Activists Yehuda Eliyahu and Betzalel Smotrich have issued a public call to the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party to break itsties to Yesh Atid.
The two activists, who head theRegavim NGO, published a letter to Bayit Yehudi saying, “It’s time to wake up, the concept of an agreement with Yesh Atid has totally collapsed.”
From the letter:
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Dear friends, we are lost. The time has come to wake up, and better late than never.
The partnership with Lapid was never something natural. We abandoned our natural partners and friends for someone different – in beliefs, in worldview, and in behavior. We thought, apparently, that if we were smart, we would get something good about it, and maybe even ‘convert’ Lapid and bring him to our side.
When our gut fears grew, we told ourselves that we had no choice other than this strange process… The time has come to be brave, to look reality in the eye, to accept the situation and to look for an escape route.
Let’s start with the big things: the rationale for a deal with Lapid was based on an agreement that Yesh Atid would support our opposition to preconditions to diplomatic talks, and in exchange, we would agree to hold such talks… The government that we are part of first freed murderers with blood on their hands as a precondition to talks, and is now in the midst of a dangerous diplomatic process.
The very existence of the diplomatic process is already doing tremendous damage in terms of public awareness, and is likely to end with the establishment of a Palestinian state, even in temporary borders, in giving up parts of our homeland and even uprooting Israeli communities.
More big things: we dealt mortal damage to the Torah world, both the hareidi and the Zionist. The yeshiva budgets were cut, and for now, Lapid is ignoring the quiet agreements on the matter… We’re not saying our MKs aren’t trying, but the reality is that it isn’t working. The Finance Minister is spitting on us, and we aren’t responding.
The state budget that passed, with the cut to child payments, demonstrates warped priorities that we should not have agreed to. This is a new set of priorities that pushes aside family values… Lapid’s disparaging remarks that whoever chooses to have children needs to take responsibility for providing for them are disgusting comments that demonstrate a disturbing set of values… And we are quiet.
Even when it comes to the “small” things, for the time being we have not accomplished anything. The bill to sell the Negev to the Bedouin for a pot of stew passed a first reading at our hands. We didn’t bring a Zionist Chief Rabbinate. The abuse of “settlers” continues… The Levy Report is already covered with such thick dust that even we don’t remember what’s written in it.Administrative distancing orders are handed out like we’re in a banana republic.
We’re afraid, and we’re not alone. The time has come for us to stand up for ourselves and to promote the agenda that we believe in. That’s why we got 12 mandates, that’s why we’re in government.
Ok Arnold – I will try to answer it the best I can – hope you have ‘spiritual eyes’ in which to see.
1)I have had direct encounters with Hashem. I realize a bold statement that many would like to lock me up for. One only has direct encounters with Hashem if they have also had direct encounters with Satan – one has to know the difference – and believe me there is a BIG difference. I am a prayer warrior – and Hashem will call upon me to sometimes pray for individuals, disasters, and even nations. I will give you one example. Where I live about 15 or so years ago we were threatened with a flood that came close to wiping out own whole city. I was alarmed to hear that there were a group on christian ministers meeting along the dikes at night praying for a flood – hoping the dikes would break thinking that because most of us were ‘unsaved’ this would cause us to cry out to g-d if we lost our homes. I ‘countered’ their prayers very exhaustively and also worked fielding evacuees. I could sense when they would pray – bad prayer works too – and I would be awoken to ‘push it back’. The city was saved. I actually live quite a normal life (normal to me). It was during Desert Storm that I was awoken to ‘pray back’ the evil that was being bestowed upon Israel. So, I know Hashem is at work because quite frankly as Jews WE HAVE HAD IT!!
2)The holocaust still has many unanswered questions for us Jews – but we must stop trying to blame each other. I don’t know why Hashem chose to be silent. Where is Hashem most of the time? It seems that evil flourishes.
3) I am not saying that Hashem is going to come down to earth per se, but we will be restored as a people. I can’t see it any other way. Why would Hashem choose me to be such a prayer warrior if it wasn’t so? The final result has always been positive. Don’t get me wrong. I am not defending Hashem in any way shape or form.
4) Evil people can be forced by Hashem to submit – not by man but by Hashem. That is the only explanation I can have for a vile Stalin. I have had too many Stalin and Stalinites in my life to EVER give them any kind or praise.
@ dove:
Alright, Just for the sake of argument, how precisely do your lofty ideas get translated into actual policy for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state?
What was haShem busy doing when the Nazis were destroying about one-third of the Jewish nation in all parts of Europe where they could lay hands on them?
