“Let me put it this way,” said Jabo at the end of the evening in Ofra. “We conducted a debate here, and we think you lost. But you’ve got the stronger hand, because you can write it any way you want.”
Given the challenge and the heavy responsibility which Jabo placed in my hands, I mean to write cautiously, step by step, and perhaps in doing so I can return the challenge to the people of Ofra, so that they may face up to the implications of what they told me.
For the stranger, the wary, the visitor from afar, Ofra surprises. On Friday afternoon it is soft and green, accessible and unfenced, and its people are welcoming, warm, and unassuming. Quickly, so quickly, the wary stranger is also seduced by the ethereal sense of festivity that permeates the Sabbath here, and in wonder he discovers in himself a tender desire to be absorbed in it in his entirety, to let down his guard, to become worthy of this welcome, of this nostalgic flickering of the candle flame awaiting him at the end of the rough road between the villages of Ain Yabrud and Silwad.
I did not want to make a short visit to Ofra. I wanted an extended one, a weekend, to see the people of this place at all hours of the day, unguarded. With their children. On a typical street I looked for the home of the family which would host me, and found it between, on the one side, the houses of Yehuda Etzion and Yitzhak Novick, and on the other, of Haggai Segel, all members of the terrorist Jewish underground, arrested three years ago. Its members were convicted variously of booby-trapping the cars of the mayors of four West Bank cities, of killing two students and wounding several others in an attack on the Islamic college in Hebron, of planting bombs in Arab buses, and of conspiring to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the Moslem shrine which sits on the site of the ancient Jewish Temple. I stayed, with my family, in the home of Menahem and Na’ama Granit and their four children, warm and pleasant people. The people of Gush Emunim, of the settlements, are used to hosting wary strangers like myself. “We never know when we will get a phone call announcing that tomorrow five or six guests are coming for a meal, for an entire day, for Shabbat,” related Ayala Resis-Tal. “Welcome. We’re used to it.” Gush Emunim, currently somewhat moribund because of the lack of widespread new settlement activity; also as a result of the exposure of the Jewish underground and the sharp internal debates which that event brought on, puts much effort into disseminating its ideas, bringing people closer to its values, and bringing its interests into the public eye. Its publicity machine is well oiled, to the point where you almost don’t notice you are being “sold” something, and only afterwards realize that the people here do not listen much, do not display a real interest in you, and that two- and three-hour heart-to-heart conversations revolve, in the end, exclusively around them and their lives. This, perhaps, is the first warning sign of the price they pay.
As for the debate:
To begin with, I did not intend to debate at all, and I don’t see that evening—in the book-lined study of Rav Yoel Ben-Nun—as a debate. Furthermore, at the end of twenty years it seems to me that all the arguments, both rational and emotional, have already been made. Only on extremely rare occasions do we hear a crushing new argument, one which requires you to reevaluate your opinions, and in Israel the reality is that it is easier for a man to change his religion, and maybe even his sex, than to change in any decisive way his political opinions. Renounce your opinions—and it is as if you have announced the total replacement of the structure of your soul, and have taken it upon yourself to proclaim that, up to now, you lived a perfect lie. So each bunker peers with its periscope at the bunker across the way, and sees there the reflection of the shining iron of its own immovability. So much for debate.
But debate was, it seems, inevitable. It began in this way: I opened by explaining what I was doing there, in Ofra, on Shabbat. What I came for and what I wanted to hear. I told of my meetings with Arabs in the area, of the pent-up (how appropriate an adjective!) hatred I found among some of them; I told of my visits to the refugee camps. Someone immediately remonstrated—as if by conditioned reflex: Don’t pity them too much. Haven’t you seen their mansions along the road to Ramallah?
I said that I had seen them, and other things as well, and that I hadn’t come to hold forth on that subject. The Ofrans leaned forward in their chairs. From that moment they lost the peacefulness of the Sabbath eve, and an invisible trip wire joined them all, facing me. I thought that there was no point in contention. They have lived in the middle of the conflict for so many years, trained to resist any attack, justified or unjustified, lacking in their naked vulnerability any sense of irony.
