An e-mail from my rabbi

The Great Snook · Aug 19, 2005

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This a forward of an e-mail that my rabbi recieved from Reuven, a friend of his in Israel.

The saddest part of this, is that many people believe you can negotiate with a bully and they will leave you alone.

Well, our entrance permit to Gush Katif was rescinded, so we couldn't go. Shemaya's already there and Shmuel snuck into the Gush last night, after spending all night in a field trying to evade soldiers.

last night we went a a solidarity prayer thing at the Kotel [the Western Wall] - except we couldn't get anywhere near even seeing the Kotel. I have never seen such crowds, such a mass of people. Tair and Hanoch got all the way to the steps that lead down from the Jewish quarter towards the Kotel, but by then, the police had closed all gates in, because there simply was no place to get it, even to squeeze in would have been difficult. The other kids, Tamar and me got not much further than the Jaffa Gate (about to the area where Herod's palace was in old times), before the flow of people simply stops, but thousands and thousands were still trying to get through. We turned around, and in about 45 minutes were able to move about the length of a car. Then people started the special prayers for Gush Katif right where they were - it was a very powerful and awesome experience. There must have been near a quarter of a million people participating.

Tonight I'm going to a rally in Tel Aviv. Will any of this stop anything, do anything? I don't know. But as Hillel says, you're not obligated to finish the work, but you're not free to ignore it.

Reuven

Friday, driving back from Kfar Shmuel where I was helping my father in law, I stopped in Ariel to buy something. As I closed the door to my car and walked across the street, I saw a boy, about 12 years old, standing on his bicycle, looking at me intently. Can I ask you a question, he said. Sure I said. Do you know the significance of those ribbons, he asked, pointing at the antenna of my car which has, as you know, both orange and blue ribbons. Sure, I said. So why do you have both orange and blue? I told him - the people who are against the withdrawal, like I am, they are my people. And those who are for the withdrawal, who disagree with me, they are my people too. He looked at me, not smiling. He wanted to think about that. After a minute or so, he rode away.

That night, Kabalat shabbat, and I could not sit down in shul, I could not sing, I was mourning though it is forbidden to mourn on Shabbat. A feeling of portent in shul, of something big and perhaps not terribly pleasant, in fact perhaps disastrous, was about to happen to our people. Shabbat Hazon, the Shabbat before Tisha b'Av. I stood in back of the shul, behind my two sons who are still in Shilo - Hanoch and Lev, the other two already inside Gush Ktif.
Lecha Dodi," and i cannot sing. I feel a pull on my leg, and a little boy, maybe 6 years old, is trying to ask me a question. I bend down. Can you show me a siddur that has an alef-bet in it? he asked. I saw behind him, his sister, maybe 4 years old. I understood immediately - during tfilah, he wanted to teach his little sister the aleph bet. I picked a siddur and turned to the alef bet on one of the fist pages. Thank you, he said quite solemnly, and led his sister down the aisle. At the last second, the little four year old girl turned her head and smiled me a thank you.

I have a pride in my people.

Monday, I left Shilo at 4 PM with about 40 other cars, to try to get to the crossing with Gaza and block the road in protest. We travel for hours, as we get closer to Gaza, we have to leave the main roads, even the secondary roads, and travel on tractor paths through fields thick with summer dust. At about 2 am, we leave our cars and start to travel by foot, through field and through wadis. AM sees us in the middle of a plowed field, davening shaharit, about 200 of us, men women, kids over 13 - no babies or small children. Afterwards we find a grove of trees, rest. At two, we walk through more fields, closer now to the crossing. Suddenly, the army sees us and we are surrounded by humvees - they all seem to be driven by attractive blonde girls - or is the hot sun frying my brains? Suddenly, one of the girls smiles at me and says - you're doing something great - go for it!!! The soldiers in the other seats are applauding us! We make it to the road, briefly block it by sitting in front of one of the huge bulldozers sent to destroy Jewish homes, then gather at the side of the road to pray and recite Psalms. The police swoop down in huge numbers: paddy wagons, control cars, walkie talkies, big husky men, girl cops to take out our women folk - no billie clubs, though. And they wait for a half hour, longer, till we finish praying, singing. at the end of our song, still singing, we pick up our bags and go in to the paddy wagons ourselves. Police are sad, some are singing with us.

We were all booked and taken to Beer Sheva for investigation. I was with Hanoch and Tair, and of course so many of my Shilo friends. At the jail, it took them about an hour to take away anything we had that might be dangerous, haul us over to the jail for our investigations, each of which took three minutes b/c they didn't ask us any question - they just asked us to sign a paper saying we would stay out of the area for 2 weeks. We signed, and were free in minutes.

