We are losing legitimacy in the international community and we cannot allow that to happens. We have to take against against the [Settlers attacks on Arab communities]..

I found it interesting and surprising to see in the news that a group of Haredim in Gush Etzion established an illegal outpost with 11 temporary structures and a water tower of some sort. They named the outpost Derech Emuna in memory of Rav Chaim Kanievsky (though I wonder if he would consider this act a merit for his memory or not). They said that the purpose was to ensure Jewish continuity in the area in the face of increasing Muslim takeover of areas in the region. They also wanted to show the public that the housing crisis can be easily resolved by establishing new communities outside of the typical cities.

The settlement of Yitzhar is well known for its strong anti-Arab sentiment, as well as a strong anti-government sentiment. One might also say the converse - the government and local Arabs have strong anti-Yitzhar sentiments.. The residents of Yitzhar have come into violent conflict with government and IDF representatives more than once, and the people of Yitzhar have always stated that Arabs are not welcome and they use only Jewish labor in the yishuv. Recently an incident hit the news where a COVID testing team from MDA was refused entry to Yitzhar because one of the team members was an Arab.

Meet the Nearot Hagevaot! (TOI)

In light of the "Danny Dayan fiasco", in which Brazil refused to accept the appointment of Danny Dayan as Israel's ambassador to Brazil due his having been a previous director of the Yesha Council, MK Issawi Frij (Meretz) has proposed another law that has about 0% chance of passing.

Frij has proposed that a person living outside the official sovereign borders of Israel cannot be appointed to serve as Ambassador or Consul or head of a delegation.

Frij says Netanyahu has turned the Foreign Ministry into an office that instead of building relations with other nations works to damage relations and provoke other nations, and to legitimize the settlers, settlements, and the occupation.
source: Srugim

This won't pass, and it shouldn't pass. Many of the settlers were sent to their settlements over the years by the Israeli governments. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly with encouragement. This is true of both Labor and Lid led governments. Let us not forget that Labor was really the father of the settlement movement, well before the Likud got involved. You can't just ban those people, people who participate fully in every other aspect of Israeli life - taxes, army, government, business, etc. and take away their rights.

I don't know what happened.

An Arab boy was found murdered in the forest of Jerusalem early this morning.

So far that is all I know.

I do not know who murdered the boy. I do not know why that person murdered the boy.

A young boy was murdered, and that is horrible, for whatever reason, by whomever it was done.

Another thing I do know is that the public has no idea yet who is responsible for this, or why.

Yet, many, be it politicians, media or just regular people, were very quickly jumping on the assumption that it was perpetrated by "settlers" as an act of revenge for the kidnap and murder of Eyal, Gilad and Naftali.

And many others have been assuming that the murder was committed by other Arabs, be it family in an honor killing or other Arabs as part of a family feud, or other Arabs as part of some criminal activity.

And I have even seen some assume that this is some sort of blood libel - Arabs killed the boy and made it look like a "settler" revenge plot just to turn the media and public momentum away from backing Netanyahu's efforts to dismantle Hamas, and turn the blame on the evil settlers.

The one thing in common is that nobody yet knows, yet people are making assumptions. The problem is not making assumptions - not really. he problem is that they then publicize these assumptions, logical or illogical as they may be, and throw blame and accusations around based on them.

Another thing I find interesting - in the wake of the kidnapping and murder of Eyal, Gilad, and Naftali, so many people were writing all over the internet and in newspapers and in chat groups, about how necessary it is to avenge the deaths of the three boys, how we must wipe out Gaza, how we must flatten PA Hebron, yadda yadda yadda - and then when the accusations start coming about the murder of an innocent boy (whether the accusations are baseless or not), suddenly everybody says a Jew would never do that!

Let's let the security forces do their jobs (according to reports they responded very quickly to the information when it was first reported), find who did this, and then we will know who to blame and what to fix.

Eliraz Fein is a 22 year old woman living in the community of Yitzhar. Yitzhar is concerned a hard-core settlement and has been at odds with the IDF for a long time, especially recently.

Fein sent out an email, internally on a forum of the yishuv, in a discussion of how to deal with the latest issues with the army. Eliraz stated in her email that she is in favor of throwing rocks at Jews, and for sure at Arabs, even if it were to cause the death of an Israeli soldier.

