Time seems to have stopped a queen on Mount Hebron.
I was driving there this week, on the road leading from Kiryat Arba to Maon, and something in my heart was a little pinched: Jewish growth is happening here too slowly.
The road is the same, narrow and winding road that I still remember as a girl more than 20 years ago.
While the rest of the settlement areas in Gush Etzion, Binyamin and Samaria flourished - Mount Hebron was left a little behind.
It is not easy to live on Mount Hebron. To the north lies Jerusalem, the capital, too far to be the great city of the settlements there, and to the south, the capital of the Negev, Beer Sheva, lies in the valley, while Mount Hebron rises to heights. Residents are complaining about the terrible congestion at the Meitar checkpoint, their main transportation artery to the south, which adds to the shaky road infrastructure and shaky neighborhood relations with the Arabs as well. Mount Hebron tells the story of an intertwined periphery and pioneering, and a country that has simply abandoned an entire region of land that so desperately needs it.
European countries are also pouring into this cauldron, and as if the challenges of the residents are not enough. For more than two years, there has been an aggressive and dirty campaign against Israel, focusing on Mount Hebron. The campaign seeks to blacken the face of the entire State of Israel, but the immediate fire from the campaign is absorbed by IDF soldiers and residents, who are at the forefront. "We are simple people," said Sarah Hagar, a resident of Abigail. Sarah suffers from constant harassment by Arabs and anarchists on the left, who come to the houses every Saturday, and terrorism that threatens her home. A few days ago, Arabs set fire to tires and blocked the road leading to Abigail, the only access artery to the settlement. Photos, only dry reporting on WhatsApp.
Sarah and her friends are fighting reluctantly in a war they did not choose. They face the millions of European governments, the Palestinian Authority and left-wing organizations, as well as the injustice inflicted on them by the High Court, the indifferent indifferent media, and of course the Arabs who surround their communities with strangulation rings of illegal construction, on fire and on land. A country, while digging smuggling roads in the mountains through which they smuggle cars and stolen goods in alarming amounts. They play with life there, on Mount Hebron, and the State of Israel does not care. It is too far, it is too wild, it does not move anyone.
During a visit there this week, the residents and young council representatives asked that we help them in the face of the public suffocation that closes in on them.
In their heads still resounded the harsh images of Simchat Torah, of the violence against Arabs living in one of the villages.
The far-left organizations did not wait a moment and did not spare a euro and produced horrific billboards shouting with hypocrisy and impudence that "it is time to stop the settler violence."
Their representatives in the Knesset even convened an urgent and populist discussion in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, deliberately ignoring the full picture of a well-oiled campaign and incessant terrorism.
The inhabitants of Mount Hebron are the flesh of our flesh.
Where the country is abandoned and the whole world attacks them, it would be good for us, the citizens, to reach out to them.
