IDF Col. Baram Targets Kedumim Mayor Daniella Weiss, Rabbi Gadi Ben-Zimra in bid to "Deal with Settler Provocateurs"

B”H

So, to counter the protests against your pogroms, you propose more pogroms, Col. Baram? Something tells me that this strategy will soon prove a failure.

One does not target some of the most respected Yesha leaders and their schools without finding significant resistance to your way of doing things.

So far, the religious Zionist public has tried to play by the rules. When confronted by police and IDF and border guards during the expulsion, Yesha leaders tried to keep the community from boiling over. These leaders tried to give people hope and asked them not to be violent with our own Jewish brothers and sisters.

However, the government didn't respect that. The government responded by beating protesters, incarcerating our youth, and destroying our property and our synagogues with reckless and brutal regularity. You have arrested our community security personnel for minor offenses, you have taken our community weapons, and you have refused to protect our people.

The Yesha leaders and rabbis tried to reassure the public that, if they just played by the rules, the government would provide for those they expelled from communities like Amona and Gush Katif.

However, the government didn't respect that. Three years later, our refugees are still living in temporary housing, their communities ravaged, the people unemployed, marriages and families put under enormous pressure and, for what? Did the promised "peace" arrive? Were the people treated with respect and honor?

The government responded by treating the refugees from Gush Katif as less than human. They didn't keep communities together, they didn't protect the property of those communities, they didn't respect the religious items of those communities.

They allowed public buildings left behind to be made into terrorist training camps and Ketusha rocket pads, and refused to respond to the terrorists.

Now, what should Daniella Weiss and the Yeshiva rabbis do? They warned everyone, including the Yesha council about what would happen. They said the government should not be trusted. The government tied the hands of the Yesha Council, just as they said they would! The government made every concession the Yesha Council made into a thorn in their eye. The government made every promise the Yesha Council made into a lie! The Yesha Council was undermined and the Yesha movement was thrown into disarray.

But Daniella Weiss--a true woman of valor, a true patriot, a true Zionist--prevailed. Her reputation and the reputation of the Yesha Rabbis tried to protect Jews from Jews. They, alone, are the reason why this country didn't fall into a civil war.

Now you turn on them too? Now you make them the enemy so that you don't have to confront your own stinking horrid government, a government has made a mockery of what used to be one of the strongest nations in the world? We see debauchery, greed, injustice, and lies where honor, loyalty, justice and honesty should prevail.

You are surprised that there begins to be a backlash? You are surprised that the support for these failed policies has dried up?

When people have found that justice is not possible, when they have tried all possible legal remedies, and when they have still been brutalized and incarcerated, they have only one course of action left to them.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

It’s called Revolution. I think it won't be long, dear Col. Baram.

When it happens, how many will be with you?

Look around.

See who has weapons and training and strength of conviction. See who has morality and ethics and knowledge. See what is the future, and what is the past--and think to yourself, "Should I throw gasoline on this situation?"

Religious Zionists are tired of being ignored because they have tried to play by the rules. They are sick of sitting on their hands while others are treated with kid gloves.

Yesha and Jerusalem are tender dry. Any words or actions may cause a spark, and any spark may bloom into a conflagration.

The leaders of Yesha have been patient, holding a match in their hands and trying to keep the friction away.

How long will they do this, Col. Baram? How long can they do this when you, yourself, are promising to deliver that friction?

I don't know about you, but when someone messes with my kids or with my community leaders or with my rabbi, I take it very very personally.

I am sure that this is not just my response. I have a feeling it is a HUMAN response.

I am just praying that everyone knows what they are getting themselves into and has made very careful plans to that effect.

M
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Last update - 10:56 25/07/2008
IDF commander: We must deal with settler 'provocateurs'
By Uri Blau and Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondents
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1005535.html

The outgoing commander of the Samaria Brigade, Col. Amir Baram, last month told Israel Defense Forces and legal officials that efforts should be made to "deal with provocateurs" among settlement leaders.

Baram cited Kedumim Mayor Daniella Weiss and Rabbi Gadi Ben-Zimra, who heads an Orthodox girls' high school in the northern West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Levona as specific examples.

At that meeting, with IDF officers and officials from the State Prosecutor's Office, Baram focused in particular on two yeshivas in the northern West Bank whose students have been party to crimes against Palestinians in the area.

One, called Dorshei Yihudcha, is located in Yitzhar and headed by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, an associate of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, who headed the Od Yosef Chai yeshiva that was formerly located at Joseph's Tomb in Nablus. Shapira is among the rabbis who signed a manifesto in support of the suspects in a brutal attack on two Arab youths on Holocaust Remembrance Day in May.

"The community's moderates are unable to exert their authority over the yeshiva boys, and there are many complaints in the area," Baram was quoted as saying. "Two yeshiva boys recently went into a nearby Palestinian village to set fire to Palestinian cars, but they were caught and beaten, and the army had to extricate them."

The second yeshiva is Shiru Lamelech, located at the Havat Gilad outpost. Baram said that a number of "problematic" youths study at that yeshiva.

Baram cited the illegal outpost of Shvut Ami as another source of problems, saying that stone-throwing by residents continues despite a permanent IDF presence there.

Violence follows removal of trailer from West Bank outpost

Two men were released from custody on Thursday after having been detained earlier in the day for firing in the air when Palestinians threw stones at their cars. Police said that the two had acted properly, since their lives were endangered by the stone-throwing.

The incident, which took place at the Yitzhar junction in the northern West Bank, was one of a series of violent incidents that followed yesterday's removal of a residential trailer from the nearby outpost of Adei Ad.

In another incident, settlers from Yitzhar reportedly threw stones at the main road on their way back to Yitzhar from Adei Ad.

At the same time, the police and the Israel Defense Forces received reports that rocks had been thrown by Israelis in the nearby Palestinian village of Burin. Police and soldiers mounted an unsuccessful search for the stone-throwers.

In the shooting incident, one of the men stopped his car close to an IDF vehicle, took a weapon from one of the soldiers and fired into the air several times. The other driver fired his own weapon.

Yitzhar residents said the man who seized the soldier's gun was not a resident of the settlement, but rather an air-conditioning technician from Jerusalem.

"He happened to be at the site and was hit by stones, and since the IDF did not respond, he decided to do something," explained one.

Regarding the trailer's removal, a Yitzhar resident said: "The police and the Civil Administration think they can come and evacuate like a 'hit and run.' So we decided that for every attempt to evacuate, we would exact a price throughout the area. The tiniest evacuation will result in incidents all day long, so it will be clear we don't give up easily."