Splitters

Are they the People’s Front of Judea, or the Judean People’s Front?

Either way, if the secular Ashkenazim and their allies can have the pre-1967 bit no matter how many Arabs might live or have lived there, then why can’t Fatah have the West Bank no matter how many Jews or Hamas supporters (effectively a different ethnic group, as ultra-Orthodox Jews are among Israelis) might live or have lived there, then why can’t the Judean People’s Front or the People’s Front of Judea have their little bit, too?

Those are people who regard the godless Zionist State as wholly illegitimate, yet are perfectly happy to live on its largesse (so that they do nothing except study, a very far cry indeed from the integration of scholarship and more conventional labour by their very recent ancestors, an integration usually held up as a glory of Judaism) while not only refusing to serve in that State’s Defence Force, but even raising their hands against the teenage conscripts who do.

But when it was decided to give the Jews (or some of them, anyway) a separate portion of what has been one of the most multiethnic places on earth since the Year Dot, then this potentially never-ending chain of events was set off. There is no love lost between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.

Drawing as they do on traditions mediated by, in, through and as ethnically different groups of Jews (so much for “all one people”), each of the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel has its own school system and what have you, in addition to the exemption from military service and the lavish welfare spending on them. But they are not satisfied. Given the history, how can they be? If you can show that you are sufficiently (even if not terribly) different, then you get your own little statelet, however dangerously, unjustly or absurdly drawn or constituted.

What with the Ethiopian Jews, the Russians Christians, the Russian Nazis, the East Africans with their religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, the Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism”, and all the rest, this will never end.

Or, at least, it will never end until a line is drawn under Zionism, the population (and thus the character) of Israel and Palestine is declared to be exactly as it is, the Law of Return is duly repealed, and any wildly impractical Palestinian demand for a corresponding right of return is blown out of the water.

Nothing less will do.