Survey: Religious Right Continues Growth

A survey conducted by Yisrael Hayom and Hagal Hahadash has found that the combined bloc of politically right-wing and hareidi-religious parties continues to grow. Right-wing and hareidi parties would win 67 seats between them if elections were held today, compared to their current 65.

Other than that, the poll found few changes on Israel's political scene. If elections were held today the government and Knesset would be virtually unchanged.

Respondents' votes would leave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his position. Netanyahu's Likud party would grow slightly to become the Knesset's largest faction, with 31 seats, but rival party Kadima would maintain its strength, and the other parties would experience only minor gains or losses.

Netanyahu's edge over Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni has grown, with 40% support for the prime minister compared to 28% for the opposition leader. Netanyahu enjoys an even higher advantage over Livni's rival, Kadima MK Shaul Mofaz, with 43% support to Mofaz's 15%.

However, an unusually high number of respondents – 42% - said they remain undecided whether Netanyahu or Mofaz is the better candidate.



http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/145347

Rabbi Lior and the "Rule of Law" : By Moshe Feiglin

Editor's note: Approximately a year ago, Rabbi Dov Lior, venerated Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Arba, gave his approbation on a book on the Jewish laws of war written by Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira. Among other issues, the book deals with the legal ramifications of the Israeli army taking action to kill terrorists even when enemy civilians may also be killed as a result. Rabbi Shapira cites numerous Jewish law sources to prove that this is permissible. The Left immediately accused Rabbi Shapira and the rabbis who gave their approbation on his book of incitement to murder. On Monday, Rabbi Lior was arrested and questioned. Heated demonstrations by the Rabbi's students ensued. The following is Moshe Feiglin's take on this issue.


First of all, I would like to salute all those people who participated in the protest against Rabbi Lior's arrest. An evil cabal has taken control of some key positions in the Ministry of Justice and has transformed its public service positions into a tool of destruction. It makes no difference if the reason for their hostility is ideological or an almost religious hunger for "enlightened" approval, or a combination of both; we must put an end to this despicable behavior.

Deputy Attorney General Shai Nitzan and his accomplices implement their evil actions within parameters determined by ideology and violence. "Law enforcement" is totally irrelevant to their actions. Just one week ago, extreme leftist Uri Avneri publicly called for the killing of settlers. He was not called in for any type of questioning. Why not? Avneri and other "lovers of Israel" are on the correct side of the political divide. 

Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef will not be questioned for remarks that would have brought Nitzan's legions to the doorstep of any Religious Zionist rabbi because Nitzan and his accomplices are actually a gang of weaklings who attack only those weaker than them. They would never dare "enforce the law" against those who know how to exact a price in the public domain.

When these are the rules of the "enlightened" game, the public that sees Rabbi Lior as its spiritual leader has no choice but to go out to the streets and protest. The protesters are not protecting Rabbi Lior alone; they are also defending the liberty of the State of Israel from a hostile and destructive takeover by an aggressive gang that crushes our society, makes large swaths of our population miserable and endangers the lives of many. The youth protesting in the streets do not know this, but they are the true defenders of Israeli democracy in the face of a wanton takeover by a tiny and belligerent minority.

A legalocracy has taken over Israel. This enlightened idol worship has made it impossible to free Gilad Shalit by making the conditions in which terrorists are incarcerated in Israel less comfortable. It is impossible to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and authorize massive construction of new homes for young couples. It is impossible for a Jew to pray on the Temple Mount, for the police must protect the rights of the violent Arabs instead of those of the Jews. It is impossible to fight our enemies without an attorney for each solder. The Israeli "justice" system does not include itself in Israeli life, but sees itself as an external factor; not just elevated above the Nation, but actually disconnected from it.

