The Other Side: The Jews of Judea and Samaria, Part 4: The Avitals

nikudaproduction
10 August '10

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The Avitals live in the community of Ofra, not far from Ramallah. Here they discuss their views of peace and co-existing with their Arab neighbors.



The media invariably portrays the Jewish citizens of communities in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as fanatics and intolerant bigots. Yet no one really talks to them to see how they really are and what they really think.

This series intends to find out who these "settlers" are, why they choose to live there, and what their aspirations and fears are.

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Dream Education

Batya Medad
Shilo Musings
06 August '10

Twenty-five years ago, our regional council opened up its first high schools. A boys school was opened in Beit El and a girls school in Ofra. Those two yishuvim (communities) were the dominant ones at the time and unabashedly "divided the pie" of goodies between themselves. They also had the only elementary schools allowed to educate the kids up the the Eighth Grade. It took years of struggle, but today the Shiloh Elementary School also goes to the Eighth grade, as do others, but that's another story...

Ofra was the first actual yishuv in the Shomron, and its founders were visionaries, not just pioneers. Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, well-known Bible expert and educator, was among the first in Ofra. He had been dreaming of what he considered the ideal education for a modern Torah-observant Jewish woman. Not only were the girls to study all of the standard academic and religious courses, but they were to learn sewing, cooking and the first graduation classes even learned basic car maintenance.

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A minor correction

Leftist coalition operating anti-Israel boycott website gets it wrong

Hagai Segal
Ynet/Opinion
29 November 09

The leftist boycott industry against Israel is becoming increasingly sophisticated with the passage of time. For example, the Coalition of Women for Peace operates an English-language website that presents a comprehensive list of plants that are related to the settlements in one way or another.

All the plants on the web site are presented as ones that benefit at the expense of an occupied nation. The site is called "Who Profits?"

However, the Coalition of Women for Peace does not make do with just providing the names of plants, the kind of goods they produce, and their exact address. The website also provides the names of the owners, perhaps so that one of these days it would be possible to bring them to trial at the International Court of Justice at The Hague on charges of committing crimes by benefiting from the occupation.

Among other names, until this weekend at least the website noted that a woman called Noa Alon is one of the owners of a Jewish food-processing plant in the West Bank.

Well, for the benefit of the highly moral European followers of the website, I will note that Noa Alon has not been the owner of that plant for a long time now. A Palestinian terrorist murdered her as well as her young granddaughter, Gal Eisenman, in a suicide attack at Jerusalem's French Hill neighborhood about seven years ago.

Both grandmother and granddaughter have been laid to rest in the small cemetery in the West Bank community of Ofra, not too far from the industrial zone where the plant was located before it was relocated to the kosher side of the Green Line.

I wonder whether their very burial there also constitutes a type of benefit of the occupation.
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