Waiting for a miracle

Aug 15th 2005
From The Economist Global Agenda

The Israeli army has begun its eviction of the Gaza strip's 8,000 or so Jewish residents. 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 started evicting the Gaza settlers, as well as those in four isolated West Bank communities. But some were still opting to 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; last 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.

Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.