Yes, I've gone nuts
This week, a resident of Kochav Yaakov made racist comments to a security official.(*) I was asked to respond to the incident right after it was reported on the radio. Agitated acquaintances, who say "we respect you even though we don't agree with your political opinions," also turned to me. It's terrible, they said; you have to condemn it. Silence is also a statement. You weren't heard responding to the female settler's curses in Hebron either. Have you gone nuts, too?
On Tuesday, in the studio of the Politika television show, they whispered to me: "Slip something in about that racist." (The show's discussion was on a bill that would prevent the Supreme Court from overturning Knesset laws.) Then, too, I didn't agree to discuss it.
The cursing woman and the racist man do, of course, anger me no less than they anger those who spoke to me about it. But something in my sense of justice - yes, justice -revolts against the prominence given to two negative and regretful, yet unfortunately routine and commonplace, incidents, just because they took place in Hebron and Kochav Yaakov.
The incidents took on the dimensions of a national rift, and those responsible were regarded as damaging the foundation of Jewish and Israeli ethics. All the women of the settlements seemed to become the cursing woman from Hebron. Otherwise, what public interest - as indicated by the incident's place as the leading news story on several television broadcasts - was there in the cursing, which is a routine matter among many other people in many other places?
The fact that the media came out against these two people specifically - and is not demanding similar treatment in hundreds and thousands of similar or worse instances that take place all the time - is a vicious phenomenon. That's why I refused to take part in this distorted attack.
No one is asking others to denounce people from their "camp" who carry out acts of murder, rape, or sexual or physical assault; who traffic in drugs or women; or who are involved in disputes with their neighbors that end in violence, not just curses. It is only with the settlers that the entire camp - more than a quarter of a million people - is responsible for the actions of all its individuals.
This week, for instance, three youths from the center of the country cruelly abused an elderly woman for three hours. They then robbed her and stole her jewelry. Of course, no one is considered an authority figure in the "social and ideological environment" of these sadists, who have since been caught. Although others have thus explained that I have a responsibility and obligation to apologize and acknowledge a moral deterioration among the settlers, and of course to condemn it, no one is regarded as having such authority over these youths. Only the cursing woman from Hebron, the racist from Kochav Yaakov and the children who throw stones at Arabs have a clear and defined geographic, religious, social, political and leadership
"address."
A year has passed since the traumatic events at Amona. The day of the evacuation, I was at Jerusalem's Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem. The radio stations incessantly reported the harsh violence of the settlers, who seriously wounded dozens of police officers, some of whom were taken by helicopter to Hadassah Ein Karem. The message was clear: The settlers are acting violently toward the police officers. After all, only the seriously wounded are taken to hospital by helicopter. Upon hearing the news, I left the patient I was visiting and rushed to the emergency room. All the wounded who had arrived there, some of whom I knew, were good kids from Ofra and other communities. I didn't find any police officers there. I moved on to the trauma ward, thinking that maybe they were there, but found not a single
police officer. Perhaps in intensive care? Only a youth with a smashed cranium was lying there.
That time, I initiated the call to the media. Although Army Radio was able to identify me, they refused to accept the information. We'll check and get back to you, they said. When they didn't get back to me, I contacted them again, saying: "You're broadcasting mistaken information. Please fix it." To no avail. The same thing happened with Israel Radio's Reshet Bet. As for the television stations, whose presenters read from texts describing police officers whose skulls had been shattered, even as the images showed mounted police cruelly using batons on young men and women, I gave up from the outset.
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(*)
The Yesha Council made a libel complaint to the police against the reporter and the newscaster as reported in today's Makor Rishon.
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