For this reason, and instead of answering, I asked for their goodwill. For their cooperation in one matter that bothers me. A side question, not even part of the debate over who is more in the right, we or the Arabs. The right or the left. Because I am very curious to see if they can imagine themselves in their Arab neighbors’ places and tell me what seems to them to be the most hateful manifestation of the occupation.
Someone (it is difficult to remember who, there were about fifty people there) said immediately, “The situation isn’t our fault!” And others murmured their agreement.
I said: That is not the question. Let’s assume that you are right. Let us assume that your view is correct one hundred percent, and that history will confirm this in time. Now I ask only for a little flexibility of thought, and ask again: What, in your opinions, does an Arab in Silwad or Ain Yabrud, in his everyday life, in his most private meditations, in his relations with his children, in what does he most feel the influence of your (just, you believe) presence here, in a place he sees as his land.
“We haven’t taken one meter of land from Arabs,” one woman said heatedly.
I saw that I had erred and not made myself clear. So I told them how I describe this to myself, and permit me to record it here with a certain lack of modesty: I related that in my own day-to-day life I attach extremely great importance to time. That sometimes I feel as if time flows in my veins. And I am not willing to tolerate the thought that even one moment of my life might pass empty of meaning, of interest, of enjoyment. I feel great responsibility to the time given us with such meanness, and it seems to me that, were I living under foreign rule, what would torture me would be—besides the tangible things that are taken as given—the fact that I do not control my time. That they can delay me at a roadblock for an hour-long interrogation; that they can impose a curfew of several days on me; that the hours of my life, which are my personal, intimate possession, turn into worn coins in the hands of a wasteful and obtuse malevolence. And this also: that they set me at an unnatural point in the general progress of historical time; that they hold back or accelerate developments and processes in an artificial and arbitrary way, without my being able to make use of all that is inherent in them. And I returned to my now familiar question.
“Fine,” said one of the Ofrans. “At the intersection coming into Tel Aviv I also get held up an hour every morning.”
Laughter.
“To my mind time is so valuable,” said my host, “that I don’t waste even a minute on such questions.”
More laughter.
But now I was not willing to give up, because it seemed to me that this was an expression of a fundamental and deep difficulty. So, for forty minutes, I continued to ask the same question over and over, and the Ofrans, educated, sharp-minded, and fluent as they are, did not succeed in answering my question, my simple request. Erlich said that what most burdens the Arabs is actually our, the Jews’, indecision with regard to the situation, and that, were we to decide to officially annex the territories, we would make things easier for them. That’s an answer to a different question, I said. The atmosphere had already become unpleasant.
Haggai Segel’s father stood in the doorway opposite me, erect, wearing a black beret, and his face expressed his hostility toward me. He stated angrily that we did not start the war (absolutely right) and that we won a victory over all our enemies in an almost miraculous way (true), and what do you think, that now we can give up everything we gained. I thought only that this also did not answer that earlier, forgotten question.
Among the myriad arguments thrown at me (sometimes by two or three voices in unison) were some which indicated an attempt to deal with the question. Noga spoke of the Bedouin she saw on television a month earlier, an Israeli Bedouin from near Beersheba, who could not find work and felt himself to be a second-class citizen. Gidele said that he is not comfortable with the way soldiers at roadblocks treat Arabs, and that he even tells them so. These were not real answers, but they showed a willingness to consider the question. Other than these and one or two other responses, the people in the room were not able, even for a little while, to shift their point of view; they did not allow themselves even a split second of empathy and uncommitted participation in the lives of those whose fates are intertwined and interwoven so much with theirs. Like fossils, they did not succeed in freeing themselves from those very bonds which they are unwilling to admit exist.
Then Yehuda said that the answer is simple: that he does not want to think even for a minute about the situation of the Arabs around him, because he is caught up in a struggle with them, at war, he said, and were he to allow himself to pity, to identify, he would weaken and endanger himself. The people in the room nodded. There was a hum of agreement.
I said that such an answer—even though anticipated—frightens me, because there are things that, when said out loud, become both a judgment and a prophecy. After such things are said out loud, is it possible to say that twenty years of heart-hardening have had no side effects?
