Nehemia Shtrasler for Haaretz
They are not weeds, a minority, or a fringe. They are the Nachshon sent before the camp to prepare the area for the settlers’ grand master plan for cleansing the land of Palestinians.
They realize that they will never be able to live quietly in their villa on the hill, as long as they are surrounded by 2.8 million poor, unemployed and desperate Palestinians under occupation. For that reason, they know the shootings on the roads and the raids on villages must continue. Therefore they want the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to continue, even escalate into a regional conflict, the war of Gog and Magog, which will solve all their problems.
The method of the settler establishment is to publicly disavow the pogroms perpetrated by the hilltop youth and dismiss them as ‘weeds’ in the settler garden. This time, too, the pogrom in Jit elicited the boilerplate statement of condemnation by the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements. It is ridiculous. The settlers also called Yitzhak Rabin’s murderer a ‘weed.’ Their line was that weeds inevitably take root on the edges of a farm field, on the margins, and they do not represent the reasonable and moderate majority.
But already back in 1995, Zerubavel Arbel, a member of Kibbutz Moaz Haim, challenged that claim: ‘I’ve been a farmer for 50 years, and I can tell you that weeds don’t grow on the edges of a field but around the irrigation lines.’ In other words, they grow near the central tap, where there is plenty of water. And so that is the case today. The murderers, the arsonists, the pogromists and those who attack soldiers are the best of the best. They are the executors of the settlers’ master plan.
The abuse of Palestinians is nothing new, but in the course of the war it has greatly increased. Entire communities have been driven from their homes and their property destroyed. Armed settlers wearing Israel Defense Forces uniforms have beaten and even shot them. They have burned olive groves, cars and homes.
They are in effect fulfilling orders issued by Bezalel Smotrich who once declared ‘Hawara must be wiped out’ (and why has the state prosecutor begun an investigation against singers Eyal Golan and Kobi Peretz for incitement against Gazans when he did not recommend the same in connection with Smotrich, a cabinet minister, whose remarks are far more influential?)
On a Friday 10 days ago, four Bedouin women and a 2-year-old girl, residents of the Israeli town of Rahat, found themselves in the illegal outpost of Givat Ronen. Upon entering, the settlers attacked their vehicle with large stones, smashed its windows, beat them and broke their bones, threatened them with their guns and finally burned the car. The response of Knesset member Limor Son Har-Melech (Otzma Yehudit) was to justify the pogrom. Perhaps she, too, should be investigated before Golan and Peretz are?
In Jit, a village regarded as peaceful, several dozen pogromists armed with rifles and pistols, entered the town, threw stones, destroyed property, shot at people (one of whom was killed and another seriously wounded), tossed Molotov cocktails and set cars and homes afire. In one case, they set fire to a house with its inhabitants inside. That family was lucky and managed to escape at the last moment – unlike the Dawabsheh family from the village of Duma, who did not get out of their home in time and were killed in a terror attack a few years ago similar to the one at Jit.
There is a clear connection between Smotrich’s Hawara remarks, Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount on Tisha B’Av, the attack in Givat Ronen and the Jit pogrom. It is no coincidence that during the pogrom the Jewish terrorists shouted at the residents of Jit, ‘We’ll deport you to Jordan.’ Their shouts revealed the strategy behind the seeming chaos – setting aflame the entire Middle East, on the way to a war of Gog and Magog against the Arab world and Iran, enabling Israel to deport all the West Bank Palestinians to Jordan, including the Arab citizens of Israel. Then the Jews can settle quietly and peacefully in the entire Land of Israel.
And representatives of these delusional terrorists were brought into the government by the most despicable man in the history of the Jewish people, Benjamin Netanyahu.