Today forced evacuation started. The evident suffering of people forced to leave their homes arouses the sympathy of many people in Middle Israel --- that temperate zone between the insular left and the insular right.
Such people may still be willing to forgive (or discount) the typical Levantine verbal hyperbole, the hysterical shrieking of "Nazi!" "Judenrat", and the like at soldiers. But you start losing those of us for whom these words actually mean something other than generic insults -- and who realize that these settlers' life expectancy without continuous heavy army guard would have been expressed in hours.
Then things happen like some Kachsucker swine quasi-randomly shooting Arab workers, and it all goes down the drain.
Listen, orange sunshines: I'm not one of you, but I'm no bleeding heart North Tel Avivnik either. You don't hear me ranting and raving about the real and imaginary "human rights infractions" on the "poor downtrodden Palestinians" by the IDF. When you start exhausting the patience of Middle Israelis like me -- people that might respect you and empathize with you even as we don't agree with you -- you're in really deep doo-doo.
And if you want to become isolated strangers in your own land, I encourage you to continue with such brilliant PR maneuvers as wearing orange "ghetto stars" with "Jude" written in them, and trying to emotionally IDF soldiers into refusing orders. (What if they all refused both to evacuate you and to serve in the disputed territories to protect your rear ends?)
And yes, we know that all the really disgusting stuff is done not necessarily by actual residents (who have at least the excuse that they are grieving), but by all sorts of "sympathizers" they need right now like a pain in the butt. That's precisely why I am so livid at those who seem hell-bent on proving the correctness of every prejudice that is held against the "national religious" camp.
UPDATE: this takes the cake. On Channel 2, during the late-night news, they showed a clip from Al-Jazeera which shows a few settlers, dressed in the black of the ultra-Orthodox, burning a bunch of objects, including... an Israeli flag. This, my friends, is why billions upon billions of taxpayer money were pumped into the Gaza Strip (not to mention thousands of soldiers risking their necks on a daily basis, and not to mention compensation payments now on the order of half a million dollars per family) --- so we can watch a bunch of supposedly Jewish religious zealots burn an Israeli flag on al-Jizzeera. In one word: feh!
Comments