Avodah Ivrit and Economic Independence

When I write that the Jews of Yosh are led by children trapped in adult bodies, I mean it. The staggering immaturity and naiveté of the dati leumi sector is reflected by the staggering immaturity and naiveté of its few uncorrupt leaders. The few men who dare to challenge the Israeli State do so in utterly counterproductive ways. They build plywood “outposts” that can neither feed nor defend themselves, much less command the surrounding countryside. They erect “settlements” without fortifications, whose “security forces” have no heavy arms, no combat-worthy armored vehicles and no indirect fire weapons. They slavishly register all their guns with the Israeli government. When their arms are maliciously confiscated by the Israelis, they do not merely feign defenselessness for the sake of propaganda. They really ARE left defenseless in the face of Islamic attack. Yet when the Moslems attack and murder them, they refuse to comprehend that the Israelis DELIBERATELY disarmed them in order to murder them by proxy. They blame individual Israeli kapos and bureaucrats, but, despite decades of bloody lessons, it never even occurs to them that the ENTIRE ISRAELI STATE is an enemy out to murder them all. They serve in Israel’s occupation army and expect the foreign Israeli soldiers to protect them, then have the gall to act surprised when the Israelis instead attack the Jews and protect Hamas. They honestly expect justice from Israeli “courts”. They honestly believe that if they just make their case clearly enough, the anti-Semitic Israeli press will suddenly stop demonizing them.

But nowhere is the childishness of Yeshite leaders is as apparent as in the matter of Avodah Ivrit. This policy would seem a no-brainer. After all, when a Moslem works for a Jew, the Jew pays the Moslem, and the Moslem then turns around and uses his wages for jihad, the Jew is effectively paying for the murder of fellow Jews. Since all Moslems are obligated to give 10% of their wages as zakat, it is 100% certain that at the very least 10% of the money provided by any Jew who employs Moslem workers will be used to finance the murder of Jews. This, of course, makes any Jew who employs Moslems a malshin and a rodef, with all the legal consequences thereof.

Furthermore, any Jew who does business with an employer of Moslems is indirectly subsidizing jihad as well, since the profit made by the employer of Moslems will clearly enable him to pay the Moslems and thus to murder more Jews. Therefore, any Torah-true Jew is obligated to shun the employer of Moslems even if he is unable to enforce justice against the rodef for some reason.

Yet despite the obligations imposed by Torah, the vast majority of communities in Yosh employ Moslem laborers on a daily basis. Moslems were employed in Gush Katif even as Gush Katif endured daily mortar attacks. Among their many averot committed by the addled idiots who lived in the Gush, perhaps the most egregious was that they paid on a daily basis for the very mortar rounds used to kill and maim their friends and neighbors. Their example is daily followed even by allegedly “religious” so-called “settlers”. The PA buses that can be seen every morning dropping off day laborers at Kibbutz Kfar Etzion are not a unique phenomenon.

There are, of course, exceptions. Bat Ayin is one. Yitshar is another. But even there, the Avodah Ivrit policy is, frankly a joke. Take Bat Ayin. Members of the community attempt to practice Jewish agriculture, but their methods are so ridiculously primitive that they cannot even feed themselves, much less make a profit. What should be a means of establishing self-sufficiency has instead degenerated into ridiculous hippie posturing.

It is understandable that Bat Ayin residents who were born under Israeli occupation or who made aliyah from the post-Soviet space cannot improve things. They come from societies where the only agricultural traditions are large-scale, inefficient, unproductive, collectivized, mechanized agriculture and small-scale, even more inefficient and unproductive, primitive agriculture. The knowledge base needed to improve their agricultural methods simply does not exist in any language they can read.

