The Unmaking of Israel (11 page)

Before the war, Orthodox Zionism had functioned mostly as an auxiliary to the secular mainstream. Its emblematic achievement in the state’s early years was establishing Bar-Ilan University, an Orthodox corner of the academic world, an artful compromise between self-segregation and full participation in modern society. Politically, the National Religious Party was a perennial coalition partner, generally dovish on foreign policy issues, in Mapai governments. Like secular Zionist parties, it had its own youth movement, Bnei Akiva, which hoped to keep its members Orthodox and make them aspire to live in religious kibbutzim.

Theologically, the oft-cited sage was Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, who had served as chief rabbi during the British Mandate and died in 1935. Kook’s teachings melded Jewish mystical doctrine and European nationalist theory. The Jews’ return to their land, he had taught, was part of God’s plan for redemption of the world, and secular Zionists were unconsciously doing God’s will. Kook’s ideas provided legitimacy for Orthodox Jews to join forces with Jews who ate pork and worked on the Sabbath, but he was quoted more than seriously studied. After his death, his only son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, headed a small yeshivah in Jerusalem and taught that Israel was “the state that prophets foresaw” when they spoke of the End of Days. The state’s military, said Kook fils, was not an expression of human power and pride. Rather, it made possible “study and fulfillment of the Torah,” since “we are learning that we must carry out the divine obligation created by that power—conquering the Land.” He developed a circle of young disciples—including Porat and Levinger—but remained a marginal figure.

Until June 1967. For many religious Jews, especially younger ones, the miraculous victory demanded explanation. Tzvi Yehuda Kook provided one: the conquests were the next step in God’s plan, in the process of redemption. When the government of Israel had acted as if “redemption stopped at the Green Line,” God had forced the Jews to conquer the rest of the homeland. So wrote Rabbi Yaakov Filber, another Kook disciple, stressing that “there is no complete redemption without the complete Land of Israel.” As reframed by the younger Kook and his followers, mystical nationalism not only justified taking part in the secular project of nation building. It taught that the world’s spiritual condition was measured by Jewish military power and territorial expansion. Religion swallowed whole the hard-line nationalism of soil, power, and ethnic superiority, and took on its shape.

Settling in “redeemed” territory was a way of consciously advancing God’s plan. For young religious Zionists, it also cured a double sense of inferiority. In building the state, their movement had been a very junior partner. Secularists saw them as milquetoasts. The ultra-Orthodox, meanwhile, regarded them as practicing lukewarm Judaism. Now they seized the chance to be the vanguard fulfilling the old secular Zionist value of settlement. At the same, they believed, they were proving their superior religious commitment, since they were keeping what Filber described as the “commandment that is as important as all the others combined, the commandment of settling the Land.”

Had the conquests been temporary, a sobering up would likely have followed the postwar intoxication. When the government held on to the occupied territories, began settling them, yet left their ultimate political fate uncertain, it created the perfect conditions for an ideological storm.

The greatest practical difficulty that Labor governments faced in building settlements was a lack of willing manpower. Their Likud successors faced the same problem recruiting people to settle deep in occupied territory. Young secular Israelis generally treated settlement as a value to be honored, not acted on. Partnership with religious Zionists of the Kook school provided the foot soldiers. In turn, religious settlers became the role model for the Orthodox Zionist community. After the emergence of Gush Emunim in 1974, the National Religious Party metamorphosed into the faction representing settlers and ultranationalist faith.

The government’s alliance with religious settlers was fraught with ignored dangers. Religious settlers were subcontractors in a project with strategic implications, but saw government decisions restricting where they would settle as illegitimate. The government was outsourcing a project that combined defense and foreign policy to an ideological camp that read pragmatic restraint as a lack of faith.

Of course, the settlement project meant more than a philosophical move for religious Zionism. Settlers migrated physically, from inside the Green Line to occupied territory. And among settlers, the religiously motivated ones were most likely to move to the small settlements farther from sovereign Israel, between Palestinian towns and villages in the mountains of the West Bank. The state made that migration easier: Israelis moving to settlements deep into the West Bank received the largest financial incentives.

