The fall of religious Zionism

STAN GOLDMAN

Gadi Taub’s The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale University Press, 2010) chronicles the rise and fall of a brave but fatally flawed idea: religious Zionism or, some would say, anti-secular Zionism.

Taub is assistant professor at the School of Public Policy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of scholarly papers on Israeli politics. He is also a frequent contributor to Yediot Ahronot, the New York Times and The New Republic, as well as a host of TV shows for teenagers, who he interviewed for this book, along with rabbis, settlers and politicians. Perhaps it was this mix of academic skills and his knowledge of Israelis from all walks of life that helped Taub make the struggle for the meaning of Zionism brilliantly clear to me.

Taub states at the outset that he is a liberal democrat wholly devoted to upholding the democratic principles of a sovereign Israel against religious leaders who would subvert this democracy in the name of a Greater Israel based upon theology.

In an interview he had in 1997 with the first head of the Settlers’ Council for the West Bank, Yisrael Harel, Taub describes how the sides of the struggle were reduced: Harel’s empty hand represented old Zionism, modern Israeli democracy and its “Westernized, empty, materialistic, lazy and spineless culture, adrift from its Jewish roots”; the other hand represented Judaism, Zionism and settlement, “the true meaning of Zionism and the future of Judaism.” The hands were moving away from each other.

Taub quotes statements made in Israel in 1967 by the settlers’ idealogue – Rabbi Zvi Yehuda – that “the miracle” of the Six Day War and the conquest of the West Bank was a fulfilment of G-d’s prophecy that the settlers would undertake a religious mission, that they now had divine authority to redeem the land of Judea and Samaria, to possess, protect and farm forever this land, which G-d-gave to the Jewish people as their heritage. Rabbi Shlomo Aviner claimed that this divine right is greater and higher than that of the state of Israel, higher even than the value of human life. (The Supreme Court of Israel disagreed.)

Two months after the Six Day War, author Amos Oz noted the conundrum of Zionism. If Zionism were democracy – the liberation of people – it would have to give up the newly acquired territories. If it were the redemption of land, as the settlers claimed, it would end up enslaving people, because there wasn’t any way that Israel could absorb the huge Palestinian population except under permanent occupation. How prophetic he was!

Methodically, Taub shows how the central flaw of the religious Zionistic vision – the unwillingness to anticipate a struggle for democratic rights in the West Bank – brought the religious settlers into conflict with not only the Palestinians and the Americans, but the secular Jews of Israel.

It is fascinating to read how brilliantly the settlers’ leaders were able to play politics by siding with leaders Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, thereby obtaining state financing for huge settlement expansion. Then, as the grand plan for a Greater Israel based upon a religious revival began to unravel, the settlers’ leadership had to abandon that tact and scramble to re-define their Zionism.

In a wide-reaching decision, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that religion didn’t give settlers the right to expropriate Arab lands; only the military could order such expropriations in the national interest. In response, the settlers’ leaders backed off their religious stance, arguing that the settlements must stay because they are a security buffer. However, when settlements proved no barrier to the Iraqi missile bombardment and when faced with possible eviction from the West Bank, the settlers’ leadership re-invented their Zionism again, asserting that they were ordinary Israeli citizens with “democratic rights” to their homes.

This is the point at which negotiations began with Yasser Arafat. Settlers were happy when Arafat walked away from a territorial deal, but a brutal realization struck the governments of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Sharon after him. Arafat knew that Israel was caught in a dilemma: either give Palestinians Israeli citizenship or get out of the West Bank and give the Palestinians their state. Both were terrible choices. To order the settlers to withdraw from the territories would dislocate hundreds of thousands of Jews, many of them tenaciously attached to the land. Giving Palestinians the democratic rights of Israeli citizens, on the other hand, would be a catastrophe, according to Taub, as the voting Arabs would soon outnumber Jews and the Jewish character of the state would be lost.

The embattled settlers asked the Israeli Supreme Court to grant them the democratic rights they denied Palestinians, the right to their homes. This was, according to Taub, “a desperate but cynical tactic for self-preservation.” Moreover, the settlers said, their homes were necessary for state security. The court dismissed their arguments, in Taub’s words:

“You cannot justify settlement because critical national interests override private rights, and then object to evacuation because private rights override critical national interests. Not only is there no moral ground on which to justify occupation in the name of human rights, but there is no legal ground either.... National interests ... [override] the property rights of individuals.”

Taub’s portrait of weeping, disillusioned youth during the ensuing nonviolent evacuation of Gaza certainly tugged at my heartstrings. Above all, it signaled the acceptance by their leadership that they had lost their battle with secular Zionism, that Israeli sovereign law stood above settlements.

As if it were an epilogue to a Shakespearean tragedy, an outbreak of Jewish terrorism sealed the fate of religious Zionism. Some zealots among the settlers were enraged at being forced to give up land that “was the birthright of the Jewish people” and that they had reclaimed from the Sinai Desert with blood, sweat and tears when, as part of the peace deal with Egypt, the religious settlement of Yamit had to be evacuated. The fear of evacuation was the last straw for Dr. Baruch Goldstein of Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, who went on a suicide mission to the Cave of Patriarchs, one of the holiest sites in Judaism and Islam. The resulting massacre of Muslims as they prayed outraged the world and especially secular Israelis. Religious Jews were spat on in the streets of Tel Aviv and many shopkeepers wouldn’t admit Jews wearing a kippah. Even more outrage occurred: bomb attacks on Arab schoolchildren and upon the mayors of two Palestinian cities.

The final blow to religious Zionism, according to Taub, came with the assassination of Rabin by Yigal Amir, a university student who felt that Rabin was about to give away “G-d-given” lands. Despite his not being a settler, he was lumped in with terrorists and the settlers, who now being seen as a threat to the state.

In today’s Middle East, nothing could be more topical than the struggle for democracy among Arab nations. I am certain that Taub intended the very force of the settlers’ Zionism, about which he writes, to motivate readers to re-examine their Jewish nationalism and commitment to democracy.

Stan Goldman is a longtime Vancouver resident, retired high school English teacher and Zionist.

^TOP