Friday, August 10, 2018

Should Israel Revoke Citizenship as Punishment?

I recently read this: 

Judges have revoked the Israeli citizenship of three men jailed after being caught, for the third time, setting fires to forests in the Galilee. They will be deported to Jordan.

No, I didn't.

What I did read was this:

Judges have revoked the British citizenship of three men jailed for grooming young girls and they may now be deported to Pakistan.

Israel's Nationality Law reads

11.(b)The Minister of the Interior may terminate the Israel nationality of a person who has done an act constituting a breach of allegiance to the State of Israel.

If "grooming", by which someone, most usually a sexual predator, sets the stage for abusing another, usually underage girls, by gaining dependent trust using gifts or drugs, alienating them from their family and community accompanied by means that instill fear, is an offence that can have one's citizenship cancelled and then be deported, I think destroying state property is an equal crime.

This country suffered greatly at the hands of Arabs.  Zionism was not only having Jews return home, recreate their language and culture and provide a safe haven but to cause the earth, the land, the soil of Eretz-Yisrael to be rejuvenated and that the desert may bloom:

The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

As notedAaron David Gordon, in his 1918 essay, Our Tasks Ahead, wrote:

In my dream I come to the land. And it is barren and desolate and given over to strangers; destruction darkens its face and foreigners rule in corruption. And the land of my forefathers is distant and foreign to me...

Reclaiming the soil and causing it to give fruit and provide food is a Zionist mitzva, a commandment, of the highest order.

He who rejects that or seeks to destroy what we have created in this once desolate land is an arch criminal.

And he/she can deserve such punishment. 

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