First, the stabbing, thereafter, the fruits. I was sickened to learn that a friend’s son was nearly killed a few weeks ago by an unwelcomed comer, a dweller from a nearby, TV dish-studded, car filled, McMansion “refugee camp.” That malevolent had brought his misshapen knife to realize the political fantasies of his twisted mind. The actualization of his mentations meant plunging his blade into an innocent, whom that evil being had never met, and, whom he would have as easily exchanged, per his creed, for any other harmless Jew.
B”H, our young man is recovering.
Even had the trespasser not had murder on his mind, I would have been repulsed, a short time later, actually a few days before this essay was written, when I witnessed that despicable person’s wicked cohorts pulling ripe sustenance from a tree sprouting in the center of my community. Those olive pickers were stealing my people’s harvest.
Our ethnic cousins engage in dark deeds with impunity. They whine, to the world, about their intent to ask their philosophical comrades to withhold oil, if any amongst their crowd gets so much as frowned upon when engaging in shocking pursuits. They succeed to the extent that they consider themselves entitled, has v’shalom, to kill our babies in their cradles.
In the minds of those Semitic relatives of ours, their acting out is part of their international “growing up.” Their choices are a “desirable” part of the propaganda with which they wash the media. I think not.
I am tired of being told not to bother to call Jerusalem’s municipal police when loss is impending or has occurred. I am tired of being told that if I engage the IDF in reporting theft or manslaughter, or even in reporting attempts at those atrocities, that our protectors will deliberately overlook those illicit, crooked items.
It is time for the world to stop being held hostage by its energy appetite. What’s more, it is time for Am Yisrael to stop compromising because of fear. “No” needs to be the beginning and the end of any communication given to those depraved others.
When I drive through my community, I do not want to see THEM. I do not want those criminals in my neighborhood as laborers. I do not want them in my parks, harvesting from my olive trees. I do not want them trying to kill my friends’ children. I do not want them exempt from justice in this world (or in the world to come).
We are in Cheshvan. Next month is Kislev, the time of Chanukah. As Rabbi Yehudah Prero writes in “Chanukah and Olive Oil: Lessons in Devotion,” “[t]he only plant that withstood the corruption that permeated the entire world …was the olive tree. It remained pure. It withstood the pressures to engage in the perverse behavior that was in vogue at the time. The olive remained faithful to the world order as G-d created it.” Accordingly, it is especially vile to see those defilers in my community, brazenly plucking my olives.
It is of no small coincidence that it is illegal to destroy olive trees and that this concept is “allegedly revered” even by those louts. Likewise, it is of no small coincidence that it is immoral for Jews to destroy fruit trees of any kind and that it is immoral for Jews to allow other nations to steal their geographic heritage whether our birthright is measured by a block of communities, by a yeshuv, by a lone farm, or by an individual specimen of Olea europaea.
Yet, those abominable others proudly rape and murder our olive trees in the same way that they proudly rape and murder our sisters and brothers and in the same way that they recently refreshed their call for our loved ones’ demise. In the world arena, Eretz Yisrael gets tossed on the heap as something cheap and as disposable, that is, as a short-term, political convenience for the dollar, yen, and euro. Our Holy Land gets treated as no more nominally valuable as is firewood, including wood filched from our sacred olive trees. No more!
Too many “well intending” NGOs, including, but not limited to mass media and to “aid” organizations invoke the needs of their vaporous causes in order to rationale their attempts to destroy the Jewish people and to wreck more than havoc within our consecrated land. International and local government and quasigovernment organizations look the other way when those dastardly events occur.
Most of us Israelis, olim, as well as families here for multiple generations, are normal folk. Whereas we might aspire to the heights of scholar warriors, in most cases, we fill our days and nights with washing dishes, with praying, with chasing children from Point A to Point B, with community service, with folding laundry, with paying very large chunks of our earnings to support our national and local infrastructures, with reserve duty, and with otherwise making time to sit down for a salad or for a pita. Sadly, also typical to our mundane goings on is our growing, collective feeling of weariness.
We are tired of being cut down both in body and in land. Our ideas are vital to us and to the nations, as a whole. Our legacy was given to us by our Creator. No good can come, either to us, or to the entire globe, from ignoring, or from indirectly or directly abating, attackers who meditatively seek and who conscientiously work to destroy our sons and daughters and to annihilate our fauna and flora. No good can come, either to us, or to the entire globe, from ignoring, or from indirectly or directly abating, attackers who meditatively seek and who conscientiously work to visit these iniquities upon us while insisting on freedom from harm.
Until that span when retribution, of an unearthly sort, will occur, we will be sad. We will be angry. More importantly, we will protect ourselves and our land. The olive pickers will be caused to stop culling our most precious harvests. There will be an end to all of this absurd brutality.