From
Challenge # 88
November-December 2004
The Holocaust, the Faithful, and Disengagement
Stephen Langfur
THE ORTHODOX Jewish settlers raise
the specter of civil war if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon persists in his
plan to disengage from Gaza and part of the West Bank. Sixty rabbis have
commanded soldiers in the name of the Torah to refuse any order to
dismantle settlements. Gush Emunim, 'the bloc of the faithful,' seeks to
topple Sharon.1
By sticking to his plan, says
the Gush, he is causing a rift in the Jewish people. Sharon returns the
accusation.
There are at least four rifts:
1) The old one that surfaces whenever the world pulls
Israel leftward and its right wing pulls it back.
2) The new rift between Sharon and the settlers, allies
since 1967.
3) A rift within the Likud, between those who support the
disengagement plan and those who side with the settlers against it.
4) An old but widening rift between the settlers and the
national consensus.
The immediate cause of all the rifts
is the fact that for the first time in history, an Israeli government
intends to dismantle settlements within the context of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The disengagement plan will not
directly help the prospects for peace. Cut off from the West Bank and
under a different rule, Gaza will remain a prison: tanks at its borders,
no economy, no gateways to the world. The mere mouthing of the plan
has already led Washington to shelve the "Road Map"; it has secured the
first endorsement by an American president for Israeli annexation of most
big West Bank settlements; it has upstaged the Geneva Agreement; and it
has taken the wind from the sails of the refusal movement on the Left.
Within Israel, nonetheless, the plan
does change the political map:
Israeli governments have a record of
yielding to the settlers. Labor caved in when Moshe Levinger, in 1968,
took over the Park Hotel in Hebron; it then permitted him and his
followers to establish Kiryat Arba overlooking Hebron. In the early
1970's, Labor built its own settlements in occupied Jerusalem, in the Gaza
Strip, and along the Jordan, avoiding the heavily populated heart of the
West Bank. Gush Emunim challenged this limitation in 1974 near Nablus. In
a confrontation with the army there, retired general Ariel Sharon took his
stand beside the settlers, saying that the order to disband them was
immoral and soldiers should refuse. Gush Emunim finally won this battle,
establishing Elon Moreh. After the Likud took power in 1977, Sharon (as
head of the Settlement Committee) founded 62 new settlements within four
years, mostly in the heartland. His alliance with Gush Emunim created a
new reality in the Territories, deemed by many to be irreversible.
These were bedfellows of
convenience. In effect, for a long time, their views
dovetailed, but the underlying impulses have always been different. Those
of the Gush are religious. Their depth has not been understood by most
secular commentators and politicians, including Sharon, who speaks of them
as of some kind of mental tic ("a messianic complex"); these motives will
form the main topic of the present article.
Sharon's intentions, on the other
hand, have had nothing religious about them. During the last quarter of
the 20th century, his military and political behavior embodied two
principles: that security depends on territory; and that Arabs only
understand brute force (which he employed – as a soldier and later as
Defense Minister – more brutally than any other Israeli). Both principles,
as said, were long congenial to Gush Emunim, which sees settlement as a
biblical injunction and negotiation with the Palestinians ("Canaanites")
as sin. Yet now the paths divide.
What has happened to break the
alliance? Sharon became Prime Minister. From his new vantage point, he
sees 1) that the Gaza settlements have become a liability in terms of
their security-value, cost, and international pressure. He sees,
furthermore, that 2) Israel's economy is linked to the world's with an
intensity such as the Likud's old guard had never envisioned. Even without
American participation, international sanctions could be lethal. The
European reaction to the separation barrier in the West Bank brings this
threat home. What is more, Sharon sees that 3) chaos today grips the
Territories, and Israel is again, in effect, the direct Occupier. After 37
years, how much longer can it dominate nearly four million people – while
the world looks on – without granting them citizenship or
self-determination? In Gaza there are 1.3 million Palestinians and 7500
settlers (0.6%). In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, there are
2.6 million Palestinians and 400,000 settlers. It makes sense, given
Sharon's concern for security, to withdraw from Gaza, thus reducing
international pressure and saving the 400,000 for Israel – not to mention
saving Israel itself.
Among Likud members, some share
Sharon's view, some are stuck in a pre-globalization concept of security,
and some line up with one or the other camp according to extraneous
political motives. But the alliance with Gush Emunim is gone forever; if
part of the Likud remains with the settlers on the question of
disengagement, the Likud will split.
GUSH EMUNIM has an entirely different view
of the situation. Each settlement is part of a divine process that went
into high gear with the Holocaust. The international pressure on Israel is
precisely what the Bible foretold concerning the final days (Zechariah
14): another confirmation that God is at work.
