The “Three Weeks,” the Gaza Disengagement and Religious Zionism

by David Shasha

The Lord is exalted above all nations,
His glory above the heavens.

Psalm 113:4

The Jewish liturgical calendar contains a number of different historical strata: There is the ancient cycle of nature which preserved a number of harvest holidays in the Fall and the Spring.  These Holidays were transformed into historical commemorations of what the Bible scholar Gerhard Von Rad called the events of the “Saving History” in Israelite culture; events such as Passover and Tabernacles.  The original Harvest festivals were transformed and supplemented with the emergence of cult Holidays such as what we now know as New Year, originally taking place not in the first month which was Nisan, but in the seventh month Tishri, and the Day of Atonement which came ten days after New Year.  Perhaps the only Holiday that continued to maintain its original context was Pentecost whose primary purpose was to celebrate the end of the ‘Omer cycle; the time when the First Fruits of the Spring harvest were brought to the Temple.  With the exception of the Day of Atonement, there were no liturgical fast days in the Pentateuch’s calendar. Later in the Diaspora period there was a celebration of Purim, marking the deliverance of the Jews from the grip of a pogrom in Persia, which began with a Fast day in commemoration of Queen Esther’s own Fast as related in the Book of Esther.

So within the Jewish liturgical calendar there are ancient Holidays that have been transformed in various ways.

But within Post-Biblical Judaism, while there are no Holidays of the magnitude of the ancient Jerusalem festivals – outside of the celebration of Hanukka, the commemoration of the re-dedication of the Temple at the hands of the Maccabees – there are a series of Fast Days first noted in Zechariah 7-8, to mark events having to do with the Destruction of the Temple.

There is the oldest of these Fast Days, the Fast of Gedaliah, which looks back to the Destruction of the First Temple prophesied by Jeremiah.  Gedaliah ben Ahikam was a Jewish captain commanding the garrison in Jerusalem who was killed by other Jews who sought to turn back Babylonian rule.  The rebels were ultimately unsuccessful and a Fast day was eventually instituted to mark his assassination.  Other days that were marked in the Jewish calendar were the 10th day of Tevet and, most famously, the bookending of the 17th of Tammuz and the 9th of Ab.  The period between these two days are known in observant Jewish circles as the “Three Weeks” which serve as a semi-mourning period that becomes progressively more stringent until the Fast of Tish’a be-Ab which is the day that marks the Destruction of both Temples – and is also, oddly enough, the day on which Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain.

The Jewish Sages, the Hakhamim, were an extraordinary lot.  They were able to do a number of different things to develop Jewish culture in the wake of the crushing defeat at the hands of the Romans.  Unlike nascent Christianity, which conducted a fierce struggle over the efficacy of the Jewish law, Halakha, through the schools of James in Jerusalem and Paul of Tarsus who both fought over the role of Gentiles in the Church, with Paul winning the battle, the Rabbis recalibrated the Biblical religion in a sophisticated and absolutely uncanny manner. 

The Sages founded a series of academies outside of Jerusalem, most famously under the aegis of the Sage Johanan ben Zakkai who received permission from Titus to establish his school at Yabneh.  While these academies began to flourish in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple cultic center – a center that had for many years been the site of contention between the forerunners of the Sages, the Pharisees, and the ruling class of Hasmoneans whose legitimacy had been questioned after the first couple of generations and had completely evaporated by the time of the Idumean pretender Herod who had married into the Hasmonean clan – the Sages developed a number of different cultural strategies that would in the long run not merely preserve Judaism, but would transform the very foundations of Jewish life.

The first act of the Sages which had everlasting significance for the future of Judaism was to organize the literature of the Israelite past into a single book.  The Sages debated the canonical status of many different works and in the end settled on twenty-four books that were then edited into one very large volume that we today call the Hebrew Bible.  But their work as scholars was far from complete.  They undertook to compile the scores of laws that had been accumulated over time in what they called the “Oral Tradition”; laws that were part of the old cult, now destroyed, which ran the gamut from obscure rituals to the essence of civil legislation.  There were laws regulating almost every aspect of human life in its religious as well as its secular variants. 

In this sense, there is no separation between the two realms within the rabbinical system. 

Ritual laws such as the law of Fringes, Sisit, are laid out in the same context as the Tort system of civil damages.  The Sages began to address the historic changes that had taken place in the Judean society since the close of Biblical history: The Sage Hillel created what is known as “Perozbul” which was a legal fiction that permitted the financial solvency of the Jewish lender inasmuch as it set into abeyance the laws involving debt remission known as Shemittah and Yobel.  These laws were perfectly reasonable for an agrarian economy where debt accumulation would bankrupt the farmers, but extremely dangerous for the new commercial urban economy in the Greco-Roman world.

