The Deal of the Century will come: here’s how Israel should cope with it
E
ighteen years have passed since I would daven Maariv at the Bayit Vegan shtibel known as “99” (Bayit Vegan Street), often sitting face-to-face with Rabbi Avraham Ravitz a”h, who then was a Knesset member from UTJ.
I was then working in public relations, not journalism, so I wasn’t looking for an interview the night I asked Rabbi Ravitz if he wouldn’t mind answering one burning political question on my mind.
This was at the peak of the second intifada. Opposition leader Ariel Sharon had just made an ill-advised visit to Har Habayis, which provoked the Palestinians. Not that they needed the pretext, but Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat took advantage of the wrath on the Arab street to unleash a new wave of terror, including suicide bombings, roadside shootings, and mortar attacks on the Gilo neighborhood in south Jerusalem. Bayit Vegan, where I was living at the time, is not far from Gilo, and the sounds of the mortars and IDF retaliation via helicopter gunships would shake my bed at night.
I approached Rabbi Ravitz because earlier that day Mishpacha’s Hebrew-language newspaper quoted his Knesset colleague Moshe Gafni as saying that if peace negotiations were to resume, then the fate of Beitar Illit and Kiryat Sefer — the two largest chareidi communities situated just over the Green Line — would be up for grabs.
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