[BRIEF NOTE] One Thing on the Settlements

From an article by Matthew Gutman on the oldest settler community in the West Bank, in the Jerusalem Post:

Just south of Kedumim the twice-dismantled Gilad Farm stands stronger than ever. And on Tuesday the mini-settlement – named after the murdered Gilad Zar and established by his brother Itai – boasted five mobile homes and a working stable.

In fact, the government has to date managed to permanently dismantle not a single inhabited outpost. In some cases the settlers, like their Sebastia predecessors, obstinately pick up the planks and sheets of tin and rebuild. In other cases, they move a few paces away, forcing the Defense Ministry to run an entirely new gauntlet of judicial red tape.

Today's hilltop youth employ the same tactics as their elders did in their day: at Sebastia scuffling Gush Emunim activists begged the soldiers dragging them away to refuse their orders.

"We will do everything possible to stop the disengagement," Weiss said. She preferred to keep the definition of "possible" to herself.

Weiss, the matriarch of three generations of settlers, still leads occasional tours to Sebastia, where it all began. She has teenage granddaughters possibly more devoted to snapping up unused pieces of the West Bank than herself, she gushed. "The competition over the land has become more and more ruthless. Now that the Arabs have a challenge before them, they are sprinting to grab land. We must do it faster.

"When we arrived here in 1974, two-thirds of the land was fallow," said Weiss. "Moving into state lands [all lands without legal claim by Palestinians] was easy," she said. Prior to the late 1970s heavy farming equipment had not been introduced to most parts of the rocky West Bank. For the locals, clearing a field took a generation; the Israeli settlers could do it in a day.

I'd be rather more sympathetic to Israel had it shown, at any point in the one-and-a-half generations, any actual willingness to prevent Israeli citizens from going off and becoming private-venture colonists (with state support, of course, whenever it was needed or wanted) on a territory shortly to become overpopulated thanks to a scarcity of arable land exploitable by the natives and a fast-growing native population. As things stand, current complaints about the difficulty of disengagement sound rather hollow--the anecdote of the prospective patient who complained that he felt pain when he did a particularly strenuous act comes to mind.

[NON BLOG] Dinner

I met James B. for dinner at the Living Well on Yonge Street, at six o'clock after work. Dinner was nice--on my end, a club sandwich with Creemore then a Strongbow. The last time I went there, the service was desultory at best, but it was much better this time. My thanks to James for the transferred copy of Night Lamp.

[LiC] New Post Up

Over at Living in Canada, I've posted a link to my Arrival Day post.

I go further, suggesting that the ability of Canadian Jews to resist assimilation over the 21st century (or, alternatively, to succumb) might well constitute a suggestive precedent for other, more recent, immigrant groups. Where Jewry goes, Tamildom or the Caribbean diasporas (for instance) might well follow.