Israel’s Justice Ministry on July 1 recorded a request to register a political party named Mahaneh Israel (Israel Camp), whose goals include uniting the forces loyal to God and His Torah to lead the public without sectarian boundaries.
The other points in the new party’s agenda as filed with the Justice Ministry are: increasing the Jewish identity of the state in every facet of life and striving to maintain the wholeness of Torah, of the nation and of the land; bolstering the presence, settlement, control and security throughout all of the land of Israel with total resistance to any abandonment of a part of the land to a foreign people; bolstering the State of Israel’s deterrence of its enemies and reaching security and true peace with our surrounding countries; a proper judicial system according to our holy Torah; welfare policy according to Torah – creating correct balances as compelled by Torah, between every individual’s right to possessions and money and society’s obligation to protect the weak and the needy and provide them a life of dignity; Jewish education as the philosophical foundation of the education system; a light unto the nations – spreading the light of Israel to the entire world and advocating the seven Noahide laws; promoting the redemption of the nation of Israel in its land, and care for Jews wherever they are in the world.
Out of the 120 candidates on the Mahaneh Israel party’s slate for the next Knesset elections, about 90 are residents of Yitzhar, an Israeli settlement located south of Shechem, just off Route 60, north of the Tapuach Junction, under the jurisdiction of the Samaria Regional Council. The town, population about 1,650, is predominantly Orthodox.
The community was dubbed by their Arab neighbors Jable el Majnun, Mount Crazy.
According to Wiki, “Yitzhar is at the forefront of the settler movement’s so called price tag policy, which calls for attacks against Palestinians in retaliation for actions of the Israeli government against West Bank settlements.” In 2008, the New York Times described Yitzhar as “an extremist bastion on the hilltops commanding the Palestinian city of Nablus … [where] a local war is … being waged.”
In May 2014, Shin Bet said the price-tag hate crimes were mainly attributable to about 100 extremist youths, mostly from Yitzhar, acting on ideas associated with rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg at the community’s Od Yosef Chai yeshiva.
The residents of Yitzhar sued the IDF magazine Bamachaneh and won an apology in an out of court settlement, with the court’s urging, for distortions, lies, and generalized, baseless slander, intended to damage the settlement’s reputation. And the Israel police lost a 50,000 shekel libel suit to four Yitzhar plaintiffs.
Yitzhar has also been home to the largest number of people who have donated their kidneys. Over the past five years, ten Yitzhar residents donated their kidneys, and they did it to save perfect strangers. A local couple, parents to 10 children, donated one kidney each in the same week. In comparison, in 2015, in all of Israel, 174 kidneys were donated from the living, when the waiting list for kidneys stood at 843 patients.
Do the math: roughly 0.625 percent of the residents of Yitzhar have donated a kidney. If a similar percentage of the population of Tel Aviv alone – about 436 thousand – had followed their example, the yield would reach thousands of kidneys, enough to heal all the kidney patients in Europe and then some.
One of the Mahaneh Israel party’s founders is Boaz Albert, who was tasered repeatedly and for no reason by police as they arrested him in his home in Yitzhar in 2013 (see video above). They just walked him and tasered him all the way to the patrol car. It’s the kind of brutality that yields leaders.