The Unmaking of Israel (14 page)

The withdrawal itself showed that secular Jews and the state had abdicated their roles in redemption. Radical settlers sometimes distinguished between Jews and Israelis. Jews were settlers, or Orthodox supporters of settlement. Israelis were secular and lived on the coast, the land of the Philistines in biblical times. In the outpost of Amonah, on a mountaintop overlooking Ofrah, a young settler explained to me that the biblical Abraham’s departure from the city of Ur taught that Jews should not live in cities. The subtext was that Ur stood for the West and for Western-facing urban Israel, all of which was opposed to true Jewishness. The name Kfar Maimon signified one more stage of alienation: the settler leadership, extreme as it might appear to “Israelis,” was altogether too moderate and law-abiding for “Jews.”

As formaldehyde, the disengagement failed. With Israel still occupying the West Bank and controlling access to Gaza, international pressure for peace talks resumed quickly. At the same time, the pullout left many members of the religious settler movement, especially young ones, doubting the legitimacy of the state and bitterly determined to mount a stronger, more violent opposition the next time around.

Yet none of this interrupted the momentum of state support for settlement, or for institutions that barbarized Judaism. One example: the Od Yosef Hai yeshivah is located in the settlement of Yitzhar near Nablus. The yeshivah’s violent history goes back at least as far as a 1989 rampage in the Palestinian village of Kifl Harith, during which sixteen-year-old Ibthisam Bozaya was shot dead. Four yeshivah students received brief sentences for that incident after a plea bargain. The head of the yeshivah, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, responded to their arrest by declaring, “Any trial based on the assumption that Jews and goyim are equal is a total travesty of justice.” Ginsburg went on to write a eulogy for the mass murderer of Hebron, Baruch Goldstein.

In late 2009, two other rabbis from the yeshivah, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, published a book called
The Law of the King
, which purports to elucidate Jewish religious law on when it is forbidden or permitted for a Jew to kill a gentile. The book’s repeated themes are that a Jew’s life is worth more than a gentile’s, and that for a Jew to kill a gentile is a lesser sin than killing another Jew. In a war between Jews and non-Jews, Shapira and Elitzur assert, Jews are permitted to kill anyone from the opposing side who poses a threat, even in the most indirect way. Enemy civilians who show emotional support for their troops are therefore legitimate targets, they say. There is no moral problem, the authors state, with the death of civilians who live near an army base or weapons plant, even if they are children, because they stand in the way of a legitimate target. Indeed, they claim, there is even a basis in religious law to argue that children may be intentionally targeted, “if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us.”

Without mentioning the Israel Defense Forces, the book is a broadside against the army’s rules on avoiding harm to enemy civilians. Such restrictions, in the authors’ views, are un-Jewish. Rather than a leaflet rationalizing theft, this is a full volume justifying war crimes, desecrating the faith in whose name it is supposedly written.

In the years 2006 to 2010, the government allocated an average of nearly $400,000 annually to Od Yosef Hai. For the years in that period for which the yeshivah’s full balance sheet is available, nearly half of its budget came from the state. The funding continued in 2010, after
The Law of the King
appeared and caused national controversy. The allocations, I should stress, do not mean that the officials who signed off on the allocations endorsed the ideas of Ginsburg, Shapira, and Elitzur. But even after
The Law of the King
made headlines, it seems no one in the Education or Welfare ministries considered whether the government should be funding an institution that taught racism.

Finally, sometime during 2010, both ministries suspended their funding, apparently in response to legal letters from the Israel Religious Action Center, the civil rights arm of Reform Judaism in Israel. The letters argued that for a government body to fund an institution engaged in racist incitement violated the “fundamental values of the State of Israel” and was “unreasonable in the extreme.” The letters, implicitly but unmistakably, were first drafts for a legal challenge before the High Court of Justice. The ministries were concerned enough to stop issuing checks. But apparently fearing either political backlash or a countersuit, they avoided admitting that they would halt funding a yeshivah over such a questionable offense. Instead, the spokespeople of both ministries insisted that the delay was due to reviews of Od Yosef Hai’s accounting and possible overreporting of the number of its students. By implication, once the bookkeeping problem was resolved, the flow of money could resume.

