The Unmaking of Israel (26 page)

Politically, ending the occupation is also the precondition for disestablishing religion and creating equality for the Arab minority. Since 1967, Israeli politics has been clenched around the issue of territory. Once, during Israel’s First Republic, “left” and “right” had the same meaning as in Europe. The left was socialist, the right capitalist. After 1967, the meanings shifted. To be on the left meant willingness to give up land; to be on the right meant compulsively keeping it. Building a coalition around other issues has become almost impossible. The conflict with the Palestinians provides legitimacy for excluding Arab-backed parties from coalitions. The right cannot rule without the ultra-Orthodox parties, but neither can the left form coalitions without including the ultra-Orthodox. So a government that would establish civil equality or separate religion and state is unachievable.

The coalition arithmetic merely reflects national habits of thought: as long as Jews and Palestinians are wrestling for control of the same homeland, both Jewish and Arab Israelis have a harder time envisioning a shared civic identity. Meanwhile settlers, and especially religious settlers, assert that they are the most dedicated Zionists, and their claim resonates with much of the Jewish public. In reality, the methods of their Zionism are taken from the pre-state era. The authentic Zionist task of the moment is dismantling the settlement enterprise so that Israel can deal with all the issues it has postponed.

This task is the key to Israel’s future. I do not pretend to predict the precise circumstances under which it will take place—whether as a result of international pressure and recognition of a Palestinian state, or in a freely embraced agreement by an Israeli government less blinkered than the one in power as I write, or through some combination of those factors.

But the domestic upheaval will be more easily managed, the risk of violent opposition more easily reduced, if Israel’s elected leaders do embrace the goal of bringing settlers home. By doing so, they can present it to the public, correctly, as the next national project that Israel must undertake. They can speak to the settlers themselves—at least the more moderate ones who may be able to hear this message—acknowledge that those who settled in the West Bank believed they were serving their country, and ask them to serve it now by returning to Israel peacefully.

Against the idea of evacuating settlements, two counterproposals are often raised. The first is to allow Jewish settlers to stay put as citizens of a Palestinian state. In principle, this makes sense. For Palestinians to achieve self-determination, their country need not be homogeneously Palestinian, just as Israel need not be homogeneously Jewish. Rather than Israel sending its police and army to evict people, or its Finance Ministry’s representatives to negotiate payment for them to move, the government could announce that on a given date, Israel will turn control of land over to Palestine. The settlers can decide whether to stay or return to Israel, as settlers have decided when other empires retreated.

This is theory. In reality, residents of the large settlements closer to the Green Line would have no inclination to live in a Palestinian state. They moved to their subsidized suburbs expecting to remain members of the Jewish majority of Israel and to improve their standard of living. By staying, they would become a minority in a country with one-tenth of the per capita wealth. The sole value of the government declaring that they could remain in their current homes would be to reduce their ability to extort exorbitant compensation for moving.

This may be a worthwhile bargaining tactic—but it cannot be offered to the residents of the small ideological settlements, who might accept it for the worst reasons. Their hope would be to carry out a Rhodesian option—to impose minority rule over the Palestinian majority by force—or at least to destabilize the new state. A treaty that left them in place would be an agreement for chaos, not peace.

The second approach to reducing the number of evacuees is for Israel to annex West Bank areas in which the most heavily populated “settlement blocs” are located, and to compensate the Palestinian state with land within the Green Line. To reduce the extent of the land swap, diplomatic experts have suggested maps for Israeli-Palestinian borders that look like caricatures of gerrymandered American congressional districts. A moderate version appears in the 2003 Geneva Accord, which was negotiated by pro-peace Israelis and Palestinians to provide a blueprint for an official accord. The accord’s border map shows narrow tendrils of Israeli territory stretching into the West Bank so that large settlements such as Ma’aleh Adumim can stay in Israeli hands.

Initially, such borders might reduce the cost of moving settlers. Yet Israel would still have to evacuate the settlers most bitterly opposed to leaving—those in the settlements far from the Green Line. After the peace agreement, the suburbs that Israel kept would be isolated, constricted, unable to grow. In any sensible policy, they would no longer receive subsidies. They would wither at the end of their territorial vines. In five years or twenty, their residents would demand government help to move to the old Israel. The state will pay for them twice—first in land, then in compensation to the settlers. The land-swap alternative is really only practical for settlements that actually hug the Green Line and in annexed East Jerusalem, where nearly 200,000 Israelis live in compact neighborhoods close to the old border.

So for Israel to move forward, most settlers must move home. The sane policy is not simply to stop building settlements, but to begin the process of evacuating them immediately, without waiting for a signature on a peace agreement. When an agreement is signed, it should include a transition of several years to permit gradual evacuation of settlers.

The logical first step in evacuation is for the government to conduct the accounting it has avoided for decades—to comb the state budget for incentives for living in settlements, to publish the cumulative cost from 1967 until today so that the public understands what it has paid for is a doomed enterprise, and to end the subsidies. In their place, the government should offer help to settlers ready to move—assistance buying reasonable housing inside Israel, retraining settlers who have made their livelihood in the inflated settlement bureaucracy and education system, counseling to ease adjustment. The explicit policy must be that the financial assistance offered at the outset is the upper limit for what will be offered later: Waiting will be costly, not profitable.

Even in a settlement of believers, there is likely to be one couple that has doubts about the future and would like to leave, though neither husband nor wife would dare say so aloud to their neighbors. Right now, practicalities such as the low market value of their home help keep them where they are. If that family is able to leave, three more may begin to discuss the heretical possibility. This is precisely why settler leaders and allies have opposed past proposals to begin paying compensation to settlers willing to leave.

