A Reason To Trust

In this post I bring a scan from Yediot Achronot, one of Israel’s two leading newspapers, and then my translation of the scan, and then commentary on it. The scan is from the issue of January 8, 2007.

Scan in screen resolution. Click image to view full size.

(Title) The students study in the dark because the school is connected to the electricity in Gaza

(Subtitle) Not only are the children of Kibbutz Sa’ad forced to study in armored rooms because of the Kassams (the Kassam rockets fired from Gaza onto Israeli inhabitations within the 1949 Armistice Line ever since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip in August 2005. —ZY), now they do not have light in the classrooms because of the power cuts in Gaza

(Author) by Matan Tzuri

(Lead) The students of the school Da’at in Kibbutz Sa’ad, which has suffered years from the firing of Kassams, have gotten used to studying in armored classrooms. But now they are forced to get used to studying in dark classrooms as well. The reason: the school receives its electricity from the Gaza Strip power grid, and every time the systems in Gaza break down, the students stay without light, without heating and without a mood.

(Body) For long years the power grid of Gaza and of the Israeli inhabitations encompassing Gaza was shared. A few years ago it was decided to put an end to that. The inhabitations encompassing Gaza were disconnected, connected directly to the local power stations, and, unrelatedly, Israel continued supplying power to Gaza (Emphasis mine. —ZY) However, for some reason, there have remained buildings that are still connected in the same grid with Gaza, among them the elementary school Da’at in Sa’ad.

In the last days, following the stormy weather and high power consumption, the power systems in Gaza are breaking down under pressure, and together with them the power in the school Da’at. The result: tens of power cuts during the studies, up to [the point of] their total disruption.

“It’s unbearable”, relates one of the teachers in the school. “The children can’t study in such a way. The armored classrooms are dark enough as they are, and now the students are really forced to be in darkness. It also heightens the anxiety in them”.

An additional serious problem that the undesirable connection to Gaza creates is that the long power cuts also paralyze the “Red Color” warning system, which warns against rocket fire. “It’s mortal danger”, (Emphasis mine. —ZY) says the security officer of regional authority Sdot Negev, Rafi Babiyan. “The Electricity Company subscribed the management of the school without the management knowing what the consequences were. The rest of the kibbutz isn’t connected to the shared grid, and life there looks totally different.”

From the Electricity Company was replied: “The school turned of its own accord to the Electricity Company and asked to disconnect from the power line of the kibbutz. The Electricity Company suggested building a new line in a few months, but the school asked to connect to another line supplying power to the Strip too.” (Emphasis mine. —ZY)

So…

This “racist, apartheid state”, this “[expletive] little country responsible for all the turmoil in the world right now”, is supplying electricity to the very region where the people have elected to power a movement that is bent on destroying it (G-d forbid), and from which rockets are fired onto its borders, and have been so ever since the total ending of all the “occupation” cited as the reason for the hostilities.

What if Israel did the sane thing, the thing expected from any rational state standing for its interests of self-preservation, and stopped supplying any power to the Gaza Strip pending the cessation of all hostilities? We already know the answer: the left-leaning “human rights organizations” and “peace movements” and their Mainstream Media lapdogs would be screaming about the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza, caused by Israel’s callousness, proving its intent to do ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians”. It is because we know this reaction that our weak, pusillanimous, dhimmi leaders have chosen to keep things the way they are, even at the cost of (see the emphasis on the rocket warning system) the lives of their own citizens.

From a recent Daily Kos diary, The End of Zionism?, quoting the New York Times:

''(Their life) impressed me as somehow truncated. . . . Their experience was not open-ended, expansive, and adventurous. . . . Their present seemed devoid of the vitality that I associate with leading a fulfilling life. . . . In waiting, the present is always secondary to the future. . . . The world in its immediacy slips away; it is derealized. It is without elan, vitality, creative force. It is numb, muted, dead.''

