The Spiritual World of the Hebrew Bands Promoting Expulsion of Palestinians
Last week another 16 Palestinian families were forced to leave their encampments. What goes on in the minds of the skullcap-wearers responsible for this?
Where does a Jew get the mental energy to raise a club and fracture the skull and arm of a 47-year-old woman standing at the entrance of her tent? What goes on in the minds of the handsome young kippa-wearers when they set fire to a Bedouin family’s animal feed and send their fattened Hebrew flocks to eat up the barley sown by Palestinians? What is the spiritual world of the erect Hebrew band that, under the aegis of Israeli soldiers, expels Palestinian shepherds from their grazing lands and homes?
Only last week, another 16 families were forced to abandon their encampments due to Hebrew violence. One family from east of the Taybeh junction on the Alon Road and another 15 families from the Ras a-Tin ridge. This, in addition to the more than a dozen families from these two sites alone, about whose under-the-radar transfer I reported on last week.
A text signed by 33 operators/owners of shepherds’ outposts in the West Bank may provide a few answers.
A text signed by 33 owner-operators of shepherds’ outposts in the West Bank provides a few answers to these questions. Published on Facebook at the end of 2019, it is validated anew by every assault and expulsion.
This is a letter of farewell and recognition written by the Hebrew shepherds to Ariel Ben-David, who for a few years headed the organization Hashomer Yosh (Guardian of Judea and Samaria), which provided the outposts with manpower and muscle. According to Google, Ben-David is a lawyer who established a so-called Torah nucleus (urban collective for young religious Zionist families) in Ramle.
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In April 2012, he explained to the news website Hakol Hayehudi that one of the considerations for the establishment of Torah nuclei in “mixed” cities (that is, the ones from which we were unable to expel all the Palestinian residents in 1948) was demographics. “This is one of the things that pushes us and gives us motivation to go there,” he said. Ben-David is also among the founders of the Komemiyut movement, whose main value is “the supremacy of Torah.”
“After a hard exile … we returned to Zion … to the inheritance of the land. In its vast, sweet spaces, we were filled with a deep connection, among other things to herding our sacred flocks.” This is the opening line of the letter, which continues: “Years passed on the Judean mountains and hills of Binyamin, the cliffs of Samaria and the Jordan plain, which were neglected and in despair. Their glory became dill and thorn bushes, their grandeur was filled with wild burglars, on their high places the bandits of the tents of Keidar roamed. [But] in this decade, and especially in its last half, another spirit has come – to restore the crown, the place where jackals lay will become an oasis of love, where the evil ones roamed, shepherds will graze sacred flocks. There will be no more deceitful tents of the foreigner, but rather the dwelling places of Israel will strike their tent poles.”
In ordinary language: As has already been analyzed by anti-expulsion activists, the project of the Jewish shepherds’ outposts – to expel Palestinian (“foreign”) shepherds – is an organized, bankrolled operation that has gathered momentum over the past decade.
The writers of the letter recycle the old canard that the land (and now: the West Bank) was desolate and ruined until we wonderful Jews arrived. This lie, then as now, is a means of overcoming the dissonance between the values “do not steal” and “do not do unto others what is hateful unto you,” “do not murder” etc., and the patterns of behavior of Zionism, the arrival of the remnants of the Holocaust and other Jewish displaced persons and exiles, lust for real estate and the craving to grow rich.
The writers repeatedly state the collective slander that the Palestinians (Keidar: one of the sons of Ishmael) are thieves by nature. The writers, the builders of the unauthorized, flourishing farms, write at length to falsely instill fear of robbers, in order to explain why Hashomer Yosh came into the picture. “And here, like an angel from heaven, you arose, our beloved Ariel Ben-David … when you took up the role [as] Hashomer Yosh, you took us into your heart … from the dust you raised us up to honor, from a small number to a great people, from an unknown to an admired brand.
“And all the way, you saw to it to find new paths. … Personally, you were quick to arrive and stay, to listen close at hand, to feel and to experience. … You and your team went all through the country explaining, you developed ties with all kinds of audiences, to acquaint them with the great dream that we share. … There is no doubt that we, the shepherds alone, would not have reached so many kinds of audiences and managed to bring them to action. The great investment has borne fruit, and volunteers have begun to flow to the farms for guarding shifts and other volunteer work. … Suddenly the night does not feel so alone.”
And indeed, Hashomer Yosh had 950 volunteers at the end of 2020, according to its most recent report to the registrar of non-profit associations published on the website Guidestar.
“We opened doors to receive excellent funding,” the letter confirms, “to support the volunteer system, and some of us even enjoyed respectable grants that were given to us in appreciation and love …” Testimony to this is Hashomer Yosh’s budget for 2020, of 5,103,838 shekels ($1,473,143): over 500,000 shekels to 12 employees and nearly 4.5 million on various activities.
We, the taxpayers in Israel, paid the guards at the violent farms with their expulsion tactics 2,069,118 shekels – the government grant to Hashomer Yosh in that year alone. Over four years (2018–2021) we paid the organization from our taxes, almost 6 million shekels. This does not include the silence the Israeli majority maintains in the face of the robbery.
And so the writers can pray with certainty: “To the blessed Lord: all those who faithfully work for public needs, please pay their wages, and give us hope in the end for our dream of salvation to come true.”