On a hilltop eight miles to the northeast of Yitzhar as the crow flies is the outpost known as Skali’s Farm: a handful of sheds, mobile homes, and tiny wooden houses, with a watchtower and stone synagogue. The founders, Yitzhak and Cheftziba Skali, live in one of the wooden houses with their four small children.

Cheftziba Skali belongs to the generation that knows not life inside Israel. She grew up in Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron. Her childhood friends, she says, are today “at the front line,” scattered among outposts and other relatively new settlements. She moved to the hilltop in 1999, when she was twenty, after marrying Yitzhak. She is a thin woman with a narrow face, her hair covered almost entirely by a knit cap, her sleeves reaching her wrists in strict religious modesty. The second generation of settlers is more liberated than the first, she tells me—less concerned with “the pressure of the law,” more prepared to live in open country, beyond the fences of established settlements. Just six other families live at the outpost.

She speaks of the veteran settlement leadership as if it has passed its expiration date. The Council of Settlements “doesn’t run things here,” she says. The outpost does not belong to Amana, though the organization did provide a generator. She does not mention that the Housing Ministry has invested nearly $200,000 in improving the site, even though two-thirds of the land is privately owned by Palestinians and the settlement has never been approved by the government. The settlers at the outpost have no contact with local Arabs, Skali says: “We’re not murderers and thieves.”

As it happens, a married couple from Skali’s Farm were suspects in the 2004 armed robbery of two donkeys from elderly shepherd Aziz Hneini of Beit Dajan, a Palestinian village just to the south. According to the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, which monitors law enforcement in the West Bank, Hneini testified that the man was also one of several settlers who later beat him so seriously that he was hospitalized for five days. After cursory investigations, the police closed both files on the grounds of “unknown perpetrator,” Yesh Din reported. Yesh Din cited the incidents as examples of “the continuous failure” of the Israeli police to enforce the law against settlers suspected of attacking Palestinians.

In themselves, the unsolved crimes are merely an epilogue to the 1982 Karp Report. They are evidence not of change, but of business as usual. So is settling on land owned by Palestinians; so is building without going through the planning process that Israel itself legally requires.

For years, says Ronny Goldschmidt, an architect formerly in charge of town planning for the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, the de facto process for establishing a settlement had nothing to do with the de jure planning procedure. Rather, it began with a “trigger”—a Palestinian terror attack or a diplomatic initiative “that threatened the settlement enterprise.” In response, “settlement leaders” identified land—state land, in Goldschmidt’s account—where it was possible to build, then got together mobile homes and people willing to be the founders, and moved them into the site. The term “settlement leaders” in this account apparently includes the top officials of the regional councils, along with other activists. After the first settlers moved in, the pressure started on government officials to approve the plans and permits that should have been completed ahead of time. Long before the plans were signed, the state had built what the community needed, from sewage lines to classrooms. The principle was always to seize political openings, move in, get generous state help, and legalize the settlements later—if ever.

And yet the outposts do represent two important shifts. The government’s role in building the outposts shows a new level of audacity, of politicians proclaiming one policy while doing the opposite, of state agencies violating the law. Among settlers, the outposts are the flagship project of the militant second generation.

Attorney Talia Sasson’s government-commissioned report, submitted in 2005, provides the most detailed description of state involvement in the outposts. Sasson, a highly respected lawyer, had only recently left the State Attorney’s Office, where she headed the Department for Special Assignments. Sharon’s decision to have her investigate the outposts was one of the most surprising acts of his career. The prime minister was apparently under pressure from the United States to explain why the outposts were proliferating, and to identify which ones had been established after he took office in March 2001. Under the 2003 Roadmap, Israel was required to remove those outposts.