If we want to return the justice system to the Nation, we must return the Nation to its own justice system. At this point, we still do not have a relevant Jewish legal codex for our modern reality, but we certainly have an excellent foundation. As soon as we seriously take Jewish law out of its exile and apply it to all facets of our current existence, it will become the most pertinent justice system for Israel; just as the Hebrew language was reborn from its exile to become the natural language for Israel - and just as the Jewish Nation emerged from 2000 years of exile to return to its Land.

Jewish Values for Israel's Codex

For the past twenty years, former Chief Justice Aharon Barak and his associates have been working on a self-contained legal codex for Israel. There is no doubt that the existing situation in which the Israeli legal code relies on a disjointed cornucopia of court decisions and Roman, Ottoman and British laws must change. Israel deserves a genuine codex of Israeli law.

But there is a poison arrow lurking here. The group that undertook this monumental task made sure to completely purge itself of any person who may have furnished the new codex with even a hint of Jewish law.

Barak and his cohorts are not stupid. Nobody understands better than them that even when a law seems logical and good, there is a spirit of the law that goes above and beyond the specific, technical legal solution for a given problem. Every body of law - and certainly a harmonious legal codex - is predicated on values. It is no coincidence that Barak and his cohorts did not even open a crack for Jewish values to infiltrate the Israeli codex.

A Jewish legal codex would highlight our connection to our Jewish sources and Jewish roots here in the Land of Israel. And that is something that the extreme Left cannot stomach - not even a little bit.


Shabbat Shalom,

Moshe Feiglin

http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/update/5771/7140.htm#Holy

Why I am not believed - by Barry Chamish

      It's a question that has haunted me for years. I use traditional journalistic methods, I demand corroborated testimony, seek only solid, indisputable evidence, don't fall for rumors and yet, the mainstream seldom, if ever, believe me.

     I don't get it.
     
Now, one piece of research has made things so much clearer to me. I speak of ("We Can't Handle the Truth"), a National Magazine Award nomination for Chris Mooney.  Finally, I understand why people don't want to believe the objective truth.

http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney

"A MAN WITH A CONVICTION is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point." So wrote the celebrated Stanford University psychologist Leon Festinger...
And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal:
It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.
Or that we never change our minds­we do. It's just that we have other important goals besides accuracy­including identity affirmation and protecting one's sense of self­and often those make us highly resistant to changing our beliefs when the facts say we should.
And that undercuts the standard notion that the way to persuade people is via evidence and argument. In fact, head-on attempts to persuade can sometimes trigger a backfire effect, where people not only fail to change their minds when confronted with the facts­they may hold their wrong views more tenaciously than ever.

       For Israel, this analysis is really bad news. For those who have a serious Jew problem, the facts be damned, Israel is an occupier, Arabs are its victims, and no amount of appeasement by Israel will ever change their minds. Caroline Glick was once a gung-ho Bush rooter, sent to Iraq to praise the American army for its unquestioned good intentions. She has clearly grown up since then and asks why American Jews primarily vote Democratic, even when the Democratic President clearly means no good for them or Israel:

Caroline B. Glick
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

Obama went on to say that he expects his
American Jewish supporters to take his side in his attacks on Israel...
What does Obama have to do for these liberal American Jews to accept
that he is no friend of Israel's?

       And liberals are not the only ones wearing blinders. Everyone is wearing them:

They would cite the findings of the 9/11 Commission, as well as a statement in which George W. Bush himself denied his administration had "said the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda."One study showed that not even Bush's own words could change the minds of Bush voters who believed there was an Iraq-Al Qaeda link.
As it turned out, not even Bush's own words could change the minds of these Bush voters­just 1 of the 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq-Al Qaeda claim changed his or her mind...