The Sages produced a literature that stood in dialectical relation to the Hebrew Bible.  The collections of Mishnah and Tosefta were created to compile the Jewish Law, Halakha, in a condensed format that could be taught and discussed at the academies.  Groups of trained reciters, Tannaim, would be the repositories of this wisdom that was greatly expanded over the centuries and would eventually take the form of the two Talmuds, the Jerusalem and Babylonian, that served as the final written expansion of this ongoing discussion.  The Mishnah form was started in the wake of the Temple’s fall in 70 CE and was distinguished by its terse and sometimes obscure form which had to be unpacked in the Academy.  The Tosefta is merely the Mishna traditions that were left outside the official Mishna compilation which was produced by Judah ha-Nasi.  The Talmuds would famously return to these varied traditions and provide even more commentary on the laws.

The Talmud, particularly in its Babylonian variant, represents the final major repository of the Rabbinical system that had been begun in the Palestinian academies after the fall of Jerusalem.

This transformation of Jewish life had a major impact on the way in which the world of the Jewish people was to be constructed.  For many centuries, as we see it reflected in the Bible, there was an ongoing battle between the strictures of Moses and the Prophets and the native cults of the Near East.  The so-called Fertility Cults of Ba’al and Ashtoreth remained a living presence in Israelite society for many centuries.  Even at the apotheosis of the Judean monarchy under Solomon, there was a tacit acceptance of the pagan cults to which Solomon responded by building cult places for his wives (1 Kings 11:7).  The scholars have called this situation Henothism or Monolatry; the acceptance of the cultic pantheon under the Monotheism of the one high God.

The Sages, in the spirit of their prophetic forbears, sought to remove any and all vestiges of the pagan cults of the Levant and did so with a fierce proclivity for settled law and the creation of a judicial system which had once been in the hands of the Temple authorities.  The latter appear in less than salutary terms in Rabbinic literature.  Even most famously in the case of the Maccabeans we have a resistance to the inclusion of their writings in the Hebrew Bible and a general disdain to truly highlight the holiday of Hanukka which had remained an extremely popular celebration among the folk though it was completely minimized in the Talmudic legislation; its laws being added as a short footnote to the laws of the Sabbath.

The Jewish Sages were modern in the sense that they were able to absorb and transform centuries if not millennia of syncretistic Israelite culture into a uniformity which established basic legal principles, edited a definitive version of Sacred Scripture and united the disparate factions of the Israelite remnant after the defeat in 70.

At the very core of the Rabbinical legislation was the commemoration of the defining moment of their history: The loss of the Temple.  The loss of the Temple was both a tragedy and liberation for the Sages.  With the Temple gone they were able to completely take the reins of Jewish culture and history, and yet they were deeply sensitive to the depth of this tragedy and marked their calendar accordingly.  The Temple was to be remembered each and every year with a three week period of mourning that, as we will see, created a solid sense of coherence within the labyrinth of Jewish history.

By setting the three week period from 17 Tammuz to 9 Ab the Sages, wittingly or unwittingly, did something that was hitherto unknown in the annals of civilization: They turned a crushing and nation-ending defeat into a complete triumph for their own ideology and way of life.  The “Three Weeks” held out the hope that Jewish political life would be restored in the Holy Land along the lines of the Rabbinic system.

With the establishment of the “Three Weeks” and the two Fasts which bracketed them, the Sages were marking the separation between the old world of the Temple and the Priests and the new age of the Rabbinical culture that had now triumphed among Jews everywhere and formed a civilization that ceased to be variable; the Mishna and Talmud now served as the foundational texts of the Jewish people.  Along with the exegetical modes that the Sages had highlighted, what we know as Midrash, a non-literal interpretation of Scripture whose aim was to recreate philosophical and rhetorical understanding of the ancient texts which could easily have succumbed to the death throes of historical irrelevance, the emergence of Rabbinic Halakha, an extension of the Mosaic and Prophetic modalities, created a new world of Judaism that had formed a whole with the ancient culture.

Just as Aristotle had synthesized the learning of ancient Athens into a comprehensive philosophical system, so too had the Sages taken the wealth of tradition from ancient Israel and systematized it.  This is not to say that the Talmud is substantially the same as the Aristotelian corpus, but the two schools were similar in that they both sought to absorb the totality of their inheritance, collect the traditions and reformulate them for the contemporary age.  The Sages did not only collect these traditions, but once they formulated them in an intelligible fashion, they conducted open discussion and debate on the laws and traditions, serving to maintain an astonishing plurality of voices and opinions.  While the Sages were punctilious in their legal utterances, they continued to uphold the principles of dialogue and a dynamic creativity that would permit the laws to be adapted and reformulated to reflect changing conditions.  The Talmud reflects the innate conservatism of the Sages but also shows us their openness and liberality; once the law is decided it continues to be open to judicial application and recontextualiztion.

But at the very core of the Rabbinical worldview is the centrality of the losing moment of 70.  Set as a counterpoint to the Day of Atonement, the Tish’a be-Ab Fast Day contains many of the same prohibitions as what is generally considered the most holy day of the Jewish calendar.  Tish’a be-Ab is a day that is understood by the Sages to mark the loss of national political autonomy as a memorial to the past and a portent of the future deliverance; a deliverance which is to be celebrated under the aegis of the Rabbinical system.  It is clear that the Sages saw the Jewish future not in light of the old Priestly system, but as an extension of their own Halakhic system.