“We’ve heard that kind of talk before,” the Ofrans said. I was not sure they had really listened. I expanded on my question a bit more, not only for them, but also to understand it better myself: when we wish to ignore someone, some other person, or thousands of people, we set up a sort of “block” in our souls. A closed-off area, fencing in all the problems we do not wish to touch. Little by little we learn to make detours, to distance ourselves from that same closed area. Our access to it is blocked. Without our noticing, it ceases to be ours. Something is lost and taken away from us, maybe forever. We are social creatures, I told the people of Ofra, and even when we are completely alone we create internal relationships with different parts of ourselves. And when we accustom ourselves to relations like those between master and slave, that division is stamped within us as well. It suddenly becomes a possible mold for our relations with our friends.
The charge most often leveled at you of Gush Emunim is approximately this: Can a person spend years closed off from and insensitive to “certain kinds” of people whom he sees face-to-face every day, without this finding its way into other parts of his life? You probably, by this time, don’t hear the charge. You have accustomed yourselves to it, and those who made it have grown tired of it themselves. So it is necessary to pain you even more and ask you: Is the soul a modular mechanism in which specific “parts” may be disconnected, or in which entire sections may be made non-operational for a period of time, in the meanwhile, until the danger passes? Can it be—and this each one of us must answer himself, alone—that in the very making of this dramatic separation you do not turn yourself, in the course of time, into just such an impenetrable mechanism, a mechanism that you sometimes control and that sometimes controls you and is capable of deeds that once were only imagined but today are already—
And I said “the Jewish underground,” and they answered me yes, yes, the underground, they always throw the underground at us. And in the same breath, almost, they began to attack my hypocrisy, since I live in Talpiot, which, they claimed, used to be an Arab neighborhood, and I do not make an issue of that, and is that not a sin against absolute justice?
I answered that the person who seeks absolute justice is evading practical decisions, and that I do not seek pure justice, nor the settling of historical accounts, but rather possible life, no more than imperfect and tolerable, causing as little injustice as possible. “And Talpiot?” they pressured me, like victors. “What about Talpiot?” I noted that they were mistaken—Talpiot was never an Arab neighborhood, and that in any case I cannot be responsible for what was done before I was born, and that on the contrary, since today we see the results of earlier wars, we must take care not to bring about further injustice. They speak, I said, as if nothing had happened between 1948 and 1967, no developments, no processes, no Green Line—the border between the State of Israel and the West Bank. They talk as if everything is undetermined and unbounded, everything happening in some sort of vacuum, outside of history, and the debate caught fire, the atmosphere became unfriendly, and we had to decide to meet again, the next day, “to talk about literature and not politics,” and in order to make up and get over the resentment.
* * *
No one today doubts that the people of Gush Emunim have distanced themselves greatly from the center of the Israeli consensus. At the beginning they meant—under the inspiration of Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook—“to exalt the soul of the nation” by virtue of their deeds over the Green Line, and to draw after them the entire nation to the land of the forefathers to a new system of values, as in the words of the Song of Songs, “Draw me, and we will run after you,” but the condition they set themselves was to be “two steps ahead of the nation”—and no more.
But in their haste they raced forward and were left without troops and without support. Without even the favor of many who at the start thought well of them. It is enough to read any issue of their magazine Nekudah to realize this. “The settlers developed a feeling of persecution as a defense mechanism, similar to what was essential in its time to the Jewish nation in exile for its defense and adjustment to an inimical environment,” writes clinical psychologist and Gush Emunim member Tzvi Moses. “The existence of such a mechanism in the psyche of the Jewish nation creates a problematic system in which change is difficult, and which may be destructive first and foremost to whoever feels persecuted, even though the aggression is, on the surface, directed against the critical and attacking object … Obstinacy and inflexible thinking typify the campaigns of the Gush today … There are side effects, such as excessive and nostalgic preoccupation with the early days of the movement, and difficulty making necessary adjustments … What today typifies the elders of the Gush—those same people who pushed for quick achievements at the start—is that they have revealed themselves to be functionaries fearful that control will be taken out of their hands, so they retard the organization’s normal development processes … In fear of the dynamic of change, necessary for growth and development, there is excessive and repeated use of ideological concepts, to the point where they are eroded and emptied of meaning. What has happened to those who have grown tired of the slogans of the left about ‘democracy’ and ‘rule of law’ is now happening to those who have tired of the unceasing and overworked expressions ‘the people of Israel’ and ‘the land of Israel.’ All difficulties and internal mishaps are blamed on outside forces: the government, the left, the Arabs. There is no self-examination of functioning.” (Nekudah 108, March 1987)
Because of this self-distancing of Gush Emunim from the central consensus, and mostly because of the underground, the general public has become estranged and hesitant with regard to its members and is reluctant to face up to the problem they present. They are frozen into a tired stereotype, and there are those who fear them in an almost mythic way: “You’re going to Ofra? Be careful of them” was the reaction of some people when they heard where I was going; and “They’re crazy. They’re fanatics. They’re blind.”
