They’re certainly not doing what I would do, and normally one might not fault them for doing what they think they need to do for security. The problem is, they’re not even of a like mind. The resignations of Sharansky and Netanyahu are very telling. (The fact that this coincides with the Three Weeks/Nine Days, a less than fortuitous time for the Jewish people, is further unnerving.)
Once upon a time, Israel was hailed as the only democracy in the middle east. IMHO, this is no longer the case. If King Arik I will not allow an election to determine the future of the lands, nor will he allow peaceful protests, this is not a democracy, it smacks of the old Soviet regime.
In answer to the topic, no, the government is not doing the right thing, they are not keeping the promises made when Yamit was destroyed, led by none other than Arik himself.
I received an email from my daughter-in-law in Gush Etzion yesterday saying the latest rumor is that they plan to stop food and water from entering Gush Katif once Tisha B’av is over. Some democracy.
No, the disengagement will most definitely NOT solve the problem - it is causing more problems. I was horrified at the surrender of weapons by the Gaza residents! I understand that they were trying to make a political statement, however, they are putting their families at risk - who is going to protect them from the terrorists? The IDF (who is ordered to remove them from the land that is flourishing from THEIR labors)?
IMHO, the government needs to be replaced. I believe what is needed is a mass aliyah of millions of Religious North American Jews who will throw the vote in the right direction. This government is causing division among Jews - is there any hope for the world if Klal Israel can’t live in peace together? I pray that the IDF soldiers who have a conscience will have the strength to follow it.
The Arab terrorists have proven that if you give them an inch they’ll take a mile - and they are not interested in anything other than every inch of our Holy land. Regardless of what comes out of their mouths in English, they want nothing less than to drive all of us into the sea. Their “government” is not willing or able to rein them in, so what is the point of “negotiating” with them? Is this situation any different than the classic case of a terrorist holding someone hostage, and when the negotiators give in to their demands the terrorist still kills the hostage?
Yisrael must take a firm stand against Yishmael - we need to demonstrate to Hash-m that our trust is in HIM. Why should the Holy One (Blessed Be He) assist Klal Israel when there are Jews among us willing to give away HIS gift to us?
I’m amazed at us, religious Jews, who all of a sudden use the argument of “democracy” in order to advocate a stand on the issue of disengagement.
Since when do we care about democratic votes when it comes to political decisions? Don’t we go to a RAV to ask his opinion and follow it, no matter what the majority thinks? Don’t we have something called “Daat Ha Torah”? Do we really care about what the rest of society thinks? Is that democratic?
What would you say if there were a plebicite on the disengagement from Gush Katif, and a few other questions were added to the questionaire such as the need for the Rabbanut in Israel? Would you say, let’s be democratic and dissolve the Rabbanut as well (assuming it was to be voted down)? What about another question such as public buses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem on Shabbat? Would your ‘democratic values’ be offended if the buses were not to start operating on the Sabbath? (assuming most Israelis voted for public transportation to operate on Shabbat, as I think they would if given the option.)
Finally, if you are so interested in democracy, it seems that the majority of Israeli citizens are for the disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
You may be for the disengagement or against it. But as a religious jews we do neither practice nor advocates democratic values when political/religious issues clash.
Pinhas.
New York
I agree to an extent, but I think your strokes may be too broad. Have all the gedolim spoken out with a single voice? I’m sure you are aware that there are frum communities that actually *applaud* the disengagement. So, even if one does consult his Rebbe before forming an opinion - then what?
Personally, I’m against the disengagement. I think it’s a tragedy. I don’t think any good will come of it. But so what? I can’t change it. The democratically elected government of Israel is not the Sanhedrin. They may do lots of stuff that we may not like, but they are within their rights to do so. At the end of the day all we can is voice our dissent, unless we pick up and move there. Then we can vote!
Whether the disengagement is a “tragedy"*** or not, only the future will tell.