It is necessary to explore this
faith – and the reasons for its extraordinary hold on believers – in order
to gauge the depth of the danger. As an indicator of what can happen,
recall Yamit. This settlement in northwest Sinai is the only one ever to
have been dismantled (in 1982, by Likud Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, as
part of the peace with Egypt). When God did not intervene to prevent the
evacuation, Gush Emunim underwent a trauma. Out of the soul-searching, two
approaches developed. One was moderate: to reach out to other Israelis in
search of a consensus, moving little by little, emphasizing security
rather than faith. The other response was to form a Jewish underground
that would work with God in implementing his will. Until it was stopped in
1984, this group mutilated Palestinian mayors, made preparations for
destroying the main Muslim sanctuaries in Jerusalem, and planned to blow
up Arab buses. Its members were respected figures in Gush Emunim.2
Ten years later, the Gush
environment produced Dr. Baruch Goldstein, who single-handedly derailed
the Oslo Accords by massacring 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron. PM Yitzhak
Rabin, in response, prepared to remove the small and troublesome Jewish
settlement in that city. The right-wing, however, expressed its outrage at
such an idea; fearing civil war, Rabin backed down. In November 1995, a
right-wing believer assassinated him.
Where should we locate these plots,
mutilations and murders in relation to the faith of Gush Emunim? Are they
sinful aberrations? Or do the killers stand in the same category as the
zealous Levites who slew the worshipers of the golden calf? In order to
see the answer, we shall need to delve into areas that are unusual for
this political magazine.
At the core of Gush Emunim is faith
in the biblical God. It is an archaic variety of faith, which
ignores some biblical commandments while emphasizing others. The archaism
occurs in reaction against challenges to faith that gathered momentum for
centuries and culminated in the Holocaust.
The Bible lays an extraordinary
emphasis on divine justice. God makes a covenant with the people of
Israel, promising that if they obey his commandments, things will go well
for them, but if not, they will be punished. (Deuteronomy
11:13-17.)
There was a time, lasting a
century or more, when the principle of divine retribution held true quite
literally. This was Israel's formative period (which in the guise of the
Book of Joshua captivates the archaizing settlers). Lacking
a king to unite them, the proto-Israelites had to focus on one god in
order to become one people. Thus united, they had sufficient power to keep
their foothold in the highlands of Canaan. Faith paid because it unified.
Nor was there a problem of divine
justice, in this formative period, on the "individual level." The
individual did not count as the basic unit of human existence. Family ties
were so strong and far-reaching that the boundaries of the person were
fluid, both in space (with the members of one's extended family) and in
time (with ancestors and descendants). If an innocent person suffered, one
could defend divine justice by supposing that his family members or
ancestors had sinned: "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge."
The situation changed radically as
soon as a major empire entered the arena. In 722 BCE the Assyrians
deported the northern tribes, leaving only Judah. Had Israel's God been
defeated? There was another option: to see him as the lord of the entire
world, directing the course of history, using the nations to punish Israel
for its sins. Here we find the first great expression of pure monotheism.
It appears in the prophet Isaiah, through whom God calls Assyria “the rod
of my anger!" (10:5) (About 2800 years later, the ideologues of Gush
Emunim will apply this same interpretive tactic to Nazi Germany.)
A revolt against Assyria in 701 BCE
resulted in the deportation of almost the entire rural population of
Judah. As for those who stayed, their extended families and clans were
broken up, and their connection to the ancestral lands was cut. No large
kinship structures now intervened between person and state. The person
lost those "fluid boundaries in space and time." It could no longer make
sense, therefore, to defend divine justice by saying, "The fathers have
eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." Rather,
"each shall die for his own sins" (Jeremiah 31:29-30). The whole of
Ezekiel 18 is devoted to this principle of individual liability:
God commands that no one shall be punished for sins that he himself has
not committed. (Orthodox interpretations of the Holocaust, including that
of Gush Emunim, disregard this commandment.3
)
Jeremiah and Ezekiel lived at the
time of the Babylonian exile (early 6th century BCE). In 538, when Cyrus
of Persia allowed the Jews to return, some did. The returnees did not
worship idols (a fact attested by archaeology). According to the covenant
faith, things ought to have gone well for them.
Things did not go well. In 63 BCE,
the Romans arrived. The stark imbalance of power seemed to contradict the
covenant faith: We aren't worshiping idols – why then this Roman
domination? Using an old prophetic text (Micah 5:3), pious Jews
found an answer: We are living amid the birth pangs of the Messiah! Just
as a woman undergoes great pain before the joyous event, so our pain is a
prelude. It derives from the fact that the demonic forces are gathering
for their last stand, because God has re-entered history. He is about to
overcome them and bring redemption.