      I was invited to speak at the 5th alternative 9-11 conference in New York. My lasting effect was to make Building 7, the unarguable, indisputable issue proving that the WTC was blown up, not by airplanes, but via pre-planted explosives. At 5:20 PM, 47 storey Building 7 was ordered collapsed in a perfect controlled demolition. It was supposed to have been hit by UA 93 but it didn't show up for the world's first event where 3 skyscrapers all fall down in an hour. So Building 7 was destroyed all by itself before the explosives within were discovered.
      How much more logic is needed to prove internal foul play? But if you're convinced that the Americans are incapable of such treachery, that fact slides down like water on a duck's back. It simply cannot be accepted, barring a change in worldview, which know-it-all people from all political stripes are incapable of doing.
      And I speak not just of what we call the mainstream left or right. I have entered the worlds of "extreme conspiracy," and they're just as stubborn and blind as anyone else. The really bad anti-semites believe Jews are Khazars, based on one speculative book by Arthur Koestler before the days of DNA. But DNA has proven beyond doubt that Jews are a unique people with no Khazarian genetic traits. But as Mooney's study proves, the bigots along with mainstream get their feathers up and hang on to wrong opinions as if their lives depended on it.
      And those who are certain that Masons are behind the push for a third world war, cite as proof the purported letters of 19th century masons Pike and Mazzini, outlining the ultimate plot. Unfortunately the letters were a figment of the imagination of author William Guy Carr, a former Intelligence Officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. My message to these believers is a simple challenge; show me a copy of the letters. Since they are a hoax, they can't be found. Like that matters!
      Just for the money, at first, I investigated a group of Israeli women who, in 1993, insisted they were visited in their homes by almost human giants. The women were middle of the roaders who gave the same description of the beings and who did not know each other. It was impossible that they hatched a plot. The reaction of Israelis, common to all sectors of the public, was the women were hysterical and Chamish is a known conspiracy nut. The facts be damned.
      Mooney notes: 

"People who have a dislike of some policy­for example, abortion­if they're unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand," says Lodge. "But if they're sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counter-arguments." These individuals are just as emotionally driven and biased as the rest of us, but they're able to generate more and better reasons to explain why they're right­and so their minds become harder to change.  

     I wrote a book called Bye Bye Gaza. Within, I documented how the Israeli government utilized the weaknesses described by Mooney to break up all dissent to its expulsion of 10,000 Jews from their homes without even having to provide compensation to the new refugees. In its last great act of defiance, the Women in Green gathered over 2000 protesters at a Gazan hotel. Then, on assignment, an infiltrator named Itamar Ben Gvir arrived at the hotel with his gang of thugs. They provoked civil disobedience from local Arabs, providing the police with an excuse to expel the protesters from the hotel, while imprisoning hundreds of them, some for months on end. Protest leader Nadia Matar called Ben Gvir "a Shabak agent" sent to destroy her protest.
      Now look who the sophisticated Matar has hired as her attorney:

> We appealed to the court to investigate the event, that smelled of an Argentinean kidnapping, and to act against the illegal arrests and violence by the police. We came to the court this past Thursday, this time as plaintiffs and not as defendants, but this was not what was so dazzling, but our lawyers, Noam Federman and Itamar Ben Gvir. The sight was uplifting. Itamar came to the courtroom with a sal-kal baby carrier, holding a baby, in order to aid his neighbor, the plaintiff Avishag Leibman. It was a pleasure to see how the attorneys Itamar and Noam exhibited such outstanding mastery of the material. They stood like lions against the immaculately dressed State's representative.

      This most unsophisticated fit of blindness got me so angry that I sent Matar a letter: "Itamar Ben Gvir is your attorney? Remember Gush Katif. What, are you nuts? He wrecked the WIG demonstration and got dozens of women arrested. WiG has been infiltrated. No wonder barely anyone supports you."
      All, however is not lost. I had a recent success:

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction...In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values­so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

       I managed to get the country, and the diplomatic world, to finally find out if Gilad Shalit, an IDF soldier kidnapped to Gaza, is dead, as I more than suspect, or with a faint glimmer of hope, is somehow alive. But I had help from unknowing allies by expressing my views on an Israeli television interview. Now, with no credit, acknowledgement or thanks, the search for Shalit's life has begun anew:

http://www.alquds.co.uk/index.asp?fname%3Dlatest/data/2011-06-24-07-52-06.htm

The International Committee of the Red Cross has called on Thursday
to provide evidence that Shalit, captured by the movement five years
ago, is still alive.
The committee said, in an unusual public appeal, that the Shalit
family has the right under international humanitarian law to
communicate with her son, aged 24 years and held since June 25, 2006.
The Committee added "because it did not show sign of life about two
years since Shalit, requests the International Committee of the Red
Cross now prove that Hamas to be alive."