The so-called “Anglo” olim have no such excuse. These people come from nations with a century-long tradition of small scale organic agriculture going back all the way to First World War “victory gardens” and the French agricultural research of the interwar period, improved upon and perfected by British and American scientists working to maximize crop yield from small home farms under conditions of total war. By now, this is not merely mature and well established technology. These are essentially traditional methods practiced for two or even three generations in the countries where these olim were born. To the Anglo oleh, accessing the knowledge base necessary to produce two to four times the yield per unit area produced by inefficient mechanized farms is as easy as ordering a book online. And yet, despite years of obvious agricultural failure, not one of Bat Ayin’s English-speaking residents has seemingly ever bothered to acquire a good textbook for practitioners of small-scale self-sufficiency agriculture or even a basic primer for garden hobbyists. The result, despite the best of intentions, is a ridiculous hillul Hashem. In a place where one should not be able to walk two meters without tripping over a compost pile, a square foot garden or a biointensive raised bed, one sees instead ridiculous bronze age fields and Russian-style hobby gardens suitable for growing a couple of carrots and a few tomatoes for a pensioner’s salad.

Things get worse when it comes to contractors. For example, last year a contractor was hired to perform some construction in Bat Ayin. The contractor was, in theory, a Jew. He promised to use Jewish labor only and charged a premium for it.

Here is one of the contractor’s employees at the community front gate, receiving a load of stolen construction stone from his Moslem supplier.

The truck full of stone is simply driven up to the gate by the Moslem driver, who feels comfortable enough doing this that he brings along his twelve year old son. The PA plates are switched to Israeli plates IN FULL VIEW of the Israeli “soldiers” “guarding” the gate. There can be no doubt that each and every one of the green-suited Israeli kapos lounging about at the entrance to the community hopes and prays that the truck is a bomb that will kill many Jews inside Bat Ayin. The Moslem hands over the keys to the “Jewish” contractor (note lack of kippah, tzitzit and beard) and catches a ride back home. The Israeli drives the truck into the village without further ado.

That is how things would have gone, at any rate, were the pseudo-Jewish Israeli in question not caught by one of the residents. Being caught forced the Israeli to stop, call his boss and complain that some crazy Jew was interfering with his business.

After he finished complaining, he drove right in.

Far from being fired, the contractor got paid. Never mind that the entire transaction from beginning to end was a violation of halacha, not to mention a security gap large enough to literally drive a truck bomb through. Bat Ayin had no choice but to pay the Israeli contractor. An Avodah Ivrit provision cannot be placed into a fake Israeli so-called “contract” or enforced in illegal Israeli so-called “courts”. Abiding by halacha and common sense by refraining from feeding, clothing and arming your enemies is “racist”, you see. The Bagatz says so. In fact, even compiling an Avodah Ivrit registry, a kind of Jewish Angie’s List, is “racist”, so much so that someone doing this openly is subject to arrest by the Israelis.

So what are the Jews to do? The obvious solution – Jewish courts and Jewish policemen operating underground in order to put to death all those who employ or do business with the enemy – is difficult and dangerous. While ultimately this is the only way to permanently stop these murderous criminals, it is quite obvious that the leadership of the Jews in Yosh is unwilling to take the necessary steps. Marighella cells can take up this work independently of any official leadership and have a significant long term impact by slaughtering Moslem laborers in droves with bomb attacks, executing the pseudo-Jewish business people who employ them in various shocking and painful ways, distributing bloodcurdling videos showing such executions via the internet and so forth. But in the short term, it would appear that the residents of semi-sane Jewish communities like Bat Ayin and Yizhar just have to put up with the “situation”.

Yet in fact appearances are deceiving. There is more than one way to skin a cat. The fact that the leaders of these communities have not developed alternatives to cope with the problem should not be chalked up to the problem being too large for them. Rather, it should be filed, like their pathetic “agriculture”, the absence of fortifications around their communities and the complete lack of proper security, as further proof of the infantilism of their leadership.

The reason Moslem labor is used is economic. The reason that stolen supplies, be it illegally quarried stone, illegally harvested produce, stolen auto parts or anything else, are bought from Moslems is economic. Yes, these actions are crimes. But they are not crimes of passion or psychological compulsion. They are crimes that pay, and pay quite well.

Therefore, if this crime wave is not fought by means of law enforcement, it should be fought by means of economics. There is a need for an economic wall between the Jewish economy and the Israeli-Islamic economy. Erecting such a wall would encourage the Jewish economy to become self-sufficient by raising the cost of transactions with Israelis and their Moslem allies, and lowering the cost of transactions between Jews. It would also make it cheap and simple to abide by Avodah Ivrit both as a Jewish producer and a Jewish consumer. Correspondingly, it would make it quite difficult to violate the national Avodah Ivrit policy, as doing so would involve substantial additional expense.