The idea of the birth pangs produced
Christianity and two disastrous revolts against Rome. (Today, we shall
see, the luminaries of Gush Emunim interpret the Holocaust as the birth
pangs of the Messiah.)
When it became clear that the pangs
had spawned no redemption, the defenders of biblical faith, Jewish and
Christian, could still find refuge in the notion of an afterlife, where
God would finally mete out justice to the good and the wicked. It is
difficult to disprove this belief, since death is a country from whose
bourn no traveler returns. For the same reason, however – lack of
verifiability – the belief proved vulnerable when, in later centuries, new
challenges to faith arose. The revolutions (philosophical, scientific,
industrial and political) of the 17th and 18th centuries upset traditional
ideas about God and the universe. The discovery of different cultures led
to a notion of the relativity of all values, including biblical
commandments. The text of the Bible was subjected to critical scrutiny.
Then came Frazer, Darwin, Marx, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Freud. The Western
world went seasick. The notion of an individual afterlife came to seem, in
the hearts of many, as doubtful as the medieval version of the cosmos to
which that notion had belonged. Multitudes abandoned biblical faith.
And now we reach the 20th century,
with its massive examples of innocent suffering. Each group tends to focus
on its own. For Jews (and many others) the epitome is the Holocaust: here
basic evil was conducted systematically on a massive scale for five years
without hindrance. If God could have intervened and did not, how can one
forgive him? If God could not intervene, what difference does it make
whether he exists or not?
When people assert their faith in the
biblical God despite these questions, the questions do not go away. Where
the Holocaust is concerned, however, the members of Gush Emunim have an
answer:
In a valuable study of the movement,
Ian S. Lustick cites Harold Fisch, former rector of Bar Ilan University
and the only member of the Gush elite to have published a systematic
treatment of the movement's views. Fisch "characterizes the Holocaust…as
an example of God's discipline – 'a commandment written in blood upon the
soil of Europe.' God thereby instructed his people that the emancipation,
in which so many Jews had placed their hopes for a future of equality
within a liberal democratic Europe, could not provide them with an escape
route from the burdens of their covenant [namely, to settle the Land of
Israel – SL]."4
Lustick continues his summary:
"Thus, the Holocaust is seen as God's way of coercing his chosen people
back to the Promised Land and of convincing them of the cosmic urgency of
its complete reunification – the whole people of Israel in the whole Land
of Israel. Best known for this interpretation of the Holocaust is Menachem
Kasher, who argued that by entailing the destruction of more Jews than the
loss of the First and Second Temples combined, the Holocaust must be
understood as the 'birthpangs of the Messianic Age (which) fell upon our
generation and thus opened for us the way to Redemption.'"5
After the Holocaust, two "miracles"
stand out: the creation of Israel in 1948 and the War of 1967, which put
the entire land again under Jewish control. "None of this is by accident!"
wrote Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who taught and inspired the founders of Gush
Emunim. "There is no mysticism here, rather open eyes that can see the
hand of God. Our holy land, that was exhausted and asleep, its power
blocked up, has arisen… And now, with the help of God, the land is in our
hands, and the Temple Mount is in our hands."6
Kook's
personification of the land is not just rhetoric. Gush teachings stress
the indissoluble bond between God, the land, and the Jewish people. The
meaning of life is to be found in that bond. "The chosen land and the
chosen people comprise one completed, divine unity, joined together at
the creation of the world and the creation of history. They comprise
one vital and integral unit."7
God is at work: first the birth
pangs, now the actual process of birth, the restoration of Israel in its
promised borders, to be followed by the redemption of the world. Within
Gush Emunim there are differences as to where the promised borders are,
but minimally they include southern Lebanon and much of Jordan. Many in
the Gush understand that it may take time, even generations, for the birth
process to be complete. Concerning the areas already under Jewish control,
however, there is strong agreement. The "indissoluble bond" cannot be
partly dissolved. Others may use the sterile phrase "dismantling of
settlements," but "these settlements are the essence of our existence and
flesh of our flesh. We shall not accept the amputation of our living
flesh."8
Here for example is Moshe Levinger,
writing in 1985:
"The public that is faithful to the
Land of Israel has begun to worry. Perhaps, in spite of everything, the
danger is real that the Yamit precedent will be repeated, God forbid, in
parts of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. I must say, taking full responsibility,
that such simplistic and absolutist comparisons between what happened in
Sinai and the infrastructure we have established here in the heart of our
forefathers' inheritance: Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, are exaggerated
and totally unjustified."9
Now Yamit is to be repeated, if the
disengagement plan goes through, for all 21 of the Gaza settlements and
four in holy Samaria. What kind of glitch is this? Gush Emunim has
envisioned delay, but this would be worse: it would be reversal
– something never contemplated. The God of the Gush does not hiccup on
the path to salvation. Archaizing faith cannot endure the hems and haws of
humdrum history. Sharon's plan would dismantle the movement's whole
interpretation of events. But if God is not at work in Gaza and Samaria,
then the members of Gush Emunim lose their answer to the Holocaust. Their
faith becomes vulnerable to the terrible questions. That is their stake in
the settlements.
