Israel’s
Religious Right and the Peace Process
Nicolas Pelham
October 12,
2009
(Nicolas Pelham
has worked in Jerusalem for the past four years for International
Crisis Group, which published the report Israel’s Religious
Right and the Question of Settlements in July 2009.)
It would be
easy to describe the residents of the outpost of Amona as radicals.
In February 2006 they led protests of 4,000 settler activists,
some of them armed, against 3,000 Israeli police who were amassed
to make sure that nine unauthorized structures in the West Bank
were bulldozed as ordered. In the ensuing clashes, 80 security
personnel and 120 settlers were wounded, more than the entirety
of the casualties during the 2005 “disengagement” from settlements
in Gaza, in a showdown that became the symbol of the West Bank
settlers’ resolve to resist the state’s efforts to tear down
encampments, like their own, that were erected without the state’s
permission. “How do I explain to my children that the army that
came to protect us behaves like our enemy?” laments Amona resident
Irit Levinger.
But what is
disturbing about the settlers in Amona is not how distant they
are from other Israelis, whether geographically or politically,
but how connected. They are national-religious; that is to say,
they are devout in their Judaism, but unlike many other religious
Jews they believe equally fervently in the secular Zionist project.
The national-religious fly Israeli flags from their lampposts
and serve in front-line units in the army. Six months after the
confrontation at Amona, half of the outpost’s men joined the
draft for the 2006 Lebanon war, and a resident was one of the
nine Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza offensive of 2008-2009.
In addition to military officers, the inhabitants’ ranks include
university lecturers, a policeman, civil servants and lawyers.
Levinger herself is a Hebrew lecturer at a state university.
Two of the wounded in the clash with police were members of the
Knesset from a larger settlement nearby. The national-religious
settlers may agitate against the state, but they are directly
linked to the state’s levers of power and benefit from its protection.
Outpost is
a misleading term. It conjures images of cowboys braving the
elements and fending off their enemies in Wild West locales.
But most outposts in the West Bank are well-equipped caravan
sites adjoining comfortable estates of red-roofed houses, built
either at the state’s behest and expense, or with private money
and state approval. Most are umbilically tied to these established
settlements’ water, road and electricity networks and rely upon
their neighbors to rise in protest if agents of the state come
knocking at the caravans’ doors. They are snapshots of the way
many settlements looked a decade or two ago and, in fact, how
towns inside Israel looked after its 1948 conquests. They are
symbols of Zionism’s onward march.
Despite international
outrage and an Israeli undertaking to remove outposts dating
back to the 2003 road map, few outpost residents genuinely fear
for their future. Most recently, Defense Minister Ehud Barak
marked 22 outposts for dismantlement “within weeks.” That was
in May. All are still standing.
The settler
movement appears similarly unfazed by the temporary construction
freeze that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu floated in late
August as a sop to former Sen. George Mitchell, the special envoy
dispatched by President Barack Obama to secure such “confidence-building
measures” from Israel and its Arab neighbors. Enforcement of
past freezes has been minimal, and Netanyahu’s offer of a nine-month
hiatus was laced with enough prior licenses to permit a full
year’s construction. The freeze proposal was less sword of Damocles
than pacifier for squalling foreigners. In the event, Mitchell
was drawn into protracted haggling over the minutiae of when
and where the freeze might take effect, and what existing construction
could continue, to the point that his previously firm position
on the freeze eroded. As of late September, the effort to achieve
a freeze had been shelved. Bulldozers licensed by the Housing
Ministry will continue to smooth the Holy Land’s hilltops for
settler housing estates.
Demographic
Weight
At first glance,
it is hard to explain the success of the West Bank settlers.
Numerically, excluding the 200,000 settlers in illegally annexed
East Jerusalem, they constitute just 4 percent of Israel’s population,
and are often resented by the rest for the disproportionate share
of the national wealth they consume. A mere 1 percent live in
the heartland of the putative Palestinian state, east of the
separation barrier that Israel has built in the West Bank. Of
these, thousands, most of them secular, have expressed interest
in moving westward in return for financial incentives. Some --
uncomfortable with geographic isolation, fears of violence and
the mounting religiosity of the settler movement -- have already
left. Relocating the remainder seems a small price to pay for
sparing Israel the worldwide opprobrium that comes with maintaining
and advancing the settlement project.