      Mooney's article can't help itself asserting the Right's information delusions. But he doesn't leave the Left unscathed:

Seth Mnookin, author of the new book The Panic Virus, notes that if you want to find vaccine deniers, all you need to do is go hang out at Whole Foods.

      And I had my problems with the liberal/Left in Israel over the crock of lies disseminated about the Rabin assassination. In the last poll of the issue taken seven years ago, conducted by Maariv, over half of religious Israelis but fewer than a third of the secular, thought that my book Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin was accurate. Taken to its conclusion, whether the pollees realized it or not, President Shimon Peres organized the murder of Rabin. And it only took me some 300 lectures with rock solid evidence, in the face of often hysterical crowds, to get the message through the blinders. According to Mooney that is because I was a secular, Hebrew-speaking Israeli with no apparent motive other than the truth. And my work will not just go away. This recent news item is self-explanatory to Israelis, Left and Right:

Yigal Amir, in prison for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, has filed an appeal that seeks to have him released from solitary confinement. The appeal is based on similar appeals by Arab terrorist prisoners who have successfully appealed in similar circumstances.
Shlomo Amir, Yigal's father, said at the beginning of his son's hearing that the family “has no faith in the courts, which issue rulings just to please the public. Yigal is kept in isolation because the authorities do not want him to spread his ideology, they say. What ideology? Yigal has never hurt anyone. He did try to murder the Prime Minister but these is no evidence that he succeeded in doing so,” Shlomo Amir said.

        However, the American radical liberal mindset will not be moved by beliefs in Israel. A few months ago, the editor of the New Yorker, Hendrik Hetzberg, yes, a Jew, wrote a disgusting and ignorant article on Amir and the Rabin assassination. I sent him and the New Yorker a complaint and a revision. Here is the result; in the June 6 edition, Hertzberg goes at it again, declaring that, "Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination in 1995, by a right-wing fanatic..."
        Thanks to Mooney, I realize, you can't change Hertzberg nor most American liberals, no matter what the objective facts. If God Himself appeared on Hertzberg's death bed and told him Amir didn't do it and Peres did, he would die believing that God was a right-wing fanatic.

end

The real battle for Israel - Yigal Walt

Monday’s riots in Jerusalem may be harbinger of inevitable secular-religious clash

In recent months we are increasingly hearing it in living room conversations, talks between friends and workplace discussions. What was once only whispered is now being uttered more openly and vehemently: The greatest threat faced by Israel today is not external, but rather, domestic; the wars of the Jews may be more dangerous than any battle waged by our enemies.

Monday’s riots in Jerusalem following Rabbi Dov Lior’s arrest were a wakeup call for those still clinging to comforting slogans of Jewish unity. The State of Israel at this time is home to distinct population groups that are drawing further apart. The gap will soon become unbridgeable; some say we are already there. 

The hundreds of religious rightist protesters who blocked the entrance to Jerusalem, burned tires in the capital’s streets and raided the Supreme Court, made their views clear: The Torah, as they interpret it, takes precedence over law and order. Israeli courts have sent a former president to jail and are currently hearing a case against our former prime minister, but a rabbi is above the law, we are now told.

