Jonathan Rosenblum wrote this article mere days after the Expulsion began. The words seem still relevant for the Callous Indifference of the Israeli Gov’t and segments of Israel’s population regarding the Gush Katif and Shomron Refugees 3 plus Months Later. MB
Excerpts:
“In the long span of Jewish history, the uprooting of 8,500 Jews from Gaza will not rank as one of the worst tragedies, though it was unique in that those doing the uprooting were themselves Jews. This was not 1492 and the expulsion from Spain or the Holocaust. And the attempts by some in the settler community to appropriate symbols of those earlier tragedies – yellow Jewish stars, concentration camp uniforms – and by implication, and sometimes explicitly, to cast the soldiers executing the evacuation orders in the role of Hitler’s S.S. troops, only infuriated secular Israelis.”
“Yet if the expulsion from Gaza was not one of the worst tragedies in Jewish history, the trauma inflicted on the Gaza residents and indeed on the entire national religious community, is nevertheless overwhelming. Rarely has a democratically elected government treated a part of its own population so harshly. “
The loss for those uprooted from their homes took place on many levels – personal, communal, theological, and sociological. The faith in the imminent redemptive process that has animated the national religious community since Israel’s miraculous expansion into the Jewish people’s historic heartland in 1967 has now suffered an immense blow.
“At the same time, the community’s sense of itself as the vanguard of Israel society, widely admired as the exemplars of the true Zionist faith, can no longer be sustained. No longer can the national religious world delude itself that only a handful of narrow societal elites stand between it and the realization of a far more Jewish state in Israel. The settlers feel rejected and spit out by a large portion of Israel. And the sense of betrayal and having been stabbed in the back runs very deep.”