One incentive, though, should not be on the table: moving a community or part of it en masse to a new location inside Israel. Nor should settlers be encouraged to “Judaize the Galilee” or the Negev, or to move as groups to Israeli cities. Such arrangements might appear to ease the transition by keeping communities together and avoiding the loss of purpose that settlers are likely to feel. But here, too, the costs later will be too high. The point of evacuating settlements is to end the ethnic conflict, not to import it. The settlement ethos does not need to be artificially revived, yet again, inside Israel. It makes as little sense in twenty-first-century Israel as covered wagon trains would make in twenty-first-century America.

In re-created settlements, evacuees are likely to stoke each other’s anger and refusal to accept the new reality. It is harder to look forward when everyone around you is looking back with fury. Beyond bureaucratic bungling, this helps explain why evacuees from Gaza have had such a painful readjustment.

The government’s goal should be reintegrating settlers into Israeli society. As an added religious benefit, some are likely to leave the “process of redemption” behind them psychologically. Misreading current events for the footsteps of the messiah is much easier when everyone around shares that misreading. Within mainstream Israeli society, it may be easier to accept that the state is merely a state, a political means of achieving practical results, and not a sacred institution whose existence signals history’s end. The hallucinatory expectations that have warped Orthodox Zionism may begin to fade.

Peace is a necessary means for fully ending the occupation. Unlike the French in Algeria, Israel cannot simply leave the West Bank to its fate. Unlike Palestinians, Algerian nationalists did not claim France as part of their birthright. A sea separated France from whatever happened in its former colony. For Israel safely to end its military control of the West Bank, it needs a peace accord with a stable—and hopefully, a democratic—Palestinian republic.

And what if the divide between the rival Palestinian political factions, or the instability of the Palestinian government, or the wider volatility of Arab politics, or a simple inability of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to reach agreement, even with the strongest intentions to do so, prevents peace?

Even in that case, Israel’s vital interest is to remove the settlements, reestablish the border, and reduce the occupation to its bare bones, its minimal military skeleton.

Diplomatically, the idea that the settlements are a bargaining chip is an illusion. The settlements do not improve Israel’s bargaining position; rather, they destroy Israeli credibility and chain Israel to the occupied territories. If they are not removed, they will grow, and the chains will grow heavier. Meanwhile, the effort to maintain them corrodes the state and brings the one-state nightmare closer to reality. Removing them is a public statement that Israel is eager to give up military control the moment it can.

In the meantime, a military presence in the West Bank is enough of a bargaining chip. Its purpose should be only to prevent attacks on Israel itself, maintain public order, and—if need be—allow international actors to help build or rebuild Palestinian governing institutions.

Even under the best conditions, the last act of the settlement drama is likely to involve Israelis in uniform forcibly evacuating settlers who do not want to go. The numbers may be small, or reach the tens of thousands. At least 65,000 Israelis live in exclusively Orthodox Zionist settlements, where opposition to leaving will be greatest.

Nor can anyone predict the level of resistance. But there is a potential for violence beyond what happened during the Gaza withdrawal. Settlers will be defending the vision—or the illusion—on which they have built their lives for two generations. Were there a withdrawal, outpost settler Cheftziba Skali told me, “Maybe I’ll lay down my life, maybe not. I don’t know.” Yisrael Ariel, a settler at Yitzhar near Nablus and a founder of the Od Yosef Hai yeshivah, told me settlers would not engage in “bloodshed” but would use “any other level” of resistance. This estimation may make him a moderate. Before Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination,
hesder
yeshivah dean Nachum Rabinovitch argued that settlers should “plant explosive charges around the whole area” of their settlements to prevent soldiers from evacuating them. Justifying that approach, he said that Israeli troops who carried out orders to evacuate settlers would be “really evil.” He added, “We remember that the German soldiers also acted under orders.”

Facing this potential for physical opposition, the government must be able to depend on the army to carry out its policy. For that to happen, it must put an end to the existence of units that have ideological profiles, to the creeping development of an officer corps that could obey a radical clergy instead of the government, to the web of ties between the military and the religious right.

As one step in that process, the IDF should immediately begin phasing out the
hesder
yeshivot. It should start by ejecting institutions whose deans have taught soldiers to refuse orders on political grounds. This is not a question of freedom of expression or religion. Those rabbis have the right to oppose ceding land or evacuating settlements. But the
hesder
yeshivot operate as adjuncts of the military, on state funds. The time that soldiers spend in the study hall partially substitutes for time in uniform. It is absurd for army-affiliated institutions to instruct soldiers to place the political agenda of the Whole Land of Israel above orders. The fact that the political agenda is shot through with religious beliefs does not justify the absurdity.

In the longer term, as part of the separation of religion and state, the
hesder
program should be dismantled entirely. Similarly, state funding should end for pre-army academies that are exclusively Orthodox and centered on religious studies. Netzah Yehudah, the
haredi
battalion, should be dissolved. The principle of equality indeed demands that
haredim
serve—but it is trumped by the principle of not permitting the existence of ideological combat units that are beholden to clergy. The army rabbinate should be reconstituted as a chaplaincy corps, whose responsibility is limited to seeing to the religious needs of soldiers. On one hand, the new corps should include clergy for the minority of soldiers who are not Jewish. On the other, uniformed rabbis should not engage in “educating” soldiers about the sacred value of land or of Jewish power—that is, teaching a barely masked political message in the guise of Judaism.

As soon as a policy decision is made to dismantle settlements, career officers and soldiers should be required to move back into Israel. If they prefer to engage in political activism against evacuation, they should be allowed to do so—as civilians. Officers, in particular, must hear a simple message: If you are not willing to lead your troops in the evacuation, you should resign your commission and leave the army honorably, rather than end your career with a court-martial, a loss of rank, and possible imprisonment.