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