A Long Day of “Suffering” in Hevron: Part 5 (Final)

Kislev 5, 5777

December 5, 2016

 

Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours

We counted more than 25 terror incidents yesterday, many in places where your humble servant traveled in the last month: Hevron, Adora, Tarkumiyya, Hizma, Qalqilya, and Hizma.

“Rocks”, Molotovs, IEDs, and arson were the forms that the terrorism took. Also, Palestinians cut down a large number of trees in a forest between Hevron and Adora.

Bennett and Netanyahu cut a deal on Amona

Though it remains somewhat unclear what the deal is.

Apparently, the Regulation Bill will be brought to the floor of the Knesset on Wednesday. This bill will begin the process of legalizing Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria that were allegedly built on “private Palestinian land.”

1. However, the Bill will not include Clause 7 which refers to land already ordered by the Israel Supreme Court to be evacuated and destroyed.

2. In other words, Amona will be razed, but not before the existing caravans/homes are placed on the three plots in Amona already determined to be “Absentee Property.”

Within 8 months, those caravans/homes will be transferred to Shvut Rachel.

In your humble servant’s opinion and in the absence of any further details to the contrary, this agreement is a devastating loss for the Amona community. 

In fact, it is the loss of the Amona community completely and bodes ill for numerous other communities throughout Judea, Samaria, and Israel.

The El Al crisis is over

The pilot walkout that brought El Al to a virtual standstill with canceled flights in every direction has ended.

Who got what?

The pilots received an 8.75% annual salary increase, and a promise from management to have no more “wet charters”–flights which are manned by flight crews from other airlines.

In return, the pilots agreed to stop splitting flights–piloting the plane in one direction and then flying back in business class. Also, pilots agreed to reduce the overnight stay between going back and forth from 44 hours to 27 hours.

Insofar as your humble servant is concerned, El Al’s resolution to this crisis has come too late.

I have vowed not to fly the airlines any time soon because of a horrible “wet charter” flight I took to Lisbon in September which may have been the worst flight I have ever taken. Operated for El Al by Privilege Airlines the service was abominable, but worse, the seats were so tightly packed together that I could not sit in my seat without smashing my knees into the seat in front of me (and I’m not a tall person). More than this, El Al has just informed me that my flight back to the U.S. next week will be leaving at 12:45 am instead of 9:45 am–meaning that I now have a 13 hour layover in New York before continuing on to California.

No more El Al for me.

John Kerry is determined to continue meddling in Israel’s affairs

Can you believe John Kerry? Even now, when he is virtually out of office, he is still demeaning Israel at every opportunity.

Yesterday he was at the Saban Forum in Washington, a favorite Democratic hangout, ranting over and over about the “settlements.”

However, his main 15 second sound bite went like this: “I know people in Israel who think that peace is possible between Israel and the Arab countries. There will be no separate peace between Israel and the Arab world–I want to make that clear to all of you. No, No, No, No, No! No peace without the Palestinian process and Palestininian peace.”

No, No, No, No, No! It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that if Kerry had his way, he would tear up Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan. After all, nothing is more important to Kerry than the utopian dream of “peace with the Palestinians.”

Say what? Who is building Israel’s naval fleet?

Fresh on the heels a few days ago of the revelation that the new submarines being built in Germany are actually being built by a company (ThyssenKrupp) partly owned by Iran comes the news that four new corvettes (patrol boats) are being built at a German shipyard wholly owned and operated by Abu Dhabi MAR and a Frenchman of Lebanese descent. 

You might think this would set off some alarms in the Israel Defense Ministry, but in a sign of how bad things have become there, a Defense Department spokesman could only mumble: “There is no intelligence risk involved.”

No intelligence risk?

Unbelievable.

TODAY’S BLOG:

A Long Day of “Suffering” in Hevron: Part 5 (Final)

Note: Your humble servant recommends that you read parts 1-4 by clicking on the appropriate links in the right hand column of this page.

