[lbo-talk] "Their Torah is Their Protest " Translated from Yideot Ahronot

[Bryan Atinsky]

Their Torah is Their Protest
Haim Tal
Yedioth Ahronot
Friday, May 9, 2003 pp 14-18;80

Shlomo Wegman (28), a financial adviser and former member of “Young Moledet”
, has been living in Alon Shvut, in the Gush Etzion area, for over twenty
years. He must have passed IDF checkpoints thousands of times. Thousands of
times he must have seen, without taking it in, the young Palestinian men
crouching by the roadside near the checkpoints, patiently waiting for
inspections to end. “That’s the transparent part of the landscape,” says
Wegman, “Seeing them never caused me to identify with their situation.
Because, after all, we’re in a difficult situation, security wise. Until one
day, last year, I saw an old man with a little girl, standing at the
checkpoint. They weren’t harassing them. Just holding them there. You can’t
get a more banal picture. But then, all of a sudden, it sunk in. Suddenly I
understood that the whole thing wasn’t really a matter of security. I
understood that this huge military enterprise was aimed to allow me to live
in an amazing landscape, a terrific villa, with the people I love, in Alon
Shvut of all places.

“At the same time, hundreds of thousands of others, old people, women and
children, who don’t form a security risk, are paying the price. Checkpoints,
searches, curfews and closures – all this just for the sake of my peace and
quiet as an observant Jew. That was when I decided to do my personal,
unilateral withdrawal. I left Alon Shvut right away even though I knew I was
going to miss it because I love the place very much. At the moment I am
living in an ugly urban settlement within the Green Line. Up till then I was
affiliated with the Moledet movement [Moledet is an extreme right-wing
party ]. I don’t know how to explain my blindness or the current blindness
of my friends and relatives who are living there. We definitely don’t have
the same view of reality.”

Wegman has signed a petition to be published in today’s edition of Ha’aretz
under the heading of “Realistic Religious Zionism”. The petition sharply
criticizes the leadership of the religious-Zionist community which is
sacrificing “on the altar of the struggle for Samaria, Judea and the Gaza
Strip … the effort to lead a religiously observant life in the actual
circumstances of the Jewish state.”

“We are calling for a withdrawal from the territories in order to bring the
dawn of redemption,” explains Nir Sheetreet (30), who teaches at a religious
seminary in the Golan Heights and who in his past secular life was an actor
. “For as long as we continue to be the only society in the whole world that
is wasting all its energies on keeping three million people, who are not
guests, under control, there’s no chance we’ll have a society and country
that live according to the Tora. At the moment we aren’t a Jewish state and
even less so a democracy.”

The rest is at:
http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/webcast/display.php3?article_id=57693