A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Checkpoint: My Recent Trip to Samaria (Part 1)

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Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours

Terror struck again in eastern Jerusalem and throughout Judea and Samaria. The only difference from the usual is that your humble servant happens to be Samaria and will be reporting on what he is doing there beginning today.

But back to yesterday which saw a motorcyclist badly wounded by “rocks”; Palestinian terrorists shooting at Yitzhar; more terrorists firebombing Jewish homes on the Mt. of Olives, and “rock and Molotov” assaults on Israelis at A-Ram, Issawiya, Deir Jarir, Tur, Hizma, Beit El, Abu Dis, Silwan, Rabah, Tzahor, Gush Etzion, Azzun, Umm Salmona, Husan, Silwan, Louvain, Al Khader, the Cave of the Patriarchs in Heron, Tarkumiyya, and near Ramallah among other places.

All told, there were 34 Palestinian terror attacks.

The idiotic Israeli media refocuses on Netanyahu

Now that the American election campaign is over and the Israeli media can stop breathlessly reporting from the United States, Benjamin Netanyahu has returned to the center of the news.

First, the attempt to provoke new elections in Israel has begun again after a one-month hiatus. The television media is back to doing everything it can to promote alliances among Israeli politicians that can somehow bring down the current government. Last night, we actually had suggestions that the duo of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett might do the trick.

How did the media hatch this latest plot? Hold your breath . . . Lapid and Bennett were spotted drinking coffee together.

Second, a new “apparent” scandal has been manufactured–this time involving new submarine purchases from Germany. The story now being disseminated by Channel 10’s chief “Netanyahu scandal monger” Raviv Drucker is that Israel did not really need the 3 new submarines that we have just contracted for, and that in fact Netanyahu pushed for the new submarines against the wishes of former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.

But wait there’s more.  A lawyer who sometimes represents Netanyahu also happens to represent the German shipyard that will build the subs. Conspiracy, conspiracy, conspiracy: Drucker would have us believe that somehow Netanyahu would sign off on the sub deal involving billions of shekels just to put some money in his friend’s pocket.

Absurd.

Next week, Drucker will be back to the Sarah Netanyahu recycled bottles “affair.”

What happened to the great French aliya?

Apparently to everyone’s surprise except your humble servant’s, the great “French Aliya to Israel” is fizzling out. Estimates of what was supposed to have been a migration of tens of thousands of French Jews to Israel this year–and perhaps hundreds of thousands in the next few years, have been drastically reduced.

So far, only about 4500 French Jews have made aliya this year.

Why the diminished number?

It’s simple:

1. Moving to Israel is difficult. Learning a new language, getting a new job, making new friends, choosing new restaurants, finding the right bottle of wine (ok, pardon the sarcasm)–all of these are proving to be a headache for the French.

2. Add to that the fact that the French are not exactly well-liked here. They have quickly become known as “complainers” who whine about everything (such as the bureaucracy) that the everyday Israeli accepts as his or her lot in life–things to be endured in order to survive and live freely as Jews.

The fact of the matter is that many of the French who had already made aliya here are actively considering returning to France or moving on to Quebec, Canada.

TODAY’S BLOG:

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Checkpoint:

My Recent Trip to Samaria (Part 1)

Sitting here in my southern Israel home in Ashdod for the past 5 months, your humble servant grew weary about reporting the endless violence in Judea and Samaria.

So a few weeks ago, I resolved to head out to Samaria to see what is happening on the ground for myself.

And though it might sound perverse, I decided to kill two birds with one stone–by traveling “undercover” with several of the loathsome organizations that I regularly castigate in this blog because of their attempts to undermine Israel. I wanted to gauge the accuracy of my own criticism of these groups.

First, I made arrangements for a tour with Machsom Watch, a self-described group of about 200 Israeli women who monitor the checkpoints in Judea and Samaria and provide what they call “humanitarian” relief to Palestinians (such as taking Palestinian mothers and children to the beach).

Thus it was that yesterday morning, my wife and I took the train from Ashdod to the Savidor Station in Tel Aviv on Arlozorov St. and at 10:30 am met our bus which was more like a mini-van.

Actually, we were the first persons there, but the van slowly filled up with an older German woman who talked incessantly, a young Swedish woman who never talked at all, three students (a young man and two women) from the Technion in Haifa–one of the women spoke Arabic and was notable for her rude behavior, four other Israelis (three women and one man), an American writer who proudly proclaimed that he wrote occasionally for the Huffington Post, two young Spanish women, and two young French women. All of these plus one guide (more later) made our total number 16–actually 17 with our Israeli-Arab driver from Kafr Kassem. Tailing along behind us in his own car was a photographer who “photographed for international publications.”

