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FEATURE
The People of Israel Before the Land of Israel
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Remembering the Resolute Restraint Displayed During the 2005 Disengagement BY TZVI LEFF
It was a hot July day in the southern village of Kfar Maimon in 2005, and the modern State of Israel seemed closer to a civil war than in any other period during its short history. Over 50,000 Israelis – the majority affiliated with the Religious Zionist sector – had converged onto the small moshav in what was a last-ditch effort to scuttle the looming Gaza Disengagement. Led by rabbis and community leaders, they intended to march into the Gush Katif bloc in Gaza and remain in the villages slated for demolition, effectively rendering the imminent pullout impossible.
According to the plan, tens of thousands of people would begin marching at dawn, overpowering any opposition and preventing the withdrawal from happening. This, organizers hoped, would be the nail in the coffin for Sharon’s designs and would keep Gush Katif in Israeli hands forever.
Yet Prime Minister Sharon had other plans. After being warned by security forces that it would not be able to pull off the Disengagement if even half of the masses succeeded in reaching the Gush Katif settlements, Sharon ordered the military to stop them by any means possible.
On July 19, 2005, the demonstrators awoke to the surreal site. No less than 20,000 IDF soldiers and police officers stood between them and the Gaza border. Armed to the teeth, they were given orders to stop the marchers “by any means possible,” including live fire. Tensions swirled; both the military and Religious Zionist leaders refused to back down. All of the drama of the past year seemed to come down to this. One wrong move and Israel would be plunged into civil war.
Yet, by late morning, the announcement went out.
“Stand down. We’re going home!” Judea and Samaria Council head Pinchas Wallerstein ordered the shocked protesters. While being fully aware that dispersing the rally meant giving up their last chance to prevent the Disengagement, Religious Zionist rabbis and other leaders were resolute.
“It’s better to lose than win and have the country fall apart,” asserted a senior rabbi. “We’re not prepared to win at any price.”
PEOPLE BEFORE LAND
A year earlier, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had declared his intention to forcibly expel 9,000 Jews who were living in the 17 villages sprawled throughout Gush Katif in Gaza. At first, the settlers didn’t take his declaration seriously; Israel was at the height of a bloody intifada that killed over 1,500 of its citizens and Sharon had just been reelected on the explicit promise that “there is no difference between Gaza and Tel Aviv.”
Throughout his four decades in politics, Sharon had made a name for himself as the strongest proponent for establishing Jewish communities
in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip; no one could imagine that he would turn his back on them. And yet Sharon was serious; the Disengagement was soon approved by the Knesset and became binding law.
Witnessing the heated events at Kfar Maimon was Anat Roth. An academic covering the happenings for the Israeli Democracy Institute, widely considered Israel’s top think tank, Roth held strong left-wing views and had previously worked for Ehud Barak and the anti-settlement movement Peace Now. Yet what she saw in the months leading up to the Disengagement changed her life.
“The tension in the air at Kfar Maimon was enormous. You could cut it with a knife,” Roth later recalled to the Yisrael Hayom daily. “I had no doubt that it would erupt sometime, but before my shocked eyes I saw the bruised and humiliated crowd embracing the soldiers and maintaining near-superhuman human restraint.”
Served a steady diet of media stories that warned of “fanatical settlers” seeking “a civil war,” Roth had expected to see violent clashes between the marchers and the soldiers. What she witnessed, though, was the complete opposite. Rather than behaving as the incited mob they were publicly portrayed as, Religious Zionist leaders demonstrated responsibility and did everything they could to avoid internecine strife.
“This is the first time that I realized that I didn’t understand what was happening. I promised myself that I would crack the riddle,” said Roth.
Over the next few months, Roth was granted unprecedented access to the settlers and their campaign to prevent the Disengagement from going forward. Allowed entry to virtually all of the planning sessions involving the Yesha Council and Yeshivat Merkaz Harav head Rabbi Avraham Shapira, she realized that the settlers’ image in the media was baseless.
Roth’s experience would change her life. From a secular academic who worked for organizations such as Peace Now, Roth today is religiously observant and resides in the settlement of Efrat. In 2015, Roth ran for the Knesset as part of the Jewish Home, a Religious Zionist political
party headed by Naftali Bennett, and is a fervent supporter of the settlements today.