Most religious settlers also moved from cities to a new kind of exurb. Ofrah created the model. Until its founding, the settlement ideal meant building a kibbutz or moshav, a socialist community whose members worked in agriculture or jointly owned industry. Nearly all the settlements established by Labor governments stuck to that pattern, with the exception of a few towns. But socialism had gone out of fashion. After much discussion, Ofrah defined itself as a “community settlement.” That meant a small residential community, managed by an association responsible for “preserving the character of the settlement,” as Gush Emunim reports explained. New residents would have to be accepted as members, so that all would share an “ideological-social background.” They would enjoy “single-family homes, quiet streets, fresh air,” a dream beyond the reach of middle-class apartment-dwelling Israelis. The community would grow no larger than a few hundred families, attracting educated professionals to an “island” of a “selected population,” deliberately “closed” and “homogenous.” The shade of one’s religious commitment, even the precise degree of modesty in women’s dress, could be a criterion for membership. When the Likud came to power, it adopted this model and built many more settlements on the same lines.

Young Orthodox Jews who had grown up in urban Israel, contending with a cacophony of political and cultural argument, moved to small communities of people like themselves, comfortable colonies with Palestinian towns and villages as scenery. Many commuted to cities inside Israel to work. But in their new homes, they did not need to face the secular Israelis who had mocked them on their way home from Bnei Akiva meetings. They became a sect, apart from the Israel they sought to lead.

Yet from the start, Orthodox settlements saw educating Jews from within the Green Line as both an ideological goal and a solution to the problem of livelihood. The economic chapter of an early Gush Emunim master plan called for establishing yeshivot and boarding schools in settlements to create jobs. Another option was commuting to teach in state-funded religious schools inside Israel. The state has backed both options. Extra funding for education has been one pillar of the structure of financial incentives supporting settlement. Free education begins two years earlier in settlements than inside Israel; the Education Ministry pays for longer school days than in most of Israel; the Interior Ministry provides extra cash to the municipal governments of settlements to pay for education. Teachers living in settlements get benefits that can boost their salaries by up to 20 percent, whether they work in the settlement or inside Israel.

The combined effect is a striking disparity: in the Israeli population as a whole, 12.7 percent of employees work in education, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. In West Bank settlements, the parallel figure is 21.9 percent, nearly twice as much. These official figures don’t distinguish between large suburban settlements and the small communities deeper in the West Bank. But the proportion of teachers is almost certainly higher in the latter, where the desire to pass on intensely held beliefs makes teaching a much more valued profession.

One day in 2003, I visited the spacious home of Moti and Lea Sklar in Ofrah. At the time, Lea Sklar was an administrator in the Jerusalem city schools, supervising education for “Judaism, equality, and democracy.” On the range of religious and political views among settlers, Sklar put herself at the moderate, even iconoclastic, end. She proudly described her two youngest daughters, of elementary school age, as “real feminists.” To satisfy the interpretation of Orthodox law requiring a married woman to cover her hair, she wore a small knitted cap, with her chest-length curls hanging out—a statement of both accepting and defying rules.

The second Palestinian uprising was still raging. Discussing her reasons for staying in Ofrah despite the increased dangers of terror attacks, Sklar said it was a warm community and the only home her five children knew. But she also stressed that Ofrah was “part of the State of Israel,” and that settling there was a direct continuation of early Zionist pioneers’ creation of the first kibbutzim. “I don’t believe in a distinction between [the land we held] before 1967 and after,” she said. “It’s all part of a process.” In the political arrangement that would complete that process, she suggested, the West Bank’s Palestinians would have “human rights to life, security, health” and a measure of autonomy—for instance, to run their own school system—under Israeli rule. They would not be citizens. “They can’t vote for my government, because then it would be an Arab government,” said the woman then in charge of education for democracy in the schools my children attended.

For children who have grown up and been educated in the closed, warm communities of the settlements, those views represent the liberal end of the spectrum. Inside Israel, settler educators have had a particularly strong presence in state religious schools and other institutions serving the Orthodox Zionist community.

