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In the minds
of many Westerners, Muslim fundamentalism has replaced communism as
perhaps the greatest single "threat" to the existing world order.
From this perspective the Palestinian intifada becomes just another
episode in a "clash of civilizations." For them, there is an
intrinsic link between Palestinian "terrorism" and, say, the al-Qaeda
bombing of an American warship off Yemen.
Almost totally absent from such arguments is any inclination to
examine Jewish fundamentalism, or so much as to ask whether it, too,
might be a factor in the conflict over Palestine, one of the reasons
why it seems so insoluble.
There is, in
fact, a great ignorance of, or indifference to, this whole subject
in the outside world, and not least in the United States.
This is due at least in part to that general reluctance of the
mainstream American media to subject Israel to the same searching
scrutiny to which it would other states and societies, and
especially when the issue in question is as sensitive, as
emotionally charged, as this one is. But, in the view of the late
Israel Shahak, it reflects particularly badly on an American Jewry
which, with its ingrained, institutionalized aversion to finding
fault with Israel, turns a blind eye to what Israelis like himself
viewed with disgust and alarm, and unceasingly said so.
American Jews,
especially Orthodox ones, are generous financiers of the shock
troops of fundamentalism, the religious settlers; indeed a good 10
percent of these, and among the most extreme, violent and sometimes
patently deranged, are actually immigrants from America. They are,
says Shahak, one of the "absolutely worst phenomena" in Israeli
society, and "it is not by chance that they have their roots in the
American-Jewish community." It was from his headquarters in New York
that the Lubavitcher Rebbe, the late Menachem Schneerson, seer of
possibly the most rabid of Hasidic sects, the Chabad, gave guidance
to his many followers in both Israel and the United States.
The ignorance
or indifference is all the more remiss in that Jewish fundamentalism
is not, and cannot be, just a domestic Israeli question. Israel was
always a highly ideological society; it is also a vastly outsized
military power, both nuclear and conventional. That is a combination
which, when the ideology in question is Zionism in its most extreme,
theocratic form, is fraught with possible consequences for the
region and the world, and, of course, for the world's only,
Israeli-supporting superpower.
Like its
Islamic counterpart, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel has grown
enormously in political importance over the past quarter-century.
Its committed, hard-core adherents, as distinct from a larger body
of the more traditionally religious, are thought to account for some
20 to 25 percent of the population. They, and more particularly the
settlers among them, have acquired an influence, disproportionate to
their numbers, over the whole Israeli political process, and
especially in relation to the ultra-nationalist right, which,
beneath its secular exterior, actually shares much of their febrile,
exalted outlook on the world. It is fundamentalism of a very
special, ethnocentric and fiercely xenophobic kind, with beliefs and
practices that are "even more extremist," says Shahak, "than those
attributed to the extremes of Islamic fundamentalism," if not "the
most totalitarian system ever invented"
Like
fundamentalism everywhere, the Jewish variety seeks to restore an
ideal, imagined past. If it ever managed to do so, the Israel
celebrated by the American "friends of Israel"
as a "bastion of democracy in the Middle East"
would, most assuredly, be no more. For, in its full and perfect
form, the Jewish Kingdom that arose in its place would elevate a
stern and wrathful God's sovereignty over any new-fangled, heathen
concepts such as the people's will, civil liberties or human rights.
It would be governed by the Halacha, or Jewish religious law, of
which the rabbis would be the sole interpreters, and whose
observance clerical commissars, installed in every public and
private institution, would rigorously enforce, with the help of
citizens legally obligated to report any offense to the authorities.
A monarch, chosen by the rabbis, would rule and the Knesset would be
replaced by a Sanhedrin, or supreme judicial, ecclesiastic and
administrative council. Men and women would be segregated in public,
and "modesty" in female dress and conduct would be enforced by law.
Adultery would be a capital offense, and anyone who drove on the
Sabbath, or desecrated it in other ways, would be liable to death by
stoning. As for non-Jews, the Halacha would be an edifice of
systematic discrimination against them, in which every possible
crime or sin committed by a Gentile against a Jew, from murder or
adultery to robbery or fraud, would be far more heavily punished
than the same crime or sin committed by a Jew against a Gentile--if,
indeed, the latter were considered to be a felony at all, which it
often would not be.
All forms of
"idolatry or idol-worship," but especially Christian ones (for
traditionally Muslims, who are not considered to be idolaters, are
held in less contempt than Christians), would be "obliterated," in
the words of Shas party leader Rabbi Ovadia Yossef. According to
conditions laid down by Maimonides, whose Halacha rulings are holy
write to the fundamentalists, those Gentiles, or so-called "Sons of
Noah," permitted to remain in the Kingdom could only do so as
"resident aliens," obliged under law to accept the "inferiority" in
perpetuity which that status entails, to "suffer the humiliation of
servitude," and to be "kept down and not raise their heads to the
Jews." At weekday prayers, the faithful would intone the special
curse: "And may the apostates have no hope, and all the Christians
perish instantly." One wonders what the Jerry Falwells and Pat
Robertsons think of all this; for it is strange, this new adoration
by America's evangelicals of an Israel whose Jewish fundamentalists
continue to harbor a doctrinal contempt for Christianity only
rivaled by the contempt which the Christian fundamentalists reserve
for the Jews themselves.
