Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale.israele
Titolo: un bell'editoriale...

.. almeno secondo me... i toni (in certi punti) li trovo un po' 
demagogici,
ma tutto sommato mi pare un bell'editoriale...
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124158935955&apage=1
Dear friends - we made a mistake
By BAMBI SHELEG
Dear Friends: I look at the pictures of the looting from the settlement of 
Nisanit, which has already begun, and I know that the coming weeks will be 
too difficult to bear. The demolition of the houses and the communities 
built in the Katif region in the past 36 years, the expected clash with 
the IDF and the celebrations of the Palestinians   all these are a sure 
recipe for terrible heartbreak.
This heartbreak will no doubt give rise to a great desire to lay the blame 
for this collective disaster on somebody. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has 
already been chosen as the obvious target for the feverish hatred among 
many of us, who speak of him as of the Roman general Titus, but born of 
the Jews. However, a keener observer of reality may raise the possibility 
that this disaster was also of our own making.
In the years following the Yom Kippur War we came to believe, with true 
sincerity, that we were the flag-bearers of the Jewish people. After all, 
we had not forgotten the Torah of Israel and its values; we knew from 
whence we came and where we were going; we had more humility, we were 
imbued with faith.
The Yom Kippur War had not badly shaken our world of beliefs, as it did 
with the leading strata of Israeli society up until then. Just the 
opposite. That war actually strengthened us. The more mature among us 
discerned a leadership and ideological vacuum, the need for a new ideal to 
"uplift the people's spirit"   then at an ebb in wake of the war's tragedy 
  and charged toward the new and exciting goal: settling Judea, Samaria 
and Gaza. Thus the great internal disengagement of religious Zionism began.
This disengagement had many and varied aspects: On the one hand, it 
strengthened our branch of Israeli society in a truly amazing fashion. We 
built extraordinary communities and large families. Our people grew strong 
and became part of all facets of society: academia, the media, the army 
and politics.
The economic situation of many of us improved unrecognizably. Our various 
educational networks, the state-religious and the national-haredi schools, 
became more powerful, both because of the fact that they were given more 
money than the regular state schools, and because many of us give 
education the highest priority and devote their lives to it.
ON THE other hand, this internal disengagement exacted a high price from 
the national and sectarian levels: the establishment of communities with a 
clearly religious nature and separate religious neighborhoods in the 
cities, with all their beauty and internal splendor, led to a sharp sense 
of distance between those who lived in them and broad sections of society.
The ideology of Merkaz Harav Yeshiva was strengthened in these places, 
which saw the settlement of all of the Land of Israel, here and now, as 
the central front of the Jewish people in this generation. Other goals 
were added, including strengthening the religious-Zionist institutions, 
fostering a culture of modesty, fighting a bitter battle against the 
permissive values of the liberal-modern world, strengthening the IDF by 
means of directing young religious youth to command positions, mainly in 
the infantry, by means of pre-army academies.
All this was done consciously by the leadership out of an internal sense 
that "our people" were worthy of replacing the old and corrupt elites in 
power, who lacked the true values, the values that we held.
The combination of an internal sense of power, of knowing the way, and the 
hatred we felt from the old elites who fought against our dream of 
settling the entire land caused many of us to stop dealing with the 
weighty questions on our doorstep. For example: What would we do with 
three and a half million Palestinians lacking civil rights?
Very few among us related to this weighty question with the proper 
seriousness. This, perhaps, is the main reason that the helm of power has 
still not come close to being in religious-Zionist hands.
On the other hand, the seclusion, combined with a deep internal sense of 
being in the right without asking for or needing external confirmation, 
caused a deep blindness in many of us.
We feel that the Israeli world outside our communities is gradually losing 
its contours. Corruption in government is intolerable; endless 
commercialization and leisure culture is destroying every good thing; the 
state education system is in terrible shape; the media is not how we would 
like it to be, and the list goes on.
THE QUESTION, therefore, is which is the egg and which the chicken? Did we 
not cause, by our very isolation, some of the above things to happen? Did 
we not have a decisive hand in the fact that the entire Israeli agenda for 
the last 30 years has focused only on the issue of the Land of Israel and 
the communities we built? And how else can the demand of the religious 
residents of Gush Katif   to be separated from the secular in the site for 
the evacuees in Nitzan   be understood?
If we were less cut off and more humble; if we didn't have an immediate 
answer to all the hard questions; if we had the guts to look straight at 
our people, at the real people who live here, and stop preaching to them 
about the amazing things going on in our own world   we might have noticed 
the fact that we have here, in our Israel, an ocean of problems in which 
we have taken absolutely no interest. If our rabbis had been less 
preoccupied with the internal discussions among themselves and others like 
themselves and had emerged to try and understand the real situation of 
Israeli society, perhaps today we would not be facing the tragedy on our 
doorstep.
