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Uprooting Jews

?We will be here for many more years?


By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
February 15, 2005

At Monday’s mass anti-expulsion rally in southern Gaza, Jewish residents of the Strip again expressed confidence that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to forcibly uproot them would not succeed.

Right-wing politicians attending the demonstration accused Sharon of incitement against the very settlers he once championed, and said the prime minister was apparently unable to deal with criticism.

One rabbi encouraged those gathered that even in these bleak times, self-sacrifice and God’s help would save Jewish Gaza and the entire nation of Israel.

Gaza Jews confident they won’t be moved

Jews will live in the Gaza Strip “for many more years,” Gaza resident David Hatuel told Monday evening’s gathering in the Katif Bloc community of Neve Dekalim.

With tears in his eyes, Hatuel said the success of this “greater goal” was assured “due to the resilience of the people here today and the people like my wife and four daughters,” who were murdered at point-blank range by Palestinian Arab gunmen last year.

Hatuel’s manner was representative of the quiet confidence the Jews of Gaza have exuded throughout the past year, certain that the Almighty, Who granted them the right to settle the coastal strip, would not allow them to be uprooted.

Shame on you, Sharon

Several right-wing Knesset members, including National Religious Party chief Effi Eitam, attended the rally.

Eitam vowed the battle over Jewish Gaza would end with Sharon sitting “at home on your farm” bereft of political power.

“I tell you [Sharon] in the name of everyone who’s here, on the day the order is given you can destroy and make up lies, but we will stand here and prove that we love the Jewish people and Land of Israel,” Arutz 7 quoted Eitam as saying.

Eitam slammed Sharon over the government’s campaign to demonize the Jewish settlers, and branded the prime minister “the greatest inciter.”

Eitam also took issue with Sharon over the latter’s apparent inability to bear criticism of his policies.

“I saw you today in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and you couldn’t even listen to my criticism of you. In the same way you fired cabinet ministers…you threw me out of the committee.”

“You trample over everything that stands in your way,” Eitam added, decrying what many see as Sharon’s undemocratic approach to pushing his new leftist policies.

"Sharon, you should be embarrassed,” the reserve IDF general stated.

God will keep his covenant

Despite the seemingly unmovable force of the Sharon government, Jewish Gaza will ultimately be saved through self-sacrifice and God’s help, Katif Bloc Rabbi Yigal Kamenetzky assured the demonstrators.

“One can feel like it's just before the Red Sea split, as if there’s nothing left to be done,” Kamenetzky said. But “when a Jew is in trouble, when the Jewish People is in danger, shouldn’t one cry out to God, Creator of the world?”

Standing before the Red Sea, the rabbi explained, God taught Moses that through self-sacrifice and prayer it is “possible to open up the heavens.”

“We’re at the stage where we can split the sea through the self-sacrifice of the people of [the Katif Bloc] and the self-sacrifice in northern Samaria,” Kamenetzky said.

“With God’s help we will continue through self-sacrifice and believe that it’s possible to win this struggle … With God’s help we will be victorious.”

In the book of Joshua, the area today known as the Gaza Strip is deeded to the Tribe of Judah in accordance with the Almighty’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The prophet Amos declares that following 2,000 years of exile, God would "plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them." (Amos 9:15)

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