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Bezalel Art School. Tel Aviv, 1929.

Too Normal for a Settler

I’ve recently reached a difficult and sad conclusion. I think that it’s the reason why I am having trouble functioning as the spokesperson of the Binyamin region and that makes me a less relevant subject for journalists to interview.

I’m too normal, too regular, too boring.

Problem number 1: I don’t live on a hilltop. True, I’ve lived in a caravan for two years, but it’s a caravan that unfortunately is located in a town, and an authorized, legal town at that. Even worse, it was one of the first towns founded in Binyamin, when having a pioneering spirit wasn’t an insult but rather an esteemed trait in the world. This town has roads and infrastructures and beautiful homes and green parks. Not wild enough, not neglected-looking enough.

Problem number 2: I only have one child, and not eight (although it’s definitely a future goal…). They can’t interview me with various children jumping in front of me, in back of me and all over me. It’s too normal to interview a young woman with just one toddler who is playing quietly outside. Because that’s the same as any young woman from a kibbutz in the North or from a city in Israel’s center.

Problem number 3: My opinions are too normative and boring. I have a hard time watching the long lines of Arab workers waiting at the security roadblock early in the morning. I think that the reality of shopping for food together and working together is a positive thing. Even when there are terrorist attacks. Not because we have no choice, but because this is the ideal humane reality in my opinion – for people who practice different religions who live in the same country to be able maintain reasonable neighborly relations. Maybe it’s a bug that I have because I’m the daughter of immigrants. Or maybe an older bug that’s part of my DNA, as a daughter of the Jewish nation, who lived in various lands for 2000 years and always wished for just a bit of mutual respect and the right to live as a Jew in a foreign country with equal rights (which they never had).

Problem number 4: I did not choose to be a settler. You can’t ask me what caused me to drop everything and live in a settlement. I’m one of the natives, the children. I was born here 29 years ago. I was born into this reality that I didn’t choose. This has always been my home, so no one can attack me with questions about my choice. The course of my life was the same as any other girl who grew up here in this town. I was always right wing, I didn’t become religious, I didn’t leave religion, and I don’t have too many grudges to bear against God – not even about the disengagement from Gaza. Grudges against people and political leaders were always abundant, but again – who doesn’t have those? That’s normal. Again, the same normalcy that’s working against me.

But maybe one of my worst problems is that I know how to speak. I was born with that trait too; I didn’t acquire it. Yesterday during a 20 minute conversation with an insurance agent, when I was finally asked what I do and I answered “spokesperson,” the agent said he wasn’t surprised. That I sounded like one. That he thought I was a lawyer, but that spokesperson fit the vibe I had given off too. Journalists don’t really want to talk to spokespeople. “It’s not authentic,” because the words that spokespeople say are too precise and calculated. The chance that they’ll be able to catch me saying something that sounds scandalous, or get a juicy comment out of me, or a media scandal, are very slim. So to “maintain the authenticity,” the foreign reporters prefer not to interview spokespeople of regional councils, of towns, or spokespeople in general. They ask to meet with the ideological residents to understand what life is like here. The ideology that they are looking for includes phrases like “God promised the land only to us,” and if they can get in some comments about revenge or hating Arabs, even better.

Orly Goldclong was interviewed for a morning talk show about Shimon Dotan’s new documentary, “The Settlers.” She said that people like her, from Maale Adumim, Gush Etzion, Ofra, all of the mainstream ‘settlements’ aren’t represented in the film, and I completely identified with her. In the documentary’s soundtrack, Dotan is quoted saying that “80% of those living here today in the settlements are settlers of convenience and housing solutions, and are not driven by ideology.” But a moment later, the director adds to his explanation, heard as the villas are shown on screen, that he chose not to focus on them in this film. The script was written in advance. The dichotomy was written in advance. Either you’re a ‘convenience’ settler or an ‘idealist’ settler. How can you reflect upon a complex reality with such a simplistic perspective?

Disclaimer – I haven’t seen the film yet but I was involved in just one meeting that was enough to make me realize that the script for this documentary was written in advance. I met the producer who worked with Dotan, conducting investigations to gather subjects for the filming days, two years ago at a small café in Rehavia. She told me that they were planning on making an in-depth documentary film on the settlement movement, and although I was advised not to cooperate with Dotan, I sat with them for at least two hours and offered to arrange in-depth interviews for them with various personalities from the settlements, from the many towns in Binyamin. She never got back to me. They found their way to Esh Kodesh on their own of course, but they apparently skipped Psagot, Ofra, Shiloh and Eli on the way. Not interesting enough, not “ideological” enough for them. It’s important to realize that Esh Kodesh isn’t a community of extremists. There are 40 charming families living there. But when someone looks specifically for those juicy comments, he’ll find them, and edit out any other reasonable comment that was made by the subject, because it doesn’t support his pre-written script.

So I’m too normal and the subjects I found are normal too, so sometimes it does produce a “normal” news article (what a surprise that there are normal people here!!!). But sometimes journalists decide to forget about the article “because there wasn’t enough meat in the interview.”

People like me don’t go down in the history books and not in the documentary films either. We didn’t create our reality from scratch, but today the reality is us, the normal people, the boring ones. Those Who believe that the land is holy but also enjoy flying to Paris to see the world. Who are willing to sacrifice in order to live in a place where the security situation is sometimes fragile, and the political situation complex, for a warm community and good education for our children. Because our dream includes living in the heart of the land of the Bible, but also sitting in our homes with a garden and gazing from the porch at the mountains that are covered in our history.