Embarrassing as it is to admit, we fell in love with ourselves. We have 
strong communities, good schools and devoted teachers. We have a path, we 
have a destiny. We know how things should progress, and if events don't 
move the way we think they should, we will volunteer to show reality the 
way.
DEAR FRIENDS, this is so difficult for me to write: We were wrong, and we 
misled our society. On the way to redeeming the land of our forefathers, 
we forgot our people. We looked out for ourselves and our children very 
well, and we forgot so many children of other people.
We tried to give new life to the Torah of Israel so it would suit the 
tasks of this generation, but the generation of rabbis that were born to 
us disappointed. Our Torah is not relevant to the real situation of the 
great majority of the Jewish people in this generation. Its language is 
cut off and its thoughts not directed to the simple and basic and 
existential troubles of our society.
The terrible truth is that this generation of rabbis created a fictitious 
agenda for us, one that scorns the issues of the simple Israeli man 
struggling to earn a livelihood, his identity and his dignity in a country 
still in its early stages of consolidation.
While we were busy with the Land of Israel and settling and fostering our 
ostensibly ideological identity, so isolated from those of other people, 
awful things took place. There are a million and a half impoverished 
people in Israeli society, and the overwhelming majority of them are not 
among our ranks.
We looked out for ourselves, did we not? The beautiful settlements we 
built, the huge and ostentatious houses in so many of them, we thought 
this was something we deserved by right. While our schools flourished   
and we made sure our children received more and more hours of schooling   
there was no one to look out for the other children.
We strengthened our own small and prestigious state religious schools and 
national haredi schools and neglected, even when we held the Education 
Ministry portfolio, all the other school systems. We acted like any 
self-interested sector, not as a worthy leadership.
We have no interest in the rights of workers, which are gradually being 
eroded   not of Jewish workers and certainly not of foreign workers; we 
have nothing to say about Israel being a world leader in the trading of 
women, and we of course have nothing to say about the Palestinian issue.
Except for a very few in our society, we don't even notice their 
existence. The Palestinians are invisible. They are a phenomenon of 
nature. We only see them when they strike at us.
And to all this it must be added that the institution closest to us, the 
one our people still control, the rabbinical courts, function like the 
legal system of a third world country, and we do almost nothing to change 
this disgrace.
The behavior of so many of us in the last few months shows that we have 
lost our wits. The hysterical demonstrations, the tacit consent to sending 
children to block roads and clash with security forces, all this attests 
to a deep sense of insult   as if society had betrayed us, the best of its 
sons.
And yes, many of us are indeed the best of its sons; but we betrayed 
society first. Innocently. Out of genuine idealism. But also out of 
arrogance. We disengaged first.
NOTA del Jerusalem Post: The writer is the editor of Eretz Acheret. This 
essay originally appeared in Ma'ariv and is reprinted with permission. 

essay originally appeared in Ma'ariv and is reprinted with permission. 
La traduzione italiana, col titolo _<<Noi coloni ci credevamo i
migliori[.] Un peccato di idealismo e arroganza>>_ è sul Corriere della
Sera di oggi 18.08 a pagina 5 (per chi è registrato sul sito web del
Corriere:
http://www.corriere.it/edicola/index.jsp?path=ESTERI&doc=T42T2
)
Saluti zetetici,
R.
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http://www.corriere.it/edicola/index.jsp?path=ESTERI&doc=T42T2
)
Faccio il birichino e lo trascrivo, perché vale la pena.
Un pezzo alto che sa mescolare orgoglio e un' autocritica che non si 
concede niente.
Magnifico.
La scrittrice
«Noi coloni ci credevamo i migliori »
Un peccato di idealismo. E arroganza
 
Cari amici, le prossime settimane saranno terribilmente difficili da 
sopportare. La demolizione delle case e delle comunità costruite negli 
ultimi 36 anni a Gaza, gli scontri con l'esercito israeliano e i 
festeggiamenti dei palestinesi: la ricetta sicura per un dolore 
straziante. Questo dolore genererà il forte desiderio di individuare il 
colpevole di un disastro collettivo. Il primo ministro Ariel Sharon è 
già stato scelto come obiettivo dell'odio esasperato di molti. È 
tuttavia verosimile che un più attento osservatore dei fatti consideri 
la possibilità che siamo stati proprio noi a provocare la catastrofe. 
