But if it is anywhere near an accurate account of events, then I am once again appalled at the arrogance and stupidity of those people. Which by their current actions have once again exacerbated tensions to the boiling point and precipitated what could have been major causalities among our people via rocket attacks into the heart of Israel. That no one has been killed* so far is due only to the Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. Which – thank God - has thus far has knocked most of those rockets out of the sky before they reached their target. But not before a lot of panic set in. Meanwhile Hamas continues to fire their unlimited supply of rockets in what seems to be rapid fire succession.
Apparently the homes in a Jerusalem neighborhood in which Palestinian families settled and were living in for many decades were found to originally belong to Jews pre 1948. When settlers found this out they got a court order to evict them and take those homes back.
In October, an Israeli district court in Jerusalem ruled that at least 12 Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem must give up their homes for Israeli settlers to take over, as well as pay for their expenses.
That eviction is still pending.
Granted that this eviction order may have been legal. But that is not what is really going on here. I doubt that any of those settlers’ ancestors were the original owners of those homes. And they surely did not need them. They just saw an opportunity to take another piece of Jerusalem out of Palestinian hands as part of their messianic drive to resettle all of the land of Israel. The consequences be damned. How do I know this? I don’t. But this is how a conversation recorded on a video went. It tells you something about their attitude of disdain for the welfare of anyone else. Least of all Palestinians:
“Jakob, you know this is not your home,” Mona al Kurd, a Palestinian woman was captured saying in a video widely circulated online where she confronts an Israeli settler occupying her house.
“Yes,” Jakob confirms. “But if I go, you don’t go back (too),” he says. He doesn’t accept any responsibility for taking over the Palestinian family’s house, because he says it wasn’t he who decided to do so.
“You’re stealing my house!” Kurd responds in frustration.
“If I don’t steal it, then someone else is gonna steal it,” he says.
I have nothing but contempt for these people. Their religious fervor is meaningless to me. They might think they are standing for the greater glory of God. But what they really are is terrorists. Terrorists against their own people – the Jewish people by exacerbating tensions unnecessarily leading to violent protests followed by rocket attacks..
Those violent protests by Palestinians in Jerusalem are being countered by Israeli police trying to protect innocent life and property. Some of the protestors were injured in those skirmishes. That moved Hamas terrorists in Gaza to launch a barrage of rockets fired into the heart of Israel that could have easily killed hundreds of innocent people. There was no justification for that either.
Israel cannot allow such an egregious attack to go unanswered. So they fired back at specific terrorist targets in Gaza. Hamas is now claiming at least 24 people were killed. Some of whom were children.
Israel has no choice. They had to act. Firing a continuous succession of rockets into Israel because some violent Palestinian protesters were injured by police is exactly what I would call a disproportionate response. Not that anyone in the media has called it that. They only find Israel guilty of disproportionate responses.
While I am on the subject of media bias - I made a point of watching how the 3 major networks and PBS reported the story last night. Of those NBC was clearly the most biased. Reporting first that Israel attacked Gaza and killed 20 people including children, making it initially seem like Israel started it for no reason. It was only after they said that - that they added it was in retaliation for rocket attacks from Hamas. So much for balanced reporting.
Back to those extremist messianic religious Zionists. There is no excuse for the behavior of these people. Some of whom have done a lot worse things than the current group is doing. To the best of my knowledge they have no rabbinic backing for any of these kinds of activities. Nor do they have the slightest bit of compassion for the people they are doing it to. Their goal is to rid Israel of all its Arabs. That should be obvious from the aforementioned conversation.
In my view, these extremists should be barred from entering the West Bank. Including East Jerusalem. On the grounds that they endanger the lives of every Israeli by their mere presence there. If they live there, let them be evicted from their homes until Moshiach comes. That would be poetic justice.
*Update: As of now, 9:25 am CDT 2 Israelis have been killed.