Alan Dershowitz, a supporter of the disengagement plan, spoke with the Jerusalem Post while in Israel to receive an honorary doctorate from Bar-Ilan University, about Israel’s obligation to the settlers:
“I think Israel has an obligation to treat the settlers as heroes, not pariahs,” he said. “The settlers went pursuant of Israeli policy, both Labor and Likud. They ought to be justly compensated. I would say more than justly compensated. They ought to be very generously compensated.
“They ought to be treated with extreme deference and they ought to be told they are heroes of Israel. They were heroes when they went and they are heroes when they are returning. They served in the front lines.”
Anne Lieberman had an important exchange during a panel discussion on disengagement, moderated by the Intermountain Jewish News, about how she would feel telling kids to go into Gaza to “protect those few thousand Israelis who live there:”
Lieberman: . . . [M]aybe I don’t understand, but I thought the IDF was there to protect all Jews everywhere, not the ones that they like or don’t like, or the politically correct or incorrect, but all Jews. I come across this attitude with Israelis: “For these people, I would let my son protect them, but for those people, I wouldn’t.” I don’t understand that.
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IJN: Anne, do you think it is realistic to ask these young men and women in the IDF to risk their lives to protect Gaza settlers?
Lieberman: I want them to. As long as those people are there, I want them to. I don’t want anything to happen to them, but I think we forget that in all this intra-Jewish soldier-settler debate, none of this would be a problem if the Arabs weren’t trying to kill us. There’s a bigger picture and that’s where the problem lies. We’re trying to make the best out of the situation but that’s the heart of the matter.
David Wolpe, in a beautiful June 11 sermon entitled “Are All Israel Really Responsible for One Another?”, concluded we are all guarantors for one another, all co-signers at Sinai, one people with one heart, and not blessed unless we bless one another.
The sermon does not in fact mention the settlers, and is nominally directed at a somewhat related issue: the not-altogether admirable propensity of Jews to provide more support for charities other than for their own. But like other literature, once published or spoken it belongs to the readers and listeners, and is what they make of it. So I hereby declare it a sermon about the settlers.
The settlers are not "right-wing fanatics;" they are not "religious nuts;" they are not even "settlers." They are Jews. They are us.