Is Israel losing its Identity

I would like to remind the elderly, diehard atheist Zionists of Kibbutz Ruhama, who object to the building of a synagogue on their kibbutz, of Ruhama's past history before the present-day kibbutz came into existence.

It was founded in 1912 as the first Jewish settlement in the western Negev, the most southern part of the country inhabited by Jews. The land was purchased on behalf of a group of Russian Jewish religious idealists called Sha'are Israel, who financed its development under the sole management of my late grandfather, Zvi Hirshfeld, a young religious Jew from Riga, Latvia. Together with a group of hard working young Jewish idealists, he prepared for crops, dug a well and built a water tower and other buildings on land legally purchased from local Beduin. Sha'are Israel hoped to come later and settle on the land.

If "Jewish history, the Bible and Jewish thought are all important" to the Ruhama veterans, I would have thought they'd show more tolerance toward a synagogue - one that would, moreover, help increase the profits of their guest house.