With the emergence of Zionism in the 19th century, the worldly triumph of the Sages away from the Temple cult had been well established.  The very idea of a restoration of the ancient cult system was not a major consideration in the writings of Sarajevan Sephardic Rabbi Judah Alkalai whose Zionism took a more pronounced worldly turn though it was still clothed in the religious language of the Sages and maintained its strict fidelity to Rabbinic law.  Alkalai, expounding the traditions of Religious Humanism that were so important a feature in the Sephardic world, blended the needs of secular modernity with the strictures of the Talmud.

In the words of Jose Faur who discusses Rabbi Alkalai in his article “Modern Sephardic Thought: Religious Humanism and Zionism”:

He believed in levying a tithe upon the Jewish people and, among different projects to be financed by these funds, the following deserve special attention: the establishment of an organization to promote international recognition of the Jewish right to the Holy Land, a Jewish Parliament, a Jewish army, schools to teach Hebrew, Jewish settlements in the Holy Land, agricultural centers, etc.

Alkalai’s major goals were practically oriented: He wished to restore Jewish autonomy in its ancestral homeland by the creation of new Jewish institutions of learning and political entities like a national Jewish Sanhedrin, Supreme Court, an army, agricultural settlements and other national/political institutions.  His approach was completely modern and yet in perfect harmony with the Jewish tradition.  Zionism among the Sephardim was not an apocalyptic messianic movement, but a movement which sought to restore Jewish national life in Israel after centuries of exile.  Alkalai’s Zionism articulated a socio-political concept embedded within a Rabbinic context; seeing the two as completely compatible with one another.

But there were two counter-trends that had developed within Zionism that became far more prominent in the wake of the Sephardi articulation of Zionist ideals: First, there was the emergence of a Herzlian Zionism that sought to minimize the role of Jewish religious tradition in any emerging Jewish State.  In Herzl’s vision, the Zionist state would become another European state and would exist within the same non-religious terms as the states of Europe.  On the other hand, there was an emergence of a Religious Zionism under the aegis of Abraham Isaac Kook who saw Zionism in light of the apocalyptic messianic mysticism of the Ashkenazi tradition. 

Rather than adopt the principles of Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism with its matter-of-fact way of dealing with the political and cultural realities of the age, Rav Kook and his disciples saw Zionism as a means to affect Jewish redemption along the lines of the ancient messianic cult.  The paradox that lay at the heart of Kook’s Zionism was that his fellow Ashkenazi rabbis had not opted to work to restore Jewish life in Israel.  In fact many of the Ashkenazi rabbis, in contrast to the Sephardic rabbis, were deeply antagonistic to Zionism and its nascent secular modernity.  The Sephardim, as we have argued elsewhere, were completely comfortable in the modern world and were enthusiastic about the restoration of Jewish life in a region that they had called home for many centuries.

We can thus see that Sephardic Zionism was not a deeply conflicted model of Jewish culture as it was for the Ashkenazim.  It was a rationally sober assessment of the need to restore to Jewish life a national element that had been missing in the many centuries of exile.  In fact, this Sephardic approach was more connected to the models of national identity current in Western culture than to the messianic and mystical visions of Rav Kook; who, as we stated, was a lone voice in the Ashkenazi community.

The general trend in the Zionist movement was tilting in favor of the Herzlians.  The political ideals of the Sephardic Zionists, partially found in Ashkenazi circles like those of Ahad Ha’am and Martin Buber whose Zionism sought political restoration seen in religio-cultural terms rather than in apocalyptic or completely secularized terms, were occluded in the religious trends of the emerging Jewish State.

The new state emerged awash in a secularized euphoria that had not sought to preserve the Talmudic Judaism.  This development led to a counter-development among Religious Zionists who began to espouse their messianic dreams.  The Sephardim, relegated to second-class citizenship, ideologically and socially, in the new state, saw their pragmatic Zionism submerged and eviscerated within a larger sea of Ashkenazi mutual recrimination. 

Religious Zionism for many years remained a docile and compliant part of the Israeli scene.  The so-called Mizrachi party of Orthodox Zionists found itself in a comfortable entente with the state and its authority.  But bubbling under the surface was a volatile messianism that came to the surface after the victories of 1967.  In 1967 the Israeli forces took back Jerusalem’s Holy Sites from the Arabs and absorbed the Biblical lands of Judea, Samaria and Gaza.  The 1967 victory energized American Orthodox Jews as well as the Religious Zionists in Israel who immediately sought to settle these conquered lands.  Up until 1967 there had been a tacit acceptance in Zionist circles that the 1948 borders comprised the fulfillment of the Herzlian vision.  But with the 1967 victories new elements emerged in the Religious Zionist community that proclaimed a new vision of messianic restoration.

Contrary to the Sephardic Zionist vision of Religious Humanism as articulated in the writings of Judah Alkalai, the new messianism was deeply informed by an apocalyptic religious vision that transformed the mundane procedures of state-building in the modern world into a full-blown anachronism that sought to statically restore the old Biblical modalities.  Similar to the ways in which Herzlian Zionism rejected the values and culture of the Diasporic Judaism, so too did these Messianic Zionists hearken back to an ancient world which would now be restored once Jewish life was replanted in the old Biblical lands.

