Naftali ("Naftul" = "Evasive") Kuntzmacher (Trickster), a member of the extreme right, is going through a hard time ("Extreme right? I've remained in the center, where Berl Katznelson once stood. It's you, including the Likud, who've become an ephemeral left"). A good, pleasant man, educated in his own way, sharp- and quick-tongued, occasionally too much so; the fastest trigger in Judea and Samaria, at least when it comes to responses on every panel and in every interview: pre-neo-Zionist, a public figure, a patriot and a settler.

The revolt of the skullcap-wearers in Hebron and their obedience to the rabbis, the issue of avoiding service in the Israel Defense Forces and the affair of the cursing professor from Bar-Ilan, have all posited him at the center of the public turmoil. But wait a minute: Why "have posited him" and why "recently"? After all, for years he has been positing himself there, in the midst of the public turmoil, maneuvering on the one hand among the Israeli elites in the media, the IDF and the government, and on the other among his friends in his community and in the settlements and the yeshivas, which are the rationale for his public existence.

He has solved the inherent dissonance in his situation by pushing everyone to the margins and portraying himself and his co-religionists as some kind of sane, balanced "center" - a practice that has become his life's ambition and purpose. He always finds this central point by engaging in anachronistic sentimentalizing about some "spirit" that used to hover here, and especially in the IDF, in the 1950s, totally ignoring the issue of the annexation of the territories, a matter which for him is a religion that brooks no compromise. But when he performs on the one hand in military-Sheinkinist-journalistic slang, and on the other with casuistry from the yeshiva, citations and verses from the Torah, our friend always knows how to give it to "extremists on the left and the right," although there is nobody more right-wing than he.