=hara0409
                               
Notes from Israeli-occupied Eretz Yisrael
Excerpt from HaAretz (English) 9 April '04 (Ada Ushpiz)

N.B.:  This interview was presumably given in Hebrew, and the
article written in Hebrew for HaAretz (Hebrew); and then
translated for HaAretz/English.


[START EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE:]  
[START ARTICLE WITH LEAD SENTENCE:]
"'I'm not here for politics.  I'm here for the simple life.  On
the contrary:  It's politics that wants to remove us from our
homes.  I absolutely did not come here for political reasons.  I
do not lead a political life, I don't live in a political place. 
I live in a natural, logical place.  To settle this land is not
politics, it's normal, regular life'

"This credo was delivered in a soft tone by Avigal Tzedek, 23, as
she and her husband, Raz, were giving their mobile home a thorough
cleaning for Pesach.  Outside, fierce winds howled across the peak
of the hill on which stands Ginot Aryeh, one of the four settler
outpots whose inhabitants the army hs said it will evacuate after
the holidays.
   At the foot of the hill lies Ofra, the mother settlement. To
the left is Givat Asaf, another settler outpost, named after Asaf
Hershkovitz, the son of Aryeh Hershkovitz, for whom Ginot Aryeh is
named.  Father and son were killed in terrorist attacks six months
apart. ... A soft mist and a wild, barren landscape combine to
hide Ein Yabrud, a nearby Arab viallage, one of many, which made
headlines some time ago when three soldiers of the Israel Defence
Forces (IDF) died not far from it, defending Ofra. ... "

"'If you were going to be uprooted from your house, wouldn't you
resist?" Raz interjected as he washed kitched utensils vigorously. 
"The very question shows conceptual problems.  There are some
things that shouldn't be asked.  Ask me whether I have to get up
tomorrow moning -- of course I have to get up.  Does it sound so
strange for a person to defend his home, his child?'"  [1]

[Avigail:] "So I now have to come to terms with the fact that he
[Sharon] is not a person of the right wing!  We have to flow with
life, not be stuck in one place.  Maybe once he was the symbol of
the right wing, but when it comes right down to it, what's the
difference between him and [the dovish party] Meretz today?"

"It is impossible to explain the love of the Land of Israel to
someone who wasn't raided on that," Raz explained bluntly.  "If I
ask you why you love your husband, it's not a matter of A, B, and
C, it's a far deeper connection, it's not someting you learn on
one foot, as the saying goes.  The other peoples refer to the land
as 'mother earth,' and mother is a blood tie, but for us it's a
relationship of husband and wife, something within us, something
that exists a priori.  I believe that I met Avigail before I met
her.  A husband and wife are one soul; there is an essential, non-
cirumstantial bond between them, which is revealed only under the
bridal canopy -- it's an eternal bond.  Even members of a couple
that were not born as one soul -- for example, a soul that
descended into the world 100 years before its mate -- the Holy One
creates a unifying soul-root for them.  It's possible to divorce,
heaven forbid [Heb. presumably: hat v'shalom, lit: an affront to
tranquility], and there is also exile, but on the truth side this
is one unity, one soul.  Since the exile there has been a constant
process of return to the unfied soul of the people of Israel and
the Land of Israel. In the middle there is a threat to evacuate
Ginot Aryeh, but in the end we will reach Baghdad, too."

"Yifat and Ariel Erhrlich, aged 26 and 28, respectively, grew up
in Ofra.  She came to the setlement with her parents when she was
a year old; he arrived at the age of 15 ...As teenagers they did a
lot of hiking across the desolate hill that would later become the
site of Emuna, and they swore to take revenge on anyone who
destroyed this magnificent primeval landscape. ... 

[Yifat says:] "I came because of the landscape, to be close to my
parents, but not too close -- this is my life.  You can't just
pack me up and kick me out of here.  We aren't playing marbles on
the hilltops, this is my life, my childhood, my dreams.  We have
been living here for three generations ...if anyone wrecks my life
and my children's lives, I will throw my ID card into the garbage
can.  As far as I am concerend, a country that evacuates people
who grew up here has failed.  I will not use violence, but it
won't be my country."  

