During that confrontation, Yehuda’s face was concealed in a mask made of bandages; only his emerald-coloured eyes shone through the slit in the disguise. Yehuda was in Hebron to help settlers stop the evacuation of the Kasbah at the entranceway to the city, and just across from the Tomb of the Patriarchs, one of Judaism’s holiest sites. He had been defending the settlements on the West Bank since August 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pulled settlers out of the Gaza Strip. At that time, he was a student at a seminary in the Golan Heights, and along with almost 1,400 other young men he followed their rabbi’s instructions and travelled to Gaza to stand vigil. Yehuda was expecting something miraculous to happen because a week beforehand, and for as long as he could recall, the rabbi had declared that the settlers would never be removed, that God would come down in a pillar of fire and that the Lord and his angels would intervene on their behalf.
Neither God nor his angels arrived, and on the fourth day of the campaign Yehuda was dragged off to prison. He felt the rabbi, who was both his mentor and a father figure, had lied to him and he considered taking his own life. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Yehuda no longer consults a rabbi before confronting the Israeli army. Instead, he has joined Noar Hagvaot (HilltopYouth), a guerrilla group run by a wealthy settler who is recruiting large numbers of disaffected young people like Yehuda. “I no longer have much use for my family, for the extended family which is called the religious Zionist community, “Yehuda told me. “Nothing like that matters anymore because everyone lied to me. No one had the courage to do what God commands. They [the rabbis and the leaders of the religious Zionist community] are all mityamrim [posers] full of more hot air than lofty ideals.”
Essentially, religious Zionists believe that redemption will come only when Israel reclaims all of its biblical lands, a great arc stretching from Beirut to Baghdad. Only then will the Mes-siah arrive, will the dead return, and will the world finally accept the primacy of Halachic (Jewish) law. The Gaza pullout represented a renunciation of this Zionist dream, which still fires the imagination and which was one of the chief motivations behind the very creation of the Jewish state. But the religious Zionist community has reached a historic tipping point, and it appears that the forces of secularism, not religious idealism, will shape the future of Israel and its relationship with Palestine. “Israel in an ideological project,” said Elyakim Haetzni, a lawyer and a founder of the settlement movement, who vows not to move from his home in Kiryat Arba, a whitewashed town of 6,500 people in the occupied territories. “To undermine Zionism is to challenge the viability of the nation as a whole. This is what happened in Gaza. We are now living in the aftermath of a tsunami from which it is not clear we will ever recover.”
For Haetzni, as for Yehuda, the sins of Gaza and of the father—of Ariel Sharon, once the great champion of settlements but now the devil traitor—will not be repeated here in the West Bank, where the symbolism runs deep and where the overwhelming majority of settlers are religious Zionists.
Between December 2003, when Sharon first announced his plan to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza and northern Samaria, and August 2005, when the Israeli Defence Forces (idf) and police successfully implemented the disengagement, the religious Zionist leaders vacillated between brazen defiance, deep contempt, and pathetic victimization—between a world-class boxer and a phlegmatic limb-swinging drunk—but were nonetheless unified in their opposition. During this time, the movement managed to jack up tensions in Israel to a point where even a sober Supreme Court justice predicted civil war. Referred to by secular Israelis as kippot srugot (knitted skullcaps), religious Zionists engaged in continuous acts of civil disobedience, and hundreds of thousands of them joined together for several three-day-long protests against the planned evacuation. Throughout this period the movement’s more extreme leaders called on Israeli soldiers to disobey any orders having to do with the evacuation. In late July 2005, ten rabbis instigated a pulsa denura, or death curse, against Sharon. At a huge protest in Tel Aviv, some Zionist leaders took public oaths of allegiance to the Gaza settlers; others, led by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother-in-law, political activist Hagai Ben Artzi, pledged to leave the Gaza settlements only in a coffin.
And then the army kicked in, clearing out the region in less than a week and without real incident. At the end of the day the only thing to leave Gaza in a coffin was the religious Zionist movement itself. “Ariel Sharon broke the back of our camp,” said Shaul Goldstein, the mayor of Gush Etzion, a bloc of twenty-one communities in the occupied territories, and a senior member of yesha, the Council of Jewish Settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. “Our rabbis are now arguing with each other to the point of total boycotts of one another. Our public is in shock, our youth is lost and despairing.”
To understand just how ugly things have become, one need only glance at the daily squabbles listed in Nekuda, the settlers’ weekly news bulletin, or listen to the religious Zionist community’s radio station, Arutz Sheva. In early December, the Jerusalem Post ran a full-page article titled “Heading for a Political Fall “which argued that the future of religious Zionism as a political force looks grim. Not only are the National Religious Party (nrp) and the National Union (nu) in what seems like an unstoppable slump in the polls, the leaders are deadlocked in a manner that shows no sign of letting up. Zevulun Orlev, chairman of the nrp, is struggling to distance himself from the concept of Greater Israel, wanting instead to emphasize education, identity, and social welfare. But men like nu Chairman Benny Elon identify with the old Gush Emunim (bloc of the faithful) theology that views Greater Israel as an integral step toward final redemption. For these men and many of their followers the state of Israel is not just a means of protecting Jews, it is a vehicle for redemption.
To stem their decline the nu and nrp have entered into a tenuous merger, but both have had their power base hollowed out. Whatever support they get will come mostly by default, i.e., from voters who see no viable alternative. In fact, many religious Zionists, who constitute up to one-third of Israel’s population, are threatening not to vote at all. More critically, the movement’s foundation, long anchored in extra-parliamentary institutions like yesha, has virtually disappeared. yesha, Goldstein told me, hardly exists any longer, despite most Israeli newspapers continuing to refer to it as alive and kicking. Senior operators like Baruch Spiegel and Yechiel Leiter, who once ran the show from backstage, have vanished from the political arena.
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