Fundamentalists come in a multitude of sects, often fiercely
disputatious with one another on the finest and most esoteric points
of doctrine, but all are agreed on this basic eschatological truth:
It is upon the coming of the Messiah that the Jewish Kingdom will
arise, and the twice-destroyed Temple will be reconstructed on the
site where the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques now stand. One
school of fundamentalists, the Hanedim, believes that the Messiah
will appear in His own good time, that the millennium, the End of
Days, will come by the grace of God alone. The Shas party is their
largest single political component. Their position has in it
something of the traditional religious quietism, which,
historically, opposed the whole idea of Zionism, immigration to
Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state.
The other
school, less extreme in outward religious observances, is more so,
indeed breathtakingly revolutionary, on one crucial point of dogma:
the belief that the coming of the Messiah can be accomplished, or
hastened, by human agency. In fact, the "messianic era" has already
arrived. This messianic fundamentalism is represented by the
National Religious Party, and its progeny, the settlers of the Gush
Emunim, or Bloc of the Faithful, who eventually came to dominate it.
Its adherents are ready to involve themselves in the world, sinful
though it is, and, by so doing, they sanctify it. Except for the
symbolic skullcap, they have adopted conventional modern dress; they
include secular subjects in the curricula of their seminaries.
According to
the teachings of their spiritual mentor, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the
Gush, or at least the rabbis who lead it, are themselves the
collective incarnation of the Messiah. Since, in biblical prophecy,
the Messiah was to appear riding on an ass, he identified the ass as
those errant, secular Jews who remain in stubborn ignorance of the
exalted purpose of its divinely guided rider. In the shape of those
early Zionists they had, it is true, performed the necessary task of
carrying the Jews back to the Holy Land,
settling it and founding a state there. But now they had served
their historic purpose; now they had become obsolete in their
failure to renounce their beastly, ass-like ways--and to perceive
that Zionism has a divine, not merely a national, purpose.
The mainstream
secular Zionist leadership had wanted the Jewish people to achieve
"normality," to be as other peoples with a nation-state of their
own. The messianics--and indeed, though for emotional more than
doctrinal reasons, much of the nationalist right--hold that that is
impossible; the Jews' "eternal uniqueness" stems from the covenant
God made with them on Mount Sinai. So, as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a
Gush leader and head of a yeshiva that studies the ancient priestly
rites that would be revived if and when the Temple were rebuilt, put
it, "while God requires other, normal nations to abide by abstract
codes of 'justice and righteousness,' such laws do not apply to
Jews." Since Zionism began, but especially since the 1967 war and
Israel's conquest of the remainder of historic Palestine, the Jews
have been living in a "transcendental political reality," or a state
of "metaphysical transformation," one in which, through war and
conquest, Israel liberates itself not only from its physical
enemies, but from the "satanic" power which these enemies incarnate.
The command to conquer the Land, says Aviner, is "above the moral,
human considerations about the national rights of the Gentiles in
our country." What he calls "messianic realism" dictates that Israel
has been instructed to "be holy, not moral, and the general
principles of morality, customary for all mankind, do not bind the
people of Israel, because it has been chosen to be above them." It
is not simply because the Arabs deem the land to be theirs that they
resist this process--though, in truth, it is not theirs and they are
simply "thieves" who took what always belonged to the Jews--it is
because, as Gentiles, they are inherently bound to do so. "Arab
hostility," says another Gush luminary, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman,
director of the Kiryat Arba settlement's main yeshiva, "springs,
like all anti-Semitism, from the world's recalcitrance" in the face
of an Israel pursuing "its divine mission to serve as the heart of
the world."
So force is
the only way to deal with the Palestinians. So long as they stay in
the Land of Israel, they can only do so as "resident aliens" without
"equality of human and civil rights," those being "a foreign
democratic principle" that does not apply to them. But, in the end,
they must leave. There are two ways in which that can happen. One is
"enforced emigration." The other way is based on the biblical
injunction to "annihilate the memory of Amalek." In an article on
"The Command of Genocide in the Bible," Rabbi Israel Hess
opined--without incurring any criticism from a state Rabbinate whose
official duty it is to correct error wherever it finds it--that "the
day will come when we shall all be called upon to wage this war for
the annihilation of Amalek." He advanced two reasons for this. One
was the need to ensure "racial purity." The other lay in "the
antagonism between Israel and Amalek as an expression of the
antagonism between light and darkness, the pure and the unclean."
