Pride and Bitterness

Love here was never gentle. It’s thorny, sharp, a feeling that wraps itself around your guts, not your heart. It doesn’t bloom in bouquets; it grows like a weed, choking the roots until the soil is barren. Children barely learn to walk, and their hearts are already armored with bitterness. They’re lulled to sleep with prayers, one hand on the Tanach and the other near the holster, waiting for fear to turn into a stone.

There’s something sick in how we teach our children. They’re born with the promise of sharing bread and respecting the elders, but they quickly learn that those who reach out first lose. They throw stones like they greet the day. And no, it’s not their fault. Who can blame them when they’re shown that love here is designed to hurt? A twisted affection watered by hate dressed up as devotion.

Of course, not everyone wearing a Kipah and living in settlements is an extremist. True enough. Many want a place to raise their kids and to recite their prayers in peace. But how do we ignore the fact that it’s precisely from there that the purest poison flows? It’s from there that masked men emerge, protected by the night and a sense of impunity, setting houses on fire in Jit, torching cars, smashing bones as quickly as they break the silence of dawn. Rasheed Seda, 23 years old, is reduced to another statistic in the endless string of Thursdays in a land where love is mistaken for possession and violence.

Netanyahu, Herzog, Gallant—all of them, with their canned condemnations as hollow as the eyes of those who’ve long grown used to seeing the worst of themselves in the mirror. They denounce with one hand and soothe with the other. They call the extremists a “minority,” as if they weren’t the ones nurturing this rage masked as piety. As if it isn’t the government itself planting the seeds of hate and then feigning shock when they harvest destruction.

Jit was just another twisted chapter in this grotesque saga. Settlers attacking, setting lives ablaze, with the tacit blessing of a system that refuses to crack down, letting them grow like weeds while the leaders pat their backs and whisper promises of “investigations.” But everyone knows justice here is a sick joke. A few extremists get arrested for the show while the cycle of violence grinds on. And who pays the price? Not the leaders, not the Kipah-wearing men waving flags like whips. It’s the ordinary people who want to live in peace but are pushed to pick a side, even when all sides reek of gunpowder.

That’s what it’s all about in the end. A land that promised love but delivers hate in daily