The New Prisoners of Zion

"They are now being asked to relinquish these accomplishments for the greater good." - Israeli Foreign Ministy press release on the Expulsion

"All for the Greater Good." - motto inscribed over the entrance of a Soviet Gulag

The New Prisoners of Zion are not in Russian jails anymore. They do not sit in cells in the Lubyanka or work in the Soviet gulags in Omsk, Archangelsk or Vorkuta. The New Prisoners of Zion are not imprisoned in foreign lands for wishing to reach Zion but in Zion itself for wishing to hold on to it, against the will of the Mapai inheritors of the philosophy and tactics of the USSR.

Vitaly Vovnoboy, who had himself come out of the USSR was arrested for the crime of owning a website that encouraged non-violent civil disobedience. Likud Party forms meant to be filed with the purpose of removing Sharon from the leadership of the Likud Party were confiscated from him and returned only after the deadline for submitting them had passed. 15 of the former Prisoners of Zion, the Asirei Zion, who had fought to reach Israel from behind the Iron Curtain, appealed on behalf of a man who had become one of Israel's New Prisoners of Zion.

The New Prisoners of Zion are an odd group. From old men to fourteen year old girls, some religious and some secular, the one thing they have in common is their opposition to a government determined to expell thousands of Jews from their homes and land and to tolerate utterly no opposition to its decrees.

In 1929, the USSR initiated the process of collectivization which removed the peasants from their land and resettled them on Kolhozes, collective farms. The peasants resisted burning their crops and destroying their tools. Troops went sent to take them, some were shot, others forcibly expelled and resettled on the new collective farms with slogans of building 'A New Socialist Future.'

Stalin's, 'New Socialist Future' was built in Siberia where the expelled farmers were sent. Sharon's 'New Socialist Future' is meant to be built in the Negev. One wasteland is exchanged for another. Blistering desert for frozen tundra. The principle though is the same and resistance to both were brutally crushed. To both Stalin and Stalin, the peasants and settlers represented an obstructive force, strongly religious and nationalistic as well as independent, they had to be crushed to make way for the stability of their regimes.

The New Prisoners of Zion, like the old, are being ground under the remorseless gears of the same socialist systems which are antitethical to democracy and freedom and can only rule through tyranny and the brute suppression of dissent. But the key to all prisons is held not by Stalin or Sharon but by the one above and a people can only be tyrannized for so long. The old Prisoners of Zion knew it and the New Prisoners of Zion know it too.