The thing is, nothing but tens of thousands of people coming down would have stopped this, and the gov't declared a state of emergency and closed all the roads. How many people were going to travel all night on rutted dirt roads to get down there? A few thousand. It was over before it started. Shemaya returned yesterday, and Shmuel is in a settlement which is being evacuated today.

While I was writing this, I heard gunfire, a couple of shots. It was obviously gunfire and not fireworks. I went over top the porch overlooking the road, the area that the shots came from, and looked - a white van was stopped in the road next to the guard booth, and a school bus had just pulled up behind it and started to honk. As I stood there, I heard more shots from the small industrial zone near the guard booth - I yelled to Tamar to call the Shilo security officer and tell him that there was gunfire in the industrial zone.

This guy from the next community over, a guy who I know - not well - but who worked on my friend's house, a professional dry-wall worker, married and with two kids, a guy whose job it was to drive Arab workers from the window factory in the industrial zone to and from their village to work, who was friends with these workers, who had just had lunch with them and was driving them home, stopped near the guard booth, asked the guard for a cup of water, and when his back was turned, grabbed his rifle, went back to the van, and shot the workers there, then ran back to the factory, and shot three more Arab workers there. Four were killed, four more injured. The guy didn't try to run, he just turned himself in when the police came. Other Arabs in the village they came from at first thought we had it wrong - the security officer killed their friends, and this guy, the driver, who they knew and liked, had tried to save them. That's how bizarre it was. I hear he had issues, even to the degree that the army and the security officer would not let him carry a rifle. But ......I, we were all speechless. with horror. shock. I did guard duty last night right where it happened.

Hard times for our people, my friends. hard times

My son Shmuel was on the roof of the yeshiva at Kfar Darom. Kfar Darom was a Jewish community in the Gaza Strip before 1948, and was lost during the war. After 1967, it was re-established, only to be evacuated and destroyed in these days. My son says that the "acid" was nothing but the "blue water" that the soldiers sprayed with fire hoses upon the protestors. The paint bombs were paint balls, also fired at them by the soldiers.

The community of Netzer Hazani agreed only to be evacuated to the Kotel. A large crowd awaits them there to comfort them and greet them.

As we discussed when learning the Holocaust, the greatest blow dealt our people was not just the 6 million deaths, but the loss of so many communities. It is especially tragic to see the destruction of Jewish communities in our days.

My son Shmuel was arrested and is being held in the Beer Sheva prison.

43 injured in Kfar Darom clash, evacuation completed

Matthew Gutman, Arieh O'Sullivan and Jerusalem Post staff, THE JERUSALEM POST Aug. 18, 2005

Forty-three people were injured, two moderately, during a clash on the rooftop of the Kfar Darom synagogue, which was overcome on Thursday night.

Twenty-five policemen, 10 soldiers and eight right wing activists were taken to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba.

Police said that about 120 demonstrators were arrested in Kfar Darom.

OC Southern Command Maj.-Gen. Dan Harel accused the protesters of using acid in an attempt to deter the forces from reaching the rooftop.

Police Inspector General Moshe Karadi was furious after the violent clash, which left some of his subordinates with light injuries sustained from acid. "We will prosecute each and every one of them," he vowed.

Karadi said the security forces' patience had worn thin after the display of violence at Kfar Darom. After two days of gentle persuasion, "from the moment when the dialogue ended, restraint also ended."

National Religious Party MK Shaul Yahalom slammed the behavior of the youth saying that it "shamed religious Zionism and the kippot on their heads."

Yahalom said that the NRP distanced itself from this action, and that these youth were "wild weeds" on the fringes of the national religious camp and do not represent it and only cause it harm.

On the Synagogue's roof, Col. (res) Moshe Leshem told The Jerusalem Post that "we're learning our lessons on how to fight this struggle and you can be certain to see them in Netzarim, [West Bank settlements] Sanur and Homesh.

The activists seemed to anticipate every police tactic. Some of them stole motor oil from the Kfar Darom military base to cause police and soldiers scaling ladders to slip. They prepared Y-shaped pikes to shove away the steel cages and used doors hauled up to the rooftop as shields against water canon.

By late Thursday night all Kfar Darom's residents had either been loaded onto buses or reached arrangements with the IDF to leave with their belongings. Residents and activists spent much of the day haranguing soldiers, beseeching them to disobey their orders.

After four failed tries a force of Israel's Swat Team both scaled the roof in ladders and landed in steel shipping containers fashioned into portable cages.

Kfar Darom's Rabbi Gabi Shreiber ruled that there was to be no violence. And after the Swat Team stormed the rooftop, the activists resisted only passively.

The unarmed Swat members elbowed their way into the thick of the crowd, as activists sprayed them with insulating foam. They wrestled in the 2-inch deep muck that accumulated on the roof – a combination of blue water, motor oil, acid and mashed onions.