Secular Israelis would not imagine the possibility of staging riots in the capital because of an “unjust arrest.” At most, they would launch a Facebook protest against the rising prices of cottage cheese. But some of the Jews living in this country, and an increasingly sizable group at that, are committed to other rules. The fact that on Monday they were being led by Knesset Member Michael Ben Ari is even more frightening.
Rioters in Jerusalem were chanting “Torah has been arrested,” implying that a human being, Rabbi Lior, symbolizes the essence of Judaism. For a religion that throughout history sanctified traditions, ideas and God, rather than people, this is a tragedy. Just look at Moses, arguably the greatest figure in Jewish history, an imperfect, stuttering man who was not glorified despite leading the Jews from slavery to freedom. We do not worship Moses, yet today some of us have taken to worshiping rabbis.

Intolerance and fanaticism

Indeed, the Jewish religion that for so long symbolized wisdom and humanism is increasingly sinking into darkness, crude intolerance and boorish fanaticism. One illustration of this is modesty becoming a focal point of Jewish belief here, as if one dress code or another is what Judaism is all about. Religious youth groups that were once mixed are now gender segregated. Religious soldiers walk out of performances as not to hear a woman singing. In some neighborhoods, women are confined to one side of the road. Segregated buses have become the norm. The list goes on and on.

The last time Israel’s secular public felt threatened we saw a secularist party, Shinui, sweeping 15 Knesset seats, becoming Israel’s third-largest party and keeping Shas out of the government. Times have changed since then, Shinui is long gone, but the sentiments that led to its rise are again brewing under the surface. This time, the outbreak of frustration and anger may be much worse; this time, both sides may be more reckless than ever.
It is still too early to tell where Israel is headed, but a secular-religious clash - the kind we had not yet seen in this country - may gradually become inevitable. If Monday’s events in Jerusalem are any indication, we may indeed be in for a very hot summer. May God grant us the wisdom to change course before it’s too late. 



http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4088011,00.html

Dovber Halevi: Rabbi Wallerstein and the El Al Ticket

On the eve of the 2008 presidential elections the Jewish community was in an uproar.
The United States was about to elect its first Muslim president. It could have catastrophic consequences for Israel and the Jewish people.
That night the Rosh Yeshiva of Torahanytime.com, Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein spoke. He expressed no fear in the upcoming ascension of Barrack Obama to leader of the free world.
But he was very concerned about the election results.
On the ballot in one of the states was a referendum on legalizing gay marriage.
Authorizing licenses for a man to legally wed another man meant the breaking of the final boundary of civilization. This was far more dangerous than anything the next president could do.
The Torah recounts the horrible consequences of past peoples who tried this.

 
Rabbi Wallerstein and the El Al Ticket

Here Comes Another Lost Tribe!

Thousands of kilometers to the east, in the furthest reaches of northeastern India, a long-lost community continues to nourish its age-old dream of returning to its ancient homeland, the land of Israel.The Bnei Menashe, or "sons of Manasseh," are descendants of one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel, which were exiled by the Assyrian empire more than 27 centuries ago.

The community, which numbers 7,232 people, resides primarily in the Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur, along the border with Burma and Bangladesh."

http://unitedwithisrael.org/here-comes-another-lost-tribe/

'The State of Irresponsibility' - Obadiah

       Affluent societies are inherently irresponsible. They duck even the most
challenging issues rather than confronting them. People with many possessions
have many attachments, and cling to them for as long as they can while closing
their eyes to real dangers. The behavior seems irrational: why not deal with the
problem, remove the threat, and return to enjoying one’s possessions? The
answer is, cowardice is contagious. Once people are afraid of something, they
will be afraid of everything. They hysterically embrace worthless solutions if
only the solutions will make them safe in the short run. Americans thus eagerly
sent their army to remote Afghanistan to fight an imaginary threat rather than
to Mexico to stop illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

       Enter the proliferation of proxy wars. American society clung to its affluence
and the Soviet gerontocracy clung to its power. Too cowardly for an open war,
the two societies clashed on the periphery. The United States fought in Vietnam
for a single reason, to stop Soviet expansion. An honest and manly way of
deciding such a conflict would be to attack the Soviet Union. Instead, the
Americans killed millions of Vietnamese who had little to do with Soviet
imperial ambitions. The USSR responded in kind by arming the Arab states against
their American client, Israel.

