http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/world/middleeast/28westbank.html?ref=middleeast
In short, an Israeli plumber helps poor Palestinians in the Hebron area and is ridiculed by Israeli settlers and harrased by the IDF jeeps.
“The settlers keep the Palestinian farmers from their land by harassing them, and then after several years they say the land has not been farmed so by law it is no longer theirs,” Mr. Nawi said. “We are only here to stop that from happening.”
That is not the view of the settlers.
“He is a troublemaker,” asserted Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, a spokesman for Israeli settler communities in the area. “It’s true that from time to time there is a problem of some settlers coming out of their settlements to cause problems. But people like Nawi don’t want a solution. Their whole aim is to cause trouble.”
I’ve spoken with Salafists(not takfiri murderers, just run of the mill salafists), and I’ve spoken with ideologically motivated Israeli settlers (as opposed to the majority who are financially motivated), and in my opinion the settlers are slightly ahead in the “bat shit insane outlook on life” meter.
I left Israel a few months back after conducting research there. While I was in Israel I focused on the political dynamics of the settler movement. Since I left I’ve ignored it because frankly it’s so despicable that reading about it puts me in a foul mood and there’s alot more interesting and important stuff happening in the Middle East. Reading this article brought me back.
These guys are FUCKING NUTS. Period.
Here are some important quotes taken from Zertal and Aldar’s book, “Lords of the Land”
Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, one of the intellectual architects of the settler movement,
“The master of the universe has his own political agenda according to which politics here below are conducted. Part of this redemption is the conquest and settlement of the land. This is dictated by divine politics, and no earthly politics can supercede it.”
Many of this guys disciples were some of the original settlers. Some of them went on to help found Gush Emunim. People who believe this stuff actually have influence in internal Israeli politics. That is fucking insane.
More from Kook,
“these borders… are ours, sanctified by divine holiness… It is not at all permitted to imagine giving up these lands. This is a devine comandment that must be carried out on pain of death.”
Rabbi Schlomo Aviner, the occupation of the West Bank is, “above the moral umane considerations of the gentiles to our land.”
Some other nutbag, “Zionism failed because it tried to make the Jewish people into what it is not-that is, a normal people, one people amongst the peoples of the world, and thereby make the land of Israel into what it is not, i.e. what every state constitutes for the people that lives in it.”
The gist of that being; Israel and the world had so indulge our settlements because of our religiously devinded perception of the world and the Jewish peoples place in it.
These people are bat shit insane. They are a black eye to the state of Israel. A lot of Israeli’s realize that.
Something I found fascinating from “Lords of the Land”, (and I’m too lazy to find the line in the book so you’ll have to trust me that it’s there) immediately after the ’67 war the Mossad issued a white paper advising that Israel create some kind of Palestinian state in the newly annexed land ASAP. In the face of Kook and others adulation at the newly aquired land the political establishment crumbled and discarded the suggestion.
If only…