Yet internally,
the settler movement is -- in the words of a former West Bank
army commander -- “Israel’s most powerful lobby.” Fearful of
additional Amona-style faceoffs with Zionism’s foremost ideologues,
few Israeli politicians dare confront the movement. It is growing
fast: The drift of the secular-minded out of the West Bank (though
not East Jerusalem) has been more than compensated for by the
movement’s burgeoning hard core of national-religious activists,
who from the outset have promoted Jewish settlement throughout
the biblical Land of Israel as a sacred duty. In addition, the
movement has coopted Israel’s ultra-Orthodox and traditionally
non-Zionist communities, desperate for room for their large families.
In so doing, the settlers have jettisoned the slowest-growing
sector of Israeli society, secular Jews, and conjoined the two
fastest to their project. The West Bank settler population, again
excluding occupied East Jerusalem, has tripled from 105,000 on
the eve of the Oslo agreement in 1992 to over 300,000 today.
The population
expansion has given the settler movement an ever more religious
hue. Ma’ale Ephraim, a settlement on the cliffs above the Jordan
Valley whose secular population largely wants out, has opened
a hesder yeshiva, a school combining religious study and
army training. And in the valley below a national-religious community
has entirely taken over Yitav, a once secular settlement. The
caravan sites littering the West Bank are also markers of growing
national-religious strength in the settlement enterprise and
the readiness of the national-religious to put ideology before
comfort. In the vicinity of Nokdim near Bethlehem, for example,
30 couples have pitched mobile homes on the hilltop, the latest
influx turning a community that once had equal numbers of secular
and pious families into a predominantly religious settlement.
The Gush Etzion bloc of which Nokdim is a part has no secular
school. Like others, it teaches that the Bible, as a local teacher
puts it, is a God-given land registry.
Prompted by
cheap housing and subsidized mortgages, ultra-Orthodox population
growth is even starker, particularly in the overspills near Jerusalem.
Beitar Illit, overlooking Bethlehem, has grown from scrub brush
to a town of 40,000 in little over a decade. Erected on hilltops
west of Jerusalem in 1996, Modi’in Illit is already the largest
settlement and is projected to grow to 150,000 people by 2020.
Even so, building fails to keep pace with demand, leading families
to move ever deeper into the West Bank. The influx has replaced
ultra-Orthodoxy’s traditional detachment from the Arab-Israeli
conflict with attachment to the land that is now home. Ultra-Orthodox
notables are as vocal as the national-religious in protesting
any freeze on construction. Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai,
leader of the Shas Party, has called for rebuilding the four
far-flung West Bank settlements from which Israel decamped in
2005.
The demographic
weight of pious Jews has increased inside Israel as well as in
the settlements. Goaded to multiply by their rabbis, the religious
marry younger and have more children than their secular counterparts,
fostering three generations in the time that secular Israelis
raise two. “Normally one must not delay marriage beyond the age
of 20,” advises Yaakov Yosef, head of the Hazon Yaakov yeshiva
and son of Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. From 2007
polling data, the Israel Democracy Institute estimates that 8
percent of Israel’s Jewish population aged over 50 and 32 percent
of the population aged between 18 and 30 are either ultra-Orthodox
or national-religious. By contrast, says the Institute, totally
secular Jewish Israelis have declined from 23 percent to 17 percent
of the population in a decade.
Numbering
about 1.5 million, the religious Jews in Israel proper provide
a rear base of moral, electoral and logistical support for the
vanguard in the settlements. “We have more followers in the army
inside the Green Line than in the West Bank,” says Yisrael Ariel,
assistant to Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, whose militant sermons
attract both an ultra-Orthodox and a national-religious audience.
“They help us obtain weapons.”
Secular Jews
seek to dam the religious tide washing over their neighborhoods,
their children’s schools and even their roads, in the middle
of which the pious stroll on the Sabbath to obstruct traffic.
“Taliban!” chimed the secular press after the Jerusalem municipality
ordered dancers unveiling a new bridge to cover their leotards
with cloaks. Amid the influx, secular Jerusalemites have left
for the coastal plains in the tens of thousands, leaving the
ultra-Orthodox -- after a century of Zionist settlement -- as
again the city’s largest community, and together with the national-religious,
the power brokers in occupied East, as well as West, Jerusalem.
