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Fri Aug 12 10:51:51 PDT 2005

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ARIEL SHARON
Aug 12th 2005  

The Israeli army is about to start evicting Jewish residents of the
Gaza strip. The row over Israel's biggest evacuation of settlers in
over two decades presages a growing clash over what makes the Jewish
state Jewish

IT IS the last Sabbath eve in July, a night of stillness and velvet
warmth after the heat of the day. The villa-lined, traffic-free streets
of Neve Dekalim are dotted with people strolling home from family
dinners or chatting softly to neighbours. Then a loudspeaker breaks the
calm. "Residents, good evening and good Sabbath. Please go into
protected buildings immediately."

The people respond to the warning as they did to the dull crack of the
mortar shell that fell an hour or so earlier. They pay not the
slightest attention.

Miracles in Neve Dekalim are a part of everyday life. According to the
settlers' count, some 6,000 mortars and Qassam rockets fired from the
Palestinian towns in Gaza have fallen on them since the second INTIFADA
erupted five years ago--nearly one for every settler. Yet only one
settler has been killed. Clumsy weapons, a statistician might say, and
a thinly spread population, in detached houses and large gardens. But
in the words of Ruth Cohen, of nearby Ganei Tal, "Every time a mortar
comes over, God bats it away with a MATKA."

The belief that the Almighty amuses Himself by playing Israel's
national beach sport with explosive shells is also why many have not
even started packing, deciding where to live or applying for
compensation. On Monday August 15th the army is due to start evicting
the Gaza settlers, as well as those in four isolated West Bank
communities. But some will wait and see. God may mean them to leave
Gaza--temporarily. If not, He will somehow stop it from happening. 

Most Israelis cannot grasp this thinking. Nor can they grasp why anyone
would live in a hot, sandy, bombarded enclave, surrounded by barbed
wire and watchtowers, much less put their children in such danger. It
must be out of religious fanaticism, or else a twisted urge to make
life hell for the 1.3m Palestinians squeezed into the rest of the Gaza
strip.

"Look beyond the ideology," urges Gideon Aran, a sociologist at the
Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The answer "quality of life" seems a
bad joke, but everybody in Gush Katif, religious (the majority) and
secular, gives it. It is not just the big houses and quiet streets.
Insulated from the rest of Israel as much as from the Palestinians, the
place evokes an older, more innocent time. Doors are left unlocked.
Parents do not worry where their children are at night. Many
inhabitants, former residents of poor, charmless towns, also find a
sense of community, of building something new. The phrase "Garden of
Eden" is even heard.

But whereas Adam and Eve knew why they must leave, the settlers cannot
understand their original sin. The government encouraged them to move
there--some after being evacuated from Yamit, the settlement strip at
the north of the Sinai, when Israel gave it back to Egypt in 1982.
Relations with the Palestinians used to be just great. Even the more
secular settlers invoke historical ties to the land going back to
biblical times. They thought they were broadening the borders of the
state. Instead they have found themselves on a sort of spacewalk
outside it, kept alive by a barrage of protective technologies that
ordinary Israelis are sick of paying for, and by miracles, which they
don't believe in.

The fall from grace will be a hard one. To leave is not just to throw
away the years or decades invested in building houses, businesses,
farms and communities and to search, perhaps fruitlessly, for new jobs.
It is to return to an Israel that has grown alien: to being, as Mr Aran
puts it, "rank-and-file citizens in a stinking political and civic
reality". And for what? Like many in Israel itself, they are sceptical
that the "disengagement" will bring any benefits; rather, they fear
that Palestinian extremists will take it as a sign that terrorism works.

Nearly half a million Israelis live on Palestinian land occupied in the
1967 war. The vast majority are in settlements not far over the pre-war
boundary (the Green Line), where living standards are higher or prices
cheaper; they do not even consider themselves settlers, though most
international bodies do. The "ideological" ones in the more distant
colonies, on the far side of Israel's "separation barrier", number
fewer than 100,000. In Gaza, 8,000 or so are being evacuated. And Gaza
matters far less economically, strategically and biblically than the
West Bank. 

Yet much more is at stake than Gaza itself. The settler movement as a
whole sees disengagement as the thin edge of a wedge that will
eventually lever Israel out of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem as
well. The argument over Gaza has also become a bitter trial of strength
between Israel's so-called "mainstream", the mostly secular Jews who
say they would gladly give up land for peace, and the
national-religious settler movement. That movement has grown ever more
powerful since the war of 1967, and seemed until Ariel Sharon's
"betrayal" to have imposed an unbreakable armlock on the state itself.
The outcome of this struggle may determine whether Israel is ever
capable of making peace.

