Run, run, run as fast as you can.

Run, run, run as fast as you can.
You’ll never catch me I’m the gingerbread man.

This would seem to be a suitable song for the Israel Police force. Tasked with enforcing the government’s incomprehensible Corona virus regulations they are going to be faced by any number of gingerbread men.

The police failed to catch more than a thousand Hasidic gingerbread men who left for Uman after both the Ukrainian and Israeli governments had asked them not to travel because of the pandemic. They are now evading capture at the Ukrainian-Belarusian border. Dancing, singing, and praying, they are trying to break both civil and religious law.

Ukraine’s Civil law has closed the border due to coronavirus. To protect its citizens, Ukrainian authorities will not admit these possible virus carriers.

Religious law states that the exact place of Moses’ grave must remain unknown, to avoid any suggestion of idolatry. But these gingerbread men are happy to pray at the tomb of their idol, Rabbi Nachman, the founder of the Bratslav Hasidic movement.

A few months ago, gingerbread men from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party did not run fast enough and were caught at polling stations handing out charms and candles that promised protection against the coronavirus. They were fined NIS 7,500 by the Central Elections Committee, a paltry sum equivalent to a few packets of gingerbread biscuits.

The gingerbread men who live in Gaza and the West Bank are not living up to their namesakes’ ideals and have been caught flat-footed by the changing Arab world. The once axiomatic avoidance of any form of contact, let alone normalisation, with the Jewish state has been swept aside by the historic agreements between Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. Let the gingerbread Palestinians try and run from this.

A long-standing issue for the many ignorant anti-Semites in some Western countries is the refugee hoax. The Palestinian gingerbread men ran from Palestine and some are now full citizens of the countries in which they are living today. They are not refugees, but third or even fourth generation descendants of the gingerbread men who ran from pre-state Israel. They have no actual connection to Palestine. But the gingerbread men who run the BDS campaigns refuse to catch on.

I, myself, am a third generation descendant of refugees. My grandparents were forced to run from Czarist Russia and found refuge in England. This hardly gives me a Right of Return to present day Russia or the right to look for the ‘small field’ that my Kleinfeld family must have owned.

But, back to our Police trying to catch our quick-thinking Israeli gingerbread men.
Policeman: You’re more than 1 kilometre from your home.
Sorry, officer, I’m ‘Providing essential treatment or care for animals.’
But you don’t have an animal.
I have a dog, but it ran away.

Sorry, officer, I’m ‘Travelling to a demonstration.’
But there is no demonstration.
There is now, I say, as I pull out a banner – I Protest.

Sorry, officer, I’m ‘Obtaining medical, psychological or complementary care.’
But there is nothing here but a house of ill-repute.
I have nothing to add to my statement..

Sorry, officer, I’m ‘Helping someone in distress.’
But there is no-one here.
I’m here and in distress and please see my last response.

As Prime Minister Netanyahu tries to run from the virus and tells us that ‘there may be no choice’ but to tighten the lock-down, he should remember the words of the gingerbread man.

Run, run, run as fast as you can.
You’ll never catch me I’m the gingerbread man.

And a Shanna Tova to all my readers.