Sasson is the first to stress that her report is incomplete. Many of the gaps can be filled in from other investigations and from the testimony of outpost settlers themselves. The picture that emerges is that between the mid-1990s and 2005, about one hundred outposts were established in the occupied territories. Though the government’s declared policy was not to allow new settlements, state agencies provided funds and other forms of support, using an arsenal of subterfuges. The Housing Ministry funneled money through the settlers’ regional councils. The councils then hired contractors to build infrastructure and public buildings at outposts, hiding the ministry’s role. The Housing and Interior ministries and the state-funded Settlement Division of the World Zionist Organization fictitiously designated outposts as expansions of older, existing settlements so that they could allocate money without government approval of new settlements. The chain of collusion reaches at least as high as ministry directors-general, the top level of the civil service. Avigdor Lieberman, director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office under Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1997, issued instructions to the Settlement Division to assist new settlements as if they were neighborhoods of older ones. Another top-level official, Ron Shechner, who served as defense minister Shaul Mofaz’s assistant for settlement affairs beginning in 2003, instructed the Settlement Division to budget outposts as if they were approved settlements, and permitted settlers to move mobile homes to illegal outposts.

But responsibility for the rogue operation reaches beyond civil servants. Sasson names at least one cabinet minister who was apparently directly involved. Numerous reports point to Ariel Sharon’s role in the outpost effort, as a cabinet member and as prime minister.

For all practical purposes, Israeli governments have not approved any new settlements since before the Oslo Accord. When Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992, he froze settlement planning, though some building continued in existing settlements. In July 1996, after Netanyahu took power, his government lifted the planning freeze. The same cabinet decision, though, stated that no new settlement could be established unless the full cabinet voted to make an exception. That hasn’t happened. The 1996 decision also imposed strict rules on new projects in existing settlements. At five points in the planning process, the defense minister—the second most prominent elected official in the country—personally had to sign off on a project. Any construction without those signatures would be illegal
by Israel’s own standards
, leaving international law aside.

In an era of peace talks, the government understood that it was “internationally impossible” to approve new settlements. Yet the “ideology of expanding the state” through settlement continued to guide government officials, says Sasson.

Setting a precise date for the birth of the outposts is impossible, as there is often conflicting testimony on when half a dozen people started living in mobile homes pulled onto a hilltop. Though outposts were set up during Rabin’s term to protest government restrictions on building, the real wave began under Netanyahu. The idea was to establish a presence, usually on high ground, to mark more land as being under Jewish control, to make it more difficult for Israel to give up land in peace negotiations.

In October 1998, in an effort to keep the Oslo process from collapsing, U.S. president Bill Clinton corralled Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority president Yasser Arafat into a summit meeting at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland. As foreign minister, Ariel Sharon also took part. The summit ended with an agreement that included Israel promising to hand over another 13 percent of the West Bank’s land to Palestinian Authority rule. Returning home, Sharon used an appearance on Israel Radio to urge settlers to take action.

“Everyone there should move, should run, should grab more hills, expand the territory,” he said. “Everything that’s grabbed, will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.”

Sharon’s words summed up the inner contradiction of the Oslo process: it promised to turn the relations between Israel and the Palestinians into an interaction between two states. But because it postponed marking the border, it encouraged Israeli leaders to act as if they had returned to the 1940s and could determine how the land would be partitioned by establishing settlements. It exacerbated their tendency to think and act like members of a national movement locked in conflict with another ethnic group over the entire land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, and to treat laws as minor obstacles to be dodged for the cause.

Amonah was one of the early outposts, established no later than 1997 on privately owned Palestinian land, without cabinet approval or building permits. The first settlers were young men who had grown up at Ofrah. By February 2003, twenty-five young families were living in mobile homes spread in a line along the mountaintop. The Mateh Binyamin Regional Council had built the road from Ofrah up the mountain, one resident said. She wasn’t sure who had paid for the high-power floodlights placed around the outpost’s perimeter for security. For more security, IDF soldiers were stationed at Amonah. At the south end of the ridge, a flat shelf had been cut in the rock to create lots for a row of houses. In 2005, Sasson reported that the Housing Ministry had spent about half a million dollars on infrastructure at Amonah. By then, the concrete frames of nine houses stood at the end of the ridge.