The underestimation of the settlers’ determination to remain can be put down to the fact that most Israelis do not understand the commitment of the settler population. Most have never travelled to the settlements, have never seen for themselves the levels of hostility and aggression building in these regions. But a traveller arriving in the West Bank town of Hebron gets this much right off the top.
At the gates of the Jewish section of Hebron, in the so-called “H2 district,” huge banners declaring “Israel Does Not Support The Transfer” stretch across storefronts that were once part of a bustling Arab Kasbah. The association of the term “transfer” with the forcible extraditions of Jews by the Gestapo is clearly intentional. “We Will Never Relent,” a second banner declares. And although the Gush is located about 100 kilometres from Hebron, a third screams, “Gush Katif Will Be Our Stalingrad.” Graffiti sprayed on walls shamelessly cry out: “Gas The Arabs.”
When the wind picks up, the banners flap relentlessly against concrete walls, creating the aural illusion of machine-gun fire, which is sometimes interrupted by the real thing. Along the winding cobblestone roads leading up to Hebron’s main yeshiva, settlers have erected monuments to their martyrs. Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who died in the act of massacring twenty-nine Arabs as they knelt in prayer during Ramadan, has earned a plaque, an enormous gravestone, and the status of a saint in Hebron. Rabbi Slonim, who along with a tiny community of sixty-nine Hebron Jews had his throat cut in the Arab uprisings of 1929, has been memorialized in myriad ways. Making your way up Hebron’s hill, you come across dozens of markers celebrating the life of Slonim and other martyrs. It is akin to the fourteen stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, which Christ climbed on the way to his crucifixion.
On the sidewalks of the H2 district, where some 450 Orthodox Jews have uprooted thousands of Palestinian families, I discover the residues of the Orange Star Campaign—badges worn by the settlers in a further attempt to associate the Disengagement Plan with the Nazi era. Mainstream Israel was appalled by the campaign, and charges of Holocaust exploitation finally forced yesha to abandon it, but the settlers soon began scouring the landscape for other dramatic ways to express their hostility.
The opportunity came in early January, following a government order to remove two illegal trailers that settlers had parked on the outskirts of Yitzhar in the Nablus region. Settlers soon flocked into the area, formed human chains, and poured barrels of oil on the road at points where it wound around its steepest cliff. Army trucks moving to the scene barely managed to avoid disaster, and later that afternoon the first bullet associated with the Disengagement Plan was fired when an Israeli soldier sent a warning shot above the head of an Israeli citizen. A precedent had been set.
If the Israeli public seems unconcerned about what is to come in Gaza, it is not for lack of alarmists and doomsayers. Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, who is perhaps the most moderate of the settlers’ leaders, falls into both camps. Nicknamed “the Bridge” for his efforts since Rabin’s assassination to mediate between the settlers and moderates and even the left wing, he accused his fellow clergy of treason, claiming plans to deploy Rabin’s assassin were hatched in fundamentalist circles. But no plans were ever found, and as a result Bin Nun became persona non grata in the Orthodox community and could no longer remain a member of his hometown settlement. Despite his excommunication, Bin Nun still worked to keep the camps from drawing inextricably apart. Then, in January, his persistence broke. In an interview in Haaretz, he argued that it was no longer possible to mediate; a collision was imminent.
In the same article, titled “Apocalypse Now,” Bin Nun condemned Sharon’s bulldozing strategies and his message that it is acceptable to uproot Jews. “Sharon is a man of force,” says Bin Nun. “He needs a national trauma to impress upon both the Israeli public and the international community that [moving settlers] will be impossible to do again.” But, as Bin Nun points out, generating traumas is not an exact calculus. Once implemented, the best-laid plans take on a life of their own. “I see everything going black. I see a civil war,” says Bin Nun. “And a civil war is the only thing that a prime minister of Israel has no right to bring about.”
Like Bin Nun, Arieh Eldad, a member of the Knesset, believes that Sharon is playing with fire. But while Bin Nun says he will do all he can to stave off a civil war, Eldad seems prepared to be its catalyst. Eldad is a plastic surgeon and a brigadier general who served for several years as the Israeli Defence Force’s Surgeon General. In his mid-fifties, bald, with a bright, clinical stare, he is considered by those on the left and the right as a kind of super-intellectual. He is one of seven sitting members of the far-right National Union Party, which recently advocated abolishing Arabic as Israel’s second official language.
In his book The Challenge of Jerusalem, Eldad refers to what he calls the “schizophrenia” at the heart of Judaism. At its core there are two irreconcilable concepts: one liberationist and redemptive, the other utopian and emancipatory. Behind the redemptive idea are those who believe they have a moral and historical right to the land. Those in the grip of the emancipatory concept hold that church and state must be kept apart and that Israel needs to normalize relations with its neighbours. On the extremes of the redemptive side are Jews who will not be satisfied until Israel is 100-percent Arabrein, a term some settlers borrow from the Nazis’ declared wish to make Germany Judenrein (free of Jews). On the extremes of the emancipatory side are those who would happily include the Palestinians in a bi-national state, even though far higher Arab birth rates would rule against Israel retaining its Jewish identity for long.
Most Israelis live, think, and work between these extremes. For better or worse they are committed to “managing the conflict,” both the external struggle with the Palestinians, and the one forever raging within their own souls. It struck me that this tug-of-war goes a long way toward explaining one of the great vexations an outsider often comes across in Israel. When Israelis are asked to consider a blatant civil-rights violation committed by their own army, they often lapse into a kind of mental ping-pong that bespeaks the schizophrenia Eldad has written about. Needless to say, the result is ambivalent judgment, which is effectively no judgment at all. Clear, distinct arguments are, in the main, limited to those Israelis willing to consider positions at the extremes.