At 10:50, 20 minutes late, we were off, heading north out of Tel Aviv, stopping first at the Kiryat Shaul Military Cemetery to pick up our primary guide, Daniella (a 60ish Israeli woman with a slight British accent).

When that guide got on, she handed out packets of “information” which included a map of the area in which we were headed, an “evaluation form” for use at the end of the trip (actually a ploy to get our email addresses), and a promotional blurb for Machsom Watch.

By 11:30, we had pulled off to the side of the road across the “Green Line” at our first stop. The purpose of the stop was to see what I had already seen hundreds of times before, the separation fence around Qalqilya to our left as well as the Palestinian settlement of Habla to the right.

Daniella began to tell us “her story” of the separation fence (she called it “the wall, the fence, or whatever”). The facts she wanted to relay were that there are no signs indicating “Green Line” and that 85% of the “Wall” is inside the Green Line.

And she was very insistent on our recognizing that the area between the Green Line and the Separation Fence is called the Seam Zone.

In passing, she threw out the small tidbit that the reason the separation fence was built was to “slow down” terrorist attacks which occurred during the first and second intifadas.

She carefully omitted the fact that the real reason the fence was built was to stop Palestinian suicide bombers–169 of whom blew up over 1200 Israeli men, women, and children between 1995 and 2007.

Also, she wanted us to know at the outset that Machsom Watch supports our IDF soldiers–whom she termed our “children and grandchildren” (more on this later).

She then invoked the name of one of her heroes–a name that she would invoke numerous times during the trip: Barack Obama.

To hear her tell it, when Obama took over the presidency in 2009, he ordered Israel to “get rid” of the checkpoints, and lo and behold, she said, there have been “barely any” terrorist attacks emanating from the “West Bank” since then.

Of course, this was a willful distortion of the facts. Yes, there have been no suicide attacks (because of the Fence), but there have been hundreds of attacks that have emanated from Judea and Samaria since then.

With more than a hundred Israelis murdered.

Daniella also mentioned that only 62% of the proposed Wall (she quickly dropped “fence and whatever”) has been built–and that the current Wall is somewhere between 720 and 815 km long. Actually, at completion, the Fence is supposed to be 708 km long but Daniella casually told us not to hold her to “her numbers.”

From there it was on to our next stop; again we pulled off the road to a point just below the Jewish community of Alfei Menashe (which she said had a population of 10,000–it actually has 7,638 residents) and which is separated from the tiny Palestinian settlements of  Wadi Rasha (pop. 100) and Ras a-Tira (pop. 400) by the Separation Fence.

At this stop, Daniella first expressed her befuddlement about why there was a wall between Alfei Menashe and the Palestinian settlements. Your humble servant thinks she would do well to read what the Israel Supreme Court had to say after an exhaustive analysis:

Such is also the case regarding the separation fence route around the Alfei Menashe enclave. The decision regarding that segment of the fence was made by the government on June 23, 2002. It is a part of phase A of the separation fence. It appears, from the interrogation of various terrorists from Samaria – so we were informed by the respondents’ affidavit (paragraph 14) – that the separation fence in this area indeed provides a significant obstacle which affects the ability of the terrorist infrastructure in Samaria to penetrate terrorists into Israel. It also appears from the interrogations that, due to the existence of the obstacle, terrorist organizations are forced to seek alternative ways of slipping terrorists into Israel, through areas in which the obstacle has not yet been built, such as the Judea area. We examined the separation fence at the Alfei Menashe area. We received detailed explanations regarding the route of the fence. We have reached the conclusion that the considerations behind the determined route are security considerations. It is not a political consideration which lies behind the fence route at the Alfei Menashe enclave, rather the need to protect the well being and security of the Israelis (those in Israel and those living in Alfei Menashe, as well as those wishing to travel from Alfei Menashe to Israel and those wishing to travel from Israel to Alfei Menashe).

In any case, Daniella continued, bemoaning the cost of the “Wall” (she said 1 km of Wall costs between 15-16 million shekels–a “Fence” was slightly less at 12 million shekels), the difficulty of the people in  Wadi Rasha and Ras a-Tira to get to their small olive orchard in the valley, and the difficult process for Palestinians to get permits “to sleep in their own beds and tend to their own property.” She also noted that empty land that is untended for 3 years becomes state land (her point being that the permit process makes it difficult for poor Palestinians to till “their land”).

At this point, we will stop for today–just as Daniella is ramping up the “poor Palestinian” angle, and just before we get to talk to a real, live, Palestinian and see an Israeli checkpoint in action.