Even in the
coastal plains, however, the proportion of the pious is growing.
Some national-religious Jews have left their outposts behind
“to settle in Israeli hearts,” a process hurried by the 2005
removal of ideological settlers from Gaza upon the orders of
ex-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as well as the phenomenon of
population growth outpacing construction. Fired up by the motto,
“Never again,” the national-religious establish cells -- in Hebrew, garinim --
in secular Jewish towns, as well as the towns of Palestinian
citizens, opening hesder yeshivas and synagogues and promoting
religious Jewish supremacy. While Israel’s secular universities
are amalgamating departments due to a shortage of students, the hesder yeshivas
are expanding exponentially.
Political
Inroads
Pampered by
the state since 1967 to cement Israel’s hold on the West Bank,
the settlers have an institutional clout that far surpasses their
numerical strength. They are entrenched in government bureaucracy,
the legal and educational systems, and, above all, the armed
forces, a traditional path of upward mobility and the backbone
of Israeli society. Where the army once recruited its crack troops
from the secular kibbutzim of Israel’s founding fathers, today
their elite corps comes from national-religious ranks. To attract
the national-religious and boost enlistment rates that first
began to erode after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the army has
opened scores of hesder yeshivas, where school-leavers
mix military drills with study of the rules of holy war. Recruitment
statistics are classified, but Yigal Levy, a military analyst
at Israel’s Open University, estimates that 40 percent of the
personnel in combat units and the corps of junior army officers
are religious. “There’s a revolution in the ranks,” says an army
intelligence officer. “Twelve percent of the population is now
dominating the army command. Within a decade, they will lead
the Central Command.”
The settlers’
impact on army strategy and conduct is subject to debate. During
the 2008-2009 Gaza war, military rabbis delivered pre-battle
addresses and accompanied the troops into the field, offering
advice, for instance, on whether paramedics should treat Palestinian
wounded. “It was common to see rabbis on the battlefield,” says
a combat soldier who fought in Gaza. “The rabbis prepared us
for a biblical struggle, and portrayed the fighting not as a
battle to stop the Qassams, but a sanctification of the Holy
Name. No one said it directly, but they wanted us to go back
to reverse Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza.” Off the battlefield,
too, rabbis boosted nationalist morale. “The campaign is a war
against Amalek,” Shmuel Eliyahu, Safed’s chief rabbi and son
of former Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel Mordechai Eliyahu, told
a gathering of religious youth.
In the West
Bank, too, the national-religious claim that they are influencing
the army’s mission. Amid threats by Defense Minister Barak to
remove some of the outposts, a council of settler rabbis, led
by Kiryat Arba’s chief rabbi, Dov Lior, ruled that settlers should
disobey orders. An army chaplain echoed his call, warning that
certain military orders are illegal if they violate religious
law. During Sharon’s Gaza disengagement, the army command abandoned
plans to use combat units -- where religious soldiers are most
prominent -- for the task of removing settlers and stationed
them instead on the outermost cordon around Gaza. Anxious about
division within the ranks, Army Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi
has repeatedly sought to shift the burden of outpost clearance
onto the police. Although in Gaza, the ranks remained remarkably
orderly, army commanders have preferred not to test their troops’
loyalty in the far larger and more unruly West Bank settlements.
“Their commitment to the Israel Defense Forces versus their commitment
to a particular rabbi can be a big dilemma for soldiers and officers,”
says a reserve general who advises the Defense Ministry on outposts.
“There are some rabbis who are very influential.” Should Barak
give the order to move against outposts, wrote Israel Harel,
a former Yesha Council leader, in the daily Ha’aretz,
“he may bring about the collapse of the army and the police.”
On the ground,
too, soldiers have often intervened in support of armed settlers,
perhaps because unlike soldiers from other localities, settlers
often serve in their local units. “The army helped us build the
synagogue, and fired their guns to chase off the stone throwers,”
said a national-religious student after settlers from Bat Ayin
near Bethlehem staked out a neighboring hill by building a house
of worship. Eighteen Palestinians were injured. East of Bethlehem,
soldiers confiscated tools from workers building a USAID-funded
park after settlers laid claim to an adjacent former army base.
