Take off the goggles of hate

1. A wave of hatred for the Amona pioneers deluged us this week. I suggest that readers skip over the foam of slander and take comfort from the people on the hill.

I visited Amona this week. The people there represent hope. Idealistic, modest men and women who make do in difficult conditions and have had their fill of the traumas of eviction and destruction are clinging to the hill for the sake of us all. This is Zionism as we used to know it: grasping hold of the land as part of the Jewish people's national struggle to return as sovereigns over their own lives and ancient land.

Look at them without the goggles of hatred some parts of the media are pulling over our eyes.

"The entire country is a hostage" for them, Raanan Shaked from Tel Aviv wrote this week in Yedioth Ahronoth. The opposite: They are "hostages" of the dream of returning to Zion, who gave up the comfort and good things the country offers its citizens today and opted to move to the hill as emissaries of the public. From there, they guard over us and carry the Zionist burden for us all.

Several weeks ago, I wrote that the battle for Amona is symbolic, since the organizations for "rights" and destruction are aiming higher: at Ofra, the mother community, the flagship of settlement. This week we heard it from the well-known social activist Dror Etkes, who filed the Peace Now petition that resulted in the demolition of nine stone houses in Amona a decade ago.

I was there this week. All that was left were remnants of concrete and metal. No Arab went up there to farm the land. Destruction for its own sake. Speaking on the "Makor" program, Etkes admitted that he had focused on Amona because of Ofra, "the Mayflower of the settlements." Members of our own people chose to cooperate with the Arabs of the region against the hilltop pioneers.

2. Upon hearing about the nascent evacuation agreement, the haters of the settlements began clicking their tongues about the "enormous amounts of money" the Amona settlers had gotten from the state. Yedioth Ahronoth gave the signal on its front page: "1 million shekels [$260,000] for every Amona family as compensation for the eviction from the contentious hilltop." Arad Nir of Channel 2 tweeted: "The Land of Israel is bought through trouble, or with million-shekel payouts." Nadav Eyal of Channel 10 also joined in: "Rehabilitate their lives. A million shekels per family, and that's the small money."

The truth is that the 42 families of Amona will each receive between 200,000 and 450,000 shekels [$52,000-$118,000] per family for their property and for their investment of up to 20 years. In my visit there, I saw grapevines, a winery, and a goat pen, along with other wonders those pioneers wrought on top of the hill. Is that a lot of money for all these things?

Amos Biderman drew a cartoon in Haaretz showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropping dollars on joyful settlers standing on top of roofs, while an Arab peasant on his mule looked on from the side. Aren't Jews and money one of the main issues in the anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"?

The rest of the money in the agreement has nothing to do with Amona, but with settlements as a whole. Zionism has always needed money; what's wrong with that? Where will the compensatory money be invested -- in buying a home on Raanan Shaked's street or in a pleasure trip around the world? No. The families are going to settle another hilltop in the Mount Hazor ridge. Here's the test: Yedioth is welcome to offer each family a choice between staying on the hill or taking 10 million shekels to leave; is there any doubt what their answer would be? None of it matters. Yedioth Ahronoth lied knowingly, as part of its tradition of hate toward the settlements, and the others did not check what it ran -- they don't have any love for the settlements, either.

3. As if the Amona people weren't dealing with enough already, another blow came on Wednesday. The main headline in Yedioth, which pushed aside all the other events in the world and the cosmos, told us that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told the Amona residents in a nighttime meeting: "I understand what it is to lose a home. After the 1999 election, we were thrown out of the Prime Minister's Residence. We had to move into the Sheraton Plaza."

The headline assumes that we're all stupid, that this was the comparison the prime minister made in an effort to show empathy for the fate of Amona. That stupidity took over the front of the newspaper that once had a country of its own and today is just spinning tales. How much meanness and venom can be squeezed into a single headline?

The people of Amona said this never happened. One resident, Hillel Vidal, was asked by Erel Segal on Army Radio if that remark had been made, and answered, "Absolutely not." He told Benny Teitelbaum and Adi Meiri on Reshet Bet: "It never happened." He said that "there was a positive atmosphere in the meeting" and "not a drop of the arrogance and condescension that they want to describe in that twisted story."

And so on. What lies behind this mendacious headline? Yes, Yedioth hates Netanyahu. But, in my opinion, it's not about that. The headline was intended to create a rift between the prime minister and the settlers. Indeed, two days earlier, the newspaper had portrayed the settlers as greedy people who wanted "an exit" from their settlement. Yet now it is full of empathy for their suffering?

Yedioth hates the settlements and has been waging war against them since the mid-1980s, when its late revisionist editor Herzl Rosenblum lost control of his paper to the leftist journalists who migrated to Yedioth from the defunct socialist papers Davar and Al Hamishmar. Since then, the paper has become the leading front of the fight against the settlements, the Right, and religious Zionism.

I remember many pieces it published denouncing the pioneers of Judea and Samaria. One of the most famous was a speech by author Amos Oz at a Peace Now rally in June 1989 that appeared in the weekend political supplement as an op-ed: "A messianic cult, closed-off and brutal, a bunch of armed gangsters, who commit crimes against humanity, sadists, wreakers of pogroms and murderers that popped up … out of the dark recesses of Judaism … out of the basements of beastliness and filth … to establish the rule of a thirsty, insane blood cult." How much violence from one who speaks out against it.

4. By no coincidence at all, the same day, journalist Rogel Alpher published a review in Haaretz of my colleague Yoav Limor's film "Disappearing," which looks at assimilation among U.S. Jews. The way Alpher sees it, the fact that Limor is concerned about assimilation labels him "racist. Just like [Education Minister Naftali] Bennett. And, with certain differences, like Hitler. Hitler almost murdered grandma because of her Judaism, and Limor rejects a bride just because of her Christianity."

Let's go over it again: The dispute in Israeli society isn't about "territories" or a "Palestinian state." It's about what these sections of the country represent in the national consciousness: the land of the Bible, the cradle of our ancient nationhood, and our religious tradition -- a debate about our identity, and more precisely, the Jewish aspect of our identity. This is what causes the irrational hatred of expressions relating to that identity, including the fear of assimilation.

The people on the hill are clinging stubbornly to the ground of their homeland. We need to bolster them. This is a historic test.

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