In late January, Eldad was invited to speak at the eleventh annual Temple Feast, a convention of ultra-Orthodox Jews whose mandate is to build the Third Temple in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount, a site occupied by Islam’s third-holiest shrine, the El Aqsa complex. Third Temple activists hold firmly to the belief that the Messiah’s return has been delayed pending reconstruction of the Temple originally built in 950 bc. Until then, they argue, Jewish history is fated to remain incoherent and incomplete.
As he made his way through the crammed corridors of the Jerusalem International Convention Centre, through gaggles of the frocked and fur-hatted, Eldad stopped to observe Rabbi Yehuda Kroizer whipping up a carefully measured concoction of loaves and crackers, a reconstruction fully in accord with the midday sacrifice as it had been prepared by the high priests in the days prior to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ad.
Eldad had accepted the invitation to speak, not because he wished to extol the virtues of temple reconstruction, but because he wanted to recruit these millenarians in support of his party’s opposition to Sharon’s plan. To that extent, Eldad was the spoiler. “In my estimation,” Eldad told the audience, “if we put the Third Temple at the centre of our thinking, the world will see us as psychos.” Eldad began more fiercely than he might have, perhaps because he knew that for this audience building the Third Temple is paramount. In their minds, setting the stage for the return of the Messiah must move ahead. If Eldad is to successfully recruit them, he would first need to break the fixation, wean them from the grip of an Eternal Return. “We now have the capacity to enlist hundreds of thousands of people to impede Sharon’s Disengagement Plan,” he told the audience. “On the other hand, we do not have the capacity to enlist nearly as many people to help with the struggle for the Temple.” The audience did not like what they heard, and many left visibly upset. But Eldad left knowing that when the time comes, many of these zealots would join the army expected to gather this summer to confront Sharon in the Gaza Strip.
Eldad’s office is a small cubicle, with a tiny, congested antechamber that his two assistants barely fit into. As I enter, he greets me with an outstretched hand, and points to a map pinned to the wall. The map is titled “Naqba,” meaning “catastrophe,” which is the way Arabs refer to Israel’s war of independence in 1947. It is densely dotted with settlements, all retaining their pre-1947 Arabic names. “This is what the Arabs want,” Eldad tells me. But I’m not interested in generalizations. I want him to help me unravel the surrealism of the Temple Feast. Eldad hesitates, before explaining that in Judaism the Temple has always stood as a vivid image of redemption. In Jewish liturgy, the reconstructed Temple provides an “end point” that focuses strivings, justifies pain and loss, and answers the question “what for?” in a manner that people can easily understand. It imbues the daily struggle with a clear and distinctive purpose. Without the Temple, Eldad continues, “Israelis would have about as much moral right to be in this country as the crusaders had to be in Palestine. Secular Jews, on the other hand, think they can do without the symbol. But they can’t.”
Eldad’s point is well-taken. Consider that in the army, skullcap-wearing young men constitute more than 40 percent of all officers. That number has risen from less than 2 percent thirty years ago and is disproportionately larger than the number of religious Jews within the population at large.
Before the war in Lebanon, officers were drawn largely from middle-class secular families. But the war in Lebanon that raged from 1982-1985 changed all of that. The middle class suddenly felt alienated from both their government, which had shifted to the right, and from an army that allowed the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians living in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The post-Lebanon era saw the children of moderate left-wing families turn away from executive functions in the military. It was precisely at this point that religious leaders initiated campaigns to get religious youth into officers’ school. One of the most worrisome consequences of this trend was highlighted in February when over 10,000 soldiers and reservists signed a petition stating that they would refuse any order having to do with the evacuation of settlers. Eldad’s argument is an interesting way of explaining both the shift and the loosening hold of secular Israelis on the national political agenda.
I asked Eldad how he, as a physician, could support the continued presence of the military in Gaza given that it was bleeding away resources that could otherwise be funnelled into health care. But Eldad claims it will cost even more to secure the borders after disengagement. The idea struck me as counterintuitive, and I asked for some proof. He had none. But what becomes perfectly clear is that the claim that disengaging from Gaza will be cheaper than maintaining the status quo has not been amply grounded. “The Army chief of staff promised that we would need far fewer soldiers to defend the borders in areas where the security wall was erected,” Eldad tells me. “But that is not true. Besides, in this case Sharon is giving away something for nothing. At most, he is exchanging land for time, not land for peace or security.”
Eldad smokes Captain Black, a brand of sweet, scented cigarillos, and partway through our conversation he leans over to open the window. We can hear the sounds of drum circles and the savage blowing of rams’ horns—the same sort of horns that Joshua used to fell the Biblical walls of Jericho. Approximately 150,000 protesters have lodged themselves just outside the Knesset’s outer wall. This great camp meeting is now in its twenty-fourth hour. Settlers from the West Bank, Gaza, and thousands more from religious institutes all around the country have erected long lines of tents purchased at taxpayers’ expense. Open kitchens stand next to prayer stalls. “This is what I am talking about,” Eldad tells me. “Unless the government falls or Sharon changes his mind and backs off, these people, and even more of them, will join the resistance. They will come down to Katif from the mountain regions, from Hebron and Nablus. And if the army closes the roads, they will come by foot. And if the military erects barbed-wire fences, they, and their young children, will prostrate themselves on the fences. And it will only be a matter of time before someone, a soldier or a settler, begins the shooting, which could easily turn into a bloodbath and escalate from there into an all-out civil war.”
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