Sorry if I annoyed you...

... but I'd be lying if I said it was entirely unintentional.

Clearly there are a lot of you out there who may not know me well enough, and a few who really should know me well enough by now... so let me state a few things for the record:

I am a Jew.

I am a Zionist.

I am religiously observant.

I am a settler... but then, so are those who live in Beer Sheva, Kiryat Gat, Petach Tikva... and Tel Aviv.

I am a bleeding heart liberal when it comes to social welfare and civil rights.

I am unapologetically conservative on homeland security and foreign relations.

I believe there is no such thing as quasi-Zionism.  Either Jews have a right to live here or they don't.    Our right to live in Tel Aviv and Haifa is based on our claim to Jerusalem and Hevron.   If anything, our claim to the latter is much stronger than to the former.

I view an attack on any Israeli as an attack on all Israelis.  Once upon a time this was the cornerstone of our national defense policy.

I believe that there is no such thing as acceptable casualties inflicted by an enemy during peacetime.  If your knee-jerk response to that statement was to point out that we aren't at peace... then why aren't we at war?  And if we aren't at war, why are our 'peace partners' still shooting at us? 

I believe that a government that thinks that any attacks on its civilian population and upon it's national sovereignty can be considered 'acceptable' ... and which continues to talk peace with those who are attacking us... must be replaced.   Negotiating terms with someone who is still attacking you doesn't lead to peace.  It leads to surrender.

I believe that when any or all of the mainstream media in a country admits to engaging in deliberate collusion with the ruling government to push forward a pre-agreed upon agenda (including not reporting - or at least drastically underreporting - attacks on 'some' Israelis), they should be discredited and replaced from the ground up by a legitimate fourth estate whom we can trust to serve as a watchdog... not a lapdog.

I believe that any citizen of a country who sits quietly by while any other citizen is targeted by foreign military forces or by domestic governmental abuse, and rationalizes it because the victims are not part of the 'mainstream consensus', has confused mainstream consensus with oligarchy.

We've all heard the rumors about the silent majority of Arabs who want peace with Israel (or at least aren't actively in favor of annihilating us).  But what good do they do us if they remain silent?  I know it sounds trite, but if they aren't part of the solution they are part of the problem.  The same can be said of our side.  Even if the majority of Tel Avivis (and those who make up the geographic and gravitational center of the country) are personally enraged by the relentless attacks on Israel's periphery (a statistic I'm certainly not ready to concede), they are enabling the attacks to continue with their collective silence.   

Our government doesn't look to Sderot or Kiryat Shmonah or even Jerusalem when making national policy decisions  Like it or not, they look to where the majority of the people live; Gush Dan (Tel Aviv and her environs).  With that power comes added responsibility (and the occasional unfair generalization). 

When Gush Dan takes to the streets in sufficiently large numbers, the government listens.  When you stay in your cafes sipping lattes, they hear your silence too.  Loud and clear.

I'd like to end here, but since some of you took my post personally I suppose I should point out what should have been obvious:

If you were annoyed or offended by my generalization about those who sit drinking lattes on Shenkin while rockets fall on Sderot and bombs blow up near Efrat, you should ask yourselves whether I was really talking about you.

If you've gone to demonstrations against the government's (and media's) willingness to accept casualties along Israel's periphery while it continues to negotiate 'peace' with those inflicting the casualties... if you've written letters to the editor, lobbied any of your Knesset members, posted to your blog, commented on other people's blogs... anything at all to lend your voice to a real consensus against inaction and silence in the face of open attacks against Israeli citizens and Israeli sovereignty... well then, obviously I wasn't talking about you, and you have no reason in the world to be offended.  Well done.

But if you haven't done anything to let the government and media (and the world at large) know how you feel, yet you somehow found the time to put [electronic] pen to [virtual] paper in annoyance, protest or indignation when you saw some idiot in Gush Etzion taking a poke at the apathetic tsfonim drinking lattes on Shenkin... well, maybe it was you I was talking about after all.  Offense intended.