semitism.net

For Ariel Sharon, the Gaza disengagement was more of a tactical move than a declaration of principle. He recognized that Israel could not maintain the occupation forever. He understood that the Second Intifada was running out of steam and that Israel held the upper hand militarily. So he decided to seize the opportunity, consolidate Israel’s most important gains from the 1967 war - principally, the Jordan River, Jerusalem and its suburbs, and a good deal of land to the East of the Green Line, including the outlet of the large Eastern Aquifer - and withdraw troops from the rest of the territories, starting with Gaza. His main goals were defined, defensible borders for Israel, and control of water resources. For the Jewish religious right, however, the Gaza withdrawal has become a final showdown on the Peel Commission’s 1937 recommendation to partition British Palestine into Jewish and Arab states…

With less than a month to go before the announced date of the Gaza withdrawal, the Israeli settlers council has organized a massive march into Gush Katif, one of the larger Gaza settlements and a bastion of Jewish resistance. The Israeli police put a ban on the protest, presumably fearing that many of the marchers would stay and impede the evacuation. At present, the march is stopped at Kfar Maimon, just outside Gaza. From Arutz Sheva:

An estimated 40,000 people gathered last night (Monday) at the gravesite of the Baba Sali in Netivot for the beginning of the three-day protest event. Many thousands more were prevented from arriving when the police confiscated the licenses of bus drivers who were hired to bring them from cities all over the country…

This morning (Tuesday), the tens of thousands of protestors awoke to find that they were enclosed by police and soldiers. They were told to hurry and rush into the moshav of Kfar Maimon, lest the soldiers and police forcibly remove them from the area…

The police… asked the demonstrators to disperse, saying that they had placed buses at their disposal to leave towards Netivot. A police spokesperson told Arutz-7 that the police are not allowing demonstrators to leave towards the west, and have closed the gates to newcomers. She said that a “steady stream of people are leaving.”

People at the site have a different story, however. “If anything, it looks like there are more people here now than there were last night,” said Menachem G. of Jerusalem.

Israel’s Orthodox rabbinic community is one of the driving forces behind the anti-Disengagement protests. Blogger Yeranan Yaakov offers a translation of a letter from former chief rabbis Avraham Shapira and Mordechai Eliyahu that was circulated to synagogues before the march:

We call upon all our Jewish brothers to join us and to join our mighty brothers in Gush Katif, to remove the siege, to cancel the expulsion, and to raise up families for settlement in the area. We call upon all our brothers to unite, to focus our efforts and to work with all their strength to the success of the project, and it is incumbant upon all of us during these days to focus only on this project to cancel this horrible decree.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the same rabbis

…issued a halachic ruling on Friday forbidding soldiers and police from enforcing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s order to close off the Gaza Strip.

“It is forbidden to participate in the closure of Gush Katif,” the rabbis wrote in their ruling. “Certainly not on Shabbat when it would be considered a desecration of the holy day,” they added.

There has always been somewhat of a tension between civil and religious authority in Israel. Jewish tradition has it that the return to the promised land will be led by the Messiah. In Israel’s early years, some Orthodox Jews questioned the legitimacy of the state because it was founded by human rather than divine action. Abraham Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of British Palestine, is credited as the founder of Religious Zionism. He taught that the Zionist leaders, though mostly secular, were unknowing participants in G-d’s project of Jewish redemption.

This idea served well enough, as long as the actions of the state were more or less in keeping with the Ortodox goal of a return to Biblical Israel. In fact, after 1967, many Orthodox saw the reclaimation of “Judea” and “Samaria” (the biblical designations for what is now the West Bank) as a sign that the Messianic age was imminent. In Israel, with secular Zionism becoming a less inspiring cause for young soldiers, the Orthodox have become the backbone of the military. In the U.S., Orthodox Jews have taken a lead role in the major Jewish organizations and are a driving force for pro-Israel advocacy.

An editorial in yesterday’s Haaretz captures the risk inherent in the secular/religious dichotomy of modern Zionism, which Shapira and Eliahu are busy exploiting:

Religious Zionism sought to be incorporated in all fields of life and society. The IDF, whose adherence to the orders of the executive authority is one of the cornerstones of democracy, was an important target in this integration process. The religious Zionist movement is proud of having successfully incorporated those who wear knitted kippot into the army.

But from this same religious Zionism that strives for integration grew Gush Emunim, which aggressively worked to crush the democratic system. Its violent messianic agenda is now yielding rotten fruit in the form of the disastrous phenomenon of refusing to obey army orders. Standing proudly at the forefront of this movement, which is leading the IDF and Israeli society to the edge of the abyss, are the two inciting rabbis, along with hundreds of rabbis employed by the establishment who are echoing their sentiments.

In my opinion, Messianism has boded disaster for the Jews every time it rears its head, from the Bar Kochba rebellion to the present time. The End of Days aside, if you want to know what it really means to invade land where another nation is living, to be an occupying force, to deprive other human beings of rights and dignity, try reading some of the soldiers’ testimonies collected by Shovrim Shtika. We are putting soldiers in an impossible position, driving them to commit acts that are (I like to think) singularly un-Jewish - certainly not in keeping with our supposed values of peace, kindness and justice. Here is one of about a thousand examples:

They caught some kid - really young, 11 or 12 years old, I don’t know how old he was - who threw stones. They managed to catch him. It was an all-out abuse. They abused him, and I don’t think something was done about it. They put him in the toilet, I remember the soldier, I remember, he was a friend of mine, a friend from the company. And he took pride in shoving the kid’s head into the toilet…

Into the bowl?

Into the bowl. And he was proud of it, and he slammed his head against the bowl, and I don’t know what else. They put him there, he was locked in the toilet for a whole day, by the company commander’s orders, to teach him a lesson. Just locked up there. And from time to time, you know, a soldier who was guarding there would enter, put his head in the toilet, slam his head against the toilet, and I remember he told me that, and I was shocked, but you know, who am I to report this? Today I don’t see it that way, but then [it was different]. I think it was madness, no doubt. I remember that boy crying, what a mess, what… Even without that the boy was already in shock, coming towards ‘the Zionist enemy’, who knows where, a whole platoon of soldiers, all of them want to kill him, in the pretense that he threw a stone. You see; that’s what happened there.

I’d like to offer as a sort of counterbalance a quote from Abraham Heschel, from an essay called A Prayer for Peace:

Is there no compassion in the world? No sense of discernment to realize that this is a war that refutes any conceivable justification of war? The sword is the pride of man; arsenals, military bases, nuclear weapons lend supremacy to nations…

Most of us prefer to disregard the dreadful deeds we do over there. The atrocities committed in out name are too horrible to be credible. It is beyond our power to react vividly to the ongoing nightmare, day after day, night after night. So we graciously bear other people’s suffering.

O Lord, we confess our sins, we are ashamed of the inadequacy of our anguish, of how faint and slight is our mercy. We are a generation that has lost the capacity for outrage. We must continue to remind ourselves that in a free society all are involved in what some are doing. Some are guilty, all are responsible.

I wish I could say that Heschel was writing about the occupation, but the quote is from 1971 and refers to American’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Which brings me to this point:

Where, today, are the rabbinic voices to contradict the warmongering and land-lust of Religious Zionism? Do we all accept this interpretation of our religion? No scholar I. But if Judaism is to survive as a religion worth adhering to, we need to challenge the notion that our destiny as a people is to found another kingdom bathed in blood, that, at best, will rise like the last only to fall when a stronger adversary comes along.