As Karen Armstrong notes in her classic The Battle for God:

Divorced from Judaism, Zionism, they believed, could make no sense.  At the same time as the Kookists sought to conquer the Occupied Territories from the Arabs, they were also engaged in a war against secular Israel.  They were determined to replace the old socialist and nationalist discourse with the language of the Bible.  Where Labor Zionists had sought to normalize Jewish life and make Jews “like all the other nations,” Gush Emunim emphasized the “uniqueness” of the people of Israel; because Jews had been chosen by God, they were essentially different from all other nations and were not bound by the same rules.  The Bible made it clear that as a “holy” people, Israel was set apart, in a category of its own.  Where Labor Zionism had tried to incorporate the liberal humanism of the modern West, Gush Emunim believed that Judaism and Western culture were antithetical.  There was, therefore, for Kookists, no way that secular Zionism could ever have worked.  Their task was to reclaim Zionism for religion, correct the mistakes of the past, and make history right again.

Jean-Christophe Attias and Esther Benbassa examine the Biblical mandate from a different perspective in their monographic study Israel, the Impossible Land:

… in contrast to what is often asserted, the Bible is not merely the literary monument of a people residing on its land, the cultural fruit of the natural osmosis between this people and its land: a large part of it was produced in exile.  Besides, the place that the Bible occupies in Jewish consciousness is far from simple.  One might even maintain that, as fundamental as it may be, traditionally this place is not absolutely central; the return to the Bible, and the Zionist return to the Bible in particular, constituted a break with the traditional attitude.  In fact, the Talmud, and in particular the Babylonian Talmud, the book of exile par excellence, disputes this centrality of Scripture.

It was in Religious Zionist messianism that a complete transformation in the Jewish national idea took place: The traditional idea as articulated by the Sephardic rabbis of the political restoration was now replaced by a land fetish that discarded the realpolitik of the age.  Over the course of decades the Zionists, led as we know by Ashkenazim, had completely ignored the non-Jewish Arab population that existed in its midst and which surrounded it.  Rather than seeking cultural and political integration in the region, which had been the desideratum of early Sephardi Zionists like the statesman Albert Antebi and non-Zionists like Haim Nahum Effendi, and the establishment of ties with the Arabs of the region, the Ashkenazim had created an isolationist state that had, as we see in the scholarship which treats the diplomatic ideas that permeated Zionist thinking throughout the 20th century, viewed itself as a colonial outpost of European civility in a sea of Arab barbarity.

But this ideology was contrary to the Zionist visions of the Sephardic Sages who had counseled a restoration of Jewish life in Israel, but in the larger context of a global political existence.  In essence, the Sephardic rabbis saw Jews as becoming an autonomous political entity in Israel, but not an isolated one.  Reading the Sephardic press in Jerusalem in the pre-State period as presented by Abigail Jacobson in her seminal article “The Sephardi Jewish Community in Pre-World War I Jerusalem,” we see an intense concern with what we would now call “normalization” with the Arabs; the articulation of a pragmatic entente with the local population that would permit the emergence of a Jewish state that would act as a stabilizing force in the larger region.

In a discussion of the Sephardi Jerusalem newspaper ha-Herut, Jacobson states:

… it seems that ha-Herut presented a unique approach for future life in Palestine. The writers of the newspaper tried to present the “new Yishuv” and the Zionist leadership with an alternative way of living with the Arabs in the country. The Arabs (in particular the Muslims, as was examined above) were perceived as potential partners for cooperation, with whom the Sephardim hoped to live in coexistence. Loyalty to the Ottoman Empire was of central importance to the Sephardim; they saw Ottoman citizenship as the “uniting component” for the people who lived in Palestine and essential for the country’s progress.

She concludes:

Hence, the Sephardi community in Jerusalem, represented by ha-Herut, offered an interesting alternative to the more dominant approach of the European Zionist leadership to the national question. How can this approach be explained: after all, ha-Herut had a Zionist agenda as well, though different from that of the European Zionists? The main explanation lies in the experience of the Sephardim in Jerusalem.

But as we now know, the vast majority of the Ashkenazi Zionists were completely opposed to the idea of entente with the Arabs of the region – and that also extended to Arab Jews whose presence in the emerging state, though seen as a necessity by the Ashkenazi Zionist leadership, was viewed as harboring possible negative cultural ramifications.  This exclusionary Zionism emerged as the foundational form of nationalist identification, at the expense of both the Talmudic vision as well as the politically realist version that required Jews to live in peace with their neighbors and provide the civil rights expected for their minority population.

In the wake of the 1967 victory there was an emerging movement which had first been boldly articulated by the American-born racist ideologue Meir Kahane seeking to combine the vision of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist leader whose views most closely resembled European Fascism, and the aforementioned Abraham Isaac Kook whose apocalyptic messianism served as the unifying force among Religious Zionists.

