My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (34 page)

But Etzion also realizes that although Ofra has taken root, its success is local and limited. Prime Minister Menachem Begin has betrayed the Land of Israel, he insists, by returning the Sinai. The Israelis of the plains are not standing by the Land of Israel. Retreat is in full motion, and it seems clear that Judea and Samaria might fall. Americanism is the new Hellenism and it is making Israel un-Jewish, weak, hollow, and rotten. Israel can only be saved by a new idea or a deed or an event that will transform history.

The Temple Mount has always fascinated Yehuda Etzion. As a child, he went with his father to West Jerusalem to look over the border toward the site that the Holy Temple once occupied. By the time the Six Day War broke out, Etzion was obsessed with the Temple Mount. And even when he was striving to build Ofra, he always knew that it was only a station on the road to the Temple Mount. “The Temple Mount is the focal point of the land,” Etzion tells me. “But it is in the hands of gentiles. As long as the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Omar mosque stand on the Temple Mount, there can be no salvation for Israel.”

In 1979, as Wallerstein begins his work at the Binyamin District Regional Council, Etzion begins meeting in Jerusalem with Yehoshua Ben Shoshan, Menachem Livni, and Shabtai Ben Dov. All four agree that no Islamic abomination should stand on the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount embodies the covenant between God and Israel. It is the source and the focus of Jewish life. The Etzion Four see the Temple Mount as the place to launch the revival of a Judaic Israel. Only dramatic action on the Temple Mount will make it possible to restart Zionism, so that this time it will be right and pure and truly Jewish.

Wallerstein does not know this at the time, but in 1980 his path parts from Etzion’s. They still live house by house in Ofra and are still Ofra’s moral leaders. Wallerstein admires Etzion’s spirit, and Etzion respects Wallerstein’s work. But in their daily lives they are working on two very different enterprises. Wallerstein is determined to establish more and more settlements, which he does. But Etzion becomes convinced that Wallerstein’s settlements are not enough. They are vital for the cause, but they will not solve the core problem. What is needed is a profound internal change. What is needed is revolution. It is necessary to replace the State of Israel with the Kingdom of Israel. Western democracy will have to make way for the great Jewish court, the Sanhedrin. God Almighty will have to intervene in modern history and save his people, his Israel.

At this point the conversation with Etzion becomes far more fascinating than my conversation with Wallerstein. Yehuda Etzion has never before spoken about the Temple Mount plot as he speaks now, revealing his innermost hopes and fears of that time. “When we founded Ofra, we already knew that our struggle would pit truth against falsehood,” he tells me. “The government’s attempt to make Samaria a Jewish-free zone was false. Our fight with the government was a fight between the good angel and the evil angel. Jewish legend teaches us that such a fight ends with a surprising outcome: the evil angel says ‘Amen’ in spite of himself. After being beaten, he is forced to see the truth. This is what happened in our case, too. Even though the forces we encountered were far superior, in the end our truth won. Even Labor’s leaders said ‘Amen’ in spite of themselves.

“Ofra’s success gave us a tremendous boost. It strengthened our faith and emboldened us. A lot of what happened later happened because of Ofra’s success. From all over the country and from all walks of life people came to see us and be with us. They were surprised by what we had accomplished. Suddenly, they saw a light on the mountaintop. So after we lit the light of Ofra, we lit the light of Elon Moreh, and we lit the light of Shilo, and we lit the light of Beit El. While secular Zionism remained below in the lowland, we climbed up and lit more and more bonfires on the mountaintops.

“But I lived in fear. What was accomplished was far from secure.
What was built was not yet stable. Everything still seemed vulnerable and reversible. And then there was the shameful peace agreement with Egypt, and the duplicity of the government, with Labor drifting further and further away from what it once was. So much so that I felt I could no longer trust the national leadership. I felt betrayed by it. And so I had to fight the State of Israel, which had ceased to be the emissary of the nation of Israel. I was obliged to act on my own for the good of the nation of Israel. As there was no real leadership to speak of, and no real state to speak of, the duty rested on me.

“In the late 1970s I was introduced to the writings of Shabtai Ben Dov. Ben Dov prepared an operative plan for the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel. I learned from him that settlements were not enough, that there was an urgent need to replace the set of foreign values that Israel had adopted. American and European concepts had to be done away with. We needed to embrace concepts that followed directly from the Torah of Israel. We had to leave democracy behind and go back to the source. We had to foment a Kingdom Come revolution.

“I knew that the Temple Mount was the focal point. The mountain is where our Father in heaven connects with us. The fact that the Temple Mount is not in our hands is the most damning testimony of how low we have sunk. The mosques on the Temple Mount are a humiliation to the people of Israel and the history of Israel and God. Blowing up the mosques would allow us to break through to the heavens. It would pave the way to sanctity, divine presence, the Sanhedrin, and the Temple. It would be a purge that would end the old corrupt era and usher in a new pure one, that would replace the secular State of Israel with a Torah-inspired kingdom.

“A third world war? An Islamic march on Jerusalem? Tens of thousands of casualties? I thought about these scenarios but came to the conclusion that they were pessimistic and alarmist. I realized that when the Dome will collapse all hell would break loose. But I didn’t think that thousands of tanks would move on Israel and that hundreds of missiles would be launched. But I also thought that even if I was wrong, the risk was worthwhile. Ben Gurion thought that the foundation of Israel justified the war it begot. Now things are no different. It was absolutely clear to me that making Israel a holy state justified suffering a war against all of Israel’s enemies.”

