“It was only going to Ma’ale Levona that I got politicized. Before I didn’t know anything.”—Bat El, 14.
Excerpt from the Girls at War, an article by Elizabeth Rubin for Tablet magazine (the ones in italics are mine):
Bat El told me that she’d been arrested so many times that her parents just send a fax now to the police station instead of coming to pick her up.
They are born into a different reality. A reality for this generation spawned by an ideological plan that unleashed a collective experience of murder and revenge that is now embedded in the communal DNA.
They say it takes one generation to found a new language. These girls are a new language, believing that they belong to the land on which they were born, and sponsored by the government they despise, which pays for their roads and electricity.
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It's an endless cycle of violence. Meaningless death? Not to them.
They don't want to co-exist with the Arabs. And when the government failed to give them what they want, they took the law into their own hand. To them and their community of (illegal) settlers, violence is the only solution.
They're fighting against the system and from the look of things, in a couple of generations, they might win the war.
Shocking, isn't it?
In our institution of higher learning, we have AUKU to, ehem, protect our youths from getting their hands dirty with politics. In Ma'ale Levona high school in the West Bank, settler girls are taught not only of math and science, but also how to be a real man!
Disclaimer: This is not an attempt to justify what's happening in the West Bank nor to glorify the war or the people involved in it. The article is about the reality of what's going on beyond the fence and provide an insight into the mind of the settler girls from Ma'ale Levona and what's motivating them to fight.
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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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Read the article in full - all 8000+ words of it - at Tablet. Photo by Gillian Laub.
Disclosure: the article is written about Jewish people by a Jew for a Jewish magazine.