There is an old parable about a child who loved fire, or thought he did. Every evening, when his father lit the wood fire outside their home, the boy watched the flames with endless fascination. Every evening he reached his hand toward the blaze, only to stop at his father's shouts of warning.
Finally, the child tired of the warnings and called back to his father, "But I want to play with fire!" The father had nothing left to do but answer his son, "Go ahead, play," and watch the boy send the tip of his finger into the orange flames with a loud sizzle.
The lesson of the story is that sometimes, no matter how much we want to protect people, friends, relatives, even family, from mistakes, sometimes people must feel the flame at their fingertips in order to learn.
In the last 48 hours, people on the right have volunteered to become the emergency guardrail for the Change Bloc, to be the safety rope that ensures that in the bungee jump the bloc is planning into the abyss of post-Zionism, there will always be someone to pull them back from the cliff.
We must not be the emergency brake for the Change Bloc. If there truly exists a Jewish minority in Israel willing to sell its soul to the devil of Arab nationalists in order to stand on their shoulders and tell itself it is tallest, then there will always be such a minority, until they learn the price on their own flesh.
Let Naftali, Gideon and Avigdor reach their hands into the flames. Let them assemble a minority government in which the Arab parties are de facto the second-largest party in the government, even if from the outside.
Let them chase after Ahmad Tibi when they need to pass the defense budget. Let them scratch their fingers between Youssef Jabareen and Mansour Abbas when the Judea and Samaria regulations come up for renewal in a little over three months. Let them bargain with the Joint List over every line item in the state budget.
Let them squirm and shrink when, at the first terror attack in Judea and Samaria during their tenure, the MKs on whose bayonets the government stands will care more about the terrorist's conditions in prison than about his Jewish victims.
Let the people who respected them see their true face. Let former IDF deputy chief of staff Eisenkot, former Yesha Council head Bennett, and Liberman, once an advocate of transfer, conduct daily bargaining over every finger of every Arab MK from Ra'am to Balad.
Let the children play with fire. Sometimes that is the only way they will learn. And even if they learn nothing from it, then you had nothing to offer them in the first place.