       Today, Syria arms Hamas and achieves its aim of fighting Israel while remaining
safe. Why does not Israel retaliate against Iran, the Hezbollah state of
Lebanon, and Syria for the terrorist attacks? Fifty years ago, Israel routinely
retaliated against Egypt for fellaheen attacks from Gaza. Nothing has changed
legally or geopolitically the Jews are in the same state of ceasefire with
Lebanon as we have been with Egypt. The real change came from affluence; having
matured, the society grew cowardly.

       The trend toward irresponsibility is all-encompassing. Take bankruptcy, a legal
way to steal and defraud. Or corporate limited liability: any number of people
can form a company, damage others through defaulted loans or factory pollution,
and close down the company with no harm to themselves.

       Governments are happy with this irresponsibility. Democratic politicians want
their short terms of office to be marked by welfare. They have no problem with
the unfortunate fact that welfare now often comes at the cost of delaying
solutions, making them much more painful later. What happens later is not the
incumbent politicians’ problem.

       Having irresponsible subjects is still better. They shirk personal
responsibility and pass all their responsibilities onto the government. Just
think of it: the state took upon itself such a basic responsibility as that of
an individual to care for his family. A wife knows that she depends for her
income not on her husband but on the welfare office. Retirees depend for their
livelihood on social security rather than on their children. In only a century,
states totally changed the societal framework: they cut family ties and
short-circuited what used to be family connections with government institutions.
Attachment is a matter of dependence; people used to depend on family members,
but now they depend on politicians and bureaucrats.

       Who can imagine such a state will persist?

Obadiah Shoher

Israeli Goverment same as 1989...

Kahane writes the prior post - A BLOODY DAY IN JERUSALEM 1989.


He states how the problem with Israel is not the Arabs it is the Leftist Jews in power.
Has it changed? Supposedly the right wingers won the 2009 election...
Where is the evidence that Bibi is respecting the mandate that has him in power?
Speeches of all kinds from Bibi that sound strong and then...he endorses the final (2 state) solution...


When will the Jewish Country get a Jewish leader that will carry out the Torah and respect HaShem's wishes? When?

What will make the people take power ???


When is the Jewish Spring? 

Now remains the time....since 1948 it has been the time.
So I guess you would have to say:

Israel - attempting world acceptance since 1948...

A BLOODY DAY IN JERUSALEM - Meir Kahane

I have just spent two days of my life in an Israeli prison.  Two more days.  And I say, unequivocally, that what happened in Jerusalem last week, as two Jews were murdered and the police protected the murderer and other Arabs even as they tear-gassed Jews, is the clearest evidence that this Jewish government can never say, “Our hands did not shed this blood.”  For surely they did, by a policy that is not only un-Jewish, but sheer madness.

I arrived shortly after the two murders.  But first consider its circumstances.  The murders took place in broad daylight, a little before 11A.M., with tens of people in the street.  It took place in Jerusalem’s main street, Jaffa road.  It took place across the street from the main Post Office.  And it took place around the corner from the main police station, in the Russian Compound.

And there is more.  The murderer, according to the police has “a security background.”  Meaning, he was arrested in the past for terrorist and nationalist involvement.  Arrested, freed, and allowed to remain in the country.  He had spent the night before at the Al Aksa Mosque that desecrates the Temple Mount and, there, listening to the Moslem hate and incitement, decided to murder Jews.

The Arab approached the bus station on Jaffa Road and without warning pulled out a knife and stabbed Nissim Levi and Kalman Vardi as well as three other Jews.  Kalman Vardi died on the spot.  He was 76.  Nissim Levi also died there.  He was 91.  One of the seriously wounded was a woman of 81.  As the Arab fled, he was caught, and as an infuriated Jewish crowd attempted to get him, a policeman fell on the Arab, covered him with his body and saved his life.  Police then physically beat up Jews and drove the Arab away.   