This is not the issue which I’ve been discussing.
All I’m saying is that there is NO democracy in religious/political clashes. The Jewish religion is not democratic.
I’m objecting to the invoking of so called democratic values into the argument, when we refuse to accept democratic decisions (if/when they came about) on other topics.
I gave as examples two more questions, in which anyone who knows the mood of the Israeli public would agree, that were they put to the test, “democracy” would dictate outcomes that are totally against our grain. (There are many more such issues).
So, in my opinion, “democracy” should be left out of the discussion.
Pinhas
New York.
***IMHO, the “tragedy” is that young boys and girls grow up with total disregard to the importance of the State and its laws. They grow up with some of their elders (including some Rabbanim and Roshei Yeshivot) teaching them that if they “got arrested they won” (won what??). They grow up seeing some of their friends calling soldiers and policemen ‘nazis’, and slashing the tires of their vehicles. A 13 or 15 year old boy or girl should not burn tires and block major highways, which risks lives. But someone drives them to these spots. Surely they did not drive themselves to the highways which they blocked. This is tragic.
Furthermore, a bigger “tragedy” is that those who object the disengagement, the vast majority of whom are religious, have given legitimacy to the refusal of orders to serve.
It will blow up in our faces when, in the not too far future, secular Jews will refuse to serve in Hebron, for instance. Up to now the ‘refusinks’ of the Left were almost ‘excommunicated’ in Israeli society.
But from now on, it will be more and more accepted. Jut look at the site of “Arutz 7” and see how the religious (right wing) media glorifies the “refusniks”. An officer who got fired because he refused orders, got a check of $1000 upon his release from the army. Isn’t that a tragedy?
Finally, the majority of Israelis, who are not religious at all, will ‘disengage’ themselves from those that are identified with the religious right wing. They will simply say to themselves: “We simply don’t care anymore”.
And that is the greatest tragedy.
Pinhas
New York
Above, there’s a post that, among other ideas, states that ...The resignations of Sharansky and Netanyahu are very telling....
IMHO
The resignations of Sharansky and Netanyahu prove nothing.
Netanyahu has cared only about himself and his political/business ambitions. When pressed, he gave in to US pressure on Hebron and other issues. So who is he to criticize another Prime Minister? All of a sudden he’s a ‘Tzadik’ with an active conscience? If he really cared so much about the settlers, he should have resigned a year ago, like Liberman did. I’m totally unimpressed. Netanyahu is at least consistant on one aspect: Bibi does what’s beneficial for Bibi. And he believes that he’ll be able to defeat Sharon at this juncture for the Prime Minister’s position.
Sharansky is even a sadder issue. Yes, he was a prisoner in the Soviet Union. But when he became Israel’s Minister of the Interior (or was it Immigration?), he opened the floodgates of immigration to almost every ex. soviet citizen. And he did it for political expediency, because he thought that they would vote for an ex-Russian. J’accuse him (and Liberman) for many of the social ills that afflict Israel right now, including the high number of non-Jewish immigrants, prostitutes and Mafia figures who now own Israeli passports. And who were the people who worked with him on this endeavor? The extreme left of Israeli politics (Meretz)---How funny could that be.
They had their cynical reasons for doing so of course (my speculation is that they saw the Russians as a balance to Shas).
Sharansky has just recently run for the post of the head of the Jewish Agency.
Why not! It’s a great job, good money, first class travel all the time and many more perks....Thank G-d he lost.
Pinhas
New York
The answer to the two questions: Is the Israeli government doing the right thing? Honestly, I don’t think so. Will the disengagement solve Israel’s problems? My answer is NO!!! My question is: Why are they been moved? What is the purpose of this movement. Doesn’t this land belong to the Jewish people anyway, according to Scriptures and the prophets?