“If you control the army, you control the country,” says the
rabbi of a synagogue in Jerusalem’s Old City Muslim Quarter.
After failing
to stymie the Gaza disengagement and being drubbed in the 2006
polls, religious and pro-settler politicians regained their mandate
in the 2009 elections. Of the 75 parliamentarians in the ruling
coalition, 27 are religious; collectively, they exercise a veto.
While other parties turn their backs, Netanyahu astutely courts
the vote of these fast-growing constituencies, making pre-election
deals with Shas, the largest ultra-Orthodox party, including
United Torah Judaism, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party, in
his coalition and promoting national-religious figures in his
party’s ranks. Under Sharon, only one Likud parliamentarian was
national-religious; under Netanyahu, six are -- almost as many
as in the national-religious parties themselves. Party activists
estimate up to a third of the Likud’s 3,000-strong central committee
has national-religious affiliations. In his June 14 keynote address
at Israel’s national-religious university, Bar Ilan, the Israeli
premier honored settlers as “an integral part of our people,
a principled, pioneering and Zionist public.” Given Israel’s
coalition horse trading, politicians from other mainstream secular
parties often opt for silence rather than antagonize this powerful
bloc.
The policy
has yielded dividends: Likud’s share of the vote in national-religious
settlements increased from 12 percent in 2006 to 23 percent in
2009. But it has also imposed constraints. Netanyahu’s proposal
for a partial settlement freeze had minority backing not just
in his coalition, but also in his party, and threatened to stir
up sufficient internal opposition to unseat him. The threat would
not be empty should the settlement freeze idea again rear its
head: His last term as prime minister ended in 1999, when the
settler lobby in the Knesset abandoned him in the wake of the
Wye River agreement and the partial pullout of the army from
the West Bank town of Hebron. He has since repeatedly had to
ward off challengers who sense an opportunity for the religious
right to seize control of their first mainstream party. In Likud’s
2007 primaries, Moshe Feiglin, a national-religious settler,
won 23 percent of the vote. A year later, he mustered the largest
caucus inside the party.
The religious
right has also made significant inroads into the bureaucracy.
National-religious employees staff most of the Civil Administration,
the military body governing the parts of the West Bank under
direct Israeli control, and whose responsibilities include approval
of settlement construction and reassignment of state land for
settler use. In the judiciary, ultra-Orthodox judges apply religious
law (halakha) in matters of personal status. In other
courts, where halakha is only one source of law, religious
factions have campaigned against the overly secular bent. In
2009, after the intervention of the national-religious Justice
Minister Yaakov Neeman, the Supreme Court appointed three new
judges, two of them Orthodox.
Law of
God, Law of Survival
The one impenetrable
bastion of governance is the peace process. Viewed through the
eyes of the religious right, negotiations have served as a platform
for their secular detractors to bolster their own international
legitimacy, wage a campaign to demonize religious factions domestically
and internationally, and target their ideology and assets. The
settlers withdrawn from Gaza, for example, were dumped in bleak,
out-of-the-way caravan parks. External mediators have done little
to make the peace process more inclusive. Geneva Initiative meetings
funded by Western embassies are devoid of religious participants.
In short, peace process dynamics have pitted religious against
secular factions, stoking a counter-process in which religious
groups act with considerable success as spoilers. Each fresh
attempt at outside mediation accentuates Israel’s religious-secular
divide.
The latest
US attempt at intervention indicates which side has the upper
hand. Statist religious politicians advocating continued Jewish
rule of the Occupied Territories remain relaxed, convinced that
time’s pendulum has swung in their favor. “Israel’s secular leaders
need an agreement now, because they know that in another three
decades ultra-Orthodox and national-religious Jews will be a
majority,” says Israel Zeira, a national-religious contractor
who is building housing complexes on both sides of the Green
Line. “The demographic threat to dividing the land is not just
Arab; it’s Jewish.”
