'They came to curse and ended up blessing'
Things came to a head with a lawsuit filed by the far-left Yesh Din organization against the community. Similar lawsuits have led to demolition and displacement elsewhere.
This time, the Samaria Regional Council’s Strategy Center decided to take preemptive action. Regional leaders focused on bringing as many politicians as possible to see the “illegal” settlement, hoping to show them the absurdity of the situation, in which a thriving community created by the government faced the chopping block for lack of a single government signature.
The initiative was wildly successful. Several ministers and more than 60 Members of Knesset came to see Rachelim, and nearly all, including those on the political left, agreed that it would be unjust for the government to destroy as “illegal” the town that it had created. When it came time for the government to submit an opinion to the Supreme Court in response to the Yesh Din lawsuit, ministers and MKs pushed for a solution that would finally authorize the community as legal – which is what ultimately was done.
Samaria Regional Council head Gershon Mesika expressed satisfaction with the decision. “This means the victory of basic logic over the politics and mean-spiritedness of the anti-Zionist left,” he declared. “The Prime Minister made the logical decision and ended years of unneeded harm to residents of the town.”
Deputy council head Yossi Dagan chose to send a tongue-in-cheek “thank you” to Yesh Din for its lawsuit. “In the name of Rachelim, I am grateful to the extreme-left group Yesh Din for its contrarian lawsuit, which caused the Israeli government to come to a decision, to grab the bull by the horns and right a wrong that had lasted for years,” he said.
“They came to curse,” he added, “but in the end, as in the [Biblical] story of Bilaam, they gave a blessing.”Read the whole thing.
Labels: Judea and Samaria
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:42 PM
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