Dear Settlers --
"Dear" in the most literal sense.
At long last it must be spelled out, without hypocritical pity, without "if" and "but".
We have paid billions of shekels in order to settle you in the Gaza Strip. We have paid billions to keep you there, and most of you have lived there at our expense. We paid billions to defend you, and dozens of soldiers, male and female, lost their lives doing this. Now we are paying billions (Eight? Ten? Twelve?) to get you out of there and pay you generous compensation.
But all this is not enough. Again you are shouting. Again you are being robbed. Again we owe you much, much more. Whole stretches of the country, preferably on the sea-shore, to be especially reserved for you, so that you can resettle "as whole communities". So that you can live separately. So that you can have your own separate schools. So that you can draw government salaries as employees of the local council, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Defense.
I don't know whether the Guinness Book of Records awards a title for champions of impertinence, cheek, impudence - in short, good old Jewish chutzpah. If so, you should win it hands down. In the past we only owed each of you a luxury villa for next to nothing, as well as a source of livelihood, land and water, now it seems we owe you everything. It is your right to help yourselves from the money needed for the sick, the elderly, the handicapped, the children, the unemployed. Because you are the best of the best. Because you are holding on to the beard of the Messiah. Because you were personally chosen by God.
I might have some sympathy for your plight, if you had uttered one word of compassion for the inhabitants of the 1500 Palestinian homes that were destroyed because of you, a greater number than all the homes of the settlers that are being destroyed now. If you had expressed any compassion for the children that were evicted from their homes within half an hour, without compensation, without hotels and psychologists. For the thousands of trees uprooted in order to supply you with "security".
As the good Rabbi Hillel said 2000 years ago, when he saw the skull floating down the river: "Because you have drowned others, you were drowned…"
And please remember: the bill is not being paid by "the State", an anonymous body, but by me and the Israeli readers of this column, out of our own pockets.