Well by now, dear readers, you have realized that the suffering referred to in the title of this series does not refer to the suffering of the “poor Palestinians” described by the atrocious group “Breaking the Silence”, but the suffering endured by your humble servant and wife who listened to their spiel–and the suffering you are being put through as I recount what happened.

In Part 5 today, we come to the end of our suffering tour which was climaxed by a tale of Palestinian suffering.

But let’s pick it up where we left off yesterday at the Hanegbi building in front of the Avraham Avinu neighborhood.

Remember our context:

We continued walking up Shuhada Street to a point across from Beit Romano where we stopped for another of Ido’s rants which by this time had become caricatures of themselves.

Once again it was all about Palestinian suffering–suffering so intense that the Palestinian population of 35,000 in the H2 zone in 1994 has now dropped to about 20,000. The only Palestinians who remain in H2, he said, were the ones too poor to go anywhere else.

As an example of the depopulation, he asked to look at the second floors of the buildings across the street. According to him, the buildings that still have Palestinian residents have bars (he called them “cages”) across the windows–bars meant to stop the “rocks” that he said were thrown by “the settlers.”

The buildings with no “cages” were empty ones.

However, in looking at the buildings, virtually all of them had bars across the windows. Whatever depopulation Ido was referring to was not visible here. In the same depopulation context, Ido referred to Gaza.

We continued up the street at which point my wife and I began to fully engage the three members of the Breaking the Silence team. I had a particularly long “conversation” with Merphie in which I first questioned how in the world Breaking the Silence can claim that Gaza is occupied.

According to her, it is occupied because Israel provides water and electricity to Gaza, Israel maintains a maritime blockade of Gaza, and because (according to her–and as yet unconfirmed by me) Israel maintains a database provided by the PLO (yes, the PLO not Hamas according to Merphie) of all new births in Gaza.  She couldn’t believe how I couldn’t see how providing humanitarian services, stopping terrorism, and keeping track of the population constitutes occupation.

I asked her if what she really wanted was for Israel to cut off all power and water to Gaza. She really didn’t have an answer to that question–particularly after I told her that I wished that Israel would.

In any case, all of this took place as Ido bored the crowd at an overlook into Beit Romano. Eventually my conversation with Merphie ended and at least 10 people from the group now engaged my wife and I in conversation about the “other side of the story.”

Continuing up the hill we came to Beit Hadassah (see map) and the Building Complex of the Six, named for six young men who were brutally murdered there by Palestinian terrorists on May 2, 1980. Across the street at a point where a stairway came down a hill was an Israeli checkpoint.

Ido took us to the side and began telling us that the checkpoint did not used to be there–that it was a recent addition to the street and totally unnecessary. He said that there was a Palestinian school on top of the hill and the poor Palestinian children had to go through the checkpoint to go to school every school day.

Meaning the body can heal on its own. order cialis online You might have faced some problems using usage of some medicines and that has to be discussed with the doctor who prescribed canada cialis 100mg your drugs. buying levitra from canada Erectile dysfunction in young men is a statement that seems far-fetched according to many people. One of the on line cialis https://www.unica-web.com/documents/statut/unicasatzung6.11.pdf most notable books is the Sexperiment.
As we stood there, a group of laughing kids came down the stairway and walked through the checkpoint without even being looked at by the two Israel soldiers on duty. But one of those soldiers grew increasingly tired of Ido’s misinformation and finally spoke up when Ido had finished.

Speaking in English, he let it be known that the reason for the checkpoint is that numerous stabbings have taken place on the stairwell.

Ido didn’t have a response.

Up the hill we went, off the road onto a path that carried us to the top of the hill. On the way up, I questioned Merphie.

Me: A lot of people say that Breaking the Silence is appalling because you subsist off of foreign money.

Merphie: We do get most of our money from outside of Israel. You can check our website.

[I did check the website later and here’s a link to the organizations that donated to Breaking the Silence in 2014 (the 2015 link did not work)]

Me: And are you paid to take trips around the world? You are not volunteers?

Merphie: Yes of course we are paid, and why not? We are serving an educational purpose. We want governments and individuals to stop supporting Israeli “occupation.” Of course people who work for the organization should get paid.