The reasonable question arises – what is an “economic wall”? How does one “wall off” an economy? Is it even possible to “wall off” the economy of a small town or region?
The answer to this question, of course is CURRENCY. Currency is an economic wall. A currency that is accepted in a community but is not accepted outside the community effectively walls off the community from the economies that border it. By setting exchange rates, the community leadership can control the cost of exchanges with the external world, thus forcing the community to develop and use its own resources. As result, the economy of the community begins to develop toward self-reliance. Since the local leadership controls the currency, it can also use it to pay community employees, such as guards, whom it could not pay due to lack of resources when it depended on non-local currencies.

Local currencies are generally introduced via a compact. A group of activists convinces a critical mass of businesses to accept the currency, paying attention to making sure that a customer could meet most of his ordinary needs via the participating businesses. In order to back the launch of the currency, the participating businesses contribute some sum to a common launch pool. Once the compact is sufficiently large, a stock of notes is printed and the system is launched. Generally at the beginning the system is not greatly trusted. The participating businesses agree to take the local currency as some percentage of a transaction, but not as 100% of the transaction. The activist group that controls the local currency effectively collects taxes to support it by means of membership fees initially collected in the currency they are trying to displace with their system.

The system is grown by offering zero interest local currency loans to businesses and trustworthy individuals, with the provision that the loan be spent within some period of time (penalties and fees may apply for non-use of loaned funds) and that the project involved benefits the community. Eventually the system grows more trusted and businesses begin to accept more of the local currency. The point can come when virtually all of the currency in local circulation is the local currency. At this point, if exchanging local currency into non-local currency is a problematic endeavor for any reason, the community is completely economically walled off from the outside world. If the activist group now begins to collect maintenance membership fees in the local currency, it becomes a de-facto self-sufficient government that prints its own money. It can then expand the range of the system by permitting new members in targeted locales to join by contributing fees in the external currency, thus generating “hard” currency for transactions with foreign powers while simultaneously expanding its control.

Were the communities of Yosh to introduce a local currency, calling it a “barter certificate”, a “community discount coupon” or something else innocuous, they would have in their hands an effective weapon for economic self sufficiency through Avodah Ivrit. Since only Jewish businesses would take it and only Jews would receive it as payment for work, the currency would be an effective enforcer of Avodah Ivrit. Since it would be structured as a voluntary club or association, the currency union could exclude and/or expel members under any number of pretexts, thus preventing Moslems and those who employ Moslems from using the system. Since the currency would be nothing but a worthless piece of paper in Israel, it would effectively wall of the communities of Yosh from the Israeli economy, causing local businesses to develop local resources to take advantage of local customers and local opportunities. This, of course, would effectively subsidize everyone in Yosh and work to create a closed, self-sufficient economy. Since cash transactions and cash profits are notoriously difficult to track even in shekels, much less in “discount coupons”, it would also be a means to fight against illegal Israeli taxation of Jews living under Israeli occupation.

For a Jewish local currency, there is, of course, one more issue that we have to address. The currency must be backed by a store of value. This is required by the Holy Torah, obviously deriving from the requirement to use honest weights and measures, “an honest hin and an honest shekel”.

Traditionally, the store of value that backs currency is precious metal. However, a store of precious metal would be subject to confiscation by the Israeli enemy, who, of course, possesses overwhelming force at this stage of our national liberation struggle and can therefore go anywhere in Yosh and do whatever he desires. A vault full of gold bars cannot even conceptually be spirited away from place to place one step ahead of enemy soldiers. The same applies to any other physical store of value. Regardless of what it is, gold, drugs, grain or any other commodity, the Israelis can find it, confiscate it and thereby collapse the currency system. Nor can the currency itself have intrinsic value as held, for example, by gold coins. If it does, it is no longer an economic wall. It is just a means to issue some pretty medallions that will quickly demonstrate the validity of Gresham’s Law by disappearing from circulation.

However, there is one store of value that the Israelis cannot control. They cannot lock it up, they cannot confiscate it, they cannot destroy it. And every Jew has some in his or her possession. That store of value is TIME. A currency that is backed by the time of the individual Jew in the form of an hour of unskilled labor is as honest a shekel as a shekel can get.