In the early 1980s, as Pinchas Wallerstein mobilizes more and more of the resources of democratic Israel to build settlements in Judea and Samaria, Yehuda Etzion mobilizes more and more settlers in Judea and Samaria to bring about a revolution that will topple democratic Israel. Wallerstein tries to impose a colonial stalemate in the West Bank, while Etzion tries to ignite Armageddon on the Temple Mount. Their success with Ofra makes the two men outrageously ambitious. While the pragmatic Wallerstein succeeds in making the Israeli republic a subcontractor of the Greater Israel edifice, the messianic Etzion wishes to replace the Israeli republic with a kingdom.

Even today, when he reconstructs the events of thirty to forty years ago, Wallerstein is energetic, forceful, and detailed. He remembers every road he opened, every industrial park he initiated, every budget he extracted from the government. He circumvented here and he maneuvered there, and he pushed and he shoved and he made mainstream Israeli politics flow to the riverbed of Gush Emunim.

But Etzion is pensive and introspective. He quietly tells me how he came to the conclusion that the time had come. Not one Ofra and not a thousand Ofras would suffice. So he carries on with the cherry orchard and with buying land from Arabs and with planning the Ofra synagogue and with weekly meetings of the Gush Emunim leadership. But his mind is elsewhere. His heart is with the Temple. He collects ancient cedar logs that were purportedly once part of the Second Temple. He imagines the Temple, thinks of the Temple, reconstructs the Temple in his mind. And he knows for certain that without redeeming the Temple there will be no redemption. Because he has never been put off by unconventional thinking, he is not put off now by the unconventional idea that is capturing his mind. And because he has always been disgusted by people who talk but don’t act, he knows he must act. He goes up the Mount of Olives at night to observe the Temple Mount, and he studies its defenses. He draws maps and acquires aerial photos and collects every piece of relevant intelligence. And he makes a detailed plan. He mobilizes men and instructs them to get explosives. He reaches a point where he has four major explosive devices (20 kilograms each) that will bring down the four pillars of the Dome; then he reaches a point where
he has twelve medium-sized explosive devices (7 kilograms each) that will bring down the twelve columns surrounding the Dome. He is ready. “In my mind,” Etzion tells me, “I already saw the Dome collapsing on itself with a huge cloud of rising dust. And then the confusion stops and Israel’s stuttering stops and there is clarity at last as one chapter ends and another begins. One era closes and another era opens. And all is different now, for we have done our share and God is bound to do His.”

When, in the spring of 1984, Israel’s Secret Service arrives in Ofra to arrest Yehuda Etzion, the community is up in arms. The official leadership denounces his deeds, but many others are supportive. It is soon revealed that Etzion is not the only Ofra resident who is a member of the now notorious Jewish underground. Several Jewish terrorists live in Ofra. A number of the terrorist operations the clandestine ring has managed to pull off earlier were planned in Ofra. From Ofra came the instructions to booby-trap the cars of three Palestinian mayors, which left two of them without legs. Only five years after Ofra settled among the Palestinians, it became a terrorist hotbed that bred ideological Jewish murderers. Ofra was home to militant messianic ideas and to a radical school of thought that believed in transforming the land by using unrestrained force.

The exposure of the Etzion-led underground is a shock. And the shock is healing. Now even the Ofra settlers realize that messianism is radioactive, that combining metaphysics with politics breeds insanity. After the initial storm subsides, the zealots’ way is rejected. The Ofra majority chooses pragmatism over fundamentalism, moderation over extremism, Wallerstein over Etzion. The settlers enlarge Ofra and strengthen it. They acquire more land and found new neighborhoods. As a community they survive two intifadas. They suffer their losses and bury their dead. They withstand the outbreaks of violence and the constant uncertainties of living in a disputed territory. True, once in a while violent Ofra gangs take the law into their own hands and carry out brutal attacks on the neighboring Palestinian villages. Even Wallerstein himself gets into a shooting incident in which he kills a Palestinian boy after his car is stoned. But as a rule, Ofra does not openly revolt against
the state. It advances its agenda not by fighting state and law, but by using them. Adopting Old Labor’s step-by-step approach, Ofra goes from strength to strength. In 1983 it has five hundred residents. In 1995 it has twelve hundred residents. Today it has approximately thirty-five hundred.

And yet, when I sit with Yehuda Etzion and hear him talk, I know that he has remained a part of Ofra’s DNA. For Etzion is right: Ofra as such is futile. Settlements as such are hopeless. In spite of Wallerstein’s longitudinal and lateral roads, the settlements have remained isolated Jewish islands in the Arab West Bank. In spite of Wallerstein’s communities and industrial parks and highways and bridges, the settlers are a minority in Judea and Samaria. As the international community will never recognize them as legitimate, the settlements are built on precarious ground. As Israel of the plains never really embraced the settlements, they remain distant and detached, living beyond mountains of darkness. Like Algeria and Rhodesia, they will not survive. They are at a dead end.

Pragmatic Wallerstein does not have a solution. He won the war of the hills, but his victory is Pyrrhic. The homes he built don’t have long-lasting foundations; the trees he planted have no deep roots. The only way to save his monumental project is Yehuda Etzion’s way. The only way to believe in the future of Ofra is to believe in cataclysm or divine intervention, or both. Etzion is honest enough to say it, but every intelligent person in Ofra must know it: they harbor in their heart a great belief in a great war, which will be their only salvation.