But in the
wake of the Gaza disengagement, some religious groups despair
of gradualism, and have adopted a more radical approach. No more
ready to surrender their manicured luxury assets in the West
Bank than the founding elites are to vacate their kibbutzim inside
Israel, a minority are preparing to resist removal by all means
-- fair and foul. Some who once invested the Israeli state with
redemptive powers now view it as sunk in corruption for withdrawing
from biblical land. Fearful of again relying on an Israeli government
that might discard them, they have bolstered autonomous coping
mechanisms. Today, settlements have their own paramilitary groups, kitot
konnenut, operating under a settlement security officer with
largely nominal army control, and maintain their own arsenals.
“I have to defend myself against Jew or Arab,” says the leader
of Kfar Tapuach, a national-religious settlement. “If
someone is coming to attack your home, you kill him. The only
law here is the law of survival.”
Rabbis also
run their own schools, media outlets and paralegal courts, applying
a higher Holy Writ, which for their communities supercedes state
law. Some rulings concern daily life, others national affairs.
“We must cleanse the country of Arabs and resettle them where
they came from, if necessary by paying. Unless we do, we will
never enjoy peace in our land,” opined Dov Lior, the West Bank’s
leading rabbi. “More and more of [the settlers] do not accept
the authority of the Israeli government as supreme,” says a former
Civil Administration head, who claims that, during his tenure,
they tried to bribe his employees and intimidate him and his
family, all for the higher cause of taking land. “Who is Barak
to issue an order that contradicts the Law of God?”
As some settlers
withdraw from the state, they move ever closer to the traditional
ultra-Orthodox stance of efforts to keep the state at arm’s length.
For their part, the ultra-Orthodox have moved closer to the national-religious
positions on Palestinians. Pollsters report that ultra-Orthodox
Jews are the most anti-peace process constituency in Israel.
In an April 2008 survey, a two-state settlement attracted 82
percent support among secular Jewish Israelis, and only 36 percent
support among the ultra-Orthodox. Twenty-eight percent of ultra-Orthodox
Israelis supported negotiations with the Palestinian Authority,
compared to 69 percent of secular Jews. “The ultra-Orthodox have
undergone a transition from being anti- to ultra-nationalists,
embracing several pillars of secular Zionism, such as ownership
of Jewish territory, though they hate to admit it,” says the
poll’s coordinator, Tamar Hermann. The headlines on the front
page of the Jerusalem Post on July 21, 2009 depict an
alliance of agendas. “Settlers Burn Trees, Block Roads to Protest
Demolitions,” reads one headline, and below it: “[Chief Rabbi]
Amar: US Policy on Settlements Contravenes a Torah Obligation.”
A firebrand ultra-Orthodox rabbi, Shlomo Dov Wolpo, warns of
a religious civil war in the event that the government concedes
to renewed US pressure on settlements: “There will be a war of
Jew against Jew -- as in the Amona pogrom. It won’t be like Gush
Katif [in Gaza] where Jews couldn’t defend their communities.
Our children will risk their lives and give their last blood.”
It remains
unclear how long this alliance between the ultra-Orthodox and
the national-religious would hold should Israel’s leadership
muster the will to embark on another strategic withdrawal. While
uneasy, ultra-Orthodox rabbis kept silent during the Gaza campaign.
“They were bought with more yeshivas,” says a yeshiva lecturer
in Immanuel, an ultra-Orthodox settlement deep in the West Bank.
But Gaza had
no ultra-Orthodox population. In the West Bank, where they constitute
the largest single settler group, some ultra-Orthodox sects --
including strains of the Bratzlav and Lubavitch Chasidic groups
-- have played a prominent role in militant ranks. Some have
joined the national-religious who enforce the “price tag policy”
-- whereby every state move constraining settler activity is
answered with a settler attack upon the soft-target Palestinians.
After the December 2008 eviction of settlers from a Hebron house,
ultra-Orthodox students joined protesters stoning Palestinians
and torching mosques across the West Bank. During the Gaza disengagement,
the authorities detained ultra-Orthodox students plotting to
fire rockets at the Dome of the Rock.
