A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews.

 
All Settlement Is Bad

Hagai Segal argues very persuasively in today's Maariv about the falsity of the Left's position on settlement. Segal writes about the failure of the Left the support Israel's latest settlement - in the Negev, well within the 1967 borders:

A new Jewish settlement, Givat Bar, was founded last week in the Negev in a swift overnight operation that was met with complete indifference. When the sun came up on it for the first time, there was no one there to sing Zionist songs of celebration. Ben-Gurion’s disciples in the Labor party and the kibbutzniks from Meretz went on with their daily routines as if nothing happened...

Of all the extra-parliamentary political bodies, only the Yesha Council (Council of Judea, Samaria and Gaza) bothered to send a congratulatory telegram. Not Peace Now, not the Geneva Accord gang, not even the Kibbutz Movement. The only official visitor, except for representatives of the Jewish Agency, was NRP leader Housing minister Effi Eitam. The local guest book remains devoid of the signatures of famous Negev proponents such as Shimon Peres, Beige Shohat, Fuad Ben-Eliezer, Amram Mitzna and Amos Oz...

If anyone at Givat Bar expected them to at least call and promise whatever help is necessary, they were disappointed. The Zionist left responded with a cold shoulder to a rare pioneering event, which should have made it very happy, the establishment of a new settlement in the Negev, on the PC side of the green line. For a generation, the left voiced indignation over the neglect of sovereign territories in the south of the country, yet it was in no hurry to embrace the young settlers there, who come free of any messianic theory or conquest lust. Nor did the media go out of its way. Most of the electronic channels treated the new secular settlement almost as if it was another religious settlement in the territories...

A week after the new settlement was established Collette Avital suddenly came for a visit ... The Labor MK spent most of her visit providing parliamentary support for the young settlement’s detractors...

The lesson: When people on the left yell at the settlers to go to the Negev, they don’t mean it. They are just allergic to caravans, to conquering the wilderness, to the Zionist enterprise.
posted on 1/28/2004