This combination of the Jabotinsky hard-line and Kook’s religious messianism was to prove a heady and combustive mixture.  Under the banner of what was to be called the Gush Emunim, the bloc of the faithful, a new and explosive vision of Religious Zionism emerged.  In contrast to the docility of the Mizrachi movement as it had been formed after 1948, Gush Emunim began to entertain new and dangerous visions of the Jewish future and its connections to the past.  A Biblical fundamentalism began to emerge from the more moderate forms of Zionism in these Modern Orthodox circles.  Having seen the founding of the state of Israel as what they called in Hebrew reshit semihat ge’ulateinu, the first flowering of the redemption, these Religious Zionists brought to the fore not the purely political and nationalist component of Jewish Zionism, but a restoration of the messianic apocalypticism of the mystical tradition that would effectively serve to neutralize the secular aims of the state.

In his definitive study of the subject Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism Aviezer Ravitzky states:

The ideology of messianic determinism thus grew gradually more extreme, from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook to his son, to the latter’s disciples, to a new generation of youngsters.  At the next stage, there were some on the fringes of the movement who went so far as to plot the destruction of the Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount.  In one sense this was a political move, designed to sabotage the Camp David Accord.  But in another sense it was a mystical attempt to cut off the forces of impurity, the “husk of Ishmael,” from the source of their vitality on the holy mountain.  For some, however, it was also an apocalyptic move to bring about a historic turn, to force the hand of the Master of the Universe by bringing on a catastrophe.  By precipitating a great holy war against Israel, they would “oblige” the Redeemer of Israel to wage a great and terrible campaign on their behalf.

At the outset of this religious movement the Israeli government, still basking in the euphoria of the 1967 victories, had sanctioned its legitimacy.  Rabbi Moshe Levinger rented space in an Arab hotel in Hebron for Passover and stayed there for good, creating a permanent Jewish settlement in that Arab city whose Jews had been famously massacred in 1929.  The government was a partner in this process, over the years supporting the building of many settlements in the West Bank and Gaza with the idea that this would eventually strengthen the state in its battle against the Arabs.

Kahane himself emerged as an independent political force in the country, creating his Kach (Hebrew, thus) party which won a number of seats in the Knesset before eventually being banned in the 1980s for racist incitement.  But the influence of Meir Kahane was quite pronounced in Religious Zionist circles.  He had developed a strongly ethnocentric Jewish language that was fiercely isolationist and anti-humanist.  He considered the Arabs – and Gentiles more generally – to be sub-human creatures that were to be made permanent second-class human beings by the emergence of a superior Jewish race.  Much of Kahane’s rhetoric parroted the very racist canards of his bete noir, Adolf Hitler.  Kahane was deeply obsessed with the Nazi Holocaust and invented a new Jewish theology that would provide what he saw as an effective response to Nazi Anti-Semitism.

The emergence of Gush Emunim from the enchanted circle of the Merkav Harav Kook Yeshiva in the wake of this Kahanist ideological Zionism came at a crucial moment for both the State of Israel as well as the Modern Orthodoxy of which it became so crucial a part.  In the wake of 1967’s victories Israel had been evolving into a serious regional power having completely vanquished each and every Arab army and was developing a close strategic alliance with the United States under the tutelage of Henry Kissinger who was Richard Nixon’s chief diplomatic advisor in his role as Secretary of State.  Israel began to see itself as invincible and looked at the Palestinians and their Arab supporters as having been completely vanquished.

American Modern Orthodoxy had been dealing with internal issues of its own.  Caught in a losing battle with fundamentalist Orthodoxy, it saw the developments in Israel, more particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, as portending a completely new era in Jewish history.  Again, leaning on the mythic concepts they extracted from Jewish tradition, the Modern Orthodox looked to a new era of redemption that would be anchored by their own brand of messianic Zionism.  Their fundamentalist Haredi Orthodox opponents were famously dead-set against any forms of Zionism and by and large disregarded the new post-1967 developments as had been the case in 1948.

The stage was thus set for a complete transformation of the conflict.

With the emergence of the PLO in 1964 as a guerrilla insurgency movement after the failures of successive Arab governments to keep Palestine from the Jews, a new player in the conflict was added to the stage.  The PLO, originally led by Ahmed Shukeiry and then taken over by Yassir Arafat, was a guerrilla movement which used the tactics of violent terror that had been developed in the Algerian insurgency against France.  But under Arafat the PLO took its war to the ends of the earth and utilized the means of airplane hijacking and civilian targets all over the world in order to make its name known to the general public.  The PLO excelled in violent actions that made a big media splash.  The PLO’s most famous moment was the kidnapping of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich just five short years after the end of the 1967 War.  Munich served as a prime example for partisans on all sides of the nature of PLO insurgency; pro-Israeli and pro-Western forces decried the barbarity of the action while the Third World consensus that had been emerging under the aegis of the USSR and international Communism championed the PLO as an example of a resistance movement that would stop at nothing to achieve “justice.”

