D'var Israel 

Shabbat shalom everyone שבת שלום לכולם

A lot of stuff has been going on since the last time we’ve seen you, both of us were sick, but now we are all good. Well, kind of, I still have a robotic leg.
But overall, we are good, and we hope you are too.

We are sure that a lot of you heard about the latest news about Naama Issachar, an Israeli- American citizen who made an Aliyah by herself at the age of 16.
Naama served at the army and then did what a lot of Israelis do, and went on her big trip to the far east in order to start her new life as a “real” Israeli.
She finished her trip in India and from there she went on a flight to Israel that had one stop at Moskva.
When she got to the airport in Moscow, they found 7 grams of weed in her backpack and she was accused with dealing drugs- what they consider to be a big crime in Russia, and because of that she was sentenced for a long jail time of 7 years. Different news reported about the bad conditions that Naama was living in, and also reported about the awful treatment she was getting.
Naama’s mom didn’t stop fighting in order to release her, which caused a lot of noise in Israel and a lot of comments saying things like how Naama is the daughter of all of us and how we should bring her back home.
Naama’s mom met with Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu in order to release her. And on January 29 Putin signed on an agreement that said that Israel is giving some of its land from the old city of Jerusalem to the Russian government in order to release Naama. Bibi then decided to go to Moskva with special efforts in order to meet with Naama, then went back to Israel with her and her mother on the Prime minister’s plane.

As much as everyone in Israel wanted Naama back at home, most people thought the price of bringing her back was too much. And the whole situation brought up a lot of moral questions: Why did she get the honor of flying on the prime minister’s plane?
Is it morally right for the prime minister to defend a citizen that hasn't fully proved her innocence?
Was all this effort put in this scenario only to create a good story for the news right before the elections? Or is it all because Naama’s uncle is one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s drivers?
Isn’t giving parts of the land of Jerusalem is too much only to release an ordinary person that’s in jail?
And the biggest question of all is- why do Naama deserve all of this special treatment just because of an unfortunate situation when there are more Israelis that have been also kept in other countries for years now for the same reasons, and especially- when we still have a lot of citizens that were locked up in enemy’s territories while they served as soldiers in the IDF to protect Israel? Why is Naama “more important” than all of these people?

This story is a hard one, but it was still very important for us to bring it to you guys.
On one hand, we have this girl, who came to Israel to be a lone soldier and got into an unfortunate situation and was clearly not dealing drugs, especially since the only reason she even got to Moskva was because of a stop at her flight. She was definitely sentenced too heavily and wasn’t treated right.
But on the other hand, why her? And why paying such a big price on this ordinary girl?

But the bigger picture that really made us want to talk about this today is how much the peer pressure that was put on the government really affected it.
At the end of the day- everyone wanted Naama back at home, and because of that everyone posted about it, commented about it, and basically made a lot of noise around it- making this to allegedly seem like one of the biggest issues that the state of Israel has, when it’s clearly isn’t.
But from this huge pressure that was being put on the government from the people of Israel, the government decided to listen, and do it. Which sounds good, but is it really good when the government didn’t know how to put a stop on this when it blew out of proportions?

Is this the moment when we realize the problematic state that three elections in a year have brought us to? Is this where we are going all because of non- stopping elections?
We truly think this is when we start to experience the results of a government that couldn’t function for over a year because it wasn’t properly chosen and we want to ask you- what do you think?

Toda raba and Shabbat Shalom.