For her, too, the view is a wining card, ostensibly available to
all, a moral substitute, fraught with spirituality and nobility,
for proof of belonging and right to the place.  [2]

"People who live in a concrete box in Tel Aviv can maybe move from
one concrete box to another, but those who live in nature, in the
landscape of their lives, cannot be moved," she insists.  "Why do
they want me to leave this place?  What did I do?  Did I murder
anyone, steal anything?  It's not human."  

   She is in favor of giving the Palestinians civil rights, but
not political rights.  Not every nation has to have political
rights, she declares. ...  [3]

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NOTES:

[1]                                                         
This is a point in the manner, albeit extended, of  ordinary-
language analysis (Wittgenstein, and J.L. Austin). 
The response seems to be in response to an implied and imagined
question:  If you were ordered by the government to leave your
home, would you chose to resist or to acquiesce. 

The general point is:  Not everything that has the form of a
question is a bona fide question.  A question logically [in the
sense of 'logic' used by mid-period Wittgenstein, articulated in
his later work as 'grammar'] exists, is meaningful, only where
there is a bona fide doubt; a choice logically exists [roughly
speaking; for this is a matter of the exegesis of the 'grammar' of
choice; and grammar, in the Wittgensteinian sense, is quite
complex] only where there are reasonable or at least rational
options.  
It is not, in ordinary circumstances, meaningful to say, eg, that
I 'choose' to brush my teeth, or to eat, or to relieve myself (and
one can highlight the oddity of such a pseudo-question or pseudo-
statement by imagining the rather extraordinary circumstances in
which it would be meaningful, and showing the contrast between
such circumstances and ordinary circumstances.  

Eg, it is not ordinarily meaningful to say that I 'choose' to wash
my hands; but in extraordinary circumstances, it may be
meaningful.  Eg, Rabbi Akiva, accursed of teaching Torah,  was
imprisoned by the Roman occupying force, and given only a limited
ration of drinking water, with which he also performed the
halachic obligation of washing is hands (upon awakening, or before
eating bread.  The Romans then cut his water ration in half; and
Akiva chose to wash his hands, rather than drink the water.

Nor, in the view of the speaker, does a husband ordinarily
'choose' to defend his wife and children if someone seeks to
uproot them from their home; this is simply something any decent
man would do; it is not a 'choice' (and cf. that most libertine
notion 'sexual preference', as if were not a matter of procreation
and conjugal loyalty, but merely of personal aesthetics), except
in an extraordinary situation, for someone of extraordinary
amorality.  

[One can imagine such a situation: Eg: "I'm sorry dear, but you
and the kids will have to go to a brothel in Rome; I've been
offered an excellent administrative position in Asia Minor on that
basis, and I've finally decided that it's really in my best
interest career-wise to accept."  
Ah, the viciousness of ostensibly liberal, 'politically correct'
(ie, ideologically fashionalble) yuppies -- (and here cf.
Shakespeare's briefly sketched parodies, eg Osiric in Hamlet.
     (Perhaps only Yale could hire Howard Bloom, much less
continue to pay him.))

[2]
{N.B.: (sa):  This is a badly written and apparently badly
translated sentence, but it does designate a rather deep thought. 
The point is that, especially for someone whose basic religious
scripture is interwoven with this geography/ecology, living on the
land of Judea-Shomron is a spiritual matter, and so gives one a
sense of belonging, a sense of place and purpose in one's
particular part of the universe.
Only that is a rather bombastic way of trying to express a basic
human virtue, and aspiration.  Again:  the closest analogy I know
is the spiritual inseperability of the American Indian peoples of
the Southwest, especially the Hopi, from their land.}


[3]
I have elsewhere [in a lost article given to Shaul Maggid, who
maybe went to Brandeis ] tried to argue that self-determinatino is
an inherent right of individuals, not of groups.