Obviously, the labor of a medical specialist, a skilled craftsman, and so forth, is worth more than mere unskilled labor. But every hour of specialist labor can be expressed as some number of hours of unskilled labor. In fact, the hour of unskilled labor is already priced in Israeli shekels, providing a basis for instant conversion of any price in the current economy. Since Israeli official minimum wage is approximately NIS 21 an hour, we cannot go wrong by setting our “Jewish Hour” to be worth NIS 25. Doing so gives a slight incentive for the average Jew to prefer the Hour as payment without unduly distorting wages and prices. It also makes for easy math.

Now, all of this might sound like fantasy. A local currency? A currency backed by time? Whoever heard of such a thing? It cannot possibly work, right?

Well, dear reader, it can work. It HAS worked. In fact, it has worked many times and it is working RIGHT NOW. You do not even need to go very far to see it work. You do not need a time machine to go to Depression-era Austria. You do not need to hack through jungles in Asia or visit slums in Latin America. All you need to do, next time you visit Brooklyn, is take a trip upstate, to Ithaca.

A Jewish local currency is a simple, effective, yet completely non-violent means to address the twin and intertwined problems of enforcing Avodah Ivrit and developing a self-sufficient Jewish economy independent of the State of Israel.

Of course, the Israelis will eventually try to disrupt any local currency system. However, if it is backed by time and if the Jews persist in using it, the Israeli efforts to disrupt it will only breed resistance and resentment and, ultimately, violence against the occupier. Without a doubt, after trying legal injunctions, arrests for non-payment of taxes and other such measures to no effect, the Israelis will eventually resort to such massively counterproductive things as large-scale counterfeiting of Jewish currency notes, “tax raids” to seize goods and services, mass arrests of Yosh residents caught using the currency and so forth. But with every act of violence and sabotage targeting the use of “community discount hour coupons”, they will only succeed in making themselves look more stupid and more ridiculous than they already look. Thus, ultimately, even if the Israeli enemy manages to collapse the system, he will play into the hands of the Resistance while he does so.

Were the leaders of the Jews in Yosh not a bunch of children trapped in adult bodies, they would not need someone else to point out to them the value of and need for a Jewish local currency. They would be busy right now establishing one themselves

16 Cheshvan, 5771

Adults and Children

It is tempting to write a gloomy, Cassandra-like post about the current status of the “peace” negotiations and the inevitable consequences thereof.  But I would find myself simply repeating what I have already written many times.  Everyone who visits this site on a regular basis knows that the real goal of the “peace process” is the annihilation of the dati leumi.   Everyone who has read Vienna Mike’s posts over the past two years knows that the ruling elite plans to precipitously remove the IDF from the helpless suburbs of Yosh, leaving the hapless, disarmed suburbanite sruggie lemmings to die or run for their lives.  Therefore, it is not really a surprise to anyone that the current “peace” proposal from Bibi the Murderous (yemach shemo) proposes to leave “settlers” in place under “Palestinian” jurisdiction, protected by “security arrangements” of the kind that “guaranteed” the sanctity and integrity of Joseph’s Tomb.  Nor is it really a surprise that Bibi the Murderous is negotiating to bring Tzipi the Treacherous into the government in order to secure the “peace” deal’s implementation even when Liberman bolts the coalition.  Nor is it really great news that, even as he plots to surrender all of Yosh to Hamas, Netanyahu is also plotting to surrender the Golan to Syria.  Negotiations to surrender Eilat to Egypt and the Galilee to Hezbollah would make a nice exclusive, I suppose, as would the news that Tzipi Livni’s father has stopped spinning in his grave long enough to rise up and strangle the daughter he would have drowned at birth had he known how she would turn out.  However, the former is going to have to wait a bit, while the latter requires a revealed miracle.

