David Wilder, the spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish community, has written an article published by various right-wing Jewish outlets arguing that Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin all met unhappy ends because they surrendered land. And he warns Netanyahu that he is liable to suffer a similar fate if he gives up land to the Palestinians.
In the article — which was published by The Jewish Press, a Brooklyn-based Orthodox weekly, and on the pro-settler Israeli website Arutz Sheva — Wilder writes:
…What then is the punishment of people who remove cities from Israel, abandoning the land, expelling the people, endangering the population?
What happened to them, what was their fate: Begin, the hero of Jewish underground, the leader who destroyed the Iraqi nuclear threat, secluded himself for years following his resignation as Prime Minister, unseen until his dying day. Rabin was assassinated. Olmert, one of the primary initiators of the Gush Katif catastrophe, has undergone numerous trials on charges of corruption, facing disgrace. Katzav, who as President refused to oppose the Gush Katif expulsion, imprisoned following conviction for rape, from the president’s mansion to a jail cell. Ariel Sharon, suffering the worst kind of hell, neither here nor there, not dead, not alive, for the past eight years. Some 8,600 people were expelled from the Gush, a year for every thousand people. And one can only image what he will face when trying to enter the pearly gates of heaven.
Wilder goes on to malign U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry (“the word ‘Kerry’ in Hebrew has a distinct meaning: impurity”) before concluding:
I can only say: Bibi beware. Don’t fall into the potholes left to you by Sharon. And to the others, who can join him, or leave him, can support him or bring him down, your fate is too hanging in the balance. Purify yourselves from the contamination of Kerry. Before Sharon’s miserable fate will almost look good to you.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that a critic has connected Sharon’s illness to his decision to withdraw from Gaza. In 2006, American televangelist Pat Robertson suggested that Sharon’s stroke was divine punishment, a comment for which he later apologized.
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