HASTENING THE MESSIAH
The existence of religious Zionism, let alone its present strength, is
an oddity, since the original Zionism was areligious, even
counter-religious. Its founders, secular Jews inspired by the
nation-state enthusiasm sweeping 19th-century Europe, saw emigration to
Palestine as a way to escape not just the squalor and persecution, but
also the stifling insularity and religious orthodoxy of SHTETL life. It
took the first chief rabbi of British Mandate Palestine, Abraham
HaCohen Kook, to argue that a Jewish return to the land could hasten
the coming of the Messiah and the final redemption.

At first, says Yedidia Stern, a scholar at the Israel Democracy
Institute, this was an underground movement. But Israel's
lightning-swift capture of territory in 1967 from Syria, Jordan and
Egypt seemed to prove, to Kook's followers, that the Jewish state was
indeed part of the messianic plan. Suddenly the promise in the book of
Deuteronomy had a new ring: "You will dispossess nations larger and
stronger than you. Every place where you set your foot will be yours."

The almost-defeat of the 1973 war only strengthened the religious
Zionists' resolve. They set up a movement, Gush Emunim, "the block of
the faithful", which took on settlement in the territories as a holy
task. And religious Zionism became the mainstream ideology for
observant Israeli--or "national-religious"--Jews.

They had willing allies. The secular Zionism of those days was no less
messianic, says Mr Stern, with settling land as one of its key values.
The Labour Party produced a modest settlement plan, mostly for a
strategic presence to secure the new eastern border. After the
right-wing Likud defeated Labour in 1977, Mr Sharon, the new minister
of agriculture, was more ambitious. His plan added a series of
industrial towns along the hills near the Green Line, and a strategic
ring of Jewish suburbs around occupied East Jerusalem. He promised his
fellow ministers 2m Jews in the occupied territories by the end of the
century. The calculation, say Akiva Eldar, a journalist, and Idith
Zertal, a historian, in "Lords of the Land", a recent book on the
settlements, was to make the settlements command the territory and
overlook it. "The unconcealed goal", they add, "was to thwart any
future possibility of setting up a viable Palestinian state with
reasonable territorial contiguity."

But to avoid international criticism that settlement in occupied
territory is illegal, it was often done in roundabout ways. Young
zealots would start, for instance, by taking on construction work at an
army base in the territories. At first they would commute. Then they
would try to set up a camp. Often they would be thrown out, and try
again. Eventually, thanks to a sympathetic or neglectful official, they
would be allowed to stay "temporarily". A generator would follow, then
families, permanent homes--"facts on the ground", in the phrase that
has become a bitter national joke--and only then, official permission.

As the settlers' influence grew, the subterfuges multiplied. A 1983
state auditor's report complained, in vain, that most building in the
territories was without local or regional planning, and that settlers
themselves were essentially deciding budgets. To this day, "settlement
outposts" continue to crop up in seeming contradiction to official
policy, thanks to friends in the right places.

All the while, however, the breach between the religious and secular
was growing. Israel's left and even much of its right has lost faith in
"Greater Israel" thanks to military setbacks, Palestinian INTIFADAS,
and, not least, demographics. The Palestinians between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan river will soon outnumber Jews. Keeping
the occupied land will force on Israel the impossible choice of being
either an apartheid state, or a binational one with Jews as a minority.

Today many mainstream Israelis, both secular and religious, resent the
settlers for the state benefits they have enjoyed, for exacerbating the
conflict with the Palestinians--and not least for expropriating the
colour orange, as in Ukraine, for their rebellion, thus forcing untold
numbers of summer outfits to stay in closets. Most would happily give
up the farther-flung settlements so that Israel can be both Jewish and
a democracy. So would even many religious Zionists, now about a fifth
of Israel's population, says Otniel Schneller, a former chairman of the
Yesha Council, the umbrella group of settlement mayors.

SHARON'S BETRAYAL
It was in this atmosphere, with the second INTIFADA already raging,
that Mr Sharon was elected prime minister in 2001. His opponent,
Labour's Amram Mitzna, had promised to disengage from Gaza. Mr Sharon
promised not to. But in December 2003 he announced a plan to do so. 

Why? The kindest theory is that he simply, suddenly, grasped the
demographic reality. (Israel will, in any case, reserve the right to
send the army back in to Gaza if necessary; in effect, it will remain
occupied.) But the move is not inconsistent for Mr Sharon, argues Mr
Eldar, because "Gaza was never part of his vision." Withdrawing might
even strengthen Israel's case for keeping control of the West Bank if,
as looks likely, the Palestinian Authority (PA) turns out to have no
authority in Gaza. Some, in fact, think that that was Mr Sharon's
calculation.

Yet the plan has alienated not just the Gaza settlers, but a large part
of the religious-Zionist mainstream that could have been supportive.
Partly it is because Mr Sharon, the settlers' godfather, is the one
pulling them out. His heavy-handed tactics did not help. He ignored a
vote in his own Likud party against the plan; fired ministers who
refused to back it; rejected calls to hold a national referendum on it
(opinion polls showed a majority favouring the pull-out, but settlers
believe that polls undercount the religious vote and that a referendum
campaign would have swung the balance); and finally scheduled the
pull-out during the three weeks leading up to the fast-day of Tisha
B'Av, when religious Jews do not move house. (It was later shifted.)

