Likud cabinet ministers discovered this week, not for the first time, that anyone who makes deals with settlers in the territories and wants their votes in the primaries, will meet them in demonstrations outside his home.

Anyone who promises to support the law to legalize settlements retroactively on land privately owned by Palestinians to prevent the demolition of the houses – and then votes against it, doesn’t return from abroad to the Knesset plenum or flees from it – shouldn’t wonder why politics makes people bilious.

And anyone who expends his days and nights, his energy and health in sincere attempts to find a considerate and humane solution to the settlers’ distress, finds himself in the position Minister without Portfolio Benny Begin found himself in this week at the State Control Committee. He sat there next to National Union MK Yaakov “Ketzeleh” Katz who, with typical crudeness, said to him: “You are destroying young souls. You are acting maliciously, evilly, like someone from Sodom.” At least he didn’t call Begin a Nazi.

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Begin, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and Michael Eitan, the minister for the improvement of government services, are the three Likud ministers who made it clear from the outset that the retroactive legalization law was illegal and immoral, with disastrous implications both for the state and the settlements. These men showed that they apparently did not conform to the criterion of lovers of the land of Israel.

For more, go to Haaretz.com

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