"If they're the rotten apples, then we aren't," critics of the recent violence in Samaria tell themselves. But did these rotten apples pop up all over Judea and Samaria, among the barren hills and "temporary" structures, out of the blue? Did their well-spoken leaders emerge spontaneously? Where did the young thugs who desecrate mosques and assault IDF soldiers come from? We are the ones who failed to condemn the burning of mosques and the scrawling of the slogan "The Prophet Mohammed is dead" on a mosque wall, but only remembered to speak out when an IDF commander was assaulted. "How did such rotten apples appear among us-" educators in Judea and Samaria ask themselves. They should take a good look in the mirror and say: "If they are rotten, it is we who made them so." They were made rotten by those who allowed the residents of Hebron to turn the lives of neighboring Palestinians into a living hell; by those who watched the terrible humiliation in silence; by those who waged the phony campaign to sanctify Joseph's Tomb in Nablus; by those who issued Halachic rulings and wrote books on what the Arabs deserve just for being Arab. Those people shouldn't really be surprised when young people view mosques as inferior traitorous places that deserve to be destroyed. Get the Israel Hayom newsletter sent to your mailbox! Those who transformed practical Zionism into an interim stage of Israel's divine salvation have influenced, whether directly or indirectly, the psyches of the price-tag criminals, who carry out violent acts against Arabs in retribution for anti-settler government policies. I am not speaking as a secular person out to attack religious and ultra-Orthodox doctrine. I am speaking as a Jew and a man who lives in Israel, who wants his children to continue to live here. We forget that we're a small, unique nation in the heart of the Arab Middle East, which, one day, will turn on us to destroy us if we don't make peace. It would be best if intellectuals, rabbis and educators were to explain our reality as it actually is to our youth, both religious and secular. Instead, we see an ideology gaining ground that believes our strength lies in isolation and in guarding our Jewish identity against outside enemies. Members of our Knesset certainly aren't fringe elements. They were democratically elected to give voice to the views of their constituents. Yet not only are they not like David Ben-Gurion, who envisioned Israelis as a light unto nations, but they also fail to represent the vision of Menachem Begin, who respected the democratic principles agreed upon before the establishment of the state. The sad truth is that our elected officials are in fact lending support to those "rotten apples" that everyone is lining up to condemn. The chant of the muezzin? Our elected officials are trying to silence it. Non-profit organizations operating in the public interest? The Knesset is trying to eradicate them. Free speech? Don't make them laugh. And then, when even those parts of the world that still like Israel condemn the erosion of its freedoms, we say, "Don't shove your noses into our business." The rotten apples will not cease to be rotten, even if they're declared terrorists and tried in military courts like the Palestinians, because their ideology is nourished by the soil of an entire sector of society. Until the rabbinical world is forced to accept reality and internalize the fact that Israel's existence is hanging by a thread, things will only get worse. We must always remember that one bad apple spoils the bunch.
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