On January 6, Ofra Felix was shot in the head in a roadside ambush. A month later, following the end of the thirty-day mourning period, her father, Rabbi Menachem Felix, began a hunger strike in front of the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem. That strike is now almost two months old, and Rabbi Felix is understandably quite weak and frail. He has been joined by tens of other strikers in support of his pain, and in demonstration of solidarity with all victims of Arab terrorism.
In mid-March, a group of twenty students entered the tent where the hunger strikers now live. The students belonged to Peace Now, and went to see and hear for themselves what the hunger strike was all about. They were addressed by activist Benny Katsover, and by another father of a victim, Yehuda Wachsman. Their responses to the speeches were quoted in The Jerusalem Post: "For the Palestinians, nothing has changed". Unfortunately, as Rabbi Felix and Yehuda Wachsman can attest, nothing has changed for the Israelis either.
Another response was that "many Palestinians don't have homes or money. So they despair, and when they despair they have no problems committing suicide." So all of a sudden, Israelis are to blame for Palestinian suicides. The financial corruption of the PLO is an adequate reason for the murder of more Jews.
The claim that the Arabs have twenty states which are unwilling to absorb the refugees was answered with "Maybe, but the Palestinians were born here". That does not give them the right to kill people. The logic is false here as well. If these Peace Now students were also born in Israel, then they should have at least as high a regard for their own people's claims to the land as they do for the claims of their killers. If they were not born in Israel, then perhaps they should abide by their own logic and leave so that Israel can fight the necessary battle for real peace.
But none of these statements in any way surprised me. For Peace Now is an organization representing an ideology which is morally and logically bankrupt, one which places the interests of our enemies above those of our own to the extent that Jewish interests are no longer of any consequence, and should be abandoned in light of conflicting claims. What did surprise me, if only in the clarification of just how far these people have abandoned Jewish concerns, were the final two comments cited in the Post. In response to a plea, made by one of the supporters of the hunger strikers, for unity of the Jewish people in the face of aggression, one of the students said, "Fine, turn to the left and we will be united." With comments such as these, the left-wing extremists of Israeli and Jewish society continue to ignore the existence of a Jewish majority whose grip on reality remains firm.
But even this comment was not sufficient to ignite my anger. One more salvo was needed, and it was dutifully provided. A yeshiva student, supporting the hunger strikers, asked, "Why, when I go to the Temple Mount, am I given two guards to make sure that I do not recite a verse of Psalms?" To this, the leader of the Peace Now group, Chen Raz, answered, "That doesn't matter to me; it's not my problem."
So here we have it. Jewish people are being prevented from exercising their right to pray on the Temple Mount. They are being prevented from exercising their right to live safely in the Jewish State of Israel, and we, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, are being told that unless we abandon our values, there will be no unity within the Jewish nation. Judaism, its history, its culture, its religion, and its safety, are being threatened as never before, and the left-wing extremists say, "It's not my problem".
If it is not the problem of the extreme left, whose problem is it? After all, where are these threats coming from? The Arabs? Homeless Palestinians? The United Nations? I don't think so. The threat to Judaism and all it represents is coming from within. The political left don't care if Israelis are being killed on the streets of Israel. They do not care that Israel is unable to withstand a military attack due to the blind ramblings of the current government. The secular left doesn't care that there are more Jewish weddings containing a non-Jewish partner than those that don't. These are not their problems.
In a way, they are right. For those who abandon Judaism do not care about its future health. Their abandonment of Judaism demonstrates that. So Jewish survival becomes the problem of the remaining Jews who are loyal to the people, the nation, and the religion. I must clarify that such loyal people are not restricted to the Orthodox. They include non-Orthodox Jews whose concern still exists for the future security of the Jewish nation. But all loyal Jews, Orthodox or not, right or left, must be concerned with the cancer growing within our midst. When Jewish people can be so unconcerned about the future of their own people, we are truly in danger. The hunger strike in Jerusalem is meant to illustrate the threat that the PLO, and through it the Oslo process, represents to Jewish life. 138 people have been killed since Oslo, and it is beyond time to put these negotiations into the sea where they belong. But to Peace Now, none of this is their problem.
Copyright 1995. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
