The heroin of Eretz Israel

[whimsicaldeb]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShAr ... ntrassID=2

The heroin of Eretz Israel
By Bradley Burston

We all have it, to some degree - a taste for the hard stuff. The heroin that is the Holy Land.

No one avoids it entirely. It gets into your blood and stays there, whether you're Israeli, Palestinian, Jew, Muslim or Christian.

All of us have it, but for some, especially the young, it has us, body and soul.

Take those kids in Hebron, the masked ones, the ones who threw rocks, eggs, tomatoes, scrap iron, at Israeli soldiers and police. The ones who called them Nazis. The new ones. The Jewish ones.

They have it the worst. That's why we're supposed to love them.

"This is not the Sheinkenite youth, which is only interested in drugs," says Dr. Yaakov Ben-Taria, a physician who lives in the Avraham Avinu Jewish section of Hebron, in a reference to the Tel Aviv street viewed by some on the religious right as the apotheosis of ultra-secular, lockstep leftist decadence.

The youth who came to protest on behalf of Hebron's Jews, he continued, "are also infected with a drug, but of a kind that I would wish on your grandchildren: the drug of life, of Torah and the Land."

The good doctor may be on to something. When I was young, they told our parents to be watching for the tell-tale signs of drug use, which, the brochures said, included:

--Anger, aggression and verbal abusiveness.

--Sadness and crying.

--Paranoia.

Should we be worried about these kids in Hebron? Or the same kids next week in the Amona outpost?

Absolutely not, we are told. They are not problem children. They are Meitav Ha-Noar, the cream of Jewry's youth. They have only have one problem: What the rest of us are doing to them.

"This is an army of Israelis who hate the Jews," the doctor said, noting that Hebron Brigade commander Colonel Motti Baruch had even cocked his gun at the protesters.

"These are youngsters from 12 - 17, youngsters facing their matriculation exams," Dr. Ben-Taria told Army Radio this week, "and all that pains them is the Land of Israel, which is being ripped away from them, step by step."

Maybe he's right. Maybe it's only the specific pictures chosen by the defeatist self-hating leftist media that makes these kids appear to have a problem. Only a few wore masks. Only a few threw punches in the faces of police and soldiers. Only one sent the SMS message to Baruch that read "Long live the fourth Reich, Heil Sharon."

Did the police and army lose control, at least to some degree? "They are spraying their faces with gas, beating them with clubs, strangling them about the neck with their hands, and it's very possible that in situations like that, these youngsters could lose control and they, also, act with violence in order to defend themselves," said Orit Struck of Hebron.

It's also true that the struggle in the Hebron case is exceptional. This is not one more outpost, one ragged hilltop out of dozens. At issue here is property to which Jews held title from the early 19th century, through the Arab massacre of scores of Jewish residents of the city in1929.

But maybe all that's beside the point for the Merry Pranksters of anti-expulsion mayhem, a traveling carnival of outpost riggers, street-fighters, chanters and shucklers and rebels for God. Sexually charged, running on hormones.

The Sixties with tsitsis.

There's little doubt that the most radical counter-culture in all of Israel is to be found in the outlying settlements of the West Bank.

Like the hippie movement, there is imaginative alternative rock here, alternative spirituality, even alternative skullcap and sidelock badges of membership.

There is the palpable, intoxicating sense of kinship in an alternative nation, the State of Judea, pure, hippie-Halachic, untainted either by Israeli law or Israeli law enforcement.

There is that knowing look in the eye, the look that says never trust anyone over 30 who wasn't a Kahane guy.

And yes, there are drugs, but they are beside the point. The point is that this is Meitav Ha-Noar, the idol of Planet Yeshiva on six continents and the Jewish Day School Galaxy as well, high on Torah, strung out on Eretz Israel, and, like the hippies they resemble, completely high on each other and themselves.

They said, at the time of the hippies, that they were a coddled generation. Could it be that, if kids are told all their lives that they are Meitav Ha-Noar, that they and they alone are saving Eretz Israel for future generations, that they might at some point come to believe it, and act accordingly?

In the end, the hippies posed a threat, most of all, to the old establishment liberals of the Democratic Party - that is, to their own parents.

Sure enough, the real threat posed by the orange diaper babies of Meitav Hanoar may be to their own parents, that is, to the establishment settlers of the West Bank.

The Intifada of Meitav Ha-Noar, after all, is not directed only at the Expulsionist Defeatist Fascistic Government and its lackey security forces. It is directed also at the Yesha Council, something that the Yesha Council knows only too well.

"The masked youths are doing enormous damage to the settlement enterprise," said Yesha Council leader Bentzi Lieberman. "Their stones are also aimed at us."

Referring to the legal title to the property that eight Jewish families have occupied since the murder of 10-month-old Shalhevet Pas in 2001, Lieberman said, "As a result of these youths and their acts of vandalism, the people of Israel fail to hear the very justified legal argument."

"We are becoming identified with the profile of Palestinians who throw stones at IDF soldiers. What's become of us?" Lieberman said.

"Israeli public opinion could say, 'Guys, we've had it with you. Even if you're right, we can't abide these kinds of acts."

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