If we conceed that it is an inherent right of individuals, then
clearly it is not necessarily a right of groups, since the self-
determination of a group may restrict or repress the self-
determination of individuals.

The demonstration that it is an inherent right of individuals is
more complex.
One can start with my lost essay [submitted, as I recall, to Mrs.
Ragavan Iyer's class at UCSB, ca. '68 ] 'Quodlibet est, est unum,
verum, bonum'.  In that I attempted a sort of transcendental proof
of the existence of Deity -- ie:  that since we cannot but
conceive of unlimited goodness, complete truth, and complete
coherence, [ Cf. the Sufi invocation 'Toward the One -- the
perfection of love, harmony, and beauty -- the only Being -- ' ]
then, by the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness -- ie: 
that that of which we cannot conceive cannot be said to exist [and
hence cannot be said to not-exist, ie:  it is meaningless to speak
of it ] -- such a Being must be said to exist [albeit to 'exist'
within the conceptual context of Kantian transcendental idealism -
- which is to say (Hamlet) -- 'all is [neecessarily ] sicklied o'er
with the pale caste of thought'.

Recall that for Kant, transcendendental idealsm is the given, so
that 'Ding an Sich', are that of which it is meaningless to speak.
("Says Kant, you may think there's a Ding-an-Sich, but it's simply
an epistemologist's shtick."(sa))

If this point is accepted, the demonstration that self-
determination is an inherent right of individuals would seem to
follow easily.

As-it-is-said in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (authored
primarly by Jefferson and Madison, if I'm correct):  "We hold
these truths to be self-evident:  that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness."  (I know of no even comporable, much less finer,
philosophic statement.)

Well, it may not be quite self-evident:

One can say (with Bereshit):  (wo)man is created in the image
(b'tzalem) of G_d.  So , as G_d is (necessarily, 'by definition'
as it were) harmonious, free, coherent, so must man be.
This takes us very much into Spinoza.
It also brings in Aristotle's teleologic notion, that all entities
strive to actualize their essence (and this of course is Maslow
(Abraham Maslow, at Brandeis).  The notion of virtu , what the
Thomists would call essence.
Curiously, Marx comes in too: (well, it should not be surprising
that various great thinkers have expressed the same -- truth, I
should say -- in different -- not merely terminologies, but
conceputal systems ): "Man is born free, but is everywhere in
chains."

I do not know that this point:  that self-determination is an
inherent right of individuals -- can be established without a
theistic premise.

That will take us into science-fiction in imagining, to sketch
conceputal boundaries,  counter-examples.  (And this is one of the
moves in ordinary-language--analysis philosophy.  More
Wittgensteinian than Austin-ian, if I recall.

That is:  imagine that humans came into existence by fiat --
created in flying soup-toureens (which rest of course on Flying
Saucers) by the Invisible Arcturans to replace the dinosaurs, not
even as slaves -- which at least has a bit of dignity; at least we
did star in Exodus (the book) -- , but as Nursury Toys.

, not from Divine Creation 

(as it is said in Sufi Islam, reflecting but adding emotional
colour to the notion of tzim-tzum -- (the Divine is imagined as
saying:) It was for love of Thee that [the Divine delimits itself,
bringing materiality, and humanity, into existence).  The Sufis
also say:  The Divine, the Infinite, created mankind in order
better to know Itself.

Well again:  as the Infinite is 'by definition' 'unum, bonum,
verum' -- harmonious, coherent, good, true -- so must be, as the
ideal, its incarnate manifestation in man.

(and this is most crudely expressed in the Christian notion of G_d
becoming man -- but the Christian error is take this as meaning: 
becoming one invididual man -- where the meaning is -- the Divine
becomes implicit, as a potentiality, as a teleologic end, as
virtue, as ideal -- in (wo)mankind.

And hence self-actualization is the purpose of life, of creation;
and as such it is an inherent right.

Well, I still don't have this Note conceptually clear and clean
enough.                                      

But maybe this is about all I can do for now.

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sa, Mevo Modi'in, 13 April '04 -- 22 Nisan (malkut sh'b' CHESED)
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