I would note here that this is not the position of the leadership of Yitzhar, and they removed her from the forum after she made that position clear, and they told her that some things, like what she suggested, are not even worthy of consideration as part of a discussion.

Back to Eliraz Fein.

The army became aware of her email and immediately went in and arrested her.

I am not going to defend her position, as she clearly has issues and it is an idiotic and dangerous position. However, she wrote it in a private email as part of a discussion, she wrote it as her opinion, not as orders - i.e. she was not giving orders to someone telling him he should go out and throw stones at soldiers. She did not put it up n a public bulletin board.

Where is the freedom of speech? That is incitement? It is idiotic, but incitement? She cannot talk about theoretically throwing stones without getting arrested, while some idiot on the radio can talk in front of an audience of tens of thousands of people about diluting and killing haredim and does not get arrested? Oh, he said it was satire. Maybe Eliraz Fein should explain that her email was satire and then they will let her go.

I am not in favor of Eliraz Fein's stated position. But I don't think she did anything to deserve being arrested.

Was PM Netanyahu bluffing when he said that settlers could stay in their houses in a Palestinian State if or when a peace deal will happen, or did he really mean it?

It is hard to believe he really meant it. The State did not allow Gush Katif residents to stay in their homes and communities when Israel gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians (Hamas). There really is not a reason to assume the State would allow it in the West Bank either.

Would it even be realistic, would that it were true? would settlers who express the desire to stay in their homes under Palestinian rule be considered idealistic or foolish?

Naftali Bennet has a different reason to oppose the idea - other than the common belief that Jews remaining under Palestinian rule would either get slaughtered fairly quickly or at minimum would be regularly harassed and targeted. Bennet's opposition to the idea is based on the idea that we have not dreamed of a return to Eretz Yisrael so that we could live under Palestinian rule.

So, what's Netanyahu's game? Was he serious? Not likely, but maybe. Was he bluffing, but Bennet and other MKs messed it up before Abbas could reject it? Maybe. Is it even possible? I doubt it.

What do you think? What's going on here?

The solution to the Middle East peace situation has finally been discovered. This would include peace between Palestinians and Israelis, as well as peace between left-wing Israelis (from Tel Aviv) and settlers.

Besides for the impression this Ynet News article gives over by depicting "settlers" as druggies, marijuana growers easily avoiding the law due to minimal police presence and ease of keeping the pots secret... it depicts a peaceful relationship between left-wingers from Tel Aviv looking for marijuana, as there seems to be a shortage in Tel Aviv, finding new meaning in the name "Green Line" and heading out there, developing relationships, and getting high with the settlers they generally so despise. Even Palestinians get some of the action in the article.

The solution to the never-ending peace process that seems to just continue making the conflict worse may just very well be getting high. If enough of us all get high, together or separate, the Peace Process just won't be quite so important any more. Of course I only advocate getting high legally and am not telling anyone to break the law - I think marijuana should be legalized... And now it should be legalized not just for medical reasons or for increasing tax revenue, but also for the sake of peace and neighborly relations..

According o the European Union, residents of Modiin are not living in Israel proper, but are "settlers". I congratulate them on acheiving this new status.

 The EU has decided that products manufactured in Modiin-Maccabim-Reut will no longer be considered to have been made in Israel, as Modiin was built on what was in 1948 a strip of no-mans land. So, while it is not "occupied" territory, Israel still does not have the right to it. The EU, by doing this, is saying that anything from that area will not be granted the tax-free status when imported into Europe.
(source: IH and INN)

Being that Modiin is now considered a settlement, residents need to make a decision whether to stay and accept their new status as a settler, or whether to leave to avoid being a settler. Staying in Modiin will require a change in lifestyle to one more commensurate with the settler lifestyle and appearance. We also now will begin to await the day when the Israeli government will decide to evacuate Modiin of its Jewish reidents and disengage from the entire area.

Thank you European union for your attempt to bring sanity, or even just balance, back to the Middle East.

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I "like" how Haaretz labels pretty much anybody with a kipa, or a woman with a head covering, as a settler, or at least a "settler-type".