After the monumental failure of Gamal Abdel Nasser to restore the military superiority of the Arab world and the parallel creation of a difficult but workable entente between the Communists and the West that had been engineered by Nixon and Kissinger, the PLO emerged as one of the boldest and most maniacal of the new Third World “liberation” movements.  Arafat had been buoyed by the emergence of an Israeli presence in the West Bank and Gaza which had served to bring an even greater number of the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli rule.  While the Arabs who remained inside the 1948 borders of Israel, who had been granted citizenship even as they were not granted equal rights, remained a fairly docile community, the inclusion of West Bank Arabs into the purview of what was now a full-fledged Israeli occupation of the conquered territories provided for a fifth column that was met with the most brutal Israeli force.  For decades the battle between an extra-territorial PLO, first based in Jordan, then exiled to Lebanon and who finally had to march off to Tunisia in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Beirut, and the Israeli forces was an amazingly brutal one where neither side held to any sense of conventional morality. 

Israel began to enact legislation to protect its military forces from accusations of torture and acts of violent repression against their Arab populations, while the PLO threw all caution to the wind and marked all Jews worldwide as targets in what was now becoming one of the ugliest guerrilla wars in the contemporary period; a war which did not distinguish between civilian non-combatants and military targets.  The Palestine Question was becoming an expanded and infinitely more brutal variant of the French experience in Algeria which now included targets all over the globe.

For the Gush Emunim, all of this fit their messianic theories like a glove.  Prophecies of Jewish apocalyptic wars, the Biblical Gog and Magog (see Ezekiel 38), were renewed in this new theology of Jewish nationalism.  The Zionist renewal of Jewish life that had been articulated in a secular context was now completely reframed in a messianic cast.  Along with an evolving Islamic consciousness in the Arab world, a trend that was made manifest in the Palestinian community with the emergence of HAMAS, a new Islamist party which fed off of the ideology of the Muslim Brothers who had been based in Egypt, this renewal of Jewish messianism set the stage for a violence that began to spiral out of control.

While the 1973 Yom Kippur War retarded the progress of the conflict and restored to Egypt a modicum of regional strength that led to the Camp David Accord of 1978, the PLO/Gush Emunim juggernaut was now in full throttle.  And while successive Israeli governments, Labor as well as Likud, provided the money and infrastructure that enabled the settlements and their ideologues to flourish, a growing consensus began to emerge among many secular Israelis that the expansionism was causing more harm than good.

The Lebanon invasion of 1982 that was designed and executed by Ariel Sharon under the leadership of Menachem Begin, the latter being the most authentic exponent of a Jabotinskyite Zionism in contemporary Israel, had taken the country by surprise and led to a complete re-evaluation of the Settlement enterprise by the average Israeli citizen.  Where the Settlers were once seen as pioneer Zionists in the mold of the old Halutzim, they were now seen in many parts of the Israeli mainstream as dangerous ideologues and overzealous religious fanatics who were dragging the country into an endless abyss.  There was a growing awareness among secular Israelis of the religious messianism that underlay the Settlement project.  And while partisans like then-Housing Minister Ariel Sharon continued to pour money into the Settlements, the creation of Peace Now was a direct response to the Settlement enterprise and the expansionist ideology that brought together Religious messianism with the ethnocentrism of Jabotinsky which had remained a marginal phenomenon until the election of Begin in the 1970s.

After the Lebanon debacle both the Israeli Right and the PLO were severely hampered in their hope to eradicate one another.  With the election of Yitzhak Rabin
as Prime Minister in 1992, after half a decade of Palestinian insurgencies that had sapped the Israeli army and the internal will of the Israeli people – though it continued to buoy the Gush Emunim messianists – a series of peace agreements between Rabin and Arafat, who would soon return to the West Bank as the President of the newly-created Palestinian Authority, brought years of intransigence and brutal violence to a provisional end. 

But as we now know, both sides continued to hedge their bets and neither fully complied at any point with a cessation of violent activity against the other.

With the signing of the Declaration of Principles under the aegis of the Clinton White House in 1993, itself an outgrowth of the Oslo Process that had been begun years earlier through the contacts of Moroccan Jews with Israeli leaders such as Shimon Peres and the PLO (to which it had been illegal for any Israeli citizen to speak with), a new era had begun.  The Israeli government had finally accepted in principle the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, the territories conquered in 1967, while the PLO had back in 1988 formally though not actually renounced violence and affirmed its acceptance of a Two-State solution.

The two enemies were seemingly on the right track to settle what once appeared as their intractable differences.

It was the continued development of radical religious and political forces on both sides that stymied these agreements and led to the furtherance of distrust between Jews and Arabs.

On the Arab side there was HAMAS, initially sponsored by the Israeli Secret Service as a counterweight to the secular PLO, who continued to maintain the idea of armed guerrilla struggle in the wake of the PLO’s formal renunciation of terror.

On the Jewish side there was the maintenance of the Settlements and the continued vigor of its ideology in Right Wing circles.  Even as Kahane’s Kach party was banned and the Settlers stigmatized in the wake of Oslo, there continued an underground movement that held firmly to the principles of messianic Zionism.

In the wake of Rabin’s famous handshake on the White House Lawn with Arafat, a Kahanist fanatic named Baruch Goldstein entered the Cave of Patriarchs in Hebron and gunned down scores of Muslims during their afternoon prayer.  Goldstein, an immigrant from Brooklyn, was stymied, as were many of the Settlers, by the emergence of a peace plan and its requirement to give back “Jewish” land to the Arabs, and he went nuts and killed many Arabs in their Hebron mosque.

