A Brookline man joins the Gaza protest :
In his two weeks in Israel, Andrew Gold has camped out at rightist demonstrations, has been caught twice trying to slip into the Gaza Strip, and has duped a soldier at a checkpoint with fake identification papers. Yesterday, the 33-year-old resident of Brookline was thrown out of this settlement, as were other opponents of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and residents of Neve Dekalim, after a wrenching standoff at the community’s most important synagogue.
Gold, a religious Jew who works as an Internet consultant, had been reading with dread for months about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza and the northern West Bank. Gold attended small protests in Boston and, he said, he felt cut off from the situation in Israel, which he had visited several times. ”When it became clear the government was going to go through with it, I decided I had to stand with my people and try to prevent it,” Gold said in an interview outside the synagogue, shortly before troops charged in and then dragged hundreds of protesters away from the site….
Gold says he felt even then that the rallies, organized by the settler leadership, were feel-good affairs, with prayers and speeches, but with no action that could dislodge the government from its plan.”All these rallies were media events. The leadership in retrospect let these people down. They could have mobilized better for a real battle against the program,” said Gold, who grew up as a secular Jew but who became observant. He said protesters should have trained to lie in streets to block troops evacuating settlers.
I don’t know Andrew Gold, but he and I live in the same town, where the large Jewish community is generally pro-Israel but split over specific policies, including the Gaza disengagement. That he would go to Israel to sneak into Gaza in order to support right-wing settlers doesn’t surprise me, but it does illustrate the disruptive role of both outside ideologues and of born-again religiosity.