To quote Haaretz, writing about last night's Likud Convention and how they claim the settlers work within the Likud to embarrass Netanyahu without any intention of even voting Likud, "Hundreds of settler-types, men and women in skullcaps and kerchiefs of all sizes and colors, crowded into the hall and settled on the plastic chairs, leaving veteran party members no room to sit".

And, of course, they are taking over where they should not be. They went to a convention for a party, of which they are members don't forget, and they took all the seats! They did not leave any empty seats for veteran party members! Oh my! Netanyahu called for a meeting of the Likud membership and ordered too small a hall without making sure "his own people" would show up, but it is the settler (or settler-type" members fault for actually showing up and participating, and not playing according to Netanyahu's playbook.

Many of these people have been members for a long time. I have no idea how many vote Likud in actual elections and how many do not. In democratic elections a person's vote is private - what he says outside the polls does not necessarily indicate what he actually did inside the polling station, and it does not matter.

"They came early and grabbed most of the seats to signal to him that he cannot do as he pleases in his party." Of course it is their fault that Netanyahu did not prepare a hall large enough for the crowds that came. They came and grabbed the seats and proceeded to embarrass him. Wait - no, it is the fault of his consultants as  the article closes wondering who Netanyahu's consultant's are that could not plan this without avoiding this fiasco.

Haaretz's version of democracy is allowing, or expecting, a leader to be able to do whatever he wants with no checks and balances. Haaretz does not even like Netanyahu, but if he cannot put down the settlers, or the settler types, then he must really be bad.


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Quote of the Day
We are not against having Jewish neighbors. I have Jewish neighbors and we have very good relations. But to bring a focal point of the settlements into the Arab population, that is crossing all red lines.

  -- Dr. Oni Kachil, Ramle councilman and representative of Muslime residents in Ramle

There is a fight over a building. It was originally promised to be used as a community center for the children of the Arab community, but then the plans were changed and the building was given to a hesder yeshiva that will be opening under the auspices of Yeshivat Shaalvim. Srugim is reporting on the issue, and the suspicion is that because professional committees saw no problem with changing the objective of the building, this issue is being used as a way of stirring up the fight against "Judaization" of the city of Ramle.

That does not bother me, and whatever happens happens. These types of fights happen in every city all the time. What does interest me is that in a city like Ramle, a city within the "Green Line", a city that is considered "mixed" with both Arab and Jewish communities, the opening of a yeshiva can be considered by the Arabs as being part of the settlement industry. "Settlements"? Within the Green Line? I thought the Arabs are ok with us, and have accepted the fact that within the Green Line we are here to stay? It seems like even within the Green Line we are settlers.

I know that tidbit is nothing new, but the leadership of Israel seems to prefer to ignore that fact, that even within the Green Line we are all settlers.

This is a fascinating video of a BBC reporter, Louis Theroux, who spent time in the West Bank talking to different people and watching different incidents. Below the video I am copying the text from the description on Youtube...



Louis Theroux spends time with a small and very committed subculture of ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers. He discovers a group of people who consider it their religious and political obligation to populate some of the most sensitive and disputed areas of the West Bank, especially those with a spiritual significance dating back to the Bible.

Throughout his journey, Louis gets close to the people most involved with driving the extreme end of the Jewish settler movement - finding them warm, friendly, humorous, and deeply troubling.

Louis Theroux spends time with ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers and discovers a small, but very committed subculture.

On a hilltop in the Northern West Bank, not far from the large Palestinian city of Nablus, I met 17-year-old Yair Lieberman.

A part-time labourer and student, Yair's home was a makeshift canvas-covered structure, only slightly more solid than a tent, which he shared with three other young men. The bed was a tangled mess of sheets, in the style of a conventional teenager's, and hung around the dwelling were posters - though not of pop groups, but of favourite rabbis. Outside, in the neighbouring lots, was a scattering of fifteen or so caravans and trailers - the outpost of Havat Gilad.

Like the settlements up and down the West Bank, Havat Gilad is illegal under international law. It lies miles inside the territory won by Israel in the 1967 war and the vast majority of the surrounding population is Palestinian. But Havat Gilad is also illegal under Israeli law. Electricity comes from a generator. Water is trucked in.

Yair moved up to Havat Gilad a couple of years ago. On a tour around the hilltop, I asked him why he'd decided to make his life in this ramshackle encampment, at the end of a dirt road, on an inhospitable hilltop among Arab olive groves.

