Let Them Do the Talking

It’s been difficult composing my column this week. I’ve been trying to gather information from 6 000 miles away in order to form some opinions on what appears to be a complex situation.
I’m still in the midst of absorbing what I’ve read and heard so for the most part I’ll let some others doing the talking for now. To gain a broader perspective I’ve been reading widely giving equal time you might say to Hamodia and to Haaretz the newspaper of Israel’s liberal secular elites. Gideon Levy a Haaret

Let Them Do the Talking

It’s been difficult composing my column this week. I’ve been trying to gather information from 6000 miles away in order to form some opinions on what appears to be a complex situation.

I’m still in the midst of absorbing what I’ve read and heard so for the most part I’ll let some others doing the talking for now. To gain a broader perspective I’ve been reading widely giving equal time you might say to Hamodia and to Haaretz the newspaper of Israel’s liberal secular elites. Gideon Levy a Haaretz columnist who sits on its editorial board writes:

As expected the campaign against the ultra-Orthodox all of them went beyond all proportion. But we can relax: The scandal of the week will quickly die down. The trendy word “exclusion” will return to its obscurity…. It was an artificial fuss: The signs had been there for years until the television cameras captured them. The spitting incident was shameful but the scandal was overdone.… The fury that erupted on Monday in Beit Shemesh with one policeman injured and two ultra-Orthodox men arrested broke out only because the media showed up.

This incident too will be forgotten. I was there. Eggs splattered around me and the ultra-Orthodox shouted “Nazi Nazi” at me too. Still I didn’t get angry at them or hate them. The secular population attacked them with raging and sweeping hatred and they reacted with similar emotions.