Economics Minister and Bayit Yehudi chairman Naftali Bennett praised the government today (Monday, Sept. 1) during a visit to Gush Etzion for its decision to answer terror with Jewish expansion.

Bennett visited Yeshiva Mekor Chaim in Gush Etzion on the first day of Israel’s school year Monday. The yeshiva, located in Kfar Etzion, was attended by two of the three teens martyred by Hamas terrorists this past June.

“Until a couple of months ago, you students here at Mekor Chaim were regular students. Today you are the spearhead. You now bear extra weight upon your shoulders, the “mekor chaim” – the source of life ‘’ of Israel,” he told the students.

“Yesterday the government made two decisions – one which builds up and strengthens the Gaza frontier, and the second which builds up and strengthens Gush Etzion,” he added.

Bennett praised the government’s decision yesterday to designate a tract of land near Alon Shevut, not far from the yeshiva, as state land. The lot is located close to the bus stop and hitchhiking post from where the three teens were kidnapped and subsequently murdered.

“What we did yesterday was an act of Zionism,” Bennett explained as he toured the area. “Building is our reply to murder.”

Women in Green organization leaders Nadia Matar and Yehudit Katzover also praised the decision.

“The Defense Minister has allocated 4,000 dunams for the city of Geva’ot – congratulations! We hope that this is indicative of additional positive steps in the future, not only as a reaction to the murder of Jews but as a policy – but the high tones of protest from America, the world, the left, and the Arabs reveal the depth of the problem of Judea and Samaria.

“If the government of Israel does not apply sovereignty to the expanses of Eretz Israel, this question will remain open to negotiations and endless disputes. Israeli Sovereignty must be applied, and realized by the state maintaining law and order for all its citizens – including the Beduin, the Arabs, and others. The time has come to initiate and once and for all apply Israeli sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley,” they said.

Israelis heard the news early Monday morning, June 30. The search was over. Yes, the search was over, but the boys were dead.

The response throughout the land was palpable: the air of hope and unity was punctured, replaced by raw anguish.

But by 2:00 the following morning, some Israeli women responded by taking action. Their action was not one of vigilantism, nor was it to raise their fists at the intractable enemy.

Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, the indefatibable Women in Green, along with a group of supporters, went to a lovely little hill just off from the Gush Etzion Junction – the site of such despair – and began clearing the area.

Since July 1, Kassover and Matar have been joined by dozens and dozens of Israelis and of visitors. They are reclaiming a bit of land that has been set aside (the site has long had official approval for tourism development), and are developing it as a functioning and vibrant tourist site.

They also renamed the hill. Previously the site was known as Givat Oz (Hill of Strength). The new name incorporates the initials of the three boys who were kidnapped and murdered – Gilad, Eyal and Naftali – and the acronym created also happens to mean great wisdom. The site is now known as Givat Oz v’Gaon.

Nadia Matar, that steadfast soldier in the war to reclaim the land, spoke with The Jewish Press about the new site.

“This is a Zionist response of the Jewish people to the incomprehensible act of killing our boys,” Matar said. “Our enemies think they will scare us away with their acts of terrorism, but they are wrong. We cling to the land ever more strongly in response to their efforts.”

The area is being cleared by hand. People show up on a daily basis to help move the rocks, clean the lone remaining stone building, and set up picnic tables for meals and chairs for lectures and services.

people came to help clear the land at Givat Oz v’Gaon.

“This will be a camping site,” Matar says. “This past weekend, the first of Givat Oz v’Gaon, we had already 70 or 80 people who brought tents to spend Shabbat here. The residents of the nearby kibbutz Migdal Oz came to join us for seudat shlishit (a meal before evening services) and swelled the crowd to between 200 and 300 people.”

The residents of Migdal Oz came by a road that connects the back of the kibbutz to the Gush Etzion junction. This is also significant, Matar explains, because for quite a long time the kibbutzniks did not use the road as there had been frequent attacks by Arabs from nearby towns.

“Now, with a strong Jewish presence between the kibbutz and the Gush junction, this road is also being ‘reclaimed’ as our response to terrorism,” Matar shared with a sense of satisfaction.

Ruthie Lieberman lives in nearby Alon Shvut. Her home was used by people who participated in the searches for the boys; she and her family lived through it with great intensity.

“The families got up from shiva yesterday,” Lieberman said. “And I found myself on this site today, helping to clear the land, to plant new trees – the ultimate act of positive Zionism.”

Lieberman and her daughter, Merav, planted one of the three trees planted in memory of the three boys.

Ruth Lieberman and her daughter, Merav, plant a tree in Eyal Yifrach’s memory at the new site created to honor the boys, Givat Oz v’Gaon.

