Someone asked me why I stopped going to synagogue: had I stopped being religious? No, they did. After the rabbis kept appearances during Gush Katif eviction, I don’t see them as religious. They fear government, not God. They declared Rebbe Schneerson – Messiah but abandoned his fundamental injunction: no part of the land of Israel could be ceded. Their synagogues, the dens of thieves, are not worth frequenting.

Is the fuss about land? A piece of desert in Gaza, not critically important by biblical or national standards? Not at all. The issue is about Jewish people. The government that sends thousands of Jews to stake the land based on nationalist aspirations, and then evicts them, has lost the claim of Jewishness. Medieval kings similarly invited the Jews to their lands to advance trade, and evicted us on occasion, robbing on the way. Israeli government acted no differently, and the rabbis who did not call on the hundreds of thousands of religious Jews to fight, lost the title of religious teachers.