"If we're not here there's a [Palestinian] city and we don't want another [Palestinian] city," he said.

What, I wondered, would be so bad about another Palestinian city?

"Because it's my land! It's the land of Israel. It's not the land of Palestinians."

Yair's beliefs are shared by a hardcore religious nationalist fringe of Jewish Israelis who have chosen to make their home up and down the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. They say that those areas belong by right to the Jewish people - a title claim based mainly on the bible.

The fact that there are nearly ten times as many Arabs as there are Jews in the West Bank, with their own dreams of a national homeland, they regard as a side-issue.

I was making a documentary about these ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers, called The Ultra-Zionists. For several weeks I'd been spending time in some of the most hardcore and uncompromising sections of the Israeli nationalist community - the Jewish enclave in Hebron, in the hilltops in the north of the West Bank, and in the crowded Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem - choosing to come at a time when peace talks were ongoing and the extreme settlers were therefore more embattled.

For many years I'd been fascinated by extreme nationalists - and I'd hoped the issue of the West Bank and its settlement by extreme religious Jews would be a chance to understand this mindset at first hand.

Last week a Palestinian shepherd lost a bunch of sheep from his flock when they went up in flames. Not with the spontaneous combustion that Dave Barry used to write about so frequently, but he blamed it on a group of settlers having set the fire that burned 17 of his sheep alive.

The leftist organizations immediately jumped on the poor shepherd's story and lambasted Israel through the international media for allowing the settlers to continue destroying the lives of the poor Palestinians while terrorizing their fields, their flock and their olive trees.

Some questions arose during the questioning, as the shepherd changed his story a couple of times regarding who burned the sheep.  According to Srugim, when he was taken for questioning to continue the investigation, he ended up admitting that he had done it himself by mistake. He was burning weeds in his field when the fire got out of control. When his sheep caught flame, he decided to rectify the situation by blaming it on the settlers. The leftists immediately jumped to blame the Israelis without even bothering to check what actually happened.

Unfortunately corrections never make headlines, Only the initial accusations do. Well, at least the shepherd must have had a good lamb shwarma for lunch that day before he went on his blood libel.

British TV interviewed a young Israeli couple living in a tiny outpost called Ramat Migron... I am impressed with how fine a job thy did responding to the interview and not getting flustered.



(HatTip: Tzedek-Tzedek)

Rav Metzger today directed a call to the rabbinic leadership of the right-wing, "settler" community. he called upon them to reign in their rhetoric, as calls to violence are unacceptable - not morally and not halachically. Even if it is for a good purpose - for guarding over the Land of Israel, it would then be a mitzva haba'a b'aveira - the ends do not justify the means. (source: Ynet)

I wonder why he did not, at the same time, call upon the rabbinic leadership of the haredi community in a similar call regarding the protests over the parking lot that opened on Shabbos.... Sure, they probably would not listen to him, but neither will the settler leadership, so what's the difference?

This is a sick portrayal of settlers. This ran on Israel's Channel 2 television.



If a similar piece of satire was made about the Arabs, it probably would never have aired, the producer would be put in jail. the tv station director would probably be fired, etc...

I did not get a picture of it, but there is a new cherem being plastered around town. This one though is a retaliatory cherem.

The "settler" organizations Matot Arim, Komemiyut, and Eretz Yisrael She'Lanu are running a cherem against the media for their support of a cherem against products made over the Green line.

It is a complicated cherem, and that is probably why it will not uscceed, but here goes, if I understand it correctly. they cannot hit the media directly, so they are analyzing the advertising in the largest newspapers, and calculating the top 10 companies and products advertised, each month. They then will post signs and information declaring the top ten of the month and that those products should be banned.

The idea is that if those companies/products get hit by a decrease in sales by 5-10% because of the cherem, the companies will advertise in these specific media outlets much less, thus hurting the specific targeted media.

Sounds complicated to me. Also, if I have to follow every month to see which products are currently under boycott, it is extremely unrealistic (for me, and probably for many others)...

More info can be found on the cherem website. Acually, that is the best part of the whole issue - there is now a website declaring cherems. It is just a shame the haredim did not get the domain and idea first, as they would put this website to much heavier use.