There is a direct link between the Arabs at gas stations who communicated with each other by yelling over the heads of the Jewish customers, and the videos disseminated on social media Sunday showing Arabs beating Jews wearing prayer shawls who were on their way to pray at the Western Wall.
The same link exists between the Bedouin criminal activity on the roads of southern Israel, where they go joyriding and fire guns in the air, and the cultural occupation of public leisure areas in Jerusalem.
Groups of young people from east Jerusalem arrive with loudspeakers, play louds music, and harass young women on the street.
We can continue to identify similar links everywhere in Israel we might look, and they all send the same message – that we aren’t in charge of our own country. They definitely feel that way. Guests don’t enter a home that isn’t theirs, shouting. They keep their eyes down and behave politely, and are thankful for what they get. Like the Arabs did after the 1967 Six-Day War.
But you can’t blame them. If the landlord forgets what is his by right – someone else will take it. Nature abhors a vacuum. And if the landlord of the Temple Mount has forgets his place – he’ll lose it. The responsibility always comes back to us. If we tiptoe around our own home, embarrassed by our size, our power, our capabilities, because we see ourselves like little mice, and try not to make noise or disturb anyone, always taking something else into account, because then the guest might not turn on us and try to murder us in our own home, on our own Temple Mount – why would we expect them to act differently from the way we treat them?
When we left Egypt, we should have allowed the entire generation of slaves to die in the desert before we entered the Land of Israel. That generation did not have the emotional capability to govern, to conquer, to own anything, certainly not a country, or to understand sovereignty. They were a people of exile, enslaved.
But even though generation after generation after generation has passed since our last exile, we still haven’t learned how to govern. Our very presence here is a miracle, wrought by those who had the hearts of the kings of Israel, but there are few like them. But that only goes for the system in charge of this country. When it comes to the people, the picture is different – the people are emotionally healthy, proud, and free. Now we just need to pray and work to make them the ones in charge.
{Reposted from the IsraelHaYom site}}