It is obvious, however, that it is not so simple, and that reality never surrenders to a stereotypic view. So I went in order to learn.
Perhaps there are not among them real moderates, but there are those who feel growing discomfort. Like those who in private conversations will finally agree to acknowledge the qualms awakening in them over what they are doing to the Arabs and to the people of Israel. There are people here such as Yoel Ben-Nun, rabbi and thinker, who sees the conflict in a wide historical perspective, and whose ideas are thought-provoking and present a real challenge. I do not want to begin listing the many other names, but I met in Ofra men and women who—when calm—are very different from the public image of them. Sensitive, deep people who stimulate thought and fondness. But again—when calm. Even then it is hard to really get to know them. Theirs is a closed society with a clear internal code of its own, of people with, in general, very similar biographies, interacting with each other over a course of years, people who have been molded since childhood by the same common experiences and struggles. The people I met are diligent, idealistic, and without a doubt courageous and ready to sacrifice themselves. Among themselves they maintain a system of mutual assistance and a high level of ideological and personal obligation. Ofra even became the model of a new type of settlement—neither a cooperative agricultural village nor an impersonal town, like those previously established, but a “community settlement,” a small, selective community of independent settlers, most of whom run businesses or work in the city.
Despite this, they are not the elite they like to think they are. In conversations with them, one wonders at the extent to which their way of thinking is sometimes simplistic, provincial, nourished by generations of suspicious self-confinement from the world. Conservatism, an important value in their eyes, disconnects them even more from the world around them and strengthens the “bunker” mentality, and it is hard to know whether they hate this or whether it is essential to their continued survival and faith.
In their conversation and their writing they unhesitatingly make use of empty clichés full of baseless arrogance (“We must move the ship of Zionism forward,” Daniella Weiss, Secretary-General of Gush Emunim, said). They speak of themselves as being “a model society,” but all their actions already give evidence of, on the one hand, weariness of the model life (and there is already hidden competition over the interior and exterior beautification of the private houses and over the number of electrical appliances they contain), and one may also sense among them, on the other hand, a certain perplexity when they must deal with the little details of everyday life, with long-range actions, since, as Ofra educator Dan Tor said, the nucleus of people which created the “Gush Emunim momentum” was “a group with ‘high messianic tension’” (Dear Brothers, p. 219). This tension is diffusing itself. And the tension will want release.
The members of Gush Emunim would like to see themselves as the heirs of the historic Mapai (Labor) movement (and the elders of Mapai never hid their sentimental softheartedness in the face of the adventures of the new pioneers of Zionism), but they do not have an inclusive and deep national vision with “appeal” and wide public support, as Mapai, the predecessor of today’s Labor Party, had in its heyday. They have too few great lights, and they rally around them in a rough sort of way, like the inhabitants of a poor Galician town drawing pride and courage from its local celebrated scholar.
They accuse the left of having an exile mentality, but they are not themselves really of the land of Israel. The architecture of their villages is strange to the landscape, proud and overbearing; they know nothing of the language, thinking, or manners of their neighbors; among many of them even the Hebrew language is incorrect, shallow, and trite. Their houses are almost bookless, with the exception of religious texts, and, in general, they have little use for culture. Even the humor of their circles is of the old Diaspora type, of sarcasm and contrariety, and reflexive, nervous contrivances, of mocking one’s real and imagined enemies. The whole world is against us, they broadcast to you with every word. Inevitably, they have created their own prison, their spiritual Sparta on the mountaintops, out of which they peek, stiff and prickly, in the face of all other opinions. They turned from people of faith to, if one translates the name Gush Emunim, a Bloc of the Faithful.
