Settler/squatter leaders trampled Palestinian rights to water, highway use, personal security, and housing, and to medical, educational and vocational opportunity. Rabbis actively encouraged attacks against Palestinians, their livestock and property. Rabbis incited their students in uniform to refuse government orders to evict settlers, and stood up for their students in squatter enclaves who branded IDF soldiers as Nazis.
- 29.09.10
A Special Place in Hell / Confessions of an Israeli anti-settler bigot
The bargain's over. The settlers are not my enemy, but the settlements are. I want my country back.
By
Bradley Burston
I have become a bigot where it comes to the settlement movement.
I believe that the officials, the activists, and the Diaspora bankrollers and rooting section of this movement have ruined my life. They ruin it a little more every single day.
The extent to which they have embittered the lives of millions of Palestinians is incalculable. I won't pretend to know what they go through or how it feels. For the moment, I just want to talk about what the settlement movement does to its fellow Israelis, and why so many of us are so fed up.
We struck a bargain years ago.
I wanted to make peace with the Palestinians. I wanted them to have a state. I wanted the occupation to end. Some bargain. I lost.
I struck another deal. Year after year I would pay high taxes to subsidize settlement houses, their private highways, their utilities, their yeshivas, the bottomless cost of safeguarding remote and illegal outposts. A theater in Ariel.
In return, settler leaders and activists spearheaded civil and military policies that trampled Palestinian rights to water, highway use, personal security, and housing, and to medical, educational and vocational opportunity. Rabbis and yeshiva directors whose salaries I paid, turned a blind eye to, or actively encouraged attacks against Palestinians, their livestock and property. Rabbis and yeshiva directors whose salaries I paid incited their students in uniform to refuse government orders to evict settlers, and stood up for their students in outlaw enclaves who branded IDF soldiers as Nazis.
Some bargain.
In return for my acquiescence, the settlement movement blackened Israel's democracy and its very name. We gave them Yitzhak Rabin and they gave us Avigdor Lieberman.
Settlement has long been, and remains, the fuel for the fire of de-legitimization of Israel, the basis of charges of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. It undermines the foundation of the idea of a Jewish state. It turns the very word settlement into an obscenity.
The movement blackmails and terrorizes and intimidates fellow Israelis into fearing the price of evacuating settlers more deeply than they fear the diplomatic isolation, the wars, the loss of majority rule that leaving settlements in place entails. To make its members feel better, it declares that anyone who says Jews can’t live wherever they want is a racist. Even though in the real world, no one simply gets to live where they want, no matter whose land it is, no matter where, and certainly not just because God told them to.
Every morning the settlements expand, the democratic and Jewish character of Israel is undermined, Israel's standing as a member of the community of nations is called further into question, and the support of this country's indispensible American ally is clouded, casting a shadow over the security of everyone here.
Like many a bigot, I truly have no quarrel with the vast majority of the Jewish residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But I do not want them to force the majority of Israelis, myself included, to live in a new Arab country which retains the name of Israel. I have no problem at all with Arab countries. But I didn't come here to live in one.
The majority here wants a state of Israel alongside a sovereign and separate state of Palestine. The majority is fed up. The majority sees the settlements as a bad bargain for Israel. The majority is tired of being pushed around. The majority loves Israel and wants it to continue to exist.
"If we are afraid to fail, then we are useless. If we are afraid of criticism, we are useless. If we are afraid to stand up and speak the truth because the truth is not a popular commodity, then we are useless."
The majority must make a choice.
The settlers are not my enemy, but the settlements are. I want my country back.Read more at www.haaretz.com
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