Three thousand years ago, 12 men, messengers of Moses, arrived in the land. They came to explore the land, to see how it was being conquered for the first time. They return to the desert and tell the Israelites hair-raising horror stories, about terrorists blowing themselves up on buses, about knives that take lives, about... well, you get the idea. They conclude their words with the sentence "And we were in our eyes as grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes." The Bible commentators explain that, when the people of the land felt that the spies were grasshoppers in their own eyes - that is how they viewed them too.
Today I got spit on, a "sheep for the slaughter" spit, a spit after which you turn around and keep walking, casually wiping away the nauseating saliva, a spit of leftist auto-anti-Semitic fate.
I walked to the Western Wall through the Jewish Quarter. When I left the Western Wall, I hesitated whether to go through the Nablus Gate or the Jaffa Gate. When I realized that the hesitation was coming from fear, I immediately decided to go through the Nablus Gate. Now imagine a guy wearing a hat and suit walking down Market Street at five in the evening, surrounded by a group of tourists chattering in some German language, and I walk and look.
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At the beginning of the journey, an ultra-Orthodox guy caught up with me and asked me to go together. I told him there was no problem, but I wasn't running away from my own house. He ran away from there. II started walking.
It was ten long and weighty minutes, ten minutes in which I searched around for Jews, trying to understand why they were afraid to walk in their eternal home, why they didn't understand that when we look at ourselves as grasshoppers, not only is that how the scum of humanity look at us - but that's how we really are.
Twenty meters before the turn inside the gate, a young boy/terrorist, about 13 years old, passed by me, without batting an eyelid, spat in my face and kept walking. I knew it was not worth stirring up a commotion - after all, there were ten police officers standing behind me who would have arrested me for "harming a minor" - but inside I was furious with you, the masses of Beit Yisrael, the writers of comments on the Prime Minister's Facebook and the likes on the "Ahronovich Home" pages. You abandoned Jerusalem, you are the ones who prefer to prolong the road and not show a screaming Jewish presence in the Arab market, it is your fault that Jerusalem looks the way it does.
And we will be seen as people who are ready to protect themselves and their children, and so we will be.
