1. Joseph Alexander Norland said:

Tim,

Thank you for highlighting this very, very interesting article.

One question has been gnawing within me: where is the secular anti-Deportation camp? It seems that the Deportation opponents consisted of religious people only, which leaves out half of the Israeli population. Surely, not all secular Israelis are either leftist or indifferent???

2. Tim said:

Joseph,
Yes, you make a good point. Netanyahu may have that answer...

3. A Time to Speak said:

There should be a distinction made between "secular" and "anti-religous".

Many of the secular are simply indifferent to anything beyond and above their immediate personal concerns. They have in effect counted themselves out of making decisions on things that do not involve what kind of new car to buy or where to go on vacation or what restaurant to eat in tonight.

"Anti-religious" is another matter. This is for the people who have a conviction and are dedicated to achieving a purpose. The purpose is the elimination of everything Judaic from Israeli life.

They are passionately for Oslo and for Disengagement because those schemes are meant to break the Jewish heart and crush the Jewish spirit. They are meant to prove that hopes of redemption of the Land were false by undoing the redemption.

Their line of argument against the religious Jews and most of all against the pioneers in Judea-Shomron-Gaza-Golan is that they are following an obsolete code of belief and conduct, unenlightened, non-modern, unproductive parasites living off others.

That is the real reason for their glee at the destructino of Gush Katif -- because the residents there disproved all these canards. They went into abandonned wasteland, empty sand dunes, and in 30 years built beautiful communities, model communities with rich cultural life, raised a generation of fine dedicated youth, and developed the world's most advanced agricultural techniques to bring forth produce so fine that it not only stocks the tables of Israel but earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year in exports.

This so spectacularlly gives the lies of the fanatical anti-Jews of Israel that they had to destroy this accomplishment.

And in so doing they have revealed who they are and why they do what they do.