My family that is still in America is worried that I’m going to be stabbed any day now. Maybe I will, but I doubt it. The general reflex when attack waves happen is to clamp down. Arab workers are no longer allowed in my town. That is really bad timing because the community pool just started undergoing renovations, and then the stabbings started, so now the pool is unusable and won’t be finished any time soon because Arab workers may not enter.
The local butcher, Basar HaShomron, is looking for Jews to replace its own Arab workers.
This is when the nationalists start coming out of the woodwork and accusing anyone who uses Arab labor of being a self-hating Jew. And endangering the community.
I shop at the Arabs. There’s a village called Nabi Elias (Eliyahu HaNavi in Arabic) that has little hole in the wall shops of vegetables, eggs, meat, a little 7-11 type Arab Kwik-E-Mart. I don’t buy the meat obviously, but we get eggs and olive oil there, mainly. Sometimes vegetables, though I haven’t lately because of Shmitah and I don’t know where they come from exactly.
Beyond the money-saving, I shop at Nabi Elias on principle. The more business between Jews and Arabs, the less stabbings and attacks in general. This is not the inane Shimon Peres theory that if you give them luxury they stop attacking. In other words if you take money from Jewish taxpayers and give it to an Arab government, everyone will be happy. No no. No peace results from one government giving money to another government. Shopping at the Arabs is based on the common sense theory that business owners want to make as much money as possible, and therefore will protect their businesses and customers from attack.
There are no rock attacks or shooting attacks in the area of the Nabi Elias market because if some stupid Arab kid dares throw a rock at passing cars in the vicinity of shop owners looking for customers, the shop owners will beat the snot out of the kid for ruining business. The rock attacks usually take place around Azun, or between Azun and Nabi Elias on the stretch of road with nothing on it.
So Thursday I was coming back from a meeting in Herzliya and decided to go shopping for eggs. I get 120 eggs at a time for 80 shekels. That’s 66 agorot an egg, because there is no State supervision on them, no minimum price controls to support egg farmers, and no sales tax. Eggs stamped by the State cost a shekel and a half usually, more than twice what I pay. And I eat between 3 and 5 whole eggs a day, so it’s not trivial. I also got olive oil, which is much more hearty than the industrialized Jewish stuff and 33% cheaper.
That’s the usual. Thursday I decided to get something extra. I bought a live chicken and had the guy put it in a box for me. Then I drove home and put it on the balcony. Then I quickly did a rerun of hilchos shechita in the שמלה חדשה, prepared my knife, checked it, got some dirt, shechted the chicken, defeathered it and gutted it, washed it and salted it, and we had chicken soup for Shabbat.
I’ve had my knife sitting in my drawer for years and finally decided to use it. My girls got to see a real shechita and pluck some feathers, and my wife got to do the mitzva of כיסוי דם, covering the blood with earth, for the first time.
Back to the Arab point, a good way to reduce attacks is to promote business. Where there is business, there are less attacks. Not that attacks and murders have not happened around joint Arab/Jewish business, but most happen in no-man’s land where there is no trade going on.
Therefore, just empirically, a good solution to lessening attacks is to buy Arab. It’s understandable if this makes you scared or uncomfortable, and I don’t mean or recommend going over to Shechem and painting the refugee camp red. Within reason. More importantly, the State, both local and national, needs to loosen restrictions against Arab labor, not tighten. If you object to that, then at least the State should get rid of welfare and minimum wage so Jews will do these jobs instead, but the state makes that impossible for Jews so Arabs must be hired instead.
Ultimately, Jews and Arabs should be allowed to build and settle wherever they want and trade and exchange between each other without interference, so that if I wanted to, I could buy land or real estate in Azun, and some Arab in Azun could buy real estate in Karnei Shomron.
The Jewish Libertarian 
BTW, I would like to suggest that “foreign worship” ie. worship even of HaShem which is unacceptable, is a better translation than idolatry.
I think I forgot a part of a sentence…
We are not allowed to make it easy for goyim to live in Eretz Yisrael, as it is written לא תחנם. This is the same neg. commandment which prohibits us from selling land, selling homes, and even renting structures for residences to stam goyim.
The Chief Rabbinate this year finally dealt with this issue for the recent shemitah’s “heter mekhirah” (which I do not hold by), when they “made” a ger toshav, to whom they could sell the Land (according to the opinion of the RaAvad, and not the Ramba”m).
We are not aloud to
…as it is written לא תחנם. See Mishneh Torah, Hil. A”Z (he never used the term Aku”m; it’s Xian censorship) 10:1-9.
Remember that the Ramba”m here means stam goy, not what the West wants to call an A”Z (the Tur, Beth Yosef, and [uncensored] Ba”Ch all concur).
Before I am accused of “picking and choosing” sources, please find some which refute my statements.
The Rambam is dealing with idol worshippers there. Muslims are not idol worshippers according to any Rishon. Asking for a source that permits business with non Jews is like asking for a source that the letter א appears in the Torah. Much of Halacha has to do with business dealings with non Jews. But you want something specific. Here. Gemara Brachos 23B, where we learn כיבוד אב ואם from a business transaction with a goy. A goy named Dama ben Netinah has a ישפה stone that the Jews need. They agree on a high price but Dama won’t sell it because his father is sleeping on the box that contains the stone and he doesn’t want to wake up his father. His reward is that his cow gives birth to a Parah Adumah and he, the goy, sells it to the Jews for even more than he would have sold the ישפה. Here’s the Agadeta. According to your values, the Rabbis that wanted to buy the ישפה and who did buy the פרה אדומה are sinners.