At any rate, all this gloom and doom is quite unbefitting the season, so let us look on the bright side of life.  Just this week, representatives of the significant faction of the ruling elite that would immediately support any credible effort to establish Medinat Yehudah have all but stood up and openly declared this fact.  Caroline Glick has outright written a column proclaiming that the “peace” process exists solely as a vehicle wherewith to exterminate the dati leumi.  Of course, being Caroline Glick, she claims that it is only Barak and Livni and their hangers-on who are responsible for the crime.  It falls to Likud veteran Michael Eitan to plainly admit, in a rambling interview to David Horovitz, that the leadership of the Likud, himself and the prime minister included, shares this goal because it sees no other way out that preserves their power and the nature of their State.  Indeed, Eitan goes so far as to essentially restate, in more polite language, the ugly truths, the inconvenient history, and the underlying facts of life that this blog has been repeating ad nauseaum  since the very first post.

In the meantime, Avigdor Liberman has thrown down the gauntlet to Netanyahu in a speech that openly positions him to place blame when Netanyahu’s “peace” processing explodes in everyone’s faces.  With the public sufficiently riled up by rockets falling on Kfar Saba and Neve Tzedek, no amount of fraud on the part of Likud, Kadima and Labor will keep Avigdor Liberman from the prime minister’s chair.

Now, a Prime Minister Liberman will be subject to all the same constraints and pressures experienced by Prime Minister Sharon(y”sh).  Ultimately, he too will start looking for a way out and a means to keep out of jail.  But, unlike Sharon, Liberman is open to unconventional solutions previously successfully tried in lands familiar to him.  His plan for “exchange of territories and populations” is essentially an open invitation for Jewish patriots to fight a proxy war on Israel’s behalf.  As prime minister, Liberman will certainly try to implement it, in the full tacit expectation of becoming Israel’s Ter-Petrosyan.

Mind you, Liberman is not going to stand up and tell the idiot dati lemmings to revolt.  If he did, he couldn’t keep his position.  As prime minister, he would even condemn the “extremists” in Yosh as he secretly armed them.  But arm them he would, if they existed as a credible movement.  Nor is Caroline Glick going to destroy her career tomorrow by writing a column in the Jerusalem Post, much less in Makor Rishon, calling for Medinat Yehudah.  She is not even going to authorize a Latma skit to openly push the idea.  But again, were there a credible set of moves by the dati leumi towards self-sufficiency, self-rule and self defense, rest assured that it would be answered first by Latma skits making fun of those who would rather have Hamastan for a neighbor, and then by well reasoned columns in both Makor Rishon and the Jerusalem Post, making the case that it is better to be neighbors with a bunch of religious Jews who want to raise sheep on hilltops in Yosh than to be neighbors with a bunch of genocidal Islamic fanatics who want to shoot rockets at Tel Aviv. Nor are the veteran rank and file of the ruling class, the likes of Michael Eitan and Bogie Ayalon likely to be averse to the idea of creating a breakaway friendly Jewish State instead of a genocidal Islamic one.  All that is needed for them to get on board is, once again, a credible movement led by serious people, one that has clear goals and the visible capacity to succeed.

All of this hinting and posturing is reminiscent of adults trying to hint to not-too-bright, recalcitrant children that it is time to finish dinner and go to their rooms.  The problem is precisely that the other side is led by overgrown children trapped in adult bodies.  And the damned kids just won’t take a hint!

The contrast between the Israeli adults and the dati leumi children is extreme.  For example, when Caroline Glick repented of her peace processing, she did not go around pretending like nothing was wrong, or writing useless mea culpa columns in the Jerusalem Post.  She looked around for some way to fight the system and, being both a skilled propagandist and a serious, heavyweight intellectual, almost immediately found it.  By creating Latma, she has unleashed a barrage of well-crafted, precision-targeted propaganda that delegitimizes the regime by making it look ridiculous.  Yes, Latma by itself cannot saturate the information space anymore than a single howitzer, however well aimed, can create a saturation barrage.  Nor does Latma possess the capacity to eliminate the opposition propagandists by direct action.  But it has still managed to do more to protect the Jews of Eretz Yisrael from the Israeli government in a single year than all the ribbon wavers of Yosh have managed in nigh on twenty years.  And, as a perfectly legal organization that never strays beyond the bounds of the law, even as it keeps laughing at the king’s nakedness in ever sharper terms, Latma is very difficult to shut down.  With each Tribal Update including a music video, each funnier yet more serious than the last, viral hits are all but inevitable and, indeed, have already been achieved.  In the tiny teacup that is Israel, even a very small spoon can create a tempest, if it keeps stirring long enough.

