Settlers use child’s letter to campaign against freeze

This week ten-year-old Eden, who lives in Avnei Hefetz settlement, east of Netanya, wrote letter to PM asking him to resist US pressure.

By TOVAH LAZAROFF
Netanyahu at Technion prize ceremony 311 (photo credit: Avi Ohayun / GPO)
Netanyahu at Technion prize ceremony 311
(photo credit: Avi Ohayun / GPO)
Eden is only 10, but already she understands that US President Barack Obama doesn’t want her to have a new house.
This week, the small girl who lives in the Avnei Hefetz settlement, east of Netanya, sat down and wrote a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, asking him to resist US pressure to impose a 90-day construction freeze.
Hers is among the first in a letter-writing campaign initiated by the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, in which school children from West Bank settlements will pen similar requests to Netanyahu and ask him not to freeze their lives.
Most of the letters will be written in schools on Friday and Sunday.
Eden’s mother, Sigal, has asked that the family’s last name not be publicized, noting that they are media-shy, even if their daughter is not.
Sigal said her family owns a house in Avnei Hefetz, but it is too small for their seven children. They bought a new lot to build a larger home, possibly with as many as six bedrooms instead of the three they now have.
But work on the home was frozen when Netanyahu imposed a moratorium on new construction from November 26, 2009, to September 26 of this year.
Now they have returned to finalizing construction plans, but they fear that a new freeze will once more halt that work, Sigal said.
In her letter to Netanyahu, Eden explains that she is in the fifth grade and has many friends and neighbors with whom she plays.
“A long time ago, I heard there was a building freeze and that it is forbidden to build more homes because the president of America, Obama, has told you no to let us build any more. I have many friends who are very sad because they live in caravans [instead of] in a large house,” Eden wrote.
“My father and mother have promised me that we will move to a different house, where I will have my own room with a bed and games. But now they are always telling me that I have to wait,” she wrote. In the meantime, she continued, she has to sleep in the same room as her brothers.
“When I sometimes fight with my brothers, I am told, you have to give in. But you are not a boy, you are the prime minister, and I think that you do not have to give in here,” Eden told Netanyahu.
“It’s not fair that someone from the US is telling you what to do,” she said. “I’m asking you not to listen to them and to allow us to build in our land, the Land of Israel.”