For the Gush,
there is a dimension to the settlements beyond the merely strategic
--the defending of the state--or the territorial--the expansion of
the "Land of Israel" till it reaches its full, biblically foretold
borders. Settlements are the citadels of their messianic ideology,
the nucleus and inspiration of their theocratic state-in-the-making,
the power base from which to conduct an internal struggle that is
inseparable from the external one--the intra-Jewish struggle against
that other Israel, the secular-modernist one of original, mainstream
Zionism, which stands in their path. The Gush must make good what
Rabbi Kook taught: that the existing State of Israel carries within
itself "the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth;
consequently, total Holiness embraces every Jewish person, every
deed, every phenomenon, including Jewish secularism, which will be
one day swallowed by Holiness, by Redemption."
It goes
without saying that the Gush consider any American-sponsored
Arab-Israeli peaceful settlement to be a virtual impossibility; but
furthermore, any attempt to achieve that impossibility should be
actively sabotaged. For them, the Oslo Accords, and the prospect of
the "re-division" of the "Land of Israel," was a profound,
existential shock. It was, said Rabbi Yair Dreyfus, an "apostasy"
which, the day it came into effect, would mark "the end of the
Jewish-Zionist era [from 1948 to 1993] in the sacred history of the
Land of Israel." The Gush and their allies declared a "Jewish
intifada" against it. The grisly climax came when, in the Ramadan of
February 1994, a doctor, Baruch Goldstein, Israeli but
Brooklyn-born-and-bred, machine-gunned Muslim worshippers in
Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque, killing 29 of them before he was killed
himself. This was no mere isolated act of a madman. Goldstein was a
follower of New York's Lubavitcher Rebbe. But what he did reflected
and exemplified the whole milieu from which he sprang, the religious
settlers, and the National Religious Party behind them. There was no
more eloquent demonstration of that than the immediate, spontaneous
responses to the mass murder; these yielded nothing, in breadth or
intensity, to the Palestinians' responses to their fundamentalist
suicide bombings, when these first got going in the wake of it. Many
were the rabbis who praised this "act," "event" or "occurrence," as
they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem's
religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling
Goldstein's virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians
had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond
the religious camp in general; polls said that 50 percent of the
Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of
it.
The "Jewish
intifada" also turned on other Jews. Yigal Amir, who assassinated
Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, was no less a product
than Goldstein of the milieu from which the latter sprang. As in
other religious traditions, the hatred Jewish fundamentalists
nurtured for Jewish "traitors" and "apostates" was perhaps even
greater than it was for non-Jews. Rabin, and the "left," were indeed
traitors in their eyes; they were "worshippers of the Golden Calf of
a delusory peace." And in a clear example of their deep emotional
kinship with the fundamentalists, Sharon and several other Likud and
far-right secular nationalist leaders joined the hue and cry against
Rabin and his government of "criminals," "Nazis" and "Quislings."
Declaring that "there are tyrants at the gate," Sharon likened Oslo
to the collaboration between France's Marshall Pétain and Hitler and
said that Rabin and his foreign minister, Shimon Peres, were both
"crazed" in their indifference to the slaughter of Jews.
The struggle
between the religious--in its fundamentalist form--and the secular,
between ancient and modern, ethnocentric and universal, is a
struggle for Israel's very soul. The Gush settlements are at the
heart of it. The struggle is intensifying and is wholly unresolved.
The fundamentalists can never win it; they are simply too backward
and benighted for that. But, appeased, surreptitiously connived
with, or unashamedly supported down the years by Labor as much as by
Likud, they have now acquired such an ascendancy over the whole
political process, such a penetration of the apparatus of the state,
military and administrative, executive and legislative branches,
that no elected government can win it either. Meanwhile, they grow
increasingly defiant, lawless and hysterical in pursuit of the
millennium.
The
Zionist-colonial enterprise has always had a built-in propensity to
gravitate towards its most extreme expression. And what, with the
rise of the Begins and Shamirs, the Sharons and now a new breed of
super-Sharons, has been true of the whole is bound to be even more
true of its fanatical, fundamentalist particular. Its latest
manifestation is the so-called "hilltop youth"; these sons and
daughters of the original, post-1967 settlers, born and reared in
the closed, homogenous, hothouse world of their West Bank and Gazan
strongholds, surpass even their elders in militancy. In keeping with
time-honored, Sharon-approved Zionist tradition, they have taken to
seizing and staking out hilltops as the sites of settlements to
come, and, in every neighborhood they claim as their own, they
forcibly prevent the Palestinians from harvesting the fruit of their
ancestral olive groves. There is surely worse--much worse--to come.
[February
2, 2004]
* David Hirst
is one of the most knowledgeable and distinguished journalists who
has covered events in the Middle East for decades.
This essay is
excerpted from David Hirst's extraordinary book The Gun and the
Olive Branch - The Roots of Violence in the Middle East,
recently re-released by Nation Books in an expanded third edition.
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