Bastards of Amona

If Wednesday’s evacuation of Amona was a sad-sack display of what Israel’s better angels could look like, illustrated in Thursday’s press as an agonizing display of respectful police evicting emotional and mostly non-violent settlers and protesters – with the largest criticism being contrast with the way Arab evictions are handled – then Thursday’s mop-up operation was a display of what those worst angels could look like.

And just as on Wednesday and Thursday morning, people lined up to show solidarity or at least express sadness over the plight of the evacuated Amonaites, nobody wants to claim responsibility for these bastards who were the outpost’s last holdouts.

Pictures of the outpost’s desecrated synagogue, complete with graffiti of the Israel’s Police insignia inside a swastika under the words “Ishmael Police” and bodies being pulled out are replete in the papers, along with words like “battle,” “confrontation,” and “law-breakers.”

The reason for the decided turn from the softer view of the evacuation a day earlier? Yedioth Ahronoth’s headline, “Curses, metal bars and a swastika in the synagogue,” offers something of a clue.

But both Yedioth and rival tabloid Israel Hayom take pains to point out that the “hooligans” (to quote Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan) are not part and parcel with the Amona evacuees.

“In the synagogue some people hitched a ride with what was happening, 10 to 20 youths who were less connected to the outpost. They didn’t listen to us and unfortunately this is the result,” Amona spokesman Avichai Boaron, who was inside the synagogue, is quoted saying in Yedioth. Boaron apparently forget that as one of the loudest voices calling on everyone to come defend the outpost, he essentially invited these kids in.

Commentator Shlomo Pyoterkovsky, used by the tabloid as the voice of the settlement movement, pushes the synagogue-dwellers even further outside the fold.

“Whoever holds the land dear to them, whoever wants to do things to avoid any more evacuations of Jewish towns, needs to say in a clear and loud voice: These troublemakers are not part of the camp of lovers of Israel fighting for its well-being. They are a bad group, a group whose values are invalid and false,” he writes.

A column by Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine is eerily similar, accusing the group of hurting the larger settlement movement. And though the paper’s front page focuses on the police pledge to throw the book at them, Shine says it’s not only the kids who are guilty.

“The rabbis and teachers in the Jewish study halls who raised these corrupted youth that cavorted in Amona need to do soul-searching immediately. The group boasts of its education system, and rightly so, but it cannot square that with these wild crops. One can only chuckle at the tapes of the rabbis who too late woke up to where they were leading the battle for Amona,” he writes.

Haaretz notes that also present in the synagogue was Amona’s rabbi, Yair Frank, who was unable to calm the fired-up youths holed up there. When asked what he even did to try, Frank instead seemed to justify their behavior.

“Unfortunately the court doesn’t represent the people,” he’s quoted saying. “The court sets policies of a harsh agenda. There are youths here who wanted to protest that.”

With the Amona evacuation done and dusted, the larger weekend editions also give papers a chance to themselves take stock of the operation on the whole, which was mostly marked by verbal abuse but not much actual violence.

In an expansive feature, Yedioth’s Oded Shalom notes that the police’s ability to calmly work through the curses and arguments for them to refuse orders didn’t just happen spontaneously.

“It’s not nice when they yell and curse at you, but if you learn how to deal with the feelings, it’s easier to do your duty, to manage the incident,” police official Shay Shomron, who helped prepare the officers mentally, is quoted as saying. “During our preparations we spoke with commanders. We told them it’s important to be calm with the residents and protesters, but also with their charges. If you see someone who is having a hard time and he is crying or losing control, so take him aside to calm down, get some air. If needed, have them smoke a cigarette. We explained to them that people at the outpost are there to protest and oppose and we need to let them passively resist.”

The one paper having no truck with the protesters or settlers is Haaretz, though it does sing the praises of the American people for going out to protest President Donald Trump, and donating generously to liberal groups seeking to oppose him.

“The energy of the opposition movement and civic involvement in the United States stand in stark contrast to the situation in Israel,” the paper writes in its lead editorial. “Most of society is totally indifferent to the loss of the state’s liberal character. The increasingly corrupt occupation, growing religiosity, discrimination against Israeli Arabs, the incarceration and abuse of asylum seekers, suppression of the free press and growing inequality are all met with meager opposition.”

Haaretz admits, though, that Israel has been under right-wing rule for nearly a decade, while liberals in the US’s defensive squads are freshly rested after eight years of having their offense on the field.

The wearing down which will eventually come is exactly Trump and Co.’s endgame, according to fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat, quoted by Orly Azoulay in Yedioth Ahronoth.

“It’s only been two weeks and my head is already spinning,” Azoulay quotes Ben-Ghiat saying in CNN, though it’s more a paraphrase or summary than an exact quote. “That’s exactly Trump and [adviser Stephen] Bannon want will happen to the public: It should remain scared from confusion and anger. It’s Bannon’s method: Don’t let them rest. This is a tactic usually used when a leader is weak, maybe because of investigations. With all this chaos starting now, who has the strength or who cares about Trump’s tax returns or his ties to Putin?”