Moreover, the preparation was hasty and slapdash. The government
started surveying new sites and building temporary homes just a few
months ago. (Yamit's residents had three years to get ready; they moved
to farms that they had already started planting.) And the benefits are
dubious. There is no peace deal, as there was with the Sinai
withdrawal. Qassam- and mortar-launchers will now be able to come
closer to the Gaza-strip border and reach more targets in Israel.

A WIDENING SCHISM
The withdrawal itself may pass off more smoothly than expected. Aside
from a few extremists, the settlers will leave their homes sadly but
without resistance. But it has turned into a much bigger conflict,
widening existing splits in the political parties, in the
religious-Zionist movement and between religious and secular Israelis.

Mr Sharon's adoption of the withdrawal plan emasculated the Labour
Party, which was forced to support its arch-enemy. But it split the
Likud. A third of the party's members in the Knesset, Israel's
parliament, opposed it; this week Binyamin Netanyahu, the finance
minister, resigned, saying he could not back it. His is an
opportunistic gamble. If the withdrawal is seen as a failure--if it
leads, for instance, to more terrorism from Gaza--he will be in a
stronger position to challenge Mr Sharon for the Likud leadership ahead
of general elections, which must be held by November 2006. 

Among the religious, people are becoming both more moderate and more
radical, says Netty Kupfer, a co-founder of Realistic Religious
Zionism, a group that is trying to find common ground. A minority of
hardliners are taking the state's disengagement from Gaza as a cue to
disengage from the state. One YESHIVA in Gush Katif refused to
celebrate Israeli independence day this year. At the Neve Dekalim
synagogue, a man keeps his mouth shut during the prayer for the state
of Israel and is berated by his neighbour: "Sing! You want to go back
to the diaspora?"

Others, more optimistically, have begun to see the expulsion as a sign
from God to reconnect with Israel as a whole, by setting up the nuclei
of religious neighbourhoods in the cities they had shunned. "To settle
in hearts instead of on hilltops," in the words of Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun,
a Gush Emunim founder who laments that the movement didn't do enough of
it earlier.

But mainstream religious Zionism has also come out of the conflict
emboldened. It is a movement without a political wing: the National
Religious Party in the Knesset is tiny, and other religious parties
were happy to back the disengagement in return for concessions on
matters such as religious education. But it has shown that it can
mobilise people in a way the left can only dream of. A "blue"
pro-disengagement campaign has fizzled miserably; orange ribbons
outnumber blue on Israel's cars by at least ten to one.

And while there were protesters of all ages, the young predominated. A
poll in the YEDIOT AHRONOT newspaper at the end of July found that
while most Israelis still backed the disengagement, most under-35s were
against. Part of a generation, in other words, has been politicised by
the Gaza pull-out--and it is right-wing. Comparisons are drawn with the
1968 protests in Europe and the Americas, which marked a generation of
future leaders. "Except that there, it was an anarchic protest against
state authority," says Mr Stern. "Here they are challenging state
authority with a different kind of Authority."

All this further drives in the wedge between secular and religious
Israeli Jews. "The debate is about what the Jewish component of the
state of Israel means," says Rabbi Michael Melchior, a government
minister and founder of a moderate religious party, Meimad. "The
settlers have succeeded in making [the withdrawal] a story of Judaism
versus emptiness. They have turned it into a KULTURKAMPF."

That conflict will find expression in many ways in the years to come.
The most obvious is over future withdrawals. The West Bank barrier that
Israel is building, on "security" grounds, to enclose the main
settlement blocks is clearly meant to complete an annexation of the
land they are on. Most Israelis support keeping them. (So does George
Bush, who has spoken of recognising "facts on the ground".) And most
would give up the small, distant settlements in the Jordan Valley if
there was something to show in return.

It is the ideological settlements just beyond the barrier that will
cause the most conflict. A majority might support abandoning them for a
true peace deal between Israel and the PA. But that looks a long way
off. Mr Sharon is in no hurry to reach one. And another unilateral
withdrawal, with no obvious benefits attached, may be impossible. If
the settlers' resistance movement remains strong, the claim that the
Gaza pull-out has set a precedent for future withdrawals looks
extremely shaky.

Withdrawals aside, says Mr Kupfer, the next crisis could be over other
aspects of the state's Jewish character. Should there be civil
marriages, rather than just rabbinical ones? Should there be public
transport on the Sabbath? Should the state continue to support Jewish
religious education? Over the years, pressure from the left has eroded
such vestiges of religious interference in civil affairs.

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4288196&fsrc=nwl

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