And when exactly will haShem come down to Earth like the deus ex machina that we all have expectantly awaited for so many centuries, to save the Jewish nation from the endless torment that it has undergone for 3,000 years?
And how exactly do you know that haShem didno’t put in place this same Josef Stalin whose memory you revile so strongly, despite that his actions saved the lives of most of the Jews in eastern Europe who survived the Holocaust, and who saved Europe from permanent Nazi conquest?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Who cares if this is on the back pages? Is that the only reason why you post comments – to get an audience??
Harris said – Good luck with getting haShem to stand up to the plate and get ready to swing his bat
Thanks Harris – obviously you don’t see Hashems hand in matters.
Harris said – As for who can best make Israel powerful, independent and safe from attack, a Jewish Stalin would do just fine
FOOL. We are to learn from history – not duplicate oppression. Moses didn’t make it to the promised land – why? You KNOW why.
King David make the mistake of thinking with his groin which cost him the life of his son.
Hashem is our only and BEST hope as we do not have to contend with human error.
Dove,
This posting and its commentary are now on the back pages of Israpendit. Which means were nobody is reading it anymore.
Good luck with getting haShem to stand up to the plate and get ready to swing his bat. (I;m not sure anybody in Israel other than olim from the USA understands or plays American, Canadian, and Central American style baseball.)
As for who can best make Israel powerful, independent and safe from attack, a Jewish Stalin would do just fine; and certainly better than an ass-licker of the US imperialism than the present prime minister of the Jewish State.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Unfortunately, Dove, we have no King David or Prophet Moshe available to the Jewish world today
That’s no excuse to use Stalin as an example of what we need. Without an ‘earthly’ leader who is in charge then??? Well Hashem of coarse! It’s high time that we insist that Hashem step up to the plate. As Jews we do have that kind of power and right. This year during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur we should make that our priority even if it means raising our fists.
@ dove:
Unfortunately, Dove, we have no King David or Prophet Moshe available to the Jewish world today. Just Herods and our very own 21st Century Josephus, ready to cave in once again to orders not even from a modern Vespasian and his son Titus, but from a sort of southside Chicago Caligula, Nero or Commodus.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
The only reason I put ** is so that my comment would not get blotted – but I see that Ted and company are either busy with Shabbat or they don’t mind the F word in full. I am not a crass person and do not make apologies for that. Couldn’t you have picked a better leader to ‘admire’?? How about one of ours?? How about King David? How about Moses?? If we had a King David or Moses today the problem would get solved and we wouldn’t have to resort to your type of defilment. There is a BIG difference between the oppressed and the oppressor. We DO NOT need an oppressor for a leader.
Well, Dove, the kind of leadership that I want for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state is precisely the same kind of cold, calculating ruthlessness as Josef Stalin exercised to make certain that great Russia would not be conquered and destroyed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. If you or your family live in Israel, then I hope for your sake and theirs that matters will never be so terrible to require such a man as the savior of the Jewish nation.
Because if the Arabs crowd in on you too closely, and the Iranians develop nuclear weapons with which to kill the lot of you, despite the promises of the snake who presides over this country, then you will be the one who is fucked, with no asterisks to hide behind.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
You are f**ked! It is one thing to admire someone with great leadership – it is quite another matter when that leadership turns into being power hungry for control and willing to brutualize millions of innocent people to get what they want.
Laura,
I admire Josef Stalin because as early as the mid-1920s, he had the foresight to begin a brutal but massive forced industrialization to the whole of Russia. His public statements to his Politburo at that time showed that he clearly understood that without such super-industrialization, Russia would never have the means to fend of the armed attack against the Soviet Union that he knew would come. And all this was at least six years before Adolf Hitler was able to set up his dictatorship in Germany and began instantly to prepare that country of a war of conquest across the face of Eastern Europe and into Eurasia.
Stalin sensed all this, and created the basis for the largest set of military industries in the whole world; without which, Russia would have been conquered and destroyed by Nazi Germany after Operation Barbarossa — the massive blitzkrieg assault on the USSR in summer 1941, plus Operation Typhoon, the full-scale assault on Moscow starting early autumn 1941, and Operation Blau, the assault intended to overrun the lower Don River basin, the Caucusas and its oilfields, and the key city of Stalingrad, all starting late June 1942.
