As I watched Bush, Olmert and Abbas on television I looked to the walls next to our television and saw the bookshelves, where our books are overflowing on the shelves. Years of accumulation. I looked at the pictures on the wall, most of which have been painted by my very talented daughter. Years of activity.
And I looked straight at Bush, Olmert and Abbas and asked them: What is it about my house, my family, my community that is an obstacle to peace? What is it about our lives that prevents the Arabs in the neighboring villages from enjoying peace and security, from living their own lives. If my son gets married and wants to live nearby, should he be asking Abbas and Bush for permission to build a new house?
I have written a great deal about our right to this land, about the history of the conflict, about an alternative way to solve the humanitarian problems of the Palestinian Arabs. Today, I want to write about the people who actually live in this land, the so-called settlers that everyone loves to hate.
We live in Judea and Samaria and we love it here. We have taken rocky, barren land and turned it into a paradise. We have planted trees and gardens, built schools and shops and raised our children to love the land as we do. The world has gathered at Annapolis, in part to solve the Palestinian refugee problem. But, in so doing, they have put forward a plan that will create an enormous Jewish refugee problem.
I am not willing to be a refugee. I tremble at the thought of going through what my friends from Gush Katif went through. I came to Israel to set down roots in my own homeland, roots that cannot be set down by a Jew anywhere else in the world. I set down my roots in Samaria. I built my home on land that did not belong to any Arab, that had not been cultivated by anyone for centuries, on the same spot where Jews lived thousands of years ago. How dare anyone try and take that away from me?
(Kippah tip: Jameel via Sondra)
What is it about our lives that prevents the Arabs in the neighboring villages from enjoying peace and security?
ReplyDeleteIs it perhaps the soldiers, the fact that you never paid for the land, the torture, the extrajudicial executions or the Jew-only roads? Perhaps it's the attitude of you settlers- that Arabs can't have national rights in their own country because of something some Abraham person was supposed to been told by God about 4000 years ago. Maybe it's your arrogance. Or the fact that you consider them Untermenschen. Why don't you ask your neighbours how they feel?
Hi there Anon. Takes a lot of chutzpah to accuse someone (I didn't write the selected text in the post) of considering Arabs as Untermenschen, the same term the Nazis used against the Jews but I'm sure you knew that. It's the Arabs that have been killing the Jews because they consider them "children of death", and they did so in other Arab countries, for example, right after the declaration of the state in Syria, Iraq and North Africa where there were Muslim pogroms against Jews. What did these Jews have to do with what was happening in the Palestine Mandate? Why kill Jewish babies in Hebron in 1929? Why break into an immigrants hostel in Jaffa in 1921 and kill 14 Jews in the country a few months? Listen, Anon., if you are not an Arab, you are backing morally, ethically and historically the wrong horse in this race. What prevents their serence village life is their desire, urge, religious command or whatever, to kill Jews. They've been doing it for centuries, the did it under the Mufti El-Husseini, they did it under Arafat and just two weeks ago, perpetrated a drive-by shooting against someone they couldn't even see as it was on a dark road. They have even killed fellow Arabs out here because, as Israelis, they were driving Israel license- plated cars. In places where they haven't "been driven" out of, for arguments sake, they have killed us. Anon., nice try there but please make sure you get your facts correct before arguing.
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