Emily's sin

A few weeks before Shlomo Katabi, the outgoing commander of the Judea and Samaria Police District, described the settlers as "the salt of the earth," and the hate glands of hundreds of talkbackers worked overtime, the settler Emily Amrusi committed a far more grievous sin. Amrusi, a former Yesha Council spokeswoman and a resident of the Talmon settlement, dared in her book "Tris" ("Divider") to describe the settlers as ordinary people. Amrusi's settlers, wonder of wonders, were not only settlers, they also went to work, dropped off their children at kindergarten, put the electricity and water bills on the refrigerator with a magnet, and were preoccupied with the vanities of this world: diets, fashion and other "Tel Avivian" matters.

The talented Amrusi's sin was a dual one: Her book expropriated the settlers from the media, which had shaped the settlers' one-sided image among the Israeli public. Her book also humanized them. Amrusi's alter ego in "Tris," Na'ama Shama, was received with total distrust when she exposed the settlers as a varied society with many different opinions. Na'ama - heaven forbid - even formed personal ties with a Palestinian woman from the neighboring village, spent time with her on the Tel Aviv beaches, and discovered that they had a world in common.

In addition to the fact that "Tris" is well written, and that the stories of the community of Al-Rom (in reality Talmon) are required reading for any sociologist, amateur or certified, who claims to know the "settlers," the reactions to the work stir melancholy thoughts. The media, which for years has nurtured prejudice against the settlers, will always measure them by political standards, not as human beings. Their cultural world will also be patently irrelevant to the media, for the most part.

he possibility that the settlers and the Palestinians have something in common, and that the cultural gaps between them may be significantly smaller than those between most Israelis and Palestinians, will be considered baseless in advance.

After all, how many of us have heard about the past longstanding ties between settlers and Palestinians? In Hebron, for example, the media was more interested in clashes than in friendship, commerce or common interests. They totally missed out on the story of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin of Efrat and his special relationship with the leaders of the Palestinian villages nearby. Even Channel 1, in "The True Story," discovered "Dubek" only shortly before his death. Dov Weinstock's son was murdered by the Palestinians, and the Palestinians remained friends with this resident of Alon Shvut.

Many stories have been neglected, like the struggle to save lovely Wadi Fukhin, which has been joined by settlers from the Kfar Etzion Field School and Palestinian organizations, or the battle of the settlers and Palestinians against the construction of the separation fence in the South Hebron Hills, and the settler-Palestinian initiative to build a facility for purifying sewage water in the Nahal Kana region. These have all been pushed to the sidelines, because as someone described it in disappointment - the television cameraman in "Tris" who was looking for "a great story" - "After all, that's something that could happen anywhere."

The settlers are not only settlers. They are mainly flesh and blood. Despite the mutual sense of unfamiliarity between them and some other Israelis, more things unite them than separate them. Those Israelis who patronizingly accuse the settlers of not really knowing their Palestinian neighbors are the ones who have never met a Palestinian; they are the ones who don't bother to know "the other," who grew up with them in the same village, for fear that "the other" will cease being so.