In the meantime, while serious adults do serious things, what do the children in Yosh do?  Well, we can take some representative samples.  David Wilder keeps posting snapshots of services at the Machpela and some videos of himself harassing some leftists.  As if the Israeli decision to abandon Hebron can be influenced by taking pictures of Jews praying.  Tzvi Fishman’s contribution to anti-regime propaganda was to waste $5,000 on a giant poster to hang on top of Beit haShalom.  In the meantime, he has also been writing blogs urging the remaining 100 or so frum Jews in America to make aliyah so they can sit with him in his personal corner of the world’s largest ghetto and wait for the other shoe to drop. Baruch Gordon, who actually runs Arutz Sheva, has basically spent his time trying to copy Tzvi Fishman.  Israel Medad at least has an interesting blog, but it is a grab bag of random items pulled from elsewhere, with no coherent message or goal.  In the meantime, David Haivri is busy welcoming a new Peace Now mapping app via facebook.  If their English activities were just a sideshow, all this would still be sad.  But, alas, these people are serious.

Sum total effectiveness of propaganda efforts –zero.  Coherent goals – none.  Realistic vision – absent.  Leadership – nonexistent.

With “efforts” like this, there can be no doubt that, barring a miracle, if Bibi fails in his effort to pull the IDF out of Yosh and expose at least 100,000 of the hapless yeshite suburbanites to a massive Arab pogrom, another prime minster will.  And when it happens, these foolish people will have the gall to act surprised!

On the plus side, things are not going to be that bad after this next mass expulsion.  The majority of the yeshites will surely run like hell once they discover that the IDF has left them defenseless and face to face with a murderous Arab mob.  Perhaps only a few thousand will die.  Who knows, some communities might even open their eyes in time to arm and fortify themselves as best they can when the coming pullout is announced.  Maybe one or two will even survive.  And once the lemmings of Yosh are slaughtered and expelled, the mamlachti so-called “leadership” that has enthralled the dati leumi community will have been totally discredited.  The cult of the Medinat Israel golden calf they preside over will simply fall apart as those who survived and those who witnessed the massacres reject wholesale those who were responsible for them.  In the meantime, the Moslems will certainly unleash a barrage of rockets against Israel’s major cities.  This will bring the IDF right back into Yosh in short order and will probably land Avigdor Liberman in Netanyahu’s current chair, thus giving Israel its first Jewish prime minister since Yitzhak Shamir.  The stage will thus be set for a rebuilding of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria on a sound ideological, economic and military basis.  Assuming, of course, that the overgrown children are replaced with adult leaders who can take a damned hint.

Chag Sameach!

20 Tishrei, 5771

The Israeli Case for Medinat Yehudah

The Jerusalem Center recently released a video delineating Israel’s “vital security needs”.  Like all such information released by Israeli propaganda organs, it is fundamentally defeatist, indeed almost suicidal, in its premises.  From the beginning, it assumes that all territory east of the Green Line will be surrendered to some non-Israeli entity.  But let’s not discuss this for a moment.  We all know that the Israelis are fundamentally suicidal in their outlook and that their very will to national self-defense is swiftly ebbing.  The more important thing about this video is that it makes, without trying, the case for Medinat Yehudah.

Consider this for a moment.   If the Israelis want security, a force friendly to Israel must control the Judean Hills and the defensive wall of the Jordan Valley.  Once a hostile force sits on the hills overlooking Jerusalem, only a nine mile drive downhill separates it from the Mediterranean.  One hour of armored combat, and Israel could be cut in half.

A friendly air force must control the airspace over Judea and Samaria with a guarantee that any hostile aircraft is intercepted within less than two minutes of violating this airspace and therefore never reaches Israel’s major population centers in any form, not even in the form of descending debris.  From the hills of Judea, the most primitive man-portable anti-aircraft rocket can shoot down any airliner taking off or landing at Ben Gurion Airport.  Therefore, no hostile force with such missiles must be present in the hills of Judea.

From the same mountain country East of Israel, all Israel’s major communications arteries are exposed to direct lay artillery, rocket and mortar fire, making them all but untenable in wartime.  With roads and mobilization centers under constant artillery fire, Israeli reserves would be unable to even mobilize, much less deploy.  Israeli forces already in the field will be fixed in their positions and cut off from resupply as long as the guns sitting in the hills above them do not run short of ammunition.