As a Zionist answer to the despicable murder of our three boys, a pioneering group of Jews headed by Women in Green went up to Givat Oz – a hilltop overlooking Tzomet HaGush – in order to create a new Jewish presence in the area.

As since the beginning of Zionism, the land of Israel is sometimes built with blood and tears. The hill is adjacent to the historical community of Migdal Eder, which was dismantled in 1927, in a forest near to Bet Fajjar, on approved State land.

The pioneers cleaned out an abandoned structure on the site and settled it, calling upon the government to immediately apply sovereignty, starting with Hevron and Gush Etzion. This call was made by the Women and Green, together with the Professors for a Strong Israel, headed by Aryeh Eldad and Matot Arim. Davidi Perl, mayor of Gush Etzion, together with his deputy, Moshe Savil, came to bless the new Givat Oz endeavor. The mayor said, “Our answer is clear and determined – we will continue to expand and build here and now. Here we will build a new community and many more in the near future. We will build and settle and hold strong to the land.”

The local police chief and army commanders came to visit and promised to safeguard the place.

This morning there will be Tefilat Shacharit at 6am. At 10am the public is invited to come and help refurbish the building (painting and cleaning).

Directions: Drive to Tzomet HaGush and turn toward Migdal Oz and Bet Fajjar. After a few hundred meters turn right onto the dirt path and continue up into the forest.

A mezuzah placed on an abandoned IDF building in the Shdema area of eastern Gush Etzion served as a victory sign for the Women in Green, who have struggled for five years to keep Arabs from occupying it and separating Jewish contiguity in the future.

The building now will serve as a cultural center, after having been abandoned in 2006 and later virtually destroyed and looted by Palestinian Authority Arabs.

Two years later, when Ehud Barak was Defense Minister, the IDF planned to give the land to the Palestinian Authority even though it is “Area C,” which under the Oslo Accords includes Jewish and Arab communities and villages that are supposed to be under complete Israeli sovereignty.

The nationalist Women in Green organized what appeared to be hopeless protests to keep the land from falling into Arab hands. They pressured the army to return to the Shedma base in 2010, and after renovations, a mezuzah was affixed to the doorpost of the building on Friday in the presence of the Deputy Minister of Religious Services Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan.

“Shdema will be a flourishing community. There will be no other sovereignty in Eretz Israel other than that of the State of Israel,” he said.

Yehudit Katsover, who along with and Nadia Matar leads the Women in Green, read a congratulatory letter by Speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein, who wrote, “The Gush Etzion area has an abundant history of special women who ‘built the House of Israel.’ On one side, standing on the main road, is the tomb of the Matriarch Rachel, who weeps and ‘refuses to be comforted for her children, who are gone.’

“And on the other side stands Shdema, which connects Jerusalem and Tekoa, the place of the woman of Tekoa who acts on behalf of the unity of the people, ‘that the one who is banished be not an outcast from him.’ Israel is redeemed by the merit of righteous women, and by the merit of tenacious and fighting women, who are persistent and experienced in struggles… Shdema will yet develop and become an important and central settlement point.”

Gush Etzion Regional Council head Davidi Perl also vowed that Shdema “will be a permanent settlement.”

The Women in Green and their supporters have struggled against leftists, both Israelis and foreigners, who have encouraged Arabs to try to take over the land. The women frequently planted trees, even after Arabs uprooted them.

Attorney Herzl Yehezkel, who during his term in office as head of the Homat Shmuel (Har Homah) Community Administration worked with the women, said the effort to prevent the transfer of Shedma to Arabs “proves that determination is successful, and there is no reason not to settle everywhere.”

“How can you be nauseated when you watch the riot police using the taser again and again on the settler Boaz Albert who’s lying on the floor screaming in pain,” writes on her Facebook page MK Zehava Gal-On, chair of the left wing Meretz party, who has no love lost for the settlement movement. But the level of abuse and brutality on the part of the police in this case has cut through political dividing lines.

A video produced and distributed by the Yitzhar outpost spokesperson’s office shows local resident Boaz Albert being subdued by a team of policemen who arrested him for breaking an administrative restraining order banning him from setting foot in the settlement.

His wife and children are living there. He sneaked in to see them. Somebody called the cops.

In the video, police barge into Albert’s home, the screen goes dark and we hear him screaming in pain. Then a police officer is seen holding a stun gun and threatening to use it against Albert who is begging not to be tasered again, crying out that he’s emphatically not resisting arrest—while one of the cops is saying:”Electricute him already.” Then four police carry Albert out in a manner that could not possibly enable him to resist them – then, in the dark we hear him screaming in agony as some cop apparently shot him full of volts just for the fun of it.