אמר רבי חזקיה גוי אשקלוני היה וראש פטרבולי היה, ואבן שישב אביו עליה לא ישב עליה מימיו, וכיון שמת אביו עשה אותה יראה שלו. פעם אחת אבדה ישפה של בנימין, אמרו מאן דאית ליה טבא דכוותה, אמרו אית ליה לדמה בן נתינה, אזלון לגביה, פסקו עמיה במאה דינר, סליק ובעי מייתו להו, ואשכח אבוה דמיך, אית דאמרין מפתח דתיבותא הוה יתיב גו אצבעתיה דאבוי, ואית דאמרין ריגלוהי דאבוה הות פשטא על תיבותא, נחת לגבון אמר לון לא יכילית מייתותיה לכון, אמרי דילמא דו בעי פריטן טובא, אסקוניה למאתים, אסקוניה לאלף, כיון דאיתער אבוה מן שינתיה סליק ואייתותיה לון, בעון מיחתן ליה בסיפקולא אחרייא, ולא קביל עלוי, אמר מה אנא מזבין לכון איקרא דאבהתי בפריטין, איני נהנה מכבוד אבותי כלום. מה פרע ליה הקב”ה שכר, אמר רבי יוסי בי רבי בון בו בלילה ילדה פרתו פרה אדומה, ושקלו לו כל ישראל משקלה זהב ונטל. והאמר רבי שבתי מאי כתיב ומשפט ורב צדקה לא יענה, אין הקב”ה משהא מתן שכרן של עושה מצות בגוי.
I will review this.
In the meantime, please see the Tur, Hoshen Mishpat 249, in which he explicitly states this, the Beth Yosef and [uncensored] Ba”Ch concur in their comments on this. In fact, The censored Ba”Ch appears to be the only source Rav Kook, and later, Rav Ovadiah, to support selling land to a stam goy for the sake of heter mekhirah. (Note: Rav Kook knew he did not need any “heter.” He knew that piqu’ah nefesh was sufficient. But, he also knew that the people still wouldn’t but into this, and needed addition support, which he believed he had found in the [censored] Ba”Ch’s commentary on the above source from the Tur.)
Please also see the last halakha of Hil. A”Z, Ch. 10, as well as his Shu”t 248, which supports this understanding of his use of the term A”Z to mean stam goy.
I contend that the whole point of the mitzvah is not to make it easy for goyim to stay in the Land.
One of the bases for the mitzvah of לא ישבו בארצך is to prevent kefirah from taking hold within the land. The Muslims and Christians are both groups of koferim.
The source you quote is about giving gifts to non Jews, not monetary exchange. The Beis Yosef explicitly says there that one may only give a gift to a ger toshav, not a goy, but selling to a goy is fine. Here’s the quote:
תניא לא תאכלו כל נבילה לגר אשר בשעריך תתננה ואכלה או מכור לנכרי. אחד גר ואחד גוי בין בנתינה בין במכירה דברי רבי מאיר רבי יהודה אומר דברים ככתבן לגר בנתינה לגוי במכירה. וידוע דהלכה כרבי יהודה
Then the Beis Yosef clarifies that עובד עבודה זרה, in this specific case, does include Muslims, and therefore one may not give a Muslim a gift. This has absolutely nothing to do with business transactions, and while selling property to an Arab is a halachic problem (not to be enforced by the State), buying eggs from them is absolutely not.
The Tur you are quoting, chapter 249, is under Hilchos Matana U’Mechila, laws of gifts. This has zero at all to do with shopping for food.
The bottom line is having a source battle is pointless. This is all a game I’m not very keen on playing. I don’t believe God shares your values on this issue. I believe He shares mine.
I nearly wrote the same exact article yesterday in response to a Salon opinion piece that started out “Dear White People,” which then became a SJW diatribe against white racism. My response was that, first, there will always be racism but that there is a countervailing natural tendency of people to put aside their particular biases in order to cooperate for mutual benefit. Along the way, people get along. They even learn to like each other. The true enemies of peace, prosperity, and justice are not the people who participate in ‘micro-aggressions’ (according to my 24 year old college-student son, I have been an offender through my language and habits…who knew?) but the people who use the power of the state to prevent and disrupt the inclination to cooperate for mutual gain.
I then found that I had not used my Salon account in some time (I usually spend zero time there) and I was unable to long in. In the process of getting a new user password, my wonderfully written piece got wiped out. Ugh.
I have thought about you and your family in the midst of the well publicized stabbings and shootings that we in the States have been reading about. I have not exactly ‘worried’ because I lived in St Louis (pop. 2.5 million) for many years and got used to the idea of stabbings, shootings, and ‘knock out’ games going on daily. Most of it was black on black, some black on white, almost none was white on black. If you plotted the violence on a map, it was highly localized. I lived just a few blocks from a so-called ‘bad’ neighborhood, yet absolutely nothing happened in my neighborhood for the eighteen years I lived there. Oh, except for the time the cops came to visit me because I’d been using my sander all day on the bottom of a boat I was building and somebody was so irritated by the noise that they reported me. The cop who responded took one look at my project and said he had no problem with me (I had already knocked off for the day), and he wished someone in his neighborhood was doing stuff like that. But I digress.