Kfar Tapuach:
Everyday Life in an Israeli War Zone
just couldn't stop thinking about the
settlers vs. the Indians yesterday. And I don't mean the kind of
Indians you see in the movies, either. I mean the type I read about in
Fort Madison, Iowa when I was 11 years old. Give me a minute to
explain and all of this will make sense.
I had lunch on Friday, 13 June 2003 with
Moshe Parry, an orthodox Rabbi from the Los Angeles area, and with
David Ha'ivri, an Israeli resident of and a spokesman for Kfar
Tapuach, an Israeli "settlement" in the "Occupied Territories" of
Israel, which in David's view (and in my view, also) really only means
he lives in a portion of Israeli territory that never should have been
under non-Jewish hegemony.
My twin brother Charles, a screenwriter,
accompanied us to talk about his fact-based portrayal of Eliezer ben
Yehuda, the founder of modern Hebrew.
Both Moshe and David are Orthodox Jews,
and I don't mind telling you it was a challenge to meet them for
lunch, considering that as best as I can tell, there is only
one truly kosher deli in all of Orange County, and these
two folks don't eat anything non-kosher. But we managed
to find each other, anyway.
David was just winding down a
fundraising tour for his Yesha community of Kfar Tapuach. The term
"Yesha" is an Israeli acronym that stands for the so-called "Occupied
Territories". All of this means that David's home town is situated
right smack in the middle of Injun territory. So to speak.
There are a lot of things I like about
David Ha'ivri. Take his name, for instance. It literally translates as
"David the Hebrew". Sort of like the Israeli equivalent of "John Doe,"
I think. Generically simple. Elegant. Like his commitment to the right
of Israel to remain in Ha'Aretz, "the Land" promised by God Himself to
Abraham and his descendants.
During our time together, I introduced
David and his host Moshe to what I've been doing to educate Americans
and the West about the problems faced from conservative Muslims. If
you could have listened in on our conversation, you would have heard
this goy singing from the same sheet of choir music with
David and Moshe about our mutual frustrations concerning
how the
United States of America has treated Jonathan Pollard.
David told me what life is like in a
small town in Israel. One surrounded by enemies who would gladly
destroy them all if given an opportunity.
The Fort
Madison Connection
As David told me his story, I was
reminded of some things I learned when I was growing up in Fort
Madison, Iowa. When I was eleven years old, a local manufacturer tore
up its parking lot to make room for some more buildings. In doing so,
the construction workers came across the ruins of old Fort Madison, a
colonial military settlement that had been burned to the ground by
"native Americans" during the first half of the 19th century. For a
brief period during the early 1960's Fort Madison's history was talked
about all around the United States.
I remember reading about old Fort
Madison in The Palimpsest, an official quarterly publication of
the Iowa Historical Society. The true stories chronicled in The
Palimpsest opened my eyes to how the Iowan Indians treated
colonial settlers.
To put it succinctly, they were brutal.
The Palimpsest wrote graphically
how the Indian attackers kidnapped American soldiers, cut out their
hearts and cut off their heads, and impaled both on stakes set out
during the middle of the night. The stakes were strategically placed
overnight near the entrance gates to the Fort Madison stockade so that
the troops would see them in the morning light when they arose from
sleep.
Creepy stuff.
And just as eternal vigilance was the
price of maintaining the peace on the old American frontier, there's a
modern-day "settlers vs. the Indians" war going on in Israel right
now. The stakes are just as high for Israeli settlers as they were for
the American colonial settlers who moved west of the Mississippi River
in the early 1800's: Life or death, with very, very little in between.
Everyday Life
in an Israeli War Zone
David gave me a CD-ROM that contains a 9
minute MPG video about life in Kfar Tapuach. The file is more than 200
megabytes in size, which means it can take a long, long time to
download and play over the internet, but if you'd like to view it,
click here and be prepared to wait for 220 megabytes to download
over your internet connection. The file contains an "MPG" extension.
(If you right-click on the link, you can save the file on your
computer.)
Even now as I think of David's video, I
can't help but think about one of the Israeli women who appears in the
video. She was described in the video as a social events coordinator
for Kfar Tapuach. She plans parties for children.
As I think about her and her work, I
can't help but ask this not-so-rhetorical question: Just how
do you plan a community recreation event for little boys
and girls when all the parents have to bring military-grade rifles
along to the party so they can protect their children from being shot
at by Muslim terrorists?
At Kfar Tapuach, the phrase "Don't leave
home without it" refers to your side arm, not to your credit card.