Every air base in Israel is likewise within direct lay artillery range of the same hills.  Artillery observers sitting in Yosh can crater and scattermine every runway in Israel literally within minutes of a decision to go to war, effectively rendering the Israeli air force useless before its pilots even know there is a war on, much less have time to get to their planes, never mind getting the planes up into the air.  And these same observers, watching through their field glasses, can stop in its tracks any effort to repair or clear these runways, effectively removing the IAF from consideration for the duration of the conflict.

To any modern armed force occupying Judea and Samaria, many major population centers in Israel are within range of not only howitzers and multiple rocket launchers, but even heavy mortars!  No Israeli civilian would be able to do anything other than cower in a bomb shelter and wait for the shells to stop falling from the moment a war starts to the moment it ends.  No factory, hospital or power plant would be able to operate.  Food distribution and garbage collection would stop.   Electricity would go away.  Sewage plants and water pumps would stop working even if they are not simply destroyed in the bombardment.  Should the war go on for more than a few days, with sewage systems destroyed, rotting garbage piling up in the hot sun and corpses in the streets, there would be real risk of starvation and epidemic disease.

The video does not mention this, but much of Israel’s water comes from wells in Western Yosh.  Any force sitting on top of these wells can simply turn off the taps and, within days, Israelis in Tel Aviv will be literally dying of thirst or drinking raw sewage.  The well problem is a major motivator behind Israel’s recent push to construct several giant desalinization plants, lest Israelis die of thirst during an Arab uprising that temporarily cuts off access to the water.  But heavy artillery based in Yosh would turn these plants’ fancy reverse osmosis filters into so much plastic-laced rubble within hours.

Moreover, the Israeli armed forces depend heavily on an electronic backbone comprised of a chain of wireless stations linked by fiber optic lines not dissimilar in concept to the backbone of a cell phone network.  With jammers advantageously positioned on the high ground in Judea and Samaria, a modern armed force can “drown” this backbone for hours on end even if it cannot, for some strange reason, shoot it full of holes with precision-guided artillery.

The bottom line is that any halfway competent, decently armed modern military force based in Judea and Samaria can simply shut down Israel at will within fifteen minutes, destroy the critical national life-support systems within hours and strangle what is left of the country within weeks, even if it does not simply overrun it within days.  The Israelis cannot permit this.  They cannot permit even the possibility of it.  Not if they want to live.

Yet they are between a rock and a hard place.  They do not want and cannot keep Judea and Samaria.  They have neither the will to indefinitely occupy land that they feel no connection to, nor the stomach to indefinitely rule over an alien people, nor the large brass beitzim needed to indefinitely receive the combined opprobrium of the entire word and answer it with the one-finger salute.  All they want is peace, at any price whatsoever.  But, as things stand now, they cannot have any peace at all, except the peace of the grave.

This is the ”real” world as it looks through their eyes.  No settler or Jewish nationalist, whether secular or religious, bearded or clean-shaven, articulate or not, can change this perception.  When naïve fools, from Ketzaleh to Feiglin, argue that the Israelis should stay in Judea and Samaria on the basis of “security needs” or “common sense” or “heritage” or common humanity, their arguments fall on deaf ears.  AND THEY ALWAYS WILL.  The Israelis want nothing but escape.  At any price.  And if they cannot have it, they will simply pretend that they can and surrender to the Moslems, or walk into the sea and drown.

Only an argument that promises the Israelis a viable escape from the death trap they have arranged for themselves can penetrate the fog of their despair.  To stop the desperate Israeli search for solutions one cannot do anything other than OFFER THEM A SOLUTION.  Medinat Yehudah can be this solution.