When I arrived shortly thereafter, furious Jews were milling about, frustrated, bitter, impotent.  I climbed on a railing and spoke to them.  I said that things could not continue this way.  I said that Arabs were not the problem but rather the Jews in power, the government that was so impotent, the leftists who give such moral, financial and legal support to the Arabs, the Israeli news media that so encourages them.  I said that until Arabs are dealt with with a heavy hand, Jews will continue to be murdered in their own land in increasing numbers.   

I began marching east, towards the Old City.  But now hundreds, if not more, had gathered and walked behind me.  The police reinforcements were arriving, and as we reached the end of Jaffa Road, the police official in charge of the operation, Natan Kremersky, stopped me and said: “If you go further there will be blood.”  Thinking he meant that the Jews would shed Arab blood, I said: “If you had done that, things might have been different.”  “No”, he said, “I mean that we will use force against you.”

When I informed the crowd, they were so furious that they shouted, “Go ahead.  We will follow you.”  We began marching toward the Old City and as we neared the walls, a solid line of police horses and others with helmets and clubs barred the way.  More ominously, they had their gas masks on and we could see the gas guns aiming at us.

As we came face to face with the police, the head of the Jerusalem Patrol, known as “Velvel” (from a religious family in Jerusalem, though he is no longer so), raised a portable bullhorn and shouted: “This is an illegal gathering.  I will give you a reasonable time to disperse.  You have three minutes.”

I approached him and said: “If your grandfather would be here, he would slap you in the face.”  Velvel reddened but did not reply.  At that point, with not more than a minute elapsed, I saw Kremersky approach Velvel and say something to him.  Suddenly, without warning, the horses charged the crowd with tear gas blasting.  I received a full blast in the face and the police began hitting Jews.  My people dragged me away; I could hardly breathe.  The nearest building was the one used as a court by the municipality and the people inside opened the doors, giving us water and muttering against the police.  

We remained for about half an hour and then, with my eyes burning but able to see, I walked down Jaffe Road with a number of Kach people.  The police were there, in force still, and as I passed they arrest us.

I spent the next 48 hours, two full days, in a small cell with six other Kach members.  The fact that the Jewish prisoners and the police inside treated us as kings made no difference.  Inside with us were some 80 Arabs, eating, drinking and being kept there at Jewish expense.  The police told me that they were afraid to mistreat them because the news media and the Red Cross would immediately intervene and they (the police) would be reprimanded and suspended.  Their frustration was evident as was their growing weariness.

It was clear to me sitting in that foul-smelling cell with a toilet in the room (a “Turkish toilet,” as it is known, with only a hole over which the person much perch) that the State of Israel was collapsing and that the prime culprits were the “elders,” the leaders, the government.

It was also clear to me that there must be a change, a fundamental change in the very system of the government, from the present fraudulent democracy (which is, of course, not democracy at all) to strong government that will save us from ourselves.

As I was freed, a few hours before Shabbat, I heard over the radio that Shamir had visited the wounded and said, “Jews must defend themselves and not leave the attackers in one piece.”

I thought to myself:  How long will we continue to accept this paragon of hypocrisy and disaster?  And when a Jew does defend himself and shoots an Arab, what does the government of Shamir do to him?  It arrests him and places him on trial.  The problem is not Arabs; it is Jews.  Jews such as Shamir and Arens and Rabin – not to mention the leftists – whose babbling lack of policy allows an intifada to continue for 18 months (!) and for Jews to be murdered in their own cities.  They must go.  Or there will be terrible things in Israel.   

Written May 12, 1989

The Rabbi (Sotah 46) comment on the Biblical law concerning the finding of the body of a murdered Jew with his murderer unknown.  The law decrees that the respected elders of the nearest town or city come out to the place of the murder and declare: “Our hands did not shed this blood!”  Meaning: the elders, the leaders, must declare before man and G-d that they did everything possible to insure that this Jew would not be murdered.