Reading the Haaretz interviews with Disengagement chief Yonatan Bassi and settler leader/disengagement opponent Rabbi Yaakov Meidan, and seeing some of the most blatantly hypocritical statements I have ever read, I have now realized that, in many ways, I myself have been thinking like a settler for years. That I too subscribe to Judaism with an agenda.
I came to this realization, that I have been a settler in my own right, while reading the Haaretz interview published a couple of weeks ago with Yonatan Bassi, the man in charge of the Disengagement Administration and in last Friday’s interview with Rabbi Yaakov Meidan, one of the leading rabbis opposed to the disengagement, but who says he will not respond with violence.
What I mean by “thinking like a settler,” or being “a settler in my own right,” is the notion that Judaism can have an agenda, or basically mean what you want it to. And that you can utter words that say one thing but really mean quite another. Or, put in another way, words that mean nothing because you only mean them to the extent they suit you and those who think like you.
The article with Mr. Bassi is fascinating and well worth everyone’s time. I think it is safe to say that he can be described as the man with among the least desirable jobs in the world at the moment. I frankly knew very little about him before reading the article, and it seems to me anyway that he has taken the attitude and approach that one would need to have to accomplish this task.
But he himself has been a part of the settler community, and it is from that place that he can utter statements like:
“Everyone here is a victim. Everyone is caught up in a tragedy.”
and
“The thought of a bulldozer crushing the garden of a family and the house of a family is a nightmare for me.”
I read and reread these statements in shock. Although it may not be fair, my shock stemmed from my assumption that his definition of “everyone” in the first statement did not include the Palestinians, the Israeli soldiers who have lost their lives or suffered severe physical or mental injury defending the settlements, the entire non-settler Israeli whose economy has been wrecked, in part, constructing and maintaining the settlements and the infrastructure they require.
No, I imagined that Mr. Bassi does not see any victims other than the settlers. And I then assumed, again possibly unfairly, that Mr. Bassi has not been having nightmares for years and is not likely to be familiar with the work of Jeff Halper and the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions. For, like only a few people, in reality, are included in his conception of the “everyone” who are victims, I imagined that Mr. Bassi really meant to say that the nightmare is the thought of bulldozers crushing the homes and gardens of Jewish families in the settlements.
Okay, so I caught someone involved with the settler movement (albeit in an unpopular way at the moment) being a hypocrite. Stop the presses? Hardly. That the settler leadership, or even the leadership of the American Jewish community that has all but demanded subscription to an “Israel right or wrong” ideology, would be guilty of hypocrisy is not news, probably not even worth a blog post.
But these statements stuck with me nonetheless. And then I read this past weekend’s interview with Rabbi Meidan, again a fascinating read. And again another guy with an unpopular job – after leading a movement that for years gambled on the notion that the State would always support and prop up their pursuit of the Land — in fact relied on their occupation of the Land — Rabbi Meidan and others must deal with the fact that they lost their gamble. And as a result of losing the gamble, thousands of his followers will suffer. Suffering merely heaped upon the suffering of, literally, millions of others that occurred while they were winning the gamble.
In the course of the interview, Rabbi Meidan is asked what he would do as a soldier faced with an order to evacuate a family from their home in Gaza. This is how he answered:
“That is a very difficult question. Very difficult. It is a question that touches also on dragging people from the home in which they have lived for 30 years. Dragging children, dragging mothers. Let me ask you: If your mothers were there, would you drag them out?”
Which is when it struck me. Here are the arguments that have failed, for the most part, for those of us on the left. Put yourself in their shoes. Apply justice and law equally to all. How can We do this after what We have been through. The victimizer ultimately becomes the victim of his actions.
And now we watch as settler leaders try to use those same arguments to defend their gamble. As they send their children into the streets to fight their battles. As they declare they cannot follow the decisions of a democratically elected government when they don’t like those decisions.
But it’s not enough to declare them hypocrites, to believe that the end of their gamble in Gaza is justice (partly) served, to feel somehow vindicated by disengagement.
Putting aside the issue of what will happen in the West Bank, we must all see this as a moment to check ourselves. For the last several years now, I have been sitting through services, waiting to find passages that justify my beliefs, that prove my politics. And I have sat in judgment of those who disagree with me, believing that they must not be able to see what I am seeing, that they are missing what Judaism is really saying to us. That they are becoming, contributing to or sitting silently while the rest of the Jewish community becomes, everything we are commanded not to be. The oppressor. The victimizer. The hypocrite.
But to do so, to use Judaism to prove a point, to support an agenda is, well, to be a settler. Judaism is not that easy. And the moment anyone believes that they and those like them have it right, then, like the gamble made by the settlers, Judaism itself is lost.