This upcoming year, the fiftieth year of the settlement of Judea and Samaria, many more words will be written about the settlers. There will be many more episodes and TV series and films about the settlement movement. But those who insist on living in the past and seeing only the extreme edges won’t truly understand the current reality or meet those people who are living that reality.

#Yishuv #Israel #media #settlers #bias

Straight thinking from Settler tweens: My Lag B’Omer lesson

MAY 18, 2015, 1:09 PM

BLOGGER Aviela Deitch

I’ve been in Israel for long enough to not even bat an eyelash at seeing children dragging anything burnable through the streets while their families diligently prepare their homes for Passover.

Living in a new, small community, there’s very little locally available for the kids to shlepp. They comb the hillsides, beg parents to keep their eyes open on the way home from work… I couldn’t say no to the sixth grade girls (all eight of them) when they came, asking for a ride up the hill to The Real Migron (destroyed, partially in 2011, almost entirely in 2012, then finally in 2015) to look for wood.

They asked for a ride, we agreed on a time, and these girls weren’t messing around. They were ALL at my door. ON TIME. We piled into our SettlerMobile, a 9-seater H1 van, and headed up the hill. On the way, I reminded/warned them that the last of the caravans had been destroyed a few weeks prior. I put in my own, silent prayer that any emotional breakdowns would wait until these kids were back with their own parents. As we rounded that last turn, we saw it. Piles of ruins. Nothing habitable. Sharp angles. Complete destruction.

It knocked the wind out of me, but aside from a fewWow!’s, these girls went straight to business. They ran directly for those ruins, ponytails swinging, and started dragging out pieces of snow-destroyed wood from the rest of the debris. I voiced to them that as far as I was concerned, it felt like picking at a grave. “These were people’s homes! These were YOUR homes! Can’t you look around the hillside and find things that just happen to be there?” With typical tween, hands-on-hips stance, they respectfully explained that these ruins aren’t Migron. Migron is where we are and who we are, they said. “We won’t be able to build anything on top of ruins, so what’s the problem with getting them out of the way, now?” Hard to argue with that, and point taken.

Don’t think they had forgotten – there were a number of cries of “This was the floor of my bedroom.” “Oh look, this was the Such-and-Such family’s cupboard.” “Oh look, the handle of So-and-So’s garden tool!” They remember. Every. Detail. But what did they decide absolutely HAD to be loaded separately, into the front seat of the van? An otherwise nondescript piece of 2×4 with “Shalechet” painted in red. This was the name of the girls’ non-conventional high school program that met up at the top of the hill for the last many months. “This was from their school. Can you take it to them?” Pieces of their siblings’ playpens, parents’ wedding photo frames, porch railings, those could all stay. But this ratty piece of seemingly worthless wood had to be returned to its rightful owners.

And then there was the datebook. Run of the mill, mass produced by an educational institution, with no name on it. But it had birthdays circled in pencil. “Daddy’s birthday” “Mommy’s birthday” “Ahuviya’s birthday”. The girls were getting frustrated. This datebook was current. From THIS year. And despite showing the warp of dried waterlogging, it needed to be returned. So, if you know who Ahuviya might be, let me know. It’s still sitting on the dashboard of the H1.

These girls, the majority of whom have lived in Migron, together, their entire lives, worked as one body rather than eight separate beings. It was like one’s arm was somehow attached to the other’s foot, such a well-oiled machine they were. In no time, we had a pile of neatly-stacked, trunk sized pieces of wood and another pile of longer pieces that would need some more work before they could be loaded up. As they pulled, hacked, jumped and whacked at these pieces of wood, I stood back, arms folded and eventually just had to remark, “Y’know, there are people who say that we limit you girls by making you wear skirts and stuff. They say it limits how you can move.” Eight expressions of DUH turned in my direction and nothing was said, until one spoke up and said, “Anyone that thinks that a skirt limits what a girl can do is limited in their own brain!”

And there were eight nods, mine included.

#Israel #Migron #Orthodox Judaism #Settler #Yishuv

Settlers and Arabs Saving a Life Together

by Avraham Hermon -

Living deep in the Shomron (Samaria), requires that I travel through a number of Arab villages to get to any point of civilization outside of my small community. This evening’s journey took me through the Samarian Arab village Funduq, located between the Israeli settlements Karnei Shomron and Kedumim. Funduq is a small town which generally takes less than a minute to drive through. The road is lined with homes, a mosque and small shops, some of which even cater to the settlers who pass through.

My travel partner was my three year-old son, who was returning with me from a medical appointment in Kfar Saba. As I entered Funduq, the sun had set and my son’s bedtime was rapidly approaching when I saw traffic come to a halt and a large swarm of people on the road, a few car-lengths ahead of me. I quickly made sure to lock the doors, wondering what had happened. Was it a terror attack? Was there a car accident? A stone throwing? Thoughts rushed through my mind as local Arabs peered from windows along the road and ran alongside the road towards the gathering of people. I had seen violent swarms and angry mobs in the past, and was even injured in a terror attack over 10 years ago.

Driving in an Arab village in the Shomron

The cars in front of me slowly maneuvered past the swarm of people. By the time that my car had reached the crowd, I couldn’t continue any further because of the crowd. Within the crowd I was able to discern a person on the ground. An unmarked car with a small flashing light pulled up beside me and out jumped a local settler. He quickly pulled his large medic bag out of the trunk of his car and ran towards the crowd, which parted to let him through.

One of the local Arabs approached the window of my car and signaled that I roll it down. I carefully opened the window a bit and he proceeded to tell me that it looks like someone was killed in an accident, and requested that I move my car forwards, towards the victim who was laying on the ground, to shine my headlights on the victim, to assist the medic.