Naomi Ragen

I have an Arab village a five minute walk across a wadi from my home, which is a ten minute drive from the heart of Jerusalem. This village is called Beit Iksa. During the Six Day War, the villagers fled. Moshe Dayan begged them to come back, and they did. Beit Iksa is now situated between two Jewish neighborhoods, Ramot and Mevasseret, each with 50,000 or more Jews. It is also near one of Jerusalem's major highways. While it was well known that villagers were involved in hundreds of break-ins and thefts in both Ramot and Mevasseret, our police did nothing. During the Intifada, villagers regularly walked across the wadi and up the steps past my home to work in construction jobs in Ramot and elsewhere. This, even after terrorists were found with suicide belts in Ramot, and admitted they were planning to blow up a synagogue and a bus.

The police never checked these workers, despite repeated phone calls and warnings. During the Oslo days, when we were marking villages as area A (completely under the control of the Palestinian Authority and its thugs) and area B (under the security control of the Israeli army), Beit Iksa became a "B". Now Haaretz reports that the security fence around Jerusalem is slated to be between Ramot and Beit Iksa. What this means is that instead of fencing off Beit Iksa from terrorist infiltrations, they have made Ramot (and probably Mevasseret) the new border with the Hamas, now slated to move into Beit Iksa. In a tour of the area, Benjamin Netanyahu said it was outrageous. When he entered Beit Iksa, there were already armed Palestinian guards waiting for him. Ehud Olmert said clearly yesterday: "We are not changing the fence." And so, area B now becomes Area A, without discussion or protest, and two peaceful communities of thousands of Jews are sitting with Hamas on their doorstep. And for those of you who have hopes that our good relations with Beit Iksa will prevent this, I have some other news: In the elections, Beit Iksa voted one-hundred percent for Hamas.

Please understand what I am telling you. If Mr. Olmert is elected, we Jews of Jerusalem are going to have to move. And so the perfidy begins, with no one to even understand how it is happening. It creeps along slowly, and gently, without much fanfare. Remember what I am telling you — in the future don’t say you didn’t know about it. I am going to make an effort to organize my community against this. But I'm just one person, and frankly I'm tired. I'm tired of fighting the people who are running this country into the ground. I'm tired of one wrong decision following another at a disastrous pace and no one ever paying the price for it. Now that everything that opponents of the disengagement said has come true, where are those responsible? I'll tell you. They are making the decisions for the next disaster in-the-making. What I'm wondering though, is how many bad decisions can we make and still survive.

For those of you outside the country, if you'd like to discuss this with the Israeli government, such as it is, I have no doubt you can Google some addresses. I wish I had the heart to do it for you, but you know what, I just don't feel up to it today.
And so, this is how we turn Jerusalem into a Hamas stronghold.

Naomi Ragen is a novelist living in Jerusalem.