I believe my statement regarding democracy was misunderstood. True, decisions made by a democratically elected government must be followed. My complaint was with the lack of the freedom of speech to protest. However, at this juncture in time, the point is moot. Nonetheless, it is my prayer that Sharon get’s what is coming to him (Condeleeza Rice). :-S
The whole public atmosphere here is so charged & there is so much rancor that it makes me heartsick. Those who oppose disengagement are wearing orange t-shirts & tying orange ribbons to their cars, bags, etc. Those who favor the disengagement (and they’re far less well-organized than the opponents) are tying blue & white ribbons to their cars, bags, etc. DW & I have tied both orange & blue and white ribbons to the Mazda & our bags. We both feel that we (Jews) are, and must remain, not friends (it goes waaay beyond that), but one people and one family despite our sharpest & most strongly felt differences of opinion; those who happen to disagree with us are our brothers & sisters now and will still be so after the disengagement. We must transcend, and be bigger than, our differences of opinion, however strongly the latter may be felt. The 3 ribbons are our statement against all the rancor & highly charged feelings. We live in a religious, very right-wing neighborhood (http://jr.co.il/ma/pic/ma012.htm). Orange ribbons & streamers are everywhere. Ours was the first (it’s now 1 of 3) car to sport both orange and blue & white ribbons (tied to the antenna). Yohanan (will start 3rd grade next week...WOO-HOO!) has told us that some of his friends have accused us of being “leftists”. As a matter of fact, we’re not; but we tell him that a) it isn’t true & that b) he should tell these friends that as much as we care about the Land of Israel, we care about the People of Israel even more. We don’t know about “right-winger” and “leftist”; such adjectives are far less important than the noun that counts, i.e. “Jew”. It is said that the saintly Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook (http://tinyurl.com/c24ga), “once quoted the rabbinic dictum that one should embrace with the right hand and rebuff with the left and commented that he was fully capable of rejecting, but since there were enough rejecters, he was fulfilling the role of embracer.” We should like to be embracers & leave the rebuffing to others.
The Kotzker Rebbe (see http://tinyurl.com/aknqt & http://tinyurl.com/2xadc) once warned against making a masekhet (a text) into a masekha (an idol). I never understood what he meant but now, when I see those who profess to love the Land of Israel blocking public roads, placing fake bombs in courthouses & bus stations, writing their ID numbers on their forearms, throwing oil & nails on public roads, threatening/calling for disobedience in the IDF, setting fire to themselves, etc., I think that I might have an inkling of what the Kotzker meant.
By the way, I’m not keen on the Disengagement. I don’t think that such a thing ought to happen & I don’t think that anything good will come of it. Currying favor with the world by making unilateral concessions is a bad idea because the world in general & the Arabs in particular, will never be satisfied with the quantity & quality of the concessions we’re making & will always want more. (Anyone, in any bazaar/market, anywhere in the world knows that you don’t give away something for nothing; I’m not against the idea of evacuating certain areas in principle, but I wanna know that we’re getting something tangible in return; it’s the unilateral aspect of the Disengagement Plan that bothers me the most). I believe that the vast majority of Muslim Arabs, while some may recognize that we exist, still do not recognize that we have a right to exist. It isn’t Gush Katif per se that offends them it is our very existence here as Jews in an independent Jewish state that offends them. We shouldn’t fool/delude ourselves here; Tel Aviv, in this respect, is no different from Neveh Dekalim (the largest Jewish community in the Gaza Strip). I think that Sharon, being a career military man (see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/sharon.html), is carrying out the classic move of withdrawing from over-extended & vulnerable lines to shorter, more defensible ones. I personally would never have built communities in the Gaza Strip (which was under Egyptian military control from 1948-67 & was not treated as a part of integral Egypt; Gazans could only, with great difficulty, move out of the Strip into Egypt proper; and of course, the late Anwar Sadat refused to take it back) in the first place but withdrawing from them now will create 2 problems. To the Arabs, it will give the impression of weakness (hey, we beat on the Jews and they ran away; let’s beat on them some more & see where else they’ll run away from). To the uneducated & uninformed in the West, it’ll give the impression that we can/should similarly withdraw from Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”, a term coined by Jordan’s King Abdallah I, the current king’s great-grandfather), even though Gaza and Judea & Samaria are not even remotely similar/comparable. Oh well, we’ll see.
