Always ahead of the curve, a few weeks ago, I wrote about the "Other Settlers" of Beitar Elite and Modiin Elite.

The JP just now did a piece entitled "We are not settlers, we are Jews".

It's an interesting article.

My favorite lines are:

(1)
"We are settlers in the same way that the people who live in [the Jerusalem neighborhood of] Ramat Eshkol are settlers," Neckameyer said.

(2)
Her [Gur] only hesitation with the label "settler," she said, is that she doesn't feel like she deserves the title. Her life is not at risk as are those of the settlers in Hebron, she said.

(3)
"I do feel that I am building Israel and protecting Jerusalem and the road to Hebron," he said. Pindrus added that if that meant he was a settler, "then you can call me one."

(4)
"The Green Line is a non-Torah concept invented by British mapmakers and has been adopted as some kind of a theological principle. There is no such thing. There is all of Eretz Israel and we have a right to every part it," said Betar Illit resident Aryeh Zelasko.

(4)
"The Torah community doesn't see itself as defined by the political fantasies of the nonreligious community," he said.

(5)
"We are not settlers. We are Jews, if anything, reclaiming that which is ours. You do not talk about resettling your home," Zelasko said.



The only quote that bothered me was:
"We are part of the [settlement area] geographically, but politically we are not," Gur said. "We have no connection to [nearby] Efrat or any of the other settlements."


And that bothers me, because it is a mistake on everyone's part that neither of the communities feel they have have connections to one another. That was the mistake we were supposed to have learned from the Expulsion.