What We Have to Put Up With

Just recently we had Tomy Lapid lambasting us as those who recall to him exactly how his antisemitic neighbor used to curse him and scare him when he was a little boy.

Next now is Danny Rubinstein of Haaretz who doesn't like the way we react to our Arab neighbors' life situation. Here:-

In the settlers' community, life is exemplary. There is a high level of solidarity and mutual aid. This is perhaps the only place in the land where drivers pick up hitchhikers. The settlers pay great attention to the details of life in their settlements, especially with regard to religious matters. They ask their rabbis whether there is a risk of slander in one act, or of theft in another, at least when it has to do with their colleagues. But if these things have to do with Arabs, it is a different story. Then they are insensitive and cruel.

Every day, as they drive on the roads, the settlers see the distress of their neighbors from the villages suffering at the roadblocks and trailing along the tracks in the hills to scrape out a living, or to get to a field, to school or to a clinic. Their claim is that it is all the fault of terror. And when they are told that it is wrong to punish an entire population, they say anyone who feels pity for the cruel will end up being cruel to those who deserve pity.

Danny, after being called pigs, monkeys and pygmies by some of these people, after being stoned by them, after having my bus set alight in Ramallah by a Molotov cocktail, been shot at, having my neighbors, including a 5-month old, killed by them, let me say that my sympathy is a bit out of sync. I am so sorry.

I am so sorry that these people have, since 1920, denied our right to a homeland and rioted and slaughtered us.

I am so sorry that they have placed their trust in Muftis, Immams and preachers. And in one Yasser Arafat.

I am so sorry that they refused the offer of autonomy of Menachem Begin.

That they refused the Olso process and began suicide bombing.

That they refused Barak's offer at Camp David II.

But, come to think of it, I am not really that sorry that they have refused our reaching out to peace because I now know that their intent is not peaceful.

So, until the people, the sha'ab, realize that there's another way out of their mess, one of coexistence and coming to terms with the Jewish national rights, I am not going to feel guilty by your base and manipulative conclusions about our behavior and our attitude out here in Yesha.