Negli anni successivi alla guerra dello Yom Kippur (il conflitto arabo- 
israeliano dell'ottobre 1973, ndr) abbiamo creduto, con autentica 
convinzione, di essere i portabandiera del popolo ebraico. Dopo tutto, 
non avevamo dimenticato la Torah e i suoi insegnamenti; sapevamo da dove 
venivamo e dove eravamo diretti. La guerra non intaccò le nostre 
credenze. Al contrario, ci rafforzò.
I più maturi tra noi riconobbero un vuoto ideologico e di leadership, la 
necessità di un nuovo ideale capace di «risollevare lo spirito del 
popolo» piegato dal conflitto e si diedero una nuova, eccitante 
missione: colonizzare la Giudea, la Samaria e Gaza. Ebbe così inizio il 
grandioso disimpegno interno del sionismo religioso. Costruimmo 
straordinarie comunità e grandi famiglie. La nostra gente divenne più 
forte e si inserì in tutti i settori della società: università, mezzi di 
informazione, esercito, politica. La situazione economica di tanti 
conobbe incredibili miglioramenti. Il prezzo, però, fu alto: la 
fondazione di comunità con una chiara matrice religiosa e la creazione 
di quartieri separati nelle città ci allontanarono dal resto della 
società. L'ideologia di Merkaz Harav Yeshiva (la scuola talmudica 
sionista fondata nel 1924 a Gerusalemme dal rabbino capo Kook, ndr) fu 
rafforzata in comunità che consideravano la colonizzazione di tutta la 
Terra di Israele l'obiettivo centrale di una generazione, al quale se ne 
aggiunsero altri, come il potenziamento delle istituzioni religiose 
sioniste, sulla base della convinzione che «la nostra gente» meritasse 
di sostituire le vecchie e corrotte élites, prive dei valori autentici, 
i nostri. Il senso del potere, unito alla convinzione di conoscere la 
via e all'odio che nutrivamo nei confronti delle élites fecero sì che 
molti di noi smettessero di occuparsi di domande come: che fare con tre 
milioni e mezzo di palestinesi privi di diritti civili? Pochissimi tra 
noi si sono posti interrogativi simili con la dovuta serietà. È forse 
questa la principale ragione per la quale la barra del potere non è mai 
stata in mani sioniste.
L'isolamento e la profonda convinzione di avere ragione, sganciata da 
qualsiasi necessità di confronto o conferma dall'esterno, hanno reso 
ciechi molti di noi. Dov'è che tutto ha inizio? Non siamostati noi a 
determinare, con il nostro isolamento, questa situazione? Non è 
soprattutto a causa nostra che la politica israeliana degli ultimi 
trent'anni si è concentrata esclusivamente sulla questione della Terra 
di Israele e sulle comunità da noi costruite? Se fossimo stati meno 
chiusi e più umili, se avessimo avuto il coraggio di volgere lo sguardo 
alle persone e smettere di predicare quanto fosse meraviglioso il nostro 
mondo, se i nostri rabbini si fossero occupati della situazione 
effettiva della società, oggi forse non saremmo di fronte alla tragedia 
consumata sulla porta di casa nostra. Per quanto sia spiacevole 
ammetterlo, ci siamo innamorati di noi stessi: abbiamo comunità forti, 
buone scuole e insegnanti devoti. Abbiamo un cammino, abbiamo un 
destino. Cari amici, è talmente difficile scriverlo: ci sbagliavamo e 
abbiamo indotto in errore la nostra società. Impegnati a riscattare la 
terra dei nostri avi, abbiamo dimenticato la nostra gente. Ci siamo 
presi ottimamente cura di noi stessi e dei nostri figli e abbiamo 
dimenticato i figli degli altri.
La nostra Torah non risponde alle esigenze della vasta maggioranza degli 
ebrei di questa generazione. La società israeliana conta un milione e 
mezzo di poveri, che per lo più non sono tra noi. Non abbiamo nulla da 
dire sulla questione palestinese. I palestinesi sono invisibili, un 
fenomeno naturale. Ci accorgiamo della loro esistenza solo quando ci 
colpiscono. Le manifestazioni scomposte degli ultimi mesi, il tacito 
assenso alla partecipazione dei bambini ai blocchi stradali e agli 
scontri con le forze di sicurezza, tutto ciò tradisce il sentimento di 
chi si percepisce vittima di un profondo oltraggio — come se la società 
avesse tradito i migliori dei suoi figli. Sì, molti di noi sono davvero 
i migliori dei suoi figli, ma siamo stati noi a tradirla per primi. Con 
innocenza. Per autentico idealismo. Anche, però, per arroganza. Siamo 
stati noi i primi a disimpegnarci.
Bambi Sheleg, direttrice di Eretz Acheret (Una terra diversa), rivista 
dei coloni Maariv (traduzione di Maria Serena Natale)
18 agosto 2005
Tb
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