The Myth of the Moderate Religious Settler

I have always tried my best to portray myself as the moderate religious settler, in effect trying to blunt the "damage" the more extreme settlers have on all of us; Explaining my beliefs together with pragmatic reasoning (which obviously toned down the _expression of my true beliefs) to garner some understanding, if not agreement, with the people who I communicated with.

However, today's two year matzav has clarified quite a lot for me, and one of the most important lessons of them all is that our horrible matzav continues, and will continue, so long as we, Jews/Israelis, don't admit to ourselves and to the rest of the world what we truly believe in, which is that Eretz Yisrael is the land of the Jewish people, period - whoever can accept that and live peacefully with us, great let's live in harmony, whoever can't accept that and acts accordingly will have to face extremely stiff consequeces. Once this is accepted, all the specifc issues can be resolved, but as long as we ourselves don't wholeheartedly scream the above message out loud, we will continue to pay for our silence.

For good or for bad, the above argument is totally based on faith and belief, and flies in the face of the pragmatic liberal world we live in. (Even though I believe that the pragmatic liberal - pascifist ideology flies in the face of true reality and pragmatism.)

So, I'm left with believeing that I no longer should portray myself as a moderate religious settler, because I'm not, and the longer we, as a community, continue to delude ourselves that such a thing exists, by hiding behind the true belief of our own religion, the longer we contribute to our horrible matzav to continue.

Thanks for letting me vent.

Avi