“There is no justification in the world for using this cruel weapon on a man who is not acting violently and does not present danger to the four cops who hover over him and who could easily arrest him without a problem.”

Gal-On said that she is fighting for the rights of settlers against police abuse, just as she’s fighting on behalf of Palestinians who are arrested without trial. She called on the right to join her in condemning both kinds of police violations of people’s civil rights.

Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar of “Women in Green” also condemned the “scandalous arrest of Boaz Albert, a resident of Yitzhar, a father of six, in a violent military operation in which security forces shot him and his brother with iron arrows from a Taser gun and wounded him. All this because of Albert’s ‘crime’ of refusing to obey the immoral and anti-democratic edict of expulsion that was given him.”

The Women in Green contend that “these expulsion orders are used solely against Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria and not against Arab stone-throwers nor against the European anarchists that attack soldiers.”

Katsover and Matar call on the “Eretz Israel” lobby MKs to intervene in the case. Meanwhile, Albert has been set free by a district court judge in Lod on friday afternoon.

A demonstration is planned for 10 PM israel time, in the Beit El area, to protest police cruelty against Boaz Albert.

On Tisha B’Av evening, the Women in Green led their traditional march with a packed crowd (despite the late hour) around the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.

As in every year for the past 19 years, the traditional Tisha B’Av Walk, with the participation of public figures, will be held.

However, this year the Walk will depart considerably late, because of instructions issued by the police, who wish to allow the Muslims to complete the Ramadan events on the Temple Mount before the Jewish Walk has even set off.

The organizers of the Walk, ‘Women in Green’ leaders Yehudit Katsover and Nadia Matar, remind us that Tisha B’Av night fell during the month of Ramadan last year as well, and the police had requested to completely change the route of the traditional Walk, under the pretext of a concern for public safety. Katsover and Matar appealed to the Supreme Court and, sure enough, 2 days later the police withdrew its objection, but not before instructing that the event be postponed to 11:00pm.

At the beginning of the restoration of the traditional Tisha B’Av Walk 19 years ago, the initiative had also been met with resistance by the police. In those days the police refused to approve the Walk to be held. “They never imagined that Jews would march there, in what they called “East Jerusalem”, in the place where only Arabs roam”, Katsover and Matar reminisce and add: “We turned to the Supreme Court and said that if this is the sovereign, unified undivided capital of Israel, there is no way we can not march there, and sure enough, we won, and the tradition of the Walk set out, literally and figuratively”.

This year, probably due to past experiences and the fear of yet another legal embarrassment, the police decided not to demand the alteration of the route of the Walk, yet at the same time instructed to postpone it to 11:30 pm, after the Muslims have completed their prayers and have left the Temple Mount area.

Katsover and Matar raise the concern that among the considerations for postponing the departure the Walk, might also nestle the police’s hope that a more limited amount of marchers will show up due to the late hour. “It should be pointed out that during the 18 years that the Walk has been held, there has not been a single case of friction or confrontation between the marchers and the local Muslims, a fact that reinforces the sense of frustration and anger following the decision of the police”, say the two.

“This is a disgrace. In the independent State of Israel, in sovereign Jerusalem, logic is working backwards. The Arabs go up to the Temple Mount, but the Jews can only pray at the Western Wall. In a sovereign state, the Jews’ events will only be held after the Arabs’ events are finished. Why? Ask the police! Someone there still hasn’t internalized that Jewish national events should take precedence. Apparently, we are still in the diaspora, and we still bend over to the demands of the gentiles”, say Katsover and Matar, who are convinced that “the late hour at which the Walk commences will not deter the masses from coming. On the contrary. It will bring more people”, they declare.

The event, which will be held on Tisha B’Av night (the night between Monday and Tuesday, July 15th 2013), is expected to be attended by the Deputy Minister of Religious Affairs, MK Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, Deputy Defence Minister MK Danny Danon, Chairman of Professors for a Strong Israel, Prof. Aryeh Eldad, and Chairman of the Israel Land Fund, Aryeh King.

The Walk will begin with a public reading ceremony of the Book of Lamentations (the Scroll of Eicha) at 10:30pm in Independence Park, located in downtown Jerusalem. At 11:30pm the Walk itself will set off along the following route: Independence Park, The New Gate (Sha’ar HaKha’dash), Damascus Gate (Sha’ar Sh’chem), Herod’s Gate (Sha’ar HaPrakhim), Lions’ Gate (Sha’ar Ha’A’ra’yot), where speeches will be made, and from there to Dung Gate (Sha’ar Ha’Ashpot) near the Western Wall.

For details:
Yehudit Katsover: 050-716-1818
Nadia Matar: 050-550-0834
The Movement for Israel’s Tomorrow (Women in Green)