This event, followed by the assassination of Rabin by a Jewish fanatic named Yigal Amir who had been inspired by Goldstein, became the defining moment for the Settler Zionists.  They had now fully congealed an ideology of what in Arabic would be called “al-Ard”; a fundamentalism that was predicated upon the complete and utter sanctity of the Land; a land that had been given by God to the Jews and could under no circumstances be relinquished.

The cycle of violence continued unabated.

Under the pressures of Oslo and the continuing violence, both political leaderships began to crack.  The Israelis did not stop oppressing the Palestinians and continued to do so under the pretext of security.  The Palestinians saw their violence as a resistance to the Israeli occupation.  There was no trust on either side – it appeared that the religious factions had succeeded.  Numerous Palestinian terror actions, Israeli reprisals and popular violent street uprisings – Intifadas – ruled the day.

With the renewal of talks by the new Prime Minister Ehud Barak under the aegis of US President Bill Clinton, the Israeli government again tried to find some way out of the mess.  But the Settlement labyrinth undid any attempts by Barak to provide a contiguous Palestinian state.  After the emergence of the most brutal Palestinian Intifada in late 2000, the Oslo Process ended with Barak’s final offer at Camp David which was modified somewhat at Taba.  But all of it was too little too late and there was little chance that the thing could succeed as the Intifada juggernaut would push Barak out of office for good, thus closing the door on his diplomacy and any chance for peace.  This violence then brought to the conflict an invigorated and rejectionist PA led by an Arafat who became much more sympathetic to HAMAS’ violence which in turn led to the election of a new Israeli government led by the notorious Right Winger Ariel Sharon.

In the course of the corrosive violence, Sharon, the legendary architect of the Settlement policy that was at the very epicenter of the conflict in its attempt to prevent a Two-State solution, decided in 2004 to pull out of Gaza.  Such a move reminded everyone of Barak’s pullout from Lebanon.  Barak’s pullout did not however involve the removal of any Jews from what the Settler messianists saw as Jewish land given exclusively to them by God.  It should be remembered that the legal rulings of Sephardic rabbi Ovadiah Yosef during the Oslo years on the permissibility of giving back land in exchange for peace was completely anathema to the Gush Emunim hordes even as it hearkened back to the old Sephardic Zionist pragmatism of Alkalai.

Sharon’s Gaza Disengagement plan is set to be executed this month.

Currently, there is a tremendous amount of consternation and anxiety in Religious Zionist circles.  The path of mutual violence that had existed even in the Oslo years and beyond assured the Jewish messianists that Israel would not dare relinquish its hold on the Settlements.  But here they saw that one of the old Labor establishment figures who had transformed himself into their best and most reliable ally, Ariel Sharon, had all of a sudden reverted back from his support of the messianist Settlers into just another Secularist and was attempting to create an anti-Settler consensus in the Israeli mainstream.

The Settlers continued to point to the existence of a malignant Palestinian violence.  They were deprived of a major ally when Yassir Arafat died in 2004.  Arafat’s short-sighted intransigence and his reliance on violent options worked to the persistent advantage of the Settler messianists.  They could always argue that the Arabs were not to be trusted because their aim was to take over all of Israel by force – and such arguments continued to resonate with the Israeli mainstream as long as Arafat led the PA.

But now the Religious Zionists were faced not with Arafat as their enemy, but with Ariel Sharon who was quite a formidable presence. 

A sector of the Religious Zionist community, who had not been completely swayed by the messianic argument, elected to follow the Sharon directive.  But a growing minority of the Settlers and their supporters elected to fight the Gaza plan.  They have pointed to the messianic promises of the Bible and restored a territorialist vision of Jewish redemption that rejects any sense of pragmatic realpolitik.  They wrap their arguments in the standard complaints of Palestinian terror that has worked so well for them in the past.  But a majority of Israelis – including a substantial number of military leaders – have completely wearied of the Occupation and want a way out – seeking a path to a normalcy that will restore the national-political aims of a non-messianist Zionism.

The messianists want a restoration of a mythic Jewish kingdom that is based on a geography that never existed even at the peak of the Davidic Commonwealth.  They have brought together the Jewish ghetto mentality that was endemic to the Ashkenazi condition and paired it with an anachronistic sense of a Jewish isolationism in the First Commonwealth period that is most clearly an illusion.

True to the romanticized form of Judaism that is so central to the Ashkenazi traditions which are foundational to both the Gush Emunim and Kahanist visions, opposition to the Gaza Disengagement is predicated upon a Jewish exclusivity that serves to remove Israel and the Jewish people from the stage of modern politics and seeks to restore to Judaism a messianic component, anti-Maimonidean in character, that is grounded in the mysticism of Ashkenazi anti-rationalism.

Here we see that there are two conflicting Jewish visions based on the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel.  The vision of Jewish normality reflects a rationalist understanding of a traditional Jewish politics that, as Rabbi Hayyim David Halevi has so brilliantly taught, accepts the values of political pluralism and the principles of democracy.  And then there is a darker and more paranoid exclusivist vision of Judaism that sees the LAND as having transformative powers; Land that will serve to establish the Third Jewish Commonwealth under a theocratic government that would expel the Arab Gentiles and usher in the final messianic redemption.