Who are these people, I ask myself, who maintain an almost utopian bubble of a society of values, making great demands on individuals, atop a mountain of injustice, impenetrability, and ignorance of their fellow men?
They have established an exemplary settlement here, among the Arab villages. Both good air and a good life. They are fruitful and multiply, and there are many families of four, six, and eight children, kein ein hara, and a school for five hundred children, an absorption center for new immigrants, cherry orchards and chicken coops—and of all this I do not write, because there is something else, difficult and threatening and much more important, somewhere under it all, which I want to unearth.
No: they are not hotheaded. It is their complexity that is dangerous, not their simplistic willingness to follow their slogans. They plan their steps with wisdom, in a calculated and pragmatic way. In this sense they are utopian rather than messianic. They are not sleepwalking hallucinators but, rather, very practical people.
When you sit with them, especially with the moderates among them, whom Gush Emunim puts on display, you may sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the differences between you are very small. Yoel Ben-Nun relates a conversation he had with Israeli writer Amos Oz, who supports the idea of a territorial compromise in the West Bank, and his conclusion in the wake of it was: “There is no chasm between us! There is no ideological conflict. The debate is only over the limits of the abilities of the Zionist enterprise today.”
But the chasm exists.
It gaped, of course, when the Jewish underground was uncovered. But the underground was only a symptom. It gapes when I see in the house of moderate Yoel Ben-Nun a picture of the photomontage he made with Yehuda Etzion, leader of the underground: the Temple sitting on the Temple Mount (and Yoel Ben-Nun condemned the underground and castigated Etzion—and as a result lost standing in the movement).
And it gapes when Yoel Ben-Nun tells me that, in his eyes, we are not yet in Greater Israel—because the Jordan River is not the border of Greater Israel, but flows down its center. While he does not expect us to achieve that in this generation, he certainly feels obligated by the Bashan and the Gilad, once parts of Biblical Israel and now in Jordan.
Such talk frightens me. Once, the talk and writing about Jews returning to Beit-El and Hebron—such as the writings of Shabbatai Ben-Dov, who called in 1953 to strive for “the full messianic definition of the Israeli kingdom”—seemed daydreams disconnected from reality. Since then we have all learned, the hard way, that in Israel’s special climate we must give serious attention to the visions of such people and their supporters. They, after all, see the Bible as an operational order. An operation that, even if its time is yet to come, will come and, if it does not come soon enough, will need to be brought. I fear life among people who have an obligation to an absolute order. Absolute orders require, in the end, absolute deeds, and I, nebbish, am a partial, relative, imperfect man who prefers to make correctible mistakes rather than attain supernatural achievements.
* * *
Who are these people who claim that they are acting in my name and in the name of my future (and who actually influence it decisively against my will), who are able to harden their hearts so much against others and against themselves, over the course of an entire generation or two, and become the kindling of the historical process they desire? What do I have to do with them? If they succeed in getting what they want, and if the opportunity presents itself (and in the inconstant Middle East it will eventually do so), and if they could proceed immediately to the next stage of realizing their grand plan, they will then be even stronger and more determined, wonderfully trained in hardening their hearts.
Who are these people who hurl themselves forward with spiritual devotion like a stone thrown from here into the clouds of the future and the promise, and all during their flight they are stone and solidity, splitting the air with power and determination, and when they finally hit ground, on a mountain or hill, they turn suddenly into a house of soft candlelight and the “warm Jewish heart”?
Who are these people who are able to pilot their lives with logic and clearheadedness into the very heart of a doubtful reality and then, upon arriving at a barrier which seems to all others impassable, metamorphose themselves into some other realm of existence, execute a sort of instant takeoff with the help of an Uzi, crossing the Messiah with a vertically launched aircraft, enter into an apocalyptic trance, dance like kids on the hilltops, shout ecstatic and ridiculous prophecies, and so, with determined blindness, with elimination of the self in order to allow the “together” to fill the soul, they are carried skyward, to the next target, and to the one after it, and wake up in the end with dawn on another hilltop, or in the heart of Hebron, red-eyed and battered by their drunken senses, fluttering toward us like spoiled children, and afterwards in provocation, and in the end in impudence and insolence?
