a danse macabre. They are hated because they have not been brainwashed by the flood of lies and cataracts of stupidity that flow out of the idiot box in all of its channels, because their instinct for survival has not yet disappeared, because they still dare to love their country, because they recognize and hate their enemy and wish to repay him as he deserves. This is an unforgivable sin for those who are covered in the dust of self-hatred and who brand themselves with the mark of Cain. The blood of the settlers can be freely spilled because, by their very existence, they do not allow us to forget the disgrace of the abandonment of Judea and Samaria, the cradle of the Hebrew nation, and the essential core of Zionist yearning.
The settlers are hated in their death because by being murdered they compel us to wake up, if only for a minute, from the intoxication of the deadly peace poison and force us to look directly at the reality of the Oslo agreement in which the Jew sold his soul to the devil, in which he abandoned the land for which he had given his heart's blood -- in witness to which are hundreds of victims of "peace." And for shaking us awake from illusory dreams to the nightmare of the present, we shall never forgive them.
(Adapted from an editorial in the July-September 1998 issue of Nativ.)
Outpost - 6 - January 1999