The recent events in Neve Daniel and Hevron are very painful ones for a number of reasons.

Last week, a small organic farm and stable ("Sde Boaz"), on which a small house had been built, was razed by the Israeli army and police. The house was indeed built without permits and one could technically make a legal case for taking it down. However, the action raises a number of important questions. First, one of Sharon's central arguments for disengagement had been that it would help secure settlement blocs in Yehudah and Shomron. The settlement bloc around which there is greatest consensus is Gush Etzion. Sde Boaz is at the epicenter of Gush Etzion, surrounded by Jewish towns and at its highest and perhaps most strategic spot. If any location in any settlement bloc at all were to remain in Israeli hands, it would be Sde Boaz. Furthermore, it happens that the area around Sde Boaz has recently begun to be cultivated illegally by Arabs for the sole purpose of making subsequent unfounded claims on the land. The police claim they are "powerless" to stop it. Finally, in removing a bunch of protesting kids from the area in order to destroy it, police used pepper spray and tear gas in cramped closed quarters and beat up some kids in a vicious and gratuitous way. (An aside: the soldiers sent out there are generally kid-next-door types who got stuck with a lousy job and the cops are just low-class losers. But the "Yasamnikim" are largely anti-semitic Russian goyim; the kids relate to them as you would to any goons for hire.)

As for the standoff in Hevron, it's important to know the facts. Twelve Jewish families are being evicted from homes they have salvaged and refurbished in what was once known as the "shuk ha-sitonai" and is now called Mitzpe Shalhevet. The land in question was last owned by Kollel Sefaradim Magen Avot and fell into Arab hands after the Arabs massacred the Jews of Hevron in 1929. It was then taken over by the Jordanian custodian of abandoned property. There is some dispute about whether it then reverted to the original owners, who have asked the Jewish community of Hevron to see to it that it is rented to Jews, or if it is to be administered by the Israeli custodian of abandoned property. A judicial committee ruled for the latter and recommended that the custodian rent the property to Jews. The Defense Ministry, as recently as a few weeks ago, agreed with this recommendation. AG Mazuz has decided not to accept the recommendation and to throw the current residents out "in order that they not be rewarded for having moved in without permission". The Jewish community had agreed that, to abide by the AG's decision, the current residents would move out and other Jews would move in instead in an orderly fashion. The AG refused and all hell has broken out.

One cannot help but note the mean-spiritedness of both these actions by the government and wonder to whose political advantage all this is. But there is something much sadder about this and many related events. There are hundreds of teenagers who have been turned into anarchists. I mean this quite literally. Kids from nice middle-class frum homes (many of them kids of Olim from the U.S.) have dropped out of high school, grown wild peyos ("not that there's anything wrong with that"), and now bop around aimlessly with guitars in between looking for fights with the army. This is not healthy. These kids have been shattered by the betrayal of every organization in this country that is meant to represent law and order. Individually, they are lost souls crying out for help. Collectively, they are dangerous. Unfortunately, the government is doing everything possible to further alienate them.

We are headed for a big bad explosion.