I am too small to understand it.
Two weeks later, in the settlement Alfei Menashe, I heard Rav Levinger, the leader of the Jewish settlers in Hebron, say: “Fifty years ago our opponents argued about Jaffa; today they argue with us about Alfei Menashe; in another fifty years they will argue with us about Amman. That’s the way it is.”
I do not comprehend people who set history in motion. The impresarios of history are beyond my understanding. They amuse themselves, I feel, with overly large toys, and the game may come down on all our heads. For instance, the game called “Blow Up the Dome of the Rock and Wait One Turn for the Arab World’s Reaction.” Historical games often end in historical mistakes.
There will be a second underground. A second and a third and a fourth. Just writing the words sickens me, but it has to be said expressly: it will happen. They will happen. Not from among the generation who gave birth to the first Jewish underground—it was dealt a mortal blow and is greatly broken, not necessarily because of the deeds, but because a cruel mirror was placed in front of its face. The first underground was not an accident of history. It was the inevitable result of reality. So the second one will be. I have noted elsewhere that the major educational problem in Ofra is the lack of discipline among the children, and that one of the women there suggested that this is linked to the lawbreaking of Gush Emunim.
In all that touches on the underground, the children of Gush Emunim receive double messages from their parents. It is enough to spend one evening with a family in Ofra to realize this. Even the most prosaic of them can evoke sudden wonder with their verbal acrobatics. The bottom line of all this twisting and turning is this: there is no regret. “We oppose the murder of the two students at the Islamic college,” the Granit parents say, “but no one regrets the attack on the Arab mayors.” And the children—five and ten years old—listen, and are meant, it seems, to patch together some sort of philosophy and system of moral values in which one attempted murder is acceptable and another is not.
Would it be too much to believe that the leader of the Jewish underground of the 1990s is now studying in one of the yeshivas? The climate of the national religious public creates a sort of internal hierarchy, headed by those who are more committed than others to the absolute order. The mental steamroller which created characters like underground members Novick, Segel, and company has not stopped working. From the do-nothing clubbiness of what they lovingly and in awe call “our circles” will emerge now and in the future the hard and dim seed of absolute commitment. The mixed reaction they heard to the deeds of the underground from within Gush Emunim, as well as the indulgent attitude of some national leaders, was well understood by the potential terrorists now rocking over their books.
It is difficult for me to connect the pleasant people I met in Ofra with the obliquity of those who chant the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Take counsel together and it shall come to naught,” but they are the same people. It is hard for me to understand Avital, who spoke with pain of the sufferings of Israeli Arabs, on whom we have forced Israeli citizenship, saying, “And I can justify every one of them who joins the PLO,” but cannot feel the same emotion with regard to the Arabs of next-door Ain Yabrud, to whom she herself is a thorn in the side; it is difficult for me to grasp the declarations that “we hire no Arab laborers,” but when I ask who built their houses, Shalmai, a sensitive and wise man, answers, “I don’t know, little dwarves came one night and built them.”
And these are the same people. I saw them in their calm days. Almost in their slack days. Not in the season of their messianic heat. Not at a time of “high messianic tension,” but it lies in wait for them always, like a disease. These are historical people, and historical people become—at certain moments—hollow and allow history to stuff them, and then they are dangerous and deadly.
Until this is fully understood, we will all continue, gone foolish from abundance and apathy and feeling inferior in the face of “activism” and “realization of ideals,” to sit in the hall and watch the gushnikim playing before us scenes of horror—at every opportunity that presents itself—yet stimulating some pleasant impulse in some hearts, as well as dramas of authentic pioneer idealism, and snatches of scenes of madness and instigation, except that sometimes, while we watch the events in that circular field and pay the small price of not doing anything, someone will awaken in the back corner of the great auditorium and will discover, when he sees the ground moving slowly under his feet, that this wonderful circus is a traveling one, traveling with determination, and that its goal and direction are known to him without any doubt.