It took the police several hours to convince, shove, and tug the 150 people on the roof – women among them – to depart on cages that shuttled up and down the building.

For the better part of the afternoon, activists pelted police and army forces with eggs, paint bombs, even watermelon and potatoes they had stored on the roof.

The military fought back, as a Psy-Op unit reiterated that all was lost and that even Neveh Dekalim had succumbed to one of Israel's largest military operations.

More gut wrenching for the evacuating troops was the removal of settlers from their homes. "Just rape us," screamed Orly Manovich into the face of a soldier standing guard near her sister-in-law's house, "I am sure if you got an order to do that you would do it too."

Soldiers all over the community huddled to cry together or marched off, hat concealing their face for a private sob.

The combined effect of insulated foam sprayed by the activists, the motor oil, and bluish water fired from the police canon produced a noxious slick concoction.

Avigail Tam-Biton, who lost her husband, Gavriel in a November 2000 terrorist bombing just outside the settlement, kept Maj.-Gen. Yiftach Ron-Tal wait in the cramped hallway as she tended to her children. Her neighbors were being evicted from their homes here in Kfar Darom, but she took her time.

Flattening the front of her large orange T-shirt that read "Who dares war against the King?" she shuffled to the family's living room, offering Ron-Tal a seat.

"Get out," spat Avigail's 16 year-old son Eliashiv from the family's kitchen. He was holding the eviction orders Ron-Tal handed the family.

"You can't kick me out, your not the man of the house," replied the general.

"Yes I am," said Eliashiv, who until his mother's marriage to Amnon Tam in June, was the oldest man of the house.

"I just started to rehabilitate my life and you're ripping me out?" cried. She begged him to apologize, begged him to refuse his orders. But Ron-Tal held fast, and smiled uncomfortably as the Biton's fired off accusations one after another. However tears brimmed in the eyes of his young aid de camp, a resident of the West Bank settlement of Kedumim.

When the meeting ended, the general ran outside to cry.

The Tam-Bitons ate lunch as a few teens barricaded a bomb shelter with hundreds of cans of corn and pickles. Soldiers patiently picked through the cans and carried the youth, mostly girls to waiting buses.

All around her, the building blocks of her life crumbled. First Shiela Shorshan, who lost her husband in a November 1992 terrorist attack left. Avigail and her son Shiloh, ran out after them as they were led away. Avigail threw her arms around Shorshan. The two widows sobbed, oblivious of the snapping cameras.

Finally, respecting Tam-Biton's wishes the IDF allowed her to be one of the last to leave the settlement. The symbolic act Tam-Biton would not allow herself to display, the young activists did for her
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Blackthorne TA · Aug 19, 2005

I'm not sure I understand the point of this post. Is it just to illustrate how sad it is from the Jewish perspective that they are being forced to leave Gaza by their government?

It was an interesting email nonetheless, though I didn't understand many of the Jewish references.

joacqin · Aug 19, 2005

At least these refugees will be showered with money and given new homes and taken care in any way imaginable. You wont see that part of the occupation power struggling in a tent camp looking for water while looking over your shoulder for tanks and soldiers.

Carcaroth · Aug 19, 2005

To be honest, I didn't understand either. Who is the Bully? The Jewish State? Israel as a whole? Palestine? The Arabs?

It is sad that people are being forced to leave their homes, and yet under international law the land belongs to Palestine, not Israel. I would prefer if they could live side by side under Palestinian law, but I somehow doubt it would work.

There was an news report a day or so back about a Jewish man who drove three Palestinians to work, then pulled a gun and killed them.
The logical explanation to me is he wanted to provoke the Palestians into another attack. That he actually WANTED more Jewish people to die.

Very sad indeed.

khazadman · Aug 19, 2005

Ariel Sharon will be lucky if he lives out his term in office. There are alot of Israelis who feel betrayed by him. After all, he's the one of the guy's that were responsible for the creation of many of these settlements. And the truly sad part of this is that this evacuation is only emboldening the killers.

Mithrantir · Sep 1, 2005

I really wonder why it is so difficult to create a unique state, in which everyone has a right to believe to whatever God he wants. I can't help myself restraining the thought that whatever is going on these people lives at this very moment is the consequence of stupid egos and stubborn priests (jews and muslims) with political influence.
And since these people allowed that to happen and in fact support it, i am sorry but they are getting what they gave.

And the truly sad part of this is that this evacuation is only emboldening the killers.
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Sorry but i don't understand this. I think that BOTH sides are NOT innocent.

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An e-mail from my rabbi

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An e-mail from my rabbi

The Great Snook Gems: 31/31Latest gem: Rogue Stone Adored Veteran

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