There
are arguably no two movements in Israel as disparate as the Settler Movement
(known as Yesha) and Neturei Karta. Yesha represents the community of Israelis
who live in the West Bank. It does not support a two-state solution and
remains wed to a Greater Israel ideology that claims all of historic Erez
Israel belongs to the Jews. Many, but not all, see Zionism in messianic terms,
an idea promulgated by their patriarch Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891-1982) and
continued by his disciples to this day.
Members of Neturei Karta protest the Occupation. Credit: Creative Commons.
Neturei Karta is an anti-Zionist
ultra-Orthodox movement that is often mistakenly conflated with the Satmar
branch of Hasidism. While it is true that the Satmar rebbe, Rabbi Yoel
Teitelbaum (1897-1979) was the titular figurehead of the Erez Israel-based
Neturei Karta movement until his death in 1979, even as he lived in Brooklyn,
the movement was actually initiated by the non-Hasidic Jerusalem born
ultra-Orthodox rabbi Amram Blau (1984-1974). Its center in Jerusalem remains
the non-Hasidic Lithuanian yeshiva “Torah ve Yirah” in the shuk (market)
in Meah She’arim. This small movement became more exposed to the public under
the leadership of the American-born Rabbi Moshe Hirsch (1923-2010) who became
Arafat’s “foreign minister.” It recently achieved media attention when some of
its members attended a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran.Members of Neturei Karta protest the Occupation. Credit: Creative Commons.
Members of Neturei Karta are what we
might call premillenialists. They are against a Jewish State in the Land of
Israel claiming that tradition dictates that the messiah will come solely by
divine fiat and the job of the Jews is to perform mitzvot and passively await
his arrival. Anyone who attempts to hasten that arrival is guilty of the
prohibition of “forcing the end.” Unlike his mentor Rabbi Hayyim Elazar
Shapira, the Hasidic rebbe of Munkacs (1872-1937) who argued that the Zionists
had defiled the land, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum demonized Zionism but believed the
land retained its sanctity nonetheless. He wrote in his introduction to his
book on the Six-Day War ‘Al
Ha-Geula ve ‘al ha-Temurah that Zionism was a sin worse than the sin
of the Golden Calf. To use terms certainly not familiar to him, Zionism is the
Jewish anti-Christ. But Neturei Karta is not opposed to the sanctity of the
Land of Israel. Quite the opposite, many continue to live in the Land of
Israel, believing it a mitzvah (Jewish commandment) to do so, and continue to
believe in its intrinsic holiness. What they oppose is any form of Jewish
political sovereignty in that land.
For Settler Zionism, broadly conceived,
the land and statehood were always inextricably intertwined. Jewish
sovereignty over the land was superimposed on the religious sanctity of the
land. Speaking on the nineteenth anniversary of the establishment of the
state, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook made what was perhaps his most famous, and
certainly most influential, speech. The shocking speech was delivered right
before the Six-Day War in 1967.
“In those first hours [of
independence],” Rabbi Kook said,
I could not make peace with what was done [in 1948], with the horrible news [of partition], that God’s words from the prophecy in the Twelve Prophets: My land was divided was coming true….Where is our Hebron? Are we forgetting it? And where is our Nablus? Are we forgetting it? And where is our Jericho? Are we forgetting it? And where is our east side of the Jordan? Where is every lump and chunk? Every bit and piece of the four cubits of God’s land? Is it up to us to give up any millimeter of it? God forbid! In the state of shock that took over my body, completely bruised and torn to pieces – I could not rejoice then.
These strong words were seared into the
minds of many of Kook’s young listeners who would become leaders of the Yesha
movement. What Rabbi Kook was saying was that there is no acceptable
sovereignty without the wholeness of the land. Later he made the case even
stronger when he stated that one may be obligated to give one’s life, to
become a martyr, to save every inch of Erez Israel. Not necessarily the state,
but the land. It can be argued that for some in Yesha the land became more
important than the state, Erez Yisrael overrode Jewish sovereignty. Kook’s use
of the term “four cubits” referring to Erez Israel is quite telling as that
term conventionally refers to the “four cubits of halakha (Jewish
law)” as the sine
qua non of Judaism. The implication here is that living on the land
is tantamount to Judaism itself! Aside from that arguably heretical point
(substituting land for law), in some way Yesha and Neturei Karta almost meet
except that for the latter the state has no role whatsoever or, more strongly,
only a demonic role to play in the messianic drama. For Yesha the state has a
role, even as holy role, but settling the land is pure sacrality.
