It seems that this policy has fallen by the wayside in Efrat, with Arabs once again roaming the streets at will, working on projects throughout the town, and raising the ire of residents who fear further attacks.
The past 23 months have proven to all intelligent Israelis (and there are thankfully quite a few) that open door policies allowing anonymous Arab workers into Israeli communities also open the door to Arab terrorists who blow themselves up in shopping malls, outside medical clinics, at restaurants and on busses.
Since my initial article was published, the government of Israel has adopted the policy of building a wall between Arab and Jewish communities in several high-tension areas of the country. There are serious problems with this idea, not the least of which are that the wall will be used as a crutch to prop up a security doctrine that is quickly failing, and that the wall will become a de facto border -- the aim of the Israeli left after the failure of a negotiated settlement.
But even with all the faults that recommend against such a wall, the idea of separation between Jews and Arabs is one that is quickly taking root throughout Israel. Even most leftists in Israel are prepared to agree that there is no hope left for the idea of Arabs living together with Jews in Israel. The form of this separation is all that remains for the different groups in Israel to debate.
Enter Efrat Mayor Eitan Golan. Here is a man who was elected last year to head up one of the larger towns in Judea and Samaria, home to a few thousand pioneering Israelis, including a large number of North American immigrants, and a town that has seen its share of mourning for several of its residents who have been killed due to Arab violence in the past two years. One would think that Golan has at heart the same values that drive Israel's front-line residents, the same drive that makes them want to create their homes in Judea and Samaria. One would think that Golan would have some appreciation for the Zionism that has created the State of Israel and seen millions of Jews return to our homeland after millennia in exile.
Eitan Golan seems not to care about the resurgence of Arabs wandering his town. He utters not a word of concern that one of them might blow himself up in the supermarket again, or open fire on children in the neighborhood parks. In fact, the situation in Efrat has gotten so bad that dozens of residents, normally placid and friendly types, took the morning off from work to stage a sit-in in his office protesting their lack of security.
Golan responded to his many visitors by asking, "Is this why they sent you here from America?" One of the protestors was a 15-year-old injured in one of the two attacks this past spring. To him, Golan demanded, "What were you doing there in the first place?"
Israel is a land to which North American immigrants come by choice, out of a deep conviction that their destiny and that of the Land of Israel are inseparable. These immigrants, of which I am one, come to Israel to live a Jewish life in the Jewish State and pursue their Jewish identity at home. No one "sent us here", and no one placed us in particular communities just to bother the over-inflated ego of some megalomaniac small fry politician. North American immigrants come to Israel out of purpose, resolve, and a sense of destiny.
The fact that many such families choose to make their homes in communities like Efrat means that Efrat is the expression of their Zionist will and their Jewish yearning to live at home. Efrat, renewed 25 years ago on its original biblical site, is the epitome of the Jewish return to its homeland. That is why they are here.
It apparently never occurred to Eitan Golan that two basic tenets of Zionism are the freedom of Jews and the security of Jews. The teenager he verbally assaulted this morning was expressing his democratic, Zionist right to walk on the street near his neighborhood medical clinic when a terrorist tried to kill him. Rather than blame the terrorist for attacking Jews in the Jewish homeland, Golan has the nerve to blame a teenager for "being there".
Golan's tirade this morning is ominously reminiscent of another Israeli politician whose ideology has since been thoroughly discredited. Shimon Peres once demanded of a Zionist demonstrator that she "go back where you came from", thinking the demonstrator was American.
This kind of stupid ignorance of the entire purpose of the State of Israel has no place in the political expression of the country or its leaders. Shimon Peres has since gone on to lose two elections, and not bother running in two others. Peres can no longer draw the votes needed to win anything. Efrat's residents should give Golani the same treatment. People of his ilk have no business running this country. That job is best left for real Zionists.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
