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Rachel Saperstein is a teacher at the Neve Dekalim ulpana and a spokeswoman for the Katif Regional Council.
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By Rachel Saperstein
July 11, 2005
I received an article by Mr. Abraham Foxman that appeared in the Haaretz newspaper. Mr. Foxman is the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL -- The Anti- Defamation League -- was established to seek out all forms of anti-Semitism and bring them to light. In short, to fight for the rights of Jews throughout the world.
But there is one place the ADL has declared off limits -- Israel, and especially the systematic home-by-home expulsion planned for the innocent Jews in Gush Katif. Mr. Foxman finds the expulsion edict passes the test of democracy and legality. He writes that it is ?a fulfilling of the Zionist dream of Jewish sovereignty through its institutions of democratic government.?
Apparently Mr. Foxman has forgotten that our prime minister hires and fires cabinet ministers by whim, bribes political parties and brought his defeated political opponents into a government that would vote for Jewish ouster. Yes, it may be legal. But is legal the equivalent of moral? Historically the Jews of the world were expelled by legal decrees. But the edicts were morally wrong.
Is it moral to watch, as I do, the tears of adult males as they weep over trees they planted or the farm they had tended until the crops began to grow?
Is it moral to ask mothers to disinter the corpses of their beloved sons and daughters?
Is it moral to pull mezuzot from doorposts, bulldoze synagogues and destroy yeshiva buildings?
Would ADL allow this to happen in any other part of the world without a storm of protest?
Mr. Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, you endorsed the "disengagement" plan.
Will you be drinking your second cup of coffee as you sit in front of your tv watching CNN report on the destruction, one by one, of Jewish communities? Will the ADL receive an "Organization of the Year" award while Jewish parents grasping infants are shoved onto waiting buses?
Were ADL employees putting stamps on envelopes filled with requests for funds while you endorsed the edict of Jewish expulsion?
Excuse me if I ask these questions. I am just a grandmother. And no one gives me awards for living under incessant bombardment. I see my husband holding on, grasping at straws of hope with his remaining three fingers. He gave his right arm in the Yom Kippur War and two of his remaining fingers as a victim of Arab terror.
We are the symbolic Jew. The Jew who left America to come home to live as a free people in our land of Israel. A Jew ready to sacrifice for Israel?s existence. A Jew who went to settle the Biblical homeland of Israel.
I see the pain in my people -- my people of Gush Katif and my people of Israel.
The sovereign state of Israel should not be rewarding their brave Jews with expulsion.
Come to Gush Katif, Abraham Foxman. Come to where your father Abraham walked and dug his wells. Meet the people whose expulsion you endorse and then speak the word legal. Or, if you dare, talk about your morality.
Indeed, legal here is not moral.
Views expressed by the author do not
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