The argument is simple, direct, persuasive.  Imagine, it says, that a bunch of crazy religious Jews completely independent of the State of Israel control Judea and Samaria.  Imagine that they have their own army, their own air force, their own police, their own government.  Imagine if they do what they want in their crazy country and fight their own war.  Imagine them, and not the IDF, fighting Arab terrorism with no concern whatsoever for international public opinion.  You want a force that will fight Hamas without Betselem?  You got it!  You want a force that can put an end to Arab terror attacks once and for all?  You got it!  You want an end to the “occupation” that will not result in sworn enemies shooting rockets at Tel Aviv from the hills of Judea, or trying to shoot down airliners on approach to Ben Gurion airport?  You got it!  You want peace, strategic depth, security, all without cost to you and without sending your sons to die in some “West Bank” hellhole?  Step right up!  Heck, if you pay rent, you can even have IDF bases in the Jordan Valley without having to patrol Ramallah, Hebron and Jenin!

And what do you, the Israeli, have to provide in return?  Simple.  Split with us the tanks, the planes, the guns.  We will take our fair share, and you can have your fair share, just like we will take our part of the Land, and you can keep yours.  Or, if you are too chicken to do even this, just walk away and open the border to us.  We will buy what we want, we will bring it home and we will use it to help ourselves.  Just stay out of our way.

We are tougher than you.  We are crazy.  Completely nuts.  We believe that Hashem will help us and that He is the only ally we need.  You can see it from our huge kippot and our long peyot and our tangled beards and our crazy tunics with long tzitzit shot through with techeilet.   We are lunatic biblical fanatics who are nothing like you.  There has been nothing like us on this earth since the days of the Hashmonaim.  We will fight forever, until the end of time, just like Hamas.  We will never give up even a centimeter of the Land.  We will build fortresses up in our hills overlooking Tel Aviv, point cannons east instead of west and intercept hostile airplanes before they ever get to you.  We will do it all at half the cost and a tenth of the effort you spend, because we are loons who do not give a rat’s behind about anyone’s opinion and we will therefore be able to use methods that you could never get away with.  We are willing to endure endless blood, sweat, toil and tears, struggle in poverty, serve in our army for a mandatory six or seven years, eat short rations, have dozens of kids and live in shacks and caves, all just so we can hold on to the Land.  The whole world will embargo us, sanction us and attack us, but because we are such lunatics, as long as we have the guns, no UN member would dare send “peacekeepers” to actually enforce any of the UN resolutions against us.  The Arabs will fight us forever, like they have always fought you, except ten times more, because they will be scared spitless of us actually marching to the Euphrates if we ever get enough men and guns.   And while the Arabs fight us, you will be safe.  As long as we don’t go under, no one will even remember that you exist.

The moment this argument is made, CREDIBLY made by lots of people who look and act serious, the moment the Israelis believe that this is for real and that Medinat Yehudah will really work, they will fall on their knees and kiss the dust at the feet of whoever makes it.  They will run from Yosh so fast, their feet will blur like a cartoon and the dust will rise to the sky like a tornado.  They will hand whoever convinces them a ton of hardware and a pile of cash, all of it with plausible deniability, of course.  They will open the border, officially or otherwise, and do everything they possibly can to keep Medinat Yehudah afloat.

Moreover, dear reader, in due course the Israelis will hand Medinat Yehudah far more than simply Yosh.  For they do not want and cannot hold the Golan, either.  Or the Galil.  Or the Negev.  Or Yerushalayim.   All they want is Gush Dan.  And even in Gush Dan, what they really want is the Tel Aviv “bubble”.  They are Bubble People, as unsubstantial and unsuited to the real world of the Middle East as the wannabe Silicon Valley-cum-Hollywood-cum-LA-cum-San Francisco soap bubble they occupy.  The first dati leumi leader to credibly offer the Israeli bubble dwellers a way to withdraw forever away from our harsh Middle Eastern reality and hide safely in their magic Bubble World will be the first Nasi of Medinat Yehudah.

Sadly, neither Feiglin nor Ketzaleh, nor even Michael Ben-Ari truly comprehends this.  Nor are things any better with our rabbis.  Even R. Shapira, R. Wolpo and R. Tal are yet to truly see the light.  Yet there is hope.  For if these tired old men do not step up to the plate, sooner or later a younger leader will.  If we cannot be this person, then your job and my job, dear reader, is to find someone who can be.  Or at least to keep speaking until, bizrat Hashem, the words fall upon the right set of ears.  The leader our people need is, surely, even now walking among us.  We just don’t know it, yet.

6 Elul, 5770