There is a long-standing myth that American lend-lease aid saved the Soviet Union. That aid was indeed helpful, enabling the Soviet Union to fully motorize its armies with the aid of great fleets of Studebaker 2-1/2 ton trucks, certain specialized raw materials, and much else. But the detailed records of that period show that the lend-lease aid to Russia did not assume significant levels until after the Persian Gulf route through Iran had been opened up by late summer 1943. And that took place after the greatest tank battle in history took place around the the village of Prokorovka near the southern Soviet Union city of Kursk.
That battle was the last assault of the German Army on the soil of the USSR. And by the time the three Allied leaders — Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt and their key military staffs met at the Iranian capital city of Teheran in November 1943, the Nazi empire was indeed doomed to destruction. The destruction would have been primarily the by the great Soviet armies of their Great Patriotic War, led by their Generalissimo Stalin. The western allies did indeed make a major contribution toward winning that war, but the historical record clearly shows that even if Eisenhower’s great Allied Expeditionary Force had not landed on the Calvados beaches of Normandy in northwest France in June 1944, the Russian armies would have stormed and broken Germany from the East, and probably would not have stopped short of the English channel.
The Russian nation did indeed pay a horrendous price for what probably was the grandest scale military victory in the history of world warfare. That horrendous price included millions of Ukrainians purposely starved by Stalin’s government in the early 1930, in order to remove the peasants from their private lands which were taken for use as large-scale collective farms; the purges of the Communist Party and of the military leadership cadres in the 1930s, and the entire system of planned slavery in the vast Gulag Archipelago that has been so accurately described by the great historian Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But those numbers were nothing in contrast with the more than 20 million Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorus, and Jews in all of the Western part of the Soviet Union that was conquered and occupied by the Nazi armies.
Stalin was not thought to be friendly toward Jews in general, an attitude said to have been provoked by his personal relations with some of the leading Jewish Bolsheviks such as Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev. But even if he didn’t trust Jews as Communists, he made certain during 1941 and early 1942 that large numbers of Soviet Jews were evacuated away from the deadly reach of Hitler’s Einsatzkommando murder brigades. It was exactly that evacuation which saved them from the Holocaust, which at some 5.7 or 5.8 million was bad enough, but which would have number some 9-10 million if the Nazis could have laid hands on all the Soviet Jews.
I might also remind you, in case you did not know, that Stalin approved appointment of more than 100 Jewish generals during the Great Patriotic War, some of them were among the top ranks of the military leadership, and one of whom, General Dovator, was one of the heroes of the Soviet cavalry that helped break the German lines in the frozen winter fighting that saved Moscow in December 1941. Nowhere in the high command of the British and US military was their any similar level of Jewish leadership at high command levels.
And in 1948, when David Ben-Gurion declared an independent State of Israel immediately following the evacuation of the British colonial occupation troops, officials and military equipment, the Soviet Union under Stalin’s direct intervention not only recognized the independence of the Jewish state immediately, but also sent a steady flow of guns, ammunition and even disassembled military aircraft from the Soviet empire, such as Czech-built Messerschmidt 109 fighter planes. At the same time, the USA and Great Britain totally embargoed shipments of any war supplies to Israel, while the British however conveniently supplied their British-officered Arab Legion which took control of Shomron, Yehuda and eastern Jerusalem in 1948.
So Stalin is indeed one of my heroes. And I wholeheartedly wish the USA and Israel could have similar kinds of leadership, rather than the two-faced, none-entities now running the USA and the latter-day equivalents of the Jewish ghetto leadership class that cooperated with their tormenters in Poland during the Holocaust.
Did he kill and brutalize enormous numbers of people? Indeed he did. But that to me is less than nothing, when compared with saving a nation from destruction. For the sake of the Russian nation at least, I sincerely hope they can raise to power another Josef Stalin, when similar need arises.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
To admire joseph stalin is pretty disturbing. But you never had to live under his totalitarian rule.
I don’t know, it sounds pretty reasonable to me to expect parents to be responsible for providing for their own children.
@ beniyyar:
Beniyyar,
I have no particular suggestion for whom should be chosen by the voters of Israel to serve as that country’s next prime minister. I have little or no interest in political personalities; only in their national vision, the policies they pursue in furtherance of that vision, and their capability of uniting and leading the nation toward fulfillment of the purposes for which they were entrusted with power.
The great leaders of Israel and the Jewish nation, in my judgement, were Theodore Herzl, Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzchak Shamir. I judge Menachem to have been a weaker personality because he allowed the execrable James Earl Carter to dictate to Israel a faked peace agreement with Egypt that cost the Jewish state control of the Sinai Peninsula. By the same standards, I did not trust Ariel Sharon and I do not trust Binyamin Netanyahu.
