The next morning, Meir had just finished praying in his jail cell when guards came to whisk him to court.
“The Defense Minister promised it was only for questioning,” Meir protested.
“The Defense Minister is in charge of the army,” a guard answered. “This is the Israeli police.”
Meir’s heart sank. The Israeli police was the strong-arm of the political left. The judge read out the three counts against him: destruction of private property; illegal settlement on government land; and plotting to blow up the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hevron.
Meir gasped. The Tomb of the Patriarchs was the second holiest Jewish site in the world, next to the Kotel.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Meir said.
“If you choose to make a statement,” the judge coldly said, “I will remind you that you have the right to be represented by council.”
“No Jew in his right mind would blow up the Tomb of the Patriarch’s,” Meir said.
“No Jew in his right mind would live in Hevron,” the judge answered.
“Abraham lived in Hevron,” Meir said. “David lived there. Jews have always lived there.”
“Would you care to show me their deed?”
“Yeah,” Meir answered. “It’s written in the Bible.”
“It’s also written in the Bible that snakes talk and that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. If you are convicted, my young friend, you can expect to sit in prison for the next seven to thirty years.”
The judge smiled, stood up, and walked out of the room.
By the time Meir returned to the prison, several hundred settlers had gathered to cheer him as he emerged from the police van. Caleb Cohen pushed forward to meet him.
“Where’s my wife?” Meir asked.
“She’s staging a hunger strike outside the Knesset,” Cohen said.
“They’ve charged me with plotting to blow up the Cave of the Patriarchs,” Meir told him.
“That’s a new one,” Caleb answered. “You’ve got to give them credit for that.”
A guard tugged on Meir’s arm. Johnny appeared at Meir’s side.
“Don’t let them break you,” he said. “Remember, they sent the Alter Rebbe to prison on trumped up charges too.”
“That was Russia,” Meir said.
A jab in the back propelled him back into the fenced courtyard.
In Tel Aviv, at the same moment that the settlers were demonstrating outside the Jerusalem prison, the Peace Now Movement had joined with the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to stage a demonstration of their own. People shouted peace slogans and waved signs reading “Settlers out of the West Bank,” “Jewish People Love Animals,” “G-d Created Jackasses Too.”
Far across the ocean, the UN Security Council passed a resolution condemning Israel and demanding immediate withdrawal from the territories. The United States refrained from using its powerful veto. In Israel and throughout the world, pressure was mounting against the religious Jews who had returned to build communities in the cities and plains of their forefathers. For, as the rabbi of Hevron explained to Meir in prison, the wrath of the nations and of the protesters in Tel Aviv was not directed against the jackass’s murder, nor even against the Jewish settlements that dotted the West Bank like pinheads on a map. Their anger was directed against the settlers’ claim to their past, which the return to Hevron and Jerusalem and to Shilo made all too disturbingly real. For if the Jewish people’s claim to the Land of Israel were true, in the way the settlers claimed, not based on mere historical ties to the land, but on G-d’s love for his Chosen People – if that claim was right, then Christianity, and Islam, and Buddhism, and Socialism and Capitalism were all wrong – and that was a proposition that the world was not yet prepared to accept.
At the Prime Minister’s office, a telephone call from the United States President had convinced the Israeli leader that strong action was needed against the settlers to pacify the enemies of the isolated Jewish state. The Israeli cabinet had met, debated, quarreled, and voted, and army bulldozers were already on their way. Racing to beat them was a convoy of buses filled with settlers heading for the showdown in Shoshana. But in their hearts, everyone already knew that the settlers wouldn’t fight the army. They were, perhaps more than anyone else, patriots to the end. They would be dragged out from caravans by their arms and pulled down from caravan roofs by their legs, but not one settler would raise a hand to strike his fellow Jew.