On The Hilltop Youth / Yigal Canaan
The commander of the Air Force in the Six Day War, Moti Hod, once told a cute story:
In 1939, on the eve of the Holocaust, his mother and he as a child, kibbutzniks from Dagenia, went on a family visit to Warsaw, Poland.
He went down to play with the children in the street. Suddenly rocks began to fly in their direction.
The Jewish children avoided it and treated it as an everyday matter.
The stone throwers were a group of Polish children. He did not understand, took stones and threw them back.
The next day the group of Polish children came and took him to them. "You are one of us" they told him.
Educational literature from the beginning of the last century is full of stories of "the warm and prickly sabras".
The upright, the tanned, the happy, the strong, the honest in their thinking.
The immigrants to Israel, socialist as they may be, were seen as the last of Lithuania's students – skeletal, bent over, bespectacled, studious, conscientious, talkative.
There was an expectation that this land would grow a new kind of person, and indeed it did. The elation was complete.
And there's more.
Around the time of the War of Independance, there was a case of a rape of a young girl from one of the farms by an Arab.
The Yishuv was incensed. Not like today. And you must understand: there was then a complete and orderly legal system, more so than the Israeli one of today.
It was possible to file a complaint with the police, and there was a judge according to His Majesty's law.
But the Palmach thought otherwise.
A squad of three was sent. Among them was the late Amos Horev, who later became a general in the IDF and president of the Technion.
They castrated the rapist.
Not only that, but Hagana songwriter Haim Hefer wrote a song, "We castrated you, Ya Muhammad", in honor of the act.
The Six Day War raised the state of Israel up a level. No longer just a coastal lowland country, a country of dried sands and swamps, but an heir to an ancestral estate.
The settlements, which were mostly religious, created a different youth. Incredible.
On top of the virtues of stature and healthy disposition, was added a meeting with the natural expanses of Judea and Samaria, an Israeli Torah outlook, free from the corruption of Western culture; purity. Little Gideon, little Judah the Maccabee.
They eagerly read the books of the Second Aliyah and the 'Letters of Yoni', and were ready in their humility to serve with all their might the wonderful country that built all of this.
They opened the door, and got the slap in the face of their lives:
This very country expels them from their house, degrades them, is afraid of them, prefers the Arabs over them.
Most of them surrendered, retired, joined the bourgeois majority or went to the ivory tower of the yeshiva. A minority remained who tried to be a "noble savage". To study in 'small yeshivot', live in communes in nature. Apply the Torah they learned with their natural personality in a kind of Indian reservation.
Their simple logic said: we are settling in the Wild West. There is no central government. The sheriff is a coward, the government representative from Washington is a hypocrite and a coward. If we don't respond, if we don't revive the territory, we simply won't survive.
I come from the conclusion, which may be unfounded, that both the Duma affair and Yatma affair were done by Jews.
The enemy throws stones, we also throw stones. The enemy throws Molotov cocktails, we also throw Molotov cocktails.
The statement that it is 'not Jewish' is self-righteous nonsense. As if an Irgun bomb is 'Jewish', or an F-16 strike is 'clean' and 'Jewish'.
To create a terrifying 'Jewish Division' in order to police graffiti written in Arab villages is a mental deviation of the State of Israel.
This youth is among the healthiest buds of our future.
I don't sign off on everything they do, but it's like a teenage boy. He was a beautiful boy, and now he is growing up nervous, angry, strange.
He needs to be handled with kid gloves. This maturation is meant to build him into a normal adult. A strong adult, who withstands the hardships of life.
If we trample him with our boots, we will destroy his future and our future.
Treatment with an iron fist will be like the radiation for ringworm that was given to immigrants in the 1950s: no more ringworm, instead they have cancer.
Whoever says that this youth is the greatest danger to the peace of the State of Israel, is simply a messenger of the enemies – some from Europe, some from the West.
These boys are the Tom Sawyer and the Huckleberry Finn of Judea and Samaria. People born into nature and a new future.
Facing the rot of the most official bodies — Shai Nitzan, Dina Zilber, the prosecutor's office, the Jewish Division — all part of an old Jewish establishment, decayed by foreign money and foreign education, what we see here is, at most, a mistake. But it is a mistake born of something young and healthy — and that is how it should be handled.
There are times when you reach an intersection and want to continue straight. But the intersection is not like that. This is a Y junction. You can continue forward to the right or forward to the left. There is no other choice.
The State of Israel is in such a situation. There is no turning back, no going straight ahead. If you take the left branch – it buries you in the 'state of all its citizens' Palestinians and Eritreans, with the 'New Israel Fund', with anti-Judaism and with progressivism. The elimination of the Jewish state.
The only way is forward and right. A Jewish state. A path that may have local problems here and there, and they will simply have to be handled correctly.
We should focus on this path. With joy, with pride, with faith.
'Path Pavers'