That’s about South Africa (the state to which it has become very fashionable to compare Israel nowadays) in 1985. The diary writer, “litho”, follows with his own words:

I wonder if Israelis might not be in a similar state: waiting, waiting for something external to happen, to bring their country's multiple crises to a final resolution. In the end, of course, white South Africans were forced to take the future into their own hands, to cede power willingly and on their own to the country's black majority (If you find any document by the blacks of South Africa stating as their goal the expulsion or extermination of all the whites of South Africa, give me a call. —ZY). Eventually, the tension of living a truncated existence became too great, and they accepted their own capacity to take control of their lives by acknowledging the great lie they all were living.

You wonder, you anti-Zionist Jew-hater? You can wonder, since you don’t live in Israel. And I, as one who does, can carry you beyond your unfounded assumptions and tell you what the State of the Nation in Israel really is:

The Jews of Israel, far from feeling drained, far from doubting the whole Zionist project, are in a flurry of doubting their self-doubt and rethinking the real great lie, the lie of post-Zionism, of negotiated peace, that held sway during the 1990’s.

Yes, we are frustrated—but it is not with ourselves that we are frustrated, but with our cowardly, incompetent leadership, a leadership that insists on not learning from its mistakes, and is so lost in its consideration of, “What will the world say?” that it takes steps that value the lives of the enemy over the lives of their own citizens.

We, the Jews of Israel, had through the 1990’s given full berth to the idea that we had to take steps to build the “Palestinians’” trust of us. Whether by letting a terrorist leader back into our country from Tunis in 1993, or by Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer in 2000, which the aforementioned terrorist leader turned down with a new Intifada, or by the attempt to remove all reason for hostilities by making the Gaza Strip judenrein in August 2005, or by this continued madness of supplying electricity to the same region to this day, we had tried, and tried, and tried, again and again, to gain their trust, as though it had been proved beyond a shadow of doubt that we were the ones who couldn’t be trusted and therefore had to correct that image.

But, in this civil year 2007, after the Al-Aqsa Intifada of 2000, after the firing of Kassam rockets ever since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip, and after the war with Hizbullah in the summer of 2006, in the same Lebanon from which Barak had withdrawn to end all pretexts for hostility on Hizbullah’s part, many of us Israeli Jews have made the move into a radically new thought: how about that other side doing something to gain our trust for a change?

The moonbats keep telling us Zionists, “Peace is a two-way street, you know?” Yes, I know; but if it’s a two-way street as you say, then how come only we are being asked to make concessions? Why is it that we are asked to pay in the real cash of lands and settlements, while the other side is asked of naught but that airy, nebulous, fuzzy, easily-broken thing called, “cessation of hostilities”?

You both, moonbats and Muslims, tax our patience. Your only saving grace is our clueless leaders, who are still beholden to world opinion and who are still basking in the delusion that Islam has nothing to do with it. But the people are shaking free of the delusion, the real great lie, in droves. The nature of the enemy is becoming clear to all:

“The tests proved that she was a virgin,” the pathologist said. The girl returned home only after her father signed a statement promising not to harm her, he added.

The father shot the girl four times in the head on Tuesday. On Wednesday, an autopsy was performed that again showed “she was still a virgin,” the pathologist said.

That’s from the LGF thread Honor Killing in Jordan, from January 25, 2007. My comment (#68 on that thread): “Thus much are peace treaties with Muslims worth. As in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm.”

So far, the other side has given us no reason to believe this is not true. I speak for a growing portion of Israeli Jews in saying, “We don’t trust them”. It is not up to the girl to prove her virginity, time after time; it is up to her psycho father to be locked up in jail until he either reforms or dies. “…When they love their children more than they hate us”, as a former Prime Minister said. She had more of that manly stuff than the wimp we currently have on that seat. Let them stop bringing up their children on the heritage of suicide bombing, and then maybe they’ll be worthy of receiving electricity from Israel.