Let us perhaps see disengagement as a victory for Judaism. For the notion that the situation in Israel and Palestine, like Judaism itself, is complex and difficult and painful, and it needs every ounce of each one of us working constantly to move forward. For the challenge that the word Israel itself presents us: struggling with God.
For the belief that Judaism is not a religion that can be claimed by a few, and that Judaism is not a religion that espouses a vision where only its followers, but all people, thrive in peace. A religion that stands for justice for all.
Rabbi Meidan concluded his interview with a statement I agreed with. A statement that, if it really did mark settler ideology, would make me proud to be one:
“I have never recognized the supremacy of the law. Justice and morality are far more important to me than the supremacy of the law. When the law stands opposite justice and morality, I stand on the other side.”
Maybe someday, Rabbi Meidan, we will stand there together.
Theophany and Power
What a really thoughtful, interesting post. I know what you mean about reading Torah and attending services, looking for passages to support a more pacifistic, egalitarian view - and not finding them. But (like you) I don’t believe that Judaism is a religion of conquest and domination. If it were, I couldn’t embrace it.
It seems to me religion has always been political: a tension between theophany and power. G-d spoke - maybe speaks - to man. But we interpret what we hear in the context of what we know and want. In preliterate societies, G-d was a power to be feared. In this literate age, G-d has become the ultimate authority. What ideologue can resist claiming divine sanction for his own opinions? We have done to G-d what we did to nature - made it a source of our own power rather than a power outside ourselves.
The earliest systematic attempt to put the Israelite oral tradition in writing was probably during the reign of Hezekiah. This included much of Kings and Prophets. Hezekiah was trying to recreate the Golden Age, already a couple of centuries past, after the destruction of Israel, with Judah an unwilling tributary of Assyria. He glorified the early rulers and invented a story of conquest (Book of Joshua) to explain how the Israelites came into the land. The archeological evidence does not support an entry by conquest. Hezekiah was trying to bolster the courage of his subjects for what turned out to be a disastrous rebellion against Assyria.
A theophany, once. And then, a political overlay. All these agendas need to be teased out, I think, to hear the voice of G-d in the text. In the end - I think - our tradition is not one of men exercising power with divine authority, but rather a gradual accretion of thought about the unknowable. We have carried G-d through time like a tabernacle, changing the guard, changing our interpretation, never finally knowing but always preserving and worshiping it.
So, to me, there is always an agenda. But it doesn’t need to be a wrong, hateful agenda. Arguing about the agenda is part of the work of religion. What we’re doing here, in our small way.
Andrew Schamess
Ethnic Cleansing Performed Against Your Own Parents
Is it really too early for following the example of Nelson Mandela and do without ethnic cleansing? Is it really incomprehensible that Israeli citizens live in the country of Palestine, working for their own future and that of their host country?
It is now for about one hundred years that jewish people have achieved something entirely unique in history: turning a religious community into a nation with a fiat language. The will power and the inhumane sacrifices encountered will stand out for ever.
While living in the US of A I did subscribe to the Jerusalem Post. Reading it, I was under the impression that the Gaza settlements to some degree were functioning as a “Miami on the Mediterranean”. Twenty years onwards the picture has changed. The countryside has become cultivated and a real home.
I do understand that the Gaza Palestinians live in destitution. They have suffered by far for too long living in crammed quarters, having there infrastructure destroyed time and again. But will they really be better off with the destroyed livelyhood of the settlers?
Germans have both started and suffered ethnic cleansing during the time of Adolf Hitler and the years thereafter. Even sixty years later the “liberated” cities and countrysides look downtrodden. The ethnic cleansing of Slovenia, Slavonia and Vojvodina, expulsing and murdering the German settlers of Yugoslavia, came back with a revenge, as we all know. For many centuries there was a far flung German diaspora in Eastern Europe (Bohemia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Baltic countries). These people were not destitute and they were – contrary to Nazi propaganda – proud citizens of their respective countries, tax payers and soldiers for their king or czar.
It is most unfortunate that Greek Cypriots rejected their Turkish compatriots. And worse that the European Union did not reject those Greeks in retaliation. Otherwise the Levante (Israel, Lebanon and Palestine) could have been invited to join the EU and the jewish resettlement in all probability would have become unthinkable.
By now this bad thing cannot be stopped anymore. But did anyone in Israel think about doubling the Gaza area into the Negev in exchange for letting the settlers live in their homes? Did anybody think “the unthinkable”, namely that as much as Arabs could become fully empowered citizens of Israel, Ashkenazim could become Palestine citizens as well?
Here in Berlin there lives an Israeli German, who cannot return to his country of birth for fear of being tried as a traitor, exactly because of working for such ideas, cooperating with the aboriginees of the “promised land”.
Just the very thought of expelling your own mother from the land she has cultivated, should thrust people into the direction of something less inhumane.
Hans-Werner Andreas, Berlin, Germany