Israel’s Divided Soul

Witnessing all this raises the question: what really happened to the religious Zionist movement during the disengagement Off the top, the answer is easy. In August 2005, Israel deployed overwhelming force, the resistance buckled, its leadership imploded. Yet even this much is unclear, if only because a single spray of bullets from one Uzi submachine gun—which many settlers own—might have stopped the pullout in its tracks. That no settler chose to draw his gun means that something other than overwhelming force was operating here. Why did the community not act more decisively, heroically, even martyr itself And when the campaign was over, why was it unable to regroup or tend to its many psychological wounds Why did a movement that seemed so bullheaded end up shattering into a thousand different pieces by the finish line And most importantly, what can we expect from the religious Zionist movement in the future should the government choose to evacuate further settlements in the West Bank

In search of answers, late last year I attended a conference called “After the Disengagement: Religious Zionism and the Israeli society. “The gathering was hosted by Bar Ilan University, whose campus stretches across seventy acres of prime real estate in Ramat Gan, a ten-minute drive from cosmopolitan and secular Tel Aviv. There is little that is either secular or cosmopolitan about Bar Ilan. One cannot help noticing just how many students and staff wear skullcaps and just how many of the buildings, halls, and even individual rooms carry plaques that identify donors as Orthodox Jews. But for a secular Israeli like me, there is more to the feeling of being out of place here than the immediate recognition that one does not belong to this community. This feeling has to do with the university’s recent history, a past that foreshadowed the disengagement battles, which mostly luck prevented from becoming a civil war and an international disaster.

On November 4, 1995, a third-year Bar Ilan law student, twenty-five-year-old Yigal Amir, travelled to Kikar Malchei Yisrael, a city square in Tel Aviv, where a peace rally was being staged. By late afternoon the media were predicting a massive turnout, a forecast that caught the attention of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s senior handlers. They were hesitant. On several occasions since Rabin signed the Oslo peace accords his life had been threatened. An effigy of the prime minister in an SS uniform was marched through the streets of Jerusalem just one month before. Nor had the international Jewish community sat on its hands. In July 1995, Canadian-born scholar and mathematician Rabbi Nachum Rabinovich published an article in the Jerusalem Post that compared Rabin’s government to the Judenrat (Jews who assisted the authorities) in Nazi-occupied Europe and described Rabin as a moser, a collaborator who delivers Jewish lives or lands into the hands of enemies. While Rabinovich did not demand din rodef—the duty to kill a Jew who imperils the life or property of another Jew—he strongly urged settlers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to lace their lands with explosives to prevent the Israeli army from engaging in any sort of evacuation.

That evening, Rabin’s motorcade left Jerusalem, and by 8 p.m. the prime minister was on stage delivering what commentators later called the speech of a lifetime. At 9.25 p.m., Yigal Amir, armed with a nine-millimetre Beretta, eluded the heavy security and shot Rabin three times before being apprehended. Two of the hollow-point bullets entered Rabin’s spleen, severing major arteries and his spinal cord. Just before 11 p.m., the prime minister died on an operating room table at Ichilov Hospital, a few blocks east of what became Rabin Square.

In the months that followed, a mourning and weary nation managed to hold off Jewish zealots long enough to take a few small steps toward resolution of the conflict with the Palestinians. Shimon Peres, who replaced Rabin, withdrew Israeli troops from six Palestinian cities. To distance himself from the attendant conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination, Benjamin Netanyahu, who took power in 1996, promised to be “the prime minister of all the people.”

After Rabin’s murder, it was impossible to persuade a cab driver to take me anywhere near the Bar Ilan campus. Many students reported feeling uncomfortable wearing skullcaps in Tel Aviv. At the same time, Israel was reaping the benefits of the Oslo Accords, its streets crowded with official visitors from the European Union, the Far East, and even from the Arab world. Israeli businessmen circled the globe developing new markets, and the Arab boycott crumbled.

And then came the Shamgar Commission’s investigation into Rabin’s death, which, among other things, exonerated the board of Bar Ilan. Two years later, things had completely deteriorated. The peace process was stalled, the Oslo agreements were frozen, negotiations with Syria had not been renewed, and the Arab world suspended all contact. The gdp dropped precipitously and the country descended into a Fortress Israel mentality.

For the religious Zionist community, however, the discontentment of the late 1990s were halcyon days. Like clockwork, their trains kept running: 154,000 settlers moved to the West Bank, hundreds of vigilante attacks on neighbouring Palestinian villages were launched, and a tunnel excavated beneath the Wailing Wall came dangerously close to the Al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam’s holiest sites. Countless other provocations—including, especially, Sharon’s walk to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa mosque—triggered a second, and far more violent, Palestinian intifada. In real terms, it was not until the disengagement campaign of August 2005 that these trains hit a brick wall and religious Zionism began leaking confidence in itself and its mandate.

How could the Israeli government have allowed such footloose behaviour Why did Peres not treat Rabin’s assassination as an occasion to censure the religious Zionist movement as the Egyptian government had censured the Muslim Brotherhood or, more significantly, as Israel has demanded the Palestinian Authority do to Hamas In this context, it must be repeated that the religious Zionist idea of Greater Israel calls not only for the annexation of all the occupied territories, but the conquest of the entire Beirut-to-Baghdad biblical homeland. It is, therefore, no less grand and fanciful than Hamas’s insistence that Israel be wiped off the map. Both are untenable fantasies that only create havoc in the minds of youthful aspirants and lead to the most extreme types of behaviour.

At the very least, one might have expected the government to force the closure of extremist seminaries, like those run by the disciples of the murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane, who advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from Israel, and the Bar Ilan Kolel, where Yigal Amir studied. But even in the few instances in which seminaries were closed, they quickly resurfaced having changed only their names. Any way one looks at this period, no decisive measures were taken, and through the hearts of religious Zionists bad blood continued to flow.