Anyone attempting to understand Roth’s total ideological transformation would be advised to read her account of the Gaza Disengagement. Titled “Not At Any Price,” it came out in 2014 and is considered the most comprehensive record of the events leading up to the withdrawal in 2005. In the book, Roth details how the settlers’ restraint and sense of leadership avoided plunging the country into civil war.
The settler leadership, it turns out, knew that it could not defeat the State of Israel. Some even thought that they shouldn’t attempt to beat it. Despite their vehement opposition to the Gaza Disengagement, they put a premium on keeping tensions in check and avoiding a civil war. Influenced by the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak Hakohen Kook, seen as a founder of Religious Zionism, “they decided that the people of Israel were more important than the Land of Israel.”
The time and effort they invested likely prevented bloodshed. Like the mother in the famous argument with King Solomon, they decided that it was better to lose their political battle than to have the State of Israel go up in flames. “We can put tremendous pressure on the government but we won’t be able to break it,” said Ze’ev Haver.
Known as “Zambish,” Haver runs the settler organization Amana and has dedicated almost his entire adult life to building up Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. But during the run-up to the Disengagement, he emerged as one of the strongest voices urging restraint and reconciliation.
“It’s impossible to save the State of Israel at a price that will defeat the
people of Israel and shatter it into pieces,” said Haver. “This isn’t victory, but something else...a split.”
CAUTIOUS RESTRAINT
The focus on preventing civil war influenced virtually every move the settlers made. When planning a demonstration, hours were spent debating the “rules of engagement’ with Rabbi Avraham Shapira, the dean of the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva and the community’s unquestioned authority on religious law. Shapira’s rulings carried immense weight in the Religious Zionist community – not only was he a close student of the late Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, but hundreds of other rabbis also viewed him as a mentor. He had headed both the rabbinical court of Jerusalem and the Supreme Rabbinic Court and had previously served as Israel’s Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi
Time after time, Shapira reiterated his opposition to any violence towards policemen and IDF soldiers at rallies and during the Disengagement itself. His moderate approach often led to raised voices and heated arguments with the more activist members of the opposition, who contended that this refusal to “take off the gloves” ensured that the struggle to prevent the expulsion would fail.
Yet the aged rabbi was resolute. While he viewed the withdrawal as a personal tragedy, Shapira forbade any and all kinds of physical insubordination vis-a-vis the forces tasked with dragging Gush Katif residents out of their homes. “There will be no pushing soldiers,” ordered Shapra. “This isn’t the Torah way.”
On the day of the Disengagement itself, “forward operating commands” comprised of rabbis from all the different streams of Religious Zionism fanned out across the settlements slated for destruction. Their purpose? Noticing and preventing any signs of violent struggle against IDF soldiers. Over the next week, they would report protesters who demonstrated violent tendencies, assisting police and the military in preventing the traumatic events from spiraling out of control.
Roth said that her main takeaway during the Disengagement was the gap between the settlers’ image and the reality: “When I started researching this, I held the common view rife in academia and among the public that the settlers are an extreme, dangerous and violent public, who would be ready to fight for the integrity of the land at all costs.
“[But,] as demonstrated in Kfar Maimon – and later also during the days of the evacuation and in Amona – it is a responsible and responsible public.”
SETTING A PRECEDENT?
Not everyone shared Roth’s positive sentiments. The media spent the year preceding the Disengagement demonizing the settlers along with the entire Religious Zionist movement as a collection of dangerous fanatics. IDF generals warned that the settlers were liable to open fire on soldiers coming to expel them from their
homes; the Shin Bet spoke of plans to blow up the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount and of plans to assassinate Sharon himself. As the clock ticked down to the scheduled date of the pullout, prominent settlers were arrested by the Shin Bet and put into administrative detention, a legal remnant of the British Mandate allowing citizens to be jailed without trial.
Making the effort to limit the anti-Disengagement activity from spiraling out of control particularly challenging was the plan’s lack of legitimacy among the right-wing public.
Sharon had been reelected in 2003 under the explicit promise not to evacuate the Gaza Strip, promising that “the status of (Gaza settlement) Netzarim is the same as the status of Tel Aviv.” After announcing his intention to carry out the withdrawal, Sharon promised to hold a referendum within the Likud party. But after the plan was defeated by a large margin, Sharon reneged on his promise and maintained that the pullout would go on as planned. Finally, Sharon fired government ministers whom he knew would vote against the plan when it came up for a vote, an unprecedented tactic never before used to ensure a majority in the cabinet.