You can term what I say as mere rants, if you so choose. But the point I try to make is that the Jewish nation has no good option but to expand the size of its territorial base. And that cannot be fully accomplished without following a policy of realistically dealing with the Arab populations in the territories that must be taken under Jewish national control and annexed. That policy I choose to support, is to deal with Arab populations of the major cities through autonomy agreements negotiated separately with the leading hamulas of those cities. What I am doing is to consolidate ideas based on the work of Israelii Arabists such as Professor Mordechai Kedar and scholars fully familar with the social and political anthropology of the Arab clans.
Yes, here in the USA I am indeed a right-winger. But that is in response to conditions unique to this country. How I might be tagged politically in Israel is another matter. How many “right-wingers” do you know of in Israel who have idolized leaders such as David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir in Israel, and Josef Stalin in the USSR?
But you are free to think and write as you wish, and so am I.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Again, the extremists will destroy everything because they believe that they know better, yeah, let’s give Labor and Meretz another chance at the ballot box, after all if Bennet is less than 100 percent radical, then he has no business being in the government. And if Bibi is not perfect, then let’s just destroy this government and put Yackimovitch in charge, because then our extremists can really oppose her. Yeah, Arnold, Bibi is a traitor and a snake and I am sure that you and your extremist buddies have another better government leader in your back pocket to replace the present coalition with. Well let’s see it, show me that radical extremist right wing government you have waiting in the wings, one that can win an election, I would truly like to see it. Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one handy do you? But Bibi is a snake and a traitor, and boo hoo, we on the Israeli Right finally win an election and all you extremists can do is tear it down. Well you and your gang have made yourselves irrelevant by your extremism, no normal Zionist even listens to your rants any more because it was extremists like you that destroyed Shamir and brought to power Rabin and Oslo. We know now that radical right wingers like you are a greater danger to the land of Israel than the most extreme secular Leftist Israeli.
I imagine haShem would prefer this generation of his Jewish nation to begin exercising the intelligence he gave them, rather than blowing smoke simultaneously out of their mouths and assholes. Maybe the USA is rich and powerful enough to endure the leadership of a two-legged snake such as our present chief executive. But the State of Israel will require a lot more power before it can survive the leadership of a lying, treacherous but faint-hearted poltroon such as Netanyahu.
I don’t suffer fools gladly, or at all when I can avoid it. And I don’t tell lies to win friends or gain social acceptance. That’s the way my dad raised me, many decades ago.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Lapid is Lapid. What did you expect? The betrayal is by Bennett and it is he who needs to be replaced.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Well and powerfully summarized. From your lips to G-d’s ears!
No one is going to up their seats.
They wouldn’t give them up when the Israeli government decided to subvert justice. Where was Ketzaleh then?
Its a little late to worry aout the future of a country that has lost its moral compass.
Katzeleh barks
A good case could be made that any political group stupid enough to have joined such a false coalition deserves no support.
But I don’t really give a damn who sits in the Knesset or what they babble about. I want action for the Jewish nation and the Jewish state:
1) Immediately annex Area C and Area B of Shomron and Yehuda, as delineated on the Oslo Accord maps. That will effectively terminate the Palestine Authority as a centger of power in Shomron and Yehuda.
2) As the PA disintegrates, negotiate separate local autonomy agreements with the most significant hamulas of the main Arab cities in Shomron and Yehuda: Jenin, Tulkarem, Nablus, Kalkilya, Ramallah, Jericho, Hevron. That ultimately could result in more or less settled and improved relations with each of these strictly local clans ruling over some 85 per cent of the estimated 1,5 million Arabs actually resident in Shron and Yeduda. If this step is handled properly, the result will be some a number of separate Palestinian mini-states, which will be easier for Israel to deal with.Ultimately, Gaza can be retaken, and broken into separate autonomous areas for the city and environs of Gaza in the northern end of the strip, and Rafiach in the southern end, with Gush Katif resettled with Jews to separate the two parts.
3) For the remainder of the Arabs living in the administered territories, offer them Israeli citizenship rights on the basis of a number of interim steps, depending on the willingness of each such Arab family to live in peace with Israel.
4) Get on with the urgent task of quadrupling the Jewish population of Shomron and Yehuda within 25 years, and the overall Jewish population of Israel in 70 years.
5) As local civil wars in the Middle East continue — which can be all but counted upon to happen — use these opportunities to expand Israel’s defense lines and borders to the Gulf of Suez in the southwest, the Syrian Desert in the east, the Litani River gorge to the north, and both sides of the Straits of Tiran in the south.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Goodbye Utopia!
That was quick.