A few weeks back, Haaretz did a piece mentioning David Dudkevitch, a settler rabbi who says that Israel has stolen the state from the Jews. In 2004, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a piece for the New Yorker called "Among the Settlers: Will They Destroy Israel?" that also mentioned Dukevitch.
I came across David Dudkevitch, a rabbi in Yitzhar. Dudkevitch, a sour-faced man in his thirties who was dressed in a black suit and a white shirt, is a person of influence among yet another type of radical settler, the âhilltop youthââteen-agers and young men who have built makeshift settlements, sometimes out of nothing more than rusting shipping containers, on remote mountaintops. They are seen as troublemakers by the Israeli Army and the Palestinians, but some settlers consider them heroic. Many of the hilltop youth are unruly high-school dropouts who are fluent in the mystical concepts of the Kabbalah and are adept in marksmanship. They also have a reputation for marijuana use.
I asked Dudkevitch whether the youth of Yitzhar were cutting down the Arabsâ olive trees.
âIâm not hearing you,â he replied. I asked again. âIâm not hearing what youâre saying. You donât understand me. Iâm not hearing and I will continue not to hear.â Then he walked away.
Thanks to Nim Chimsky for tip and headline.
I think a couple of weeks ago I put forward the idea that the best way to demystify the militant settler youth was as hippies. Western publics are after all accustomed to the received idea that hippies are into drugs, mysticism, dropping out, being anarchists, and sort of enviable to the poor bastards in their 'little boxes of ticky tacky that all look just the same', but unfortunately have to be dealt with firmly.
Looking at that 2004 Goldberg article again, I see he finds it just as hard to categorise Ariel (miles from the green line, but still basically a 'dormitory settlement') as I do, so he simply avoids specifics on the 'economic settlements' as he calls them:
"Perhaps three-quarters of the Jews in the West Bank could be considered economic settlers. They are reliable supporters of right-wing parties, but many of them are secular in their outlook. The remainder of the settlers, fifty thousand or so, came to the territories for reasons of faith. Although many of the settlements are near the Green Line, the national-religious settlements tend to be isolated from Israel and from each other. Many of them are along Route 60, the main north-south highway that runs near the mountain spine of the West Bank. The Jews of the central West Bank, in settlements such as Beit El and Ofra, are Biblical literalists, but they tend to respect the authority of the elected government in Jerusalem. The more unremitting settlers are the Jews living in Hebron, in Kiryat Arba, and in a chain of settlements in the mountains near Nablus…"
He has a lovely remark from Tommy Lapid, who obviously should never have stopped being a TV show presenter and tried to enter politics:
âThey believe there will come a point in the critical clash between us and the Palestinians when it would come time to transfer the Palestinians to Jordan; the second thing they hope for is the great American aliyah â a million more Jews coming to Israel. The third, and by far the most stupid, thing is that they believe God will help them.â
POV of the hilltop youth is that they are the ones with real jewish morals, not the state of Israel which harbors gentile, western civilization morals:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtStEngPE.jhtml?itemNo=1043782&contrassID=2&subContrassID=15&title=''We%20are%20the%20ones%20with%20Jewish%20morals'%20'&dyn_server=172.20.5.5
pure tribal morality anyone?
True Phil, David Duke would agree. Mirror, mirror on the wall…
UN official: Israeli delegation spreading 'malicious lies'
Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz, Dec 16 2008
hilltop youth
Israeli hillbillies and the Rabbi Ernest T. Bass.
What's so odd about Rav Dudkevitch's remarks about not hearing Goldberg? He interviewed me twice for that piece, over 90 minutes in total (a face-to-face talk in my office and a phone call), and ignored me. I guess I didn't fit his preconceived conceptions. There are others that don't hear, I presume and there are also others who simply don't read.
morris, the Jews are worried about the same thing as whites, the difference is, the Jews have always thought it was fine for whites
and Western civilization brought by whites, to vanish, but when it comes to them, oh no. Pretty funny, except whites are paying tax dollars for their own erasure, while Jews are using white tax dollars to
preserve Jews as a "continuity."
A white trash hillbilly, a jewish settler, no difference. But the difference is that jews use the Holocaust to seduce the whites into their won death, while the Jews don't blink an eye, which is always focused on the ball, i.e. , jewish survival at all costs–it's elementary, like 5 thousand years of jewish group survival, while the goy powers vanish into history books.
*******************************************
I just can't resist (one last time):
âIt is no longer my countryâ- Rivka Michaeli
âFor me, this business called the state of Israel is finishedâ¦I canât bear to
see it anymore, the injustice that is done to the Arabs, to the Beduins. All
kinds of scum coming from America and as soon as they get off the plane
taking over lands in the territories and claiming them for their own⦠I canât
do anything to change it. I can only go away and let the whole lot go to hell
without me.â – Israeli actress (and household name) Rivka Michaeli, quoted in Israeli peace movement periodical, âThe Other Israelâ, August 1998