What is the source of our repugnant status? Some refer to us as leeches who have sucked the Israeli treasury dry, and caused undeserved stagnation to the Negev and the Galil, by our demands to fund our settlements; others even charge us with immorality, saying we have robbed the Palestinians of lands that rightfully belong to them.
There are voices of those like Avrum Burg, who have internalized the cruel canard our enemies have cynically flung at us, holding us responsible for the suicide bombers who murder the innocent citizens of Netanya, Tel Aviv, Hadera and Petach Tikva.
These voices have forgotten the Treaty of Versailles and the Balfour Declaration, which initially called for eighteen Arab states and one Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan; they portray us as white European Boers conquering and colonizing the “South African” homelands of the native Palestinians, paying no mind that it is we Jews who have lived in this area for 4,000 years in unbroken continuity and that we comprised the majority of those who lived on and worked these lands in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In their blind idealization of the possibilities for peace with the Palestinians, they choose to overlook that from the UN Partition Plan of 1947 to the tense period preceding the Six Day War to the Oslo accords of 1993 to the Camp David Summit of 2000, it is we Israelis who have consistently been willing to compromise and it has been the Arabs who have refused offer after offer to share this land.
Yes, you can only make peace with your enemy – but that enemy must be willing to make peace with you.
Though most Israelis seem to have bought into the “immorality” of our position and condone any ill treatment we may receive as being well deserved, we settlers remain proud of our settlements, proud of the unique and close relationship some of us have succeeded in establishing with our Palestinian neighbors, proud of our educational network, proud of the idealism and patriotism of our youth, who still find their way into the most elite and dangerous units of the IDF.
But we are hurt and dismayed by the hatred leveled against us. Yes, the settler community speaks with different voices and from varying degrees of a wide right-wing perspective, but the overwhelming majority of us are rational, committed, patriotic and idealistic citizens. Do we not deserve to be embraced and co-opted in a consensus government (even if that government rejects Greater Israel as a viable option) rather than cast aside and delegitimized as criminals?
Most of us would welcome a plan enabling us to live in peace with peaceful neighbors – but instead we are told that many of our legal settlements (beyond the “fence”) will have to be dismantled even as Hamastan is gaining unprecedented political support and renewed terrorism is rearing its ugly head.
The government’s claim that unilateral separation will enhance our ability to defend ourselves – that once we retreat from settlements it will be easier to extirpate the enemy – is unproven, but the destruction of our homes and the uprooting of our settlers is taking place with great dispatch and in an atmosphere that only strengthens our feelings that we, the settlers, have become the enemy.
Does the government not realize that the insensitivity and hatred we feel emanating from its policies only serves to energize the extremist elements of our population and threatens to rob our state of its most committed and idealistic youth (God forbid)?
If it’s true that most Israelis hate the settlers, they must also hate themselves. After all, modern Israel was founded by pioneers who settled on lands claimed by the Arabs. If our government continues to delegitimize the settler community, I fear that eventually we will witness the evacuation of Jews from Tekoa, Efrat – and Jerusalem.