Precedent
sends mixed signals. For 30 years, the state has won each battle
for withdrawal, from Sinai to Gaza. But in 1995 bullets fired
by a law student from Bar Ilan killed Yitzhak Rabin, helping
to derail the Oslo process. Subsequently, a host of senior commanders
and politicians advocating withdrawal have faced death threats,
sanctioned by rabbis who claim that anyone abandoning “Jewish
land” is a traitor. Chief of Staff Ashkenazi’s home has been
vandalized, and cameras hidden in another senior commander’s
home. In 2008, a rabbi at New York’s Yeshiva University advised
his students visiting a Jerusalem Old City military college to
shoot the Israeli prime minister who negotiates a withdrawal
from Jerusalem. (After a recording appeared on the Internet,
the rabbi apologized.) Violence is increasingly commonplace.
The day the New York Times published an article headlined,
“Settlers Will Resist, but Not Fight” and datelined Havat Gilad
outpost, the “hilltop youth” of the encampment threw Molotov
cocktails and stones at Israeli soldiers, disabled their military
vehicles and set fire to Palestinian fields. “Political leaders
willing to make concessions risk the threat of assassination,”
says a former head of the General Security Service, Israel’s
internal intelligence agency.
Shifting
the Onus
Flexing its
muscles within the government and without, the religious right
has grown more assured in its capabilities. Despite the rare
external congruence of a seemingly determined Obama administration,
a supportive Palestinian Authority and Arab League, and a relatively
quiet Hamas, external mediation failed to garner a settlement
freeze, let alone an end to occupation.
The alternative
of engaging the current spoilers is not attractive. Few groups,
if any, have done so much to disrupt the political process, or
so blatantly flout the will of the international community. There
is no guarantee that engagement would not simply empower the
settler movement further, providing them legitimacy with nothing
in return.
But a policy
that rolls back the military occupation first and settlements
last may yet have more mileage than the current pursuit of the
reverse. Palestinian negotiators have repeatedly stated their
readiness to harbor and protect Jews who choose to remain under
their rule. “If they want to live in the Palestinian state, they
are welcome, but on the condition that we will have an independent
Palestinian state whose capital is Jerusalem,” said Ahmad Qurei,
then chief negotiator for President Mahmoud Abbas, in a 2008
interview. Come the time when the sides agree upon demarcation
of borders, the onus will be on the settlers to decide whether
they value the state over the land, or prefer to live under Palestinian
rather than Israeli authority.
The majority
would likely head west, tempted by financial incentives as well
as the security of the familiar. The more militant settlers may
fight to remain in their own separatist enclave. “If the army
leaves, we’ll establish a kingdom,” says a rabbi in Nahliel,
an ultra-Orthodox settlement near Ramallah. But others have considered
acclimating to a state of Palestine. “Jews were here before Israel,
and will be here after it. Zionism is disintegrating; Judaism
is growing,” says the rabbi’s assistant, who recalls the equilibrium
Jews and Muslims enjoyed in more harmonious times. “We’ve lived
under the Turks and the British. Why not under the Arabs?” asks
a resident of Bat Ayin, another hardline and mainly ultra-Orthodox
settlement. During the period of negotiations, those seeking
to stay would have an interest in exploring the prospect of better
relations with their neighbors and the Palestinian Authority,
perhaps to expedite building permits that are currently bound
up in Israeli red tape. Already there are issues where settlers
and Palestinians might make common cause, for instance, in easing
the traffic jams at army checkpoints. Post-statehood, settlers
could serve a Palestinian state as guarantors, or at least advocates,
of access and movement across borders for family ties, trade
and internal tourism, be it to holy sites or the beach. In the
words of a stallholder in the market of Nablus, “The principal
problem is not the religious Jews who wish to pray at [Nablus’]
Joseph’s Tomb. It’s the oppression of military rule.”
Should the
parties miraculously achieve the reverse -- an effective settlement
freeze that jump-starts a successful political process -- the
outcome of two states living side by side in peace and security
might well remain a miasma. Should Israel’s army defy the spoilers
and succeed in ousting hordes of settlers, secular-religious
tension could again flare, but more intensely, inside Israel’s
shrunken borders. As an advance guard of national-religious Jews
did in Acre on Yom Kippur in 2008, ex-settlers seething with
the desire for vengeance might target Israel’s Palestinian citizens,
sparking violence that spirals into actual steps to “expel the
Arab enemy,” to quote a placard ubiquitous at right-wing demonstrations.
There might be two states, but they would likely be of the strict
ethnic-sectarian strain, nursing grievances and goals of battling
another day.
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