In any case, the fissure between land
and state in the settler movement became apparent some years ago when two
settler rabbis, Menachem Fruman (1945-2013) and Yoel Bin Nun raised the
possibility that they would consider remaining in West Bank settlements even
if it became part of a Palestinian State. This would include holding
Palestinian passports. That is, after Oslo, as the prospect of Greater Israel
became dimmer, Fruman and Bin-Nun considered the possibility of choosing land
over state. Setting aside the impracticalities of such a possibility, its mere
suggestion is quite telling. This possibility was raised by the Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week when he floated the idea of some
settlements remaining in a Palestinian State. It is true that the Yesha
movement immediately rejected this possibility, the Prime Minister likely used
it as a ploy to bait the Palestinians, and the Palestinian president Mahmoud
Abbas has surely not embraced it, but for my purposes that is all beside the
point. I suggest that the very possibility of such was an idea is embedded
deep in the subconscious of R. Zvi Yehuda Kook’s religious Zionism. It was
born in that 1967 Independence Day speech when Greater Israel was soon to
become a reality.
The tension between state and land has
always existed in the settler movement. It is just that the Greater Israel
ideology has kept it at bay. For the Greater Israel ideologues, Erez Yisrael
and Medinat Yisrael are identical. That is the backbone of Kook’s religious
Zionism. But Oslo, Camp David II, and now the emerging Kerry parameters,
raises the hammer that may shatter the identity of state and land. That
rupture is called “the two-state solution.” Many settlers will have to make a
choice: state or land. Most will choose state. Some may choose land. Those
that choose land, even if in reality they cannot manifest that choice, have
moved close to Neturei Karta where only the
land is sacred. That is the core of their anti-Zionism. For the settlers, if
land is preferred to state, even in principle, the final death of Greater
Israel may give birth to a kind of Settler Post-Zionism.
In some sense this is happening in
other ways. Outlying and illegal settlements, most inhabited by young men and
women who have abandoned the bourgeois settlements of their parents, view
themselves as more and more distinct from the state. Some refer to Israel as
“the lowland state” (medinat
ha-shefelah) or “the state of Tel Aviv” (medinat
Tel Aviv), a reference to the secular state. Many in these outlying
settlements rarely go to Israel proper. Some have even openly rejected
allegiance to the settler rabbinic authorities. For them, the land is what
matters, almost exclusively, even if living on it eschews Israeli law. They
are arguably already post-Zionists.
These are admittedly small enclaves as
are the number of settlers who openly state their preference for land over
state. But they exist, and they are growing. And as they do, we are witnessing
a strange mutation of settler ideology that moves toward the position of
Neturei Karta: the holiness of the land uber
alles. If a two-state solution really begins to loom on the horizon, the
choice will become more and more relevant. If this happens it is significant
to note this is not new but is embedded in Kookean religious Zionism from that
fated day in 1967 when Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook openly said he could not
celebrate Israeli Independence Day.
The question as to whether Jewish
settlers will have the opportunity to remain in their communities if a
Palestinian State comes into existence remains open. It’s not clear that they
will want to remain and it is not clear that the Palestinian authorities would
allow it. In his 2012 book Embracing
Israel/Palestine Michael Lerner argues that those settlers who are
willing to live as law-abiding citizens of the Palestinian state (just as
hundreds of thousands of Palestinians now live as law-abiding citizens of the
Israeli state) should be allowed to remain in their West Bank homes. If
negotiations ever get that far, this might be a way to accommodate those
religious settlers for whom the holiness of the Land of Israel is really their
deepest commitment. In making this choice, religious settlers would be
reflecting a post-Zionist perspective where land becomes more important than
sovereignty. It is here where settler post-Zionism and Neturei Karta converge
in giving religious Israelis a way to overcome the seemingly intractable
opposition of many to any peace agreement that would force fellow Jews to move
from their homes in seeming violation of the mitzvah to settle and live in the
entirety of the Land of Israel.
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