How evil do you have to be to set one community against another? We've just heard about the allocation of 1.25 billion shekels ($350 million) in development aid to southern Israel. We've seen the pioneers in Judea and Samaria rush to the aid of their brothers in the south and even sacrifice their lives for them -- and for a moment we were moved by a sense of national unity. For a moment. During the war, the hardcore Left tried to break it up. Now Yedioth Ahronoth, the newspaper that used to be the most powerful in the nation, has joined them. On Friday, a venomous headline screamed "Mount Hebron: 1,418 shekels, Hof Ashkelon: 12 shekels," referring to communities in Judea and Samaria and southern Israel respectively. According to the sub-head, the left-wing institute Molad -- the Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy -- is reporting a "huge gap in budgets going to settlements and Gaza periphery." A box directed the reader to the regular column of that well-known lover of settlements, Nahum Barnea. The most prominent numbers from the Molad Institute (with thanks to the New Israel Fund) are as follows: The Settlement Division in the World Zionist Organization allocated some 75 percent of its most recent budget of nearly $55.4 million to settlements in Judea and Samaria. Researchers at the institute simplistically divided the money by the number of residents and arrived at the figure quoted in Yedioth Ahronoth. The manipulation is clear; the number is partial. The Settlement Division is one of many lump sums in the government budget, which comprises several hundred billion shekels. Molad and Barnea didn't check how much a resident of the Negev actually "costs" compared to his counterpart in Judea or Samaria. If the government budget for the country's local councils was divided by the number of their residents, the research would have discovered a clear preference for residents of the south and the Galilee. The budget of the Settlement Division is $16 million, divided equally between the Galilee, the Negev, and Judea and Samaria. The total sum does not take into account designated projects, most of which are not in Judea and Samaria. We should focus on the example quoted by Barnea and the Molad people. The investigation "exposed" that the Beit El settlement received some 51 million shekels ($14 million) this year, which was "more than was allocated this year to all the communities in northern and southern Israel." We've already discussed the additional $350 million to the south, but here's the story: The Left was opposed to populating Beit El's Ulpana neighborhood, which was established in adherence with a government decision in 1998. Some of the land, they claimed, was privately owned by Arabs. Alternatives were offered in exchange for the land, but the desire to destroy prevailed. The court ordered the evacuation of the homes, and the government decided to transfer some of the neighborhood to another location. That is what the 51 million shekels ($14 million) was earmarked for. But here we have a situation where one leftist organization (Yesh Din) works to demolish the homes of Jews, and another leftist group (Molad) complains that doing so comes with a hefty price tag. Meanwhile, the Beit El community leaders would gladly give up the millions to have their homes back. Head of the Settlement Division Danny Krichman, who knows the numbers, said in an interview on Army Radio: "Molad's research is a bunch of nonsense. The numbers are baseless." Krichman said that a resident of the settlements receives less money than a resident of the south: "Molad reads one book, and talks about another one they haven't read." According to his own calculations, "The Division invests some 1,500 shekels ($415) per resident of Mount Hebron, and 5,000 shekels ($1,385) per resident of Hof Ashkelon." The research also "discovered" that the Settlement Division funds "religious right-wing organizations," a Bolshevik definition of religious Zionist groups. As far as Molad and Barnea are concerned, such groups are devoted to "spreading the Torah in the Tel Aviv area." What criminals. Barnea writes about the Ruach Aviv (Spring Spirit) group that is active in one of the exclusive Ramat Aviv neighborhoods, some of whose activity he calls "missionary." "They are trying to turn the secular children in the neighborhood religious, and the religious children into nationalist ultra-Orthodox," he writes. I called the director of Ruach Aviv. He told me he had been born in Ramat Aviv and returned there with friends. Together, they founded a community comprising both secular and religious members. They work to strengthen solidarity and the Jewish Zionist identity. On the High Holidays, they hold public activities and prayers. They host meetings between young people, the elderly, and Holocaust survivors. Religious girls volunteer in schools as part of the national service program and help kids with emotional and cognitive problems. During the war they collected care packages for soldiers and coordinated projects to support businesses in the south. The director said, "We don't try to bring people back to religion at all. That's not our language, and that's not the outcome [we see.]" Let's admit the truth: The question isn't how the budget is allocated. The thinning Left doesn't want any settlement on top of the hill. Luckily for us, Israeli society is healthier than that. When we see the belt of insane groups tightening around us, the last thing we need is a Palestinian state that will quickly turn into an arm of Hamas or ISIS or some other murderous stupidity. The dialogue of Molad, Barnea, and their comrades is stuck in the 80s, before the big noise of the Oslo Accords and the disengagement from Gaza and the wars that resulted. Most of the public understands that Israel needs settlements on the hill and in the Jordan Valley. That is classic Zionism -- our military and moral security zone.