Once we got to the top of the hill, we had a good overlook of the entire city of Hevron.

And another nauseating description of Palestinian suffering by Ido. Take a look at the picture below:

Ido wanted to tell us that during the second intifada the neighborhood had been a Palestinian snipers location. All day the snipers would randomly fire into the Jewish neighborhoods below. One day, he said, a sniper even killed a Jewish infant as she lay in her stroller.

What Ido bizarrely couldn’t understand was why the IDF turned its attention to the hill in an attempt to stop the snipers–and especially why the IDF destroyed the house where the murderer of the infant fired from.

At this point, we all sat in a circle and a 25-ish Palestinian man representing a Palestinian group called “Youth Against the Settlements/Occupation” came and talked to us against a backdrop of “Free Palestine” signs stenciled on the side of a home.

For 30 long minutes. 30 long minutes of “we are not free”, “we are suffering”, “we just want peace”, “we are not free”, “we are suffering”, “we just want peace”, ad nauseum. Mixed in were bits of misinformation such as his version of the story of a woman who was killed by soldiers on Shuhada Street after she pulled a knife and tried to stab them. Our Palestinian lecturer said she was shot 17 times for no reason while she lay on the ground.

Nonsense.

Oh yes, and he wanted to tell us that another function of his group is to visit the families of dead terrorists to give them peace and comfort.

What was left to say?

When he finally finished, we made our way down the hill and back to our bus and headed back to Tel Aviv after going back through the Tarkumiyya checkpoint.

Ido then summarized the trip: Palestinian suffering, suffering, and more suffering); Israeli occupation, occupation, and more occupation. And so on.

Thirty minutes out from Tel Aviv, Ido opened it up for questions; I went first, and our back and forth went like this (emphasis mine):

Me: Considering all that you have said today, do you think that Jews have any right to live in Hevron?

Ido: That’s a good question. But I think it is the right of the Palestinians to make that decision when the occupation ends.

Me: They have already made that decision. Abu Mazen has repeatedly said that not one Jew will be able to live in Palestine after the “occupation” ends.

Ido: I’m not aware that he ever said that. But even if he did, we should end the “occupation” first, and then we can talk about it.

Me: Doesn’t this mean that you support ethnic cleansing of all Jews from Judea and Samaria?

Ido: (no response)

In a way, this exchange sums up the entire trip. Breaking the Silence does not believe that Jews have any place in Hevron or any other place in Judea and Samaria. One wonders what they say when their leftist friends claim that all of Israel is occupied. I imagine it is something like Ido said: “Just give the Palestinians everything they want, and we’ll figure it out then. If they decide there shouldn’t be Israel, well, that’s their right.”

By 4:30 pm, after a major traffic jam, we arrived back at Arlozorof and made our way back to Ashdod.

So, my overall summary of this trip:

1. It was a useful trip to hear what our enemies say. And make no mistake about it, “Breaking the Silence” is the enemy.

2. The Breaking the Silence presentation involved giving half-truths and outright misinformation. But even more, Breaking the Silence specializes in omissions. In telling about Hevron, the speakers only focus on the punitive actions taken because of terrorism, not the terrorism that produced the actions.

3. Conversations with Breaking the Silence staff confirmed everything that we have ever written about the group. They are a group of disgruntled IDF veterans who are paid (largely with foreign money) to travel the world trashing the IDF and Israel.

4. Their trashing of Israel takes the form of asserting that the government of Israel is not democratic.  For them, the fact that Israelis live in one of the most democratic places on Earth–and elect their leaders after bruising election campaigns–means nothing.

5. Their trashing of our soldiers is more subtle. On the one hand, they want to claim that they support the IDF, but say this while warning everyone that the soldiers are violently aggressive, that the soldiers collude with the “settlers”, and that most soldiers and former soldiers (except for those in Breaking the Silence) have lost their moral compass.

6. The Jewish community members of Kiryat Arba and the H2 section of Hevron are heroes who are courageously standing up for Jewish rights in Judea. They deserve all of our support.