Since the new mayor, Dr. Aliza Bloch, took over, the city has been relatively quiet. People are happy wit hte progress on many fronts, including general cleanliness, roads, schools, cultural, and whatever other things are going on. The mayor talks regularly about peaceful approaches to communities with dialog rather than approaching issues form a place on conflict and competition... Even the number, and severity, of hafganot has significantly dropped and the city has been relatively quiet for the past 8-9 months or so.
That might all change at this point. The local news has recently been reporting on a number of issues that have caused rumblings, such as the population diversity expected between RBS Daled and Hei, such as some budgeting issues, etc. though nothing has really caused the problems that were supposedly expected to result from those rumblings. But now, with Bloch having removed a caravan used as a shul placed on public ground without permission, it looks like that explosion is on the way.
According to Kikar, the extremists are now waging threats to restart their fights throughout the city of Bet Shemesh as a result of what she did. According to activists from the extremist community, if this is the "order" Bloch has come to do and to overturn our neighborhoods, and destroy our shuls, she can continue doing so and we will put down the order throughout the city as we know how to do.
Threats were explicitly waged that if she continues to fight them in their neighborhood, they will go out and cause a big mess in the secular neighborhoods of the city.
So, it looks like the honeymoon is over.
It will be interesting to see how Bloch approaches this issue from here on out. Until now she has not really worked (at least not publicly) on the issues of their illegal activities such as graffiti and signs and illegal shuls and buildings and has only tried to help them, like all the other neighborhoods, with improving cleanliness, garbage collection, infrastructure improvements, etc. Now that she is taking up the main issue, we wait to see where it goes. Will Dr Bloch find a way to go back to her own approach of dialog and find a way to keep things quiet and have them cooperate, or will she see that as futile and take the more heavy handed approach that generally ignites the city? Or she can choose to ignore it as much as possible and basically give them autonomy to do what they want as long as they dont bother too many other people.
Another factor might just be the onset of summer, the heat frustrates people, boredom of vacation, and perhaps this will all go away quietly at the end of the summer...
------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel ------------------------------------------------------