Besides, we should take a long view. We’re going to get it all back soon anyway.
As a “religious” orthodox Jew, I cannot blame others for what is happening, nor can I attribute what is happening to some dark & nefarious conspiracy. Rather, my emunah tells me to look inward when I try to comprehend why Hashem is allowing this g’zera to take place. I think that the “settler” community in particular, and the religious right in general, is now paying the price for a generation of arrogance in which we assumed that we deserved all the resources & funds we could get (whether legally or not) because we were the best & the brightest, were doing Hashem’s work, that while all Jews who lived in the Land of Israel were equal some (depending on where they lived) were more equal than others, etc. One of the leaders on the right, some years ago, said, ”Lo hitzlachnu l’hitnachel b’levavot.” He was right then & he’s right now but the thought that the religious right’s current troubles might be its own fault (just a teensy-weensy bit, even partly!) is just to painful for most people on the religious right to contemplate. The chickens of years of arrogance are coming home to roost & the religious right doesn’t like it. We should start acting like mature adults instead of like a little kid having a royal snit when his friends suddenly decide they don’t want to play his way anymore. (This http://tinyurl.com/9hcln is Amotz Asa-El’s very good recent article about Rav Medan from The Jerusalem Post.)
Our esteemed Finance Minister has resigned, purportedly over his opposition to the Disengagement Plan. (As a great man once said, “Yeah, right.") Netanyahu was a very good Foreign Minister way back & and an even better Finance Minister; however, he was a lousy Prime Minister. He has no conscience, he’s all wheels and gears and calculations, the weathervane par excellence! He would lead the struggle for the Disengagement Plan and do it far better than Sharon if he thought he could benefit politically/personally thereby! To anyone who would now follow Bibi: I’ve got this nice bridge connecting Manhattan & Brooklyn that I would like to sell you!
The Israeli right lives in a fantasyworld totally detached from reality because it thinks that we can beat the Palestinians into docile submission & that the latter will then, out of the fear in their hearts, leave us alone. Wrong. The Israeli left lives in a fantasyworld totally detached from reality because it thinks that if we withdraw to the 1967 lines (which the late, left-wing Abba Eban once derided as “Auschwitz lines") the Palestinians/Arabs will then, out of the goodness of their hearts, leave us alone. Wrong. Both do their respective ostrich imitations & stick their heads in an ideological sandbox of their own devising, forgetting that one who sticks his head in sand usually gets it in the other part of his body rendered prominent thereby.
And I live in a confusionworld immersed in reality, depressed thereby, too afraid to slip into the ignorance-is-bliss comforts of this or that fantasy.
Zev Chafets had a pretty good op-ed piece in The New York Times the other day: http://tinyurl.com/bcvkx.
I read somewhere that David Ben-Gurion way back instructed the Haganah & Palmach that no yishuv was to be abandoned, no matter how remote & isolated it may have been. He made very few exceptions. Two of these were the small yishuvim at Neveh Yacov (where the northern Yerushalayim neighborhood now stands) and Atarot (where the industrial zone now stands; see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/battle47.html) I heard that when some Haganah officer questioned him about the principle of withdrawing from Jewish yishuvim, BG supposedly said that we would get them back soon enough. And see how big & flourishing Neveh Yacov is today!
I believe my statement regarding democracy was misunderstood. True, decisions made by a democratically elected government must be followed. My complaint was with the lack of the freedom of speech to protest. However, at this juncture in time, the point is moot. Nonetheless, it is my prayer that Sharon get’s what is coming to him (Condeleeza Rice). :-S
