My friend Lenny Ben-David has posted two photos on his blog. One is of the biers of the Fogel Family, five Jews slaughtered in 2011 at the Jewish community of Itamar in Samaria. The second photo he displayed is of the victims of the Kishinev pogrom of over 100 years ago in the Ukraine.In a book edited by Edward Judge, "Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom," the chronicles of that horrific period are retold and have been summarized so: In February of 1903, in a town in the southwestern part of the Russian empire, a peasant stumbled upon the corpse of 14-year old Mikhail Rybachenko, bruised and covered with stab wounds, in a garden. The murder immediately fueled wild rumors that he had been killed by local Jews in need of his Christian blood to prepare their matzah bread. Panic rumors, grounded in sinister superstitions of Jewish sorcery and ritual murder, quickly spread to nearby towns. By April, they had hit Kishinev -- a growing metropolis of 100,000 inhabitants rife with the unrest of rapid expansion, ethnic rivalry, revolutionary agitation, and anti-Semitism -- with full force. The resulting massacre left dozens dead, and hundreds wounded, maimed, widowed, orphaned or homeless.More first-hand details can be read here.
But there is another, a third photograph that came to my mind. It also displayed biers of murdered Jews. The incident occured in 1937 during the period the Jewish Yishuv preferred to call the ''Disturbances'' just before the Irgun Tzvai Leumi, under the command of David Raziel initiated a prolonged policy of reprisals. The details:On November 9, 1937, five Jewish workers set out to work in the fields of Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem. They were encircled by an Arab gang and after exchanges of fire, all five were killed and robbed of their rifles (Kibbutz Maaleh Hahamisha - The Hill of the Five - was named for them). The murder stunned the Jewish community in Jerusalem, but despite their pain and anger, the leaders of the Jewish Agency continued to call for restraint.
In the center can be seen Moshe Shertok (Sharret) who, by the way, spent some two years as a child with his family at Ein Sinya in the Benjamin region, and to the left is Chief Rabbi Itzhak Halevi Herzog and to the right is Menachem Usshishkin, head of the JNF at the time. At the funeral, according to the Davar newpsaper account, 50,000 were present.
What happened after the murders of those five workers of the land, tillers of the soil, Zionists who returned to the Land of Israel, the national home of the Jewish people as guaranteed and recognized by the League of Nations? Very shortly after, the Kibbutz of Maaleh HaHamisha was established. Another community of Jews was added to the map that now includes Kiryat Shmona (for the eight victims at Tel Chai in 1920) and Givat Hashlosha (for three victims of Ottoman torture in 1916).
Those today who are disturbed by a Jewish presence throughout the Land of Israel all too often seek to blame the Jewish victims, as if, somehow, the very reality of a Jew living where his forefathers lived is a crime, is "illegitimate", is an "obstacle to peace". One pundit, who is permitted the public-payed screen of IBA''s Channel One TV every Friday evening, had this thought:The settlers are like the nuclear power station in Fukushima - a grandly built project of huge proportions, which was set up in the wrong place on the basis of false assumptionsIn the past, we who live in the Land of Israel beyond the artificial armitice-line of 1949, have been stigmatized as ''a cancer,'' as '' criminals against humanity, sadists...'' that tanks should be employed to crush us (here) or as legitimate targets for Arab terror as when Israel Prize winner, Hebrew University professor Zev Shternhal wrote in Haaretz (and later attempted to recant): "If the Palestinians had a little sense, they would concentrate their struggle against the settlements… and refrain from planting bombs west of the Green Line."Despite the internal criticism and the lack of proper support from this government, the real parallel picture to the five slaughtered Jews of Itamar is my third one, that of another Jewish location of residency - which has been the proper and traditional Zionist response for decades: to build, to continue normal life activity and not to yield in the face of terror.