I have singled out Gush Emunim
because of the danger it poses, but let me close by noting that the
post-Auschwitz attempt to rediscover God's work in the birth of Israel is
extremely widespread. Gush Emunim is the logical extension of a norm, the
tip of an iceberg.10 One finds this
notion in synagogue worship ("Bless thou the state of Israel, the
beginning of the dawn of our redemption…."). At Yad Vashem, the Holocaust
Memorial in Jerusalem, the exhibit culminates in the creation of the
State. The implicit message is this: since Israel arose thus in holiness –
out of the dry bones, the ash, the mass graves – opposition is forbidden.
Post-Auschwitz theologians (Joseph
Soloveitchik, Irving Greenberg, Emil Fackenheim, Eliezer Berkovits) find
God's hand at work in the survival of the Jewish people and the rebirth of
Israel. One can explain such things on less edifying grounds. And besides!
Try saying that to an Armenian, a Tutsi, a refugee from Darfur, or to any
of the myriad instances of unredeemed innocent suffering, including those
from the Holocaust.
Fackenheim tells Jews not to abandon
their faith or Israel, because that would mean granting Hitler posthumous
victories.11 I cannot agree.
Let the dead do posthumous bookkeeping. The victory of the living is to
find meaning in one another – without illusions and opiates.
n
Endnotes
(1) Gush (pronounced "goosh") Emunim was founded in 1974. In 1981 it took
institutional form as the Yesha Council (Yesha, meaning salvation, is an
acronym for Judah [Yehuda], Samaria [Shomron], and Gaza). The
Mafdal
(National Religious Party) has represented it in both the Barak and Sharon
governments. At least 80% of its perhaps 40,000 members are orthodox Jews;
the rest are secular believers in the Jewish people's destiny to settle
the biblical land of Israel. Back to text.
(2) Ian S. Lustick,
For the Land
and the Lord, Council of Foreign
Relations, 1988. Chapter 3. The complete text is available at
www.ssc.upenn.edu/polisci/faculty/
data/lustick/for_the_land/index.html
Back to text.
(3) For example, among the orthodox in Israel who do not belong to Gush
Emunim, one sometimes hears that European Jewry was punished because of
its assimilationist tendencies. Apart from its obscenity, this response
ignores the facts. Among those murdered by the Nazis were over 80 percent
of the Jewish scholars, rabbis, full-time students and teachers of Torah
alive in 1939. (The estimate is by Rabbi M. J. Itamar, former
secretary-general of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.)
Back
to text.
(4) Lustick, op. cit. Chapter 4, citing Harold Fisch,
The Zionist Revolution,
1978, pp. 18, 85-87. Back to text.
(5) Menachem Kasher,
The Great Era
(in Hebrew), Jerusalem: Torah Shlema,
1968, p. 32. By the "Great Era," Kasher means the promised age of
redemption. Kasher's works are widely studied in the yeshivas of Gush
Emunim.
Back
to text.
(6) Tzvi Yehuda Kook, "Between the People and Its Land,"
Artzi
Vol. 2 (Spring 1982)," p.21. Back to text.
(7) Ibid., pp. 15-16 (emphasis in original). Back to text.
(8) Haim Druckman, "The Cry of the Land of Israel,"
Artzi
Vol. 1 (1982) p.37. Back to text.
(9) Moshe Levinger, "With Alertness and Security,"
Nekuda, No.93, November 22, 1985, p.8.
For the same argument, see also Yoel Ben-Nun, "Not to Be Nervous and Not
to Be Made Nervous," Nekuda,
No. 68, January 13, 1984, pp.4-7. (Cited by Lustick, op. cit.)
Back to text.
(10) Ehud Sprinzak applies the image of the iceberg to Gush Emunim in
another way. The movement has received backing from a large subculture
which he designates by the "knitted skullcaps" on the heads of its men. In
the 1950's and 60's, while
the rest of
Israel's educational system underwent "an astonishing dilution, the
religious Zionists developed an educational system which created norms of
life and behaviour of the highest order for a quarter of the school
population." This constituency shares many of the norms of Gush Emunim.
Ehud Sprinzak, "The Iceberg Model of Political
Extremism,"
www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/gush_iceberg.html
Back to text.
(11) Emil Fackenheim,
The Jewish
Return Into History, Schocken, 1978, p.
32. Back to text.
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