In their partnership with Orthodox settlers, secular politicians underwrote the indoctrination of a new generation in radical religious culture. The dangerous results have become clear only as that generation has come of age.

Chapter IV
Children of the Hills

The handbill hung on the study-hall notice board. Only one of the thirty students was in the hall at midday. He had the wispy beard of a young man who has never shaved, and thick blond sidelocks that hung over his shoulders. The name of the institution, “Sing Unto the Lord Yeshivah,” and the slogan, “The Lord Is King,” were painted rather sloppily on the outside of the prefab building. A donkey and large yellow tractor for construction work stood in the dusty parking lot at Havat Gilad, Gilad’s Farm, an illegal outpost southwest of Nablus. It was late October, the height of the olive harvest. Driving in, I’d seen Palestinian families working in the groves, picking the fruit that provides the deep green oil that is the West Bank’s premier product.

The writing on one side of the handbill was printed over a soft photo of an olive grove. On the other side, the background showed a Palestinian woman wearing a white headscarf and standing next to a mutilated olive tree. The Hebrew text was written in the diction of Jewish religious law,
halakhah
, and cited classical religious works from the Bible onward.

The ripening of the olives, said the leaflet, provided the opportunity to fulfill Moses’ command to the twelve spies he sent into Canaan, “Be strong and take from the fruit of the land.” The way to show who really had title to the Land of Israel was to “bring its good fruit from its temporary occupants”—meaning Palestinians—“to its true owners”—meaning Jews. All the soil of the Land of Israel and all the trees belonged to the Jewish people, it said, so that by taking the fruit, Jews are “returning what has been stolen to our own hands and not stealing from others.”

In places where harvesting olives from Palestinian groves was impractical, the handbill’s unsigned author continued, the proper alternative was to follow Ecclesiastes’ words, “A time to plant and a time to uproot,” and cut down the trees. A war was in progress, and “one of the important means . . . to victory over our enemies is driving him out of our land by harming his property.” The text ends with the prayer for a speedy end to the infamy of “strangers consuming our inheritance” and the shame of them being able to do so “with the help of the establishment and various security bodies that have forgotten their Jewish identity.”

The handbill tacked to the notice board demonstrated an old principle: with enough determination, an interpreter of sacred texts can turn them inside out, making a sin into an obligation. On the simplest level, the writer had to explain away the explicit commandment in Deuteronomy 20:19 against chopping down fruit trees as a means of waging war. He rationalized an obvious act of theft as reclaiming one’s own property. He also ignored an ancient and well-known rabbinic gloss on the disagreement between the shepherds of Abraham and his nephew Lot in the book of Genesis: Lot’s men, the tradition says, grazed his herds in fields owned by Canaanites, rationalizing that God had promised the land to Abraham’s descendants. But Abraham rejected that excuse. The story teaches that a divine promise for the undefined future cannot justify theft from the land’s here-and-now inhabitants. This is a tradition that schoolchildren learn.

Historically, religious groups that believe God’s kingdom on earth is near are particularly vulnerable to this kind of photo-negative morality. There’s no better way to demonstrate that a new age has dawned than to say that new rules have replaced the old. In Judaism, the classic example is the seventeenth-century false messiah, Shabtai Tzvi, whose followers turned adultery into a ritual. In our time, theologies that absorb extreme political doctrines suffer similar vulnerability to sanctifying sins—as shown by Islamic radicals who have turned the forbidden act of suicide into heroism.

The religious settlement movement is doubly vulnerable: it springs from the faith expressed by Tzvi Yehudah Kook that “we are already in the middle of redemption,” and from recasting nationalism, at its most tribal, as religious doctrine. The combination is expressed by a quotation that appears on the website of Shvut Ami, another illegal outpost in the Nablus area. On the cusp of the messianic era, it says, “the most important point is the land of Israel. From it everything flows, and except for holding tightly to it, there is no way to bring holiness into the world.” The words are those of Rabbi Ya’akov Moshe Harlap, a disciple of the elder Kook, who died in 1951. Whatever Harlap’s original intent, his words open the door to a “moral” system in which seizing territory outweighs obligations to human beings.