Rabbi F writes from Israel:
Amen, Vox, right on, anytime you’re in the area come up and see us. Now write on the plight of the refugees, who are being treated with incredible cruelty in order to destroy their faith and communal support and cut their birthrate along with the rest of the God-fearing Israelis. The ruling clique is afraid that we will outnumber them in a few years and take over..
Democracy can sure be a bitch when those nasty demographics start to come into play. This is one element of the anti-settler action that I had not really considered before, but it makes sense that the secular Jews, who are as reproductively challenged as secular Americans, would have reason to be very worried about the birthrate of religious Jews as well as Israeli Arabs.
In any event, it makes it clear that to see this as merely Jew-on-Jew is not correct, that there are serious divisions in the Jewish world just as there are in Blue-Grey or Red-Blue America.