Such messianic principles mirror the fanaticism of the Muslim extremists on the Palestinian side who have also placed their entire faith in the “redemption” coming from the Land as the final means to achieve their Islamic deliverance.

In the Rabbinical understanding of the Jewish Diaspora, a conception that was founded in the ideology of the “Three Weeks” and the commemoration of Tish’a be-Ab, Jews were exiled for their misdeeds and the return to Israel will take place, as was formulated by Rabbi Judah Bibas, another early Sephardi Zionist in the 19th century, under the aegis of Teshuba, repentance to God’s laws.  Never satisfied with myths and dreams, the Sephardic Sages were not content to let the Jewish people be crushed by the collapse of the old empires of Europe and the Middle East, but were pro-active and elected to formulate a Zionist vision that would provide dignity for the Jewish people while remaining true to the Sephardic principles of Religious Humanism.

As Jose Faur states in his discussion of Rabbi Bibas’ vision:

His Zionist ideals were grounded in his interpretation of the duty of teshuba, repentance, whose literal meaning is ‘return.’ Teshuba is operative at two levels.  At the individual level, it is spiritual, and means the recognition and abandonment of sin, followed by a ‘return’ to the ways of the Lord.  However, Judaism also recognizes teshuba as a collective duty.  At this level, it must be – by sheer definition – political.

Ashkenazi Zionism rejected the principles of Sephardic Religious Humanism and adopted a neo-Hegelian approach to Jewish Nationalism which drew from the well of Ashkenazi/Western self-understanding.  The only real exception to this was the Ihud group that had been influenced by the Religious Humanist ideas of the great leader Ahad Ha’am and was perpetuated by Philo-Sephardi scholars and humanists like Martin Buber, Ernst Simon and Gershom Scholem who represented the final flowering of the German-Jewish Haskalah; a movement that had been cruelly decimated by the Nazis and had found itself unwelcome in the emerging Israeli state which had been more influenced by the Ostjuden theories of Bolshevism in the Mapai and the neo-Fascism of the Revisionists.

The contemporary Religious messianists look to the destruction of the Second Temple with great intensity.  They have developed a frenzied and manic approach to Jewish existence in its historical sense and have become completely dominated by an irrational obsession with Anti-Semitism and a rejection of universal humanist principles.  The attempt to give back any part of what these Settlers see as the Biblical land of Israel will consistently be met with force and violence.  This messianist ideology is in conflict with any reasoned way of resolving the conflict.  It rejects the only possible peaceful solutions: There is a partition of the Land or there is a complete integration and annexation of the larger territory to create one Greater Israel which would then become the country of all its citizens.

Religious Zionism has become a primeval and reactionary force in light of its Kahanist substrate.  It is a deeply paranoid and alienated movement that truly believes in the metaphysical certainties implicit in its position.  It has rejected the humanity of the Arabs just as it has rejected the humanity of other Jews and Gentiles who do not agree with its extreme position.  It has drawn messianic lines of continuity between the old Second Commonwealth history and the current crisis.  It has resolutely ignored the lessons of two thousand years of Diaspora history and leapfrogged over the pragmatic realities of modern politics.  It has created a false illusion, similar in this respect to its Muslim counterpart, of relying on violence as the only means of dealing with political conflict.

What we are now seeing with those who wear the orange t-shirts is a Jewish religio-political fundamentalism gone wild.  They are loath to accept the realities of modernity as such realities impinge on the messianic dream of Jewish Redemption.  They do not want a mundane territorial state in the Middle East.  What the Settler messianists want is a supra-mundane magical Land that will affirm for them the rules and strictures of a Judaism that seeks to replicate the forms and symbols of an outmoded and anachronistic past that would be utterly oblivious to the march of time and the cognitive and political realities of mankind.

During the period of the “Three Weeks” observant Jews are required to mourn the loss of the kingdom and to pray for its restoration.  We have been taught by our holy Sages that the Temple was destroyed because of sin’at hinnam, the baseless hatred that tore up and divided the Jewish people preventing them from achieving and preserving their internal unity. 

Indeed, we must keep in mind that the Sages continued to counsel a calm sober reason and judiciousness in our political affairs.  We are not taught to stand idly by and be massacred – turning the other cheek is not an absolute concept for the Talmudic rabbis.  But neither have we been taught to ignore our responsibilities as citizens of this world.  We are taught that even our enemies are God’s children, formed in His image.  We are taught that we must act in accordance with the dictates of human dignity and the respectfulness and humility that ensure all members of the human family their basic civil rights and protections.

The lost vision of Religious Humanism that was preserved in the Sephardic rabbinate is an important desideratum in the maelstrom of nationalistic acrimony and ethno-religious hatred that currently animate so many in the Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities.  It is only through peace that God’s vision will be restored and not through the often violent assertions of what the fanatics purport to have identified with absolute certainty as God’s exclusive will; a will that, understandably, only serves to confirm their own exclusive rights as the sole recipients of God’s love and care.

David Shasha