As a result of the aforementioned events, the Disengagement was widely viewed as undemocratic among the right-wing public. In addition, the police used extreme levels of violence to break up anti-Disengagement rallies, often arresting and then brutalizing innocent people who had not committed any crime. In the days prior to the rally in Kfar Maimon, police officers confiscated the vehicles of anyone looking religious who was heading in that direction; busses charted by event organizers were seized and prominent activists detained.
It was the intensive efforts by the community’s rabbis and other leaders that prevented matters from deteriorating.
“Contrary to the public image of the settlers,” said Roth, “the Land of Israel is not the only and supreme value in their worldview. The integrity of the land is indeed sacred value, but so is the integrity of the people and the state. Fixing the state’s failings from the inside is rooted in the Torah education from an early age, and therefore, even in places where leadership was not present, the violence did not erupt.”
The policy of restraint epitomized by the leadership’s refusal to resort to more extreme measures came under tremendous attack within the community following the Disengagement. Yesha’s approach was seen as defeatist and at fault for allowing 45 years of pioneering settlement to be easily destroyed within a week by a collection of IDF bulldozers. In weekly synagogue parsha sheets and sectoral newspapers, the rabbis and other leaders were lambasted as “collaborators” who merely paved the way for a similar move elsewhere.
The criticism intensified after Prime Minister Sharon, and then Ehud Olmert, pointed to Gush Katif to highlight the ease to which it was possible to uproot Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as well. Others alleged that ruling out more extreme yet effective tactics prior to the withdrawal was a result of the Yesha Council wanting to maintain a positive image in the eyes of the secular elite.
“What happened in Gush Katif cannot happen a second time, be
cause if it happens a second time then it will happen a third time and then a fourth time until everything is destroyed,” wrote prominent activist Amichai Boaron.
SHATTERED DREAMS
The backlash was particularly withering from the Gush Katif evacuees themselves, who were shocked to discover that the government had no plan for them after expelling them from their homes. In the months pri
or to the Disengagement, government officials assured them that all their needs would be attended to; the state was said to be building alternative housing while Sharon promised of “a solution for every evacuee.”
Yet all of those promises were soon proven false. There was no alternative housing for Gush Katif residents; the best they could hope for were flimsy and dank caravans which had a waiting period lasting years. Contrary to assurances, communities were not kept together; former farmers accustomed to living in large and spacious homes were scattered to dingy motels in remote parts of the country.
With their agriculture-based businesses destroyed, many families faced financial ruin. The government had provided shipping containers for them to transport their belongings but then promptly lost them. Thousands tracked down their possessions months later in a dilapidated warehouse only to find them ruined by the heat and mishandling.
The families were stuck in the decrepit hotels for months, even years. Depression abounded; unemployed fathers could be seen wandering the lobbies at all hours of the day while divorces skyrocketed. Hundreds of children abandoned religion due to the trauma they experienced, while many residents, who were characterized by strong Zionist fervor, felt betrayed by the state and ceased celebrating Independence Day.
By 2006, fully two years after the Disengagement, 75% of adults remained without a steady job. Another 65% still lived in temporary housing, and 87% still hadn’t been financially compensated by the government for the value of their now-bulldozed homes. During the same year, the State Comptroller issued a scathing report calling the state’s treatment of the evacuees as a “massive failure” marked by “indifference and criminality.”
Their extended suffering and mistreatment led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to appoint an official government-sponsored commission of inquiry to investigate what was behind the string of failures. The findings were stark; the government “failed a failure that is hard to overstate in dealing with the refugees” and consistently refused to take responsibility for their plight.
“The evacuees are the salt of the earth. With hard work, sacrifice, talent and blind faith they erected amazing communities in the areas that were evacuated. It is especially because the settlements were a way of life for them, the evacuation was especially traumatic,” summarized the panel. “People lost not only their homes, jobs and communities, but they also lost a part of their identity.
“The state has a responsibility toward them in the basic contract that ensures the human rights of every citizen of the state, not to mention citizens who have been turned into refugees in their homeland by the state.”