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| Israel Shahak Articles |
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| Settler Opposition to Rabin's Policies |
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| Israel Shahak |
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Dr. Shahak, Holocaust survivor, and retired professor of chemistry at Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, is chairman of the Israeli League for Human and Civil
Rights.
Israeli commentators were in consensus that until the beginning of September 1992, Rabin as a person and to some extent also his entire government were highly popular among Israeli Jews, including those who voted for Likud or secular opposition parties. I share this assessment. Rabin's popularity stemmed from two primary reasons: from his success in presenting himself to the public as the true-blue successor of Begin, to whose achievements he was careful to respectfully defer on every conceivable occasion, and from the disarray within Likud, with its increasingly ruthless succession struggle for the party leadership by no less than five contenders. Until the beginning of September, the only group which opposed Rabin openly were the religious settlers.
Since then, however, Rabin's declared policies have also been opposed with special vigor by the Golan Heights settlers, who are mostly secular and whose motivation and influence are very different. In view of the fact that the opposition of the religious settlers did not succeed in shaking Rabin's position with the Israeli public while the Golan Heights settlers achieved a much greater success, it is necessary to distinguish sharply between the ideologies of the two groups. It is equally necessary to explore the real attitude of the majority of Israeli Jews to both groups of settlers and indeed to the occupied territories themselves.
This differing attitude of the majority of the Israeli public stems inter alia from the fact that the religious settlers act in strict subordination to their rabbis, who do not hesitate to advocate their political opinions aggressively. About a year after the Madrid conference the unperturbed self-confidence of these rabbis found its manifestation in a symposium, "Is autonomy for resident aliens in the Holy Land feasible?" (The symposium was organized and paid for by the Ministry of Religions in conjunction with the Ministry of Education, and reported on by Nadav Shragai in Ha'aretz, October 14.) The star speaker there was Rabbi Shlomo Goren. He opined that "autonomy is tantamount to a denial of Jewish religion." Denying Judaism is considered the gravest of possible infidelities, and the Halacha enjoins pious Jews to kill infidels and therefore also those who advocate autonomy. But how, exactly, is Goren's thesis argued for? Because Jewish religion, says Goren, expressly prohibits "granting any national rights to any group of foreigners in the Land of Israel." In addition Rabbi Goren denies that "a Palestinian nation exists." Why? Because "the Philistines disappeared in the Second Century and I have never heard of them having been resurrected." Undeterred by the infidelities now so widespread, Rabbi Goren assured his audience that "the process of Redemption, already underway for 100 years, cannot be reversed when Divine providence watches us all the time." Rabbi Aviner emphatically concurred with Goren that "granting no matter how tiny a bit of autonomy" is religiously prohibited. For Rabbi Zalman Melamed, the chairman of the "Committee of the Rabbis of Judea, Samaria and Gaza District" (the body ruling Gush Emunim), this was not enough. According to him, "no rabbinical authority disputes that it would be ideal if the Land of Israel were inhabited by the Jews alone." Rabbi Shlomo Min-Hahar contributed his expertise on Islam and Christianity, claiming that "the entire Muslim world is money-grubbing, despicable and capable of anything," whereas "all Christians without exception hate the Jews and look forward to their death. . . hoping that the Arabs will do the dirty work of exterminating the Jews for their benefit."
Such deliberations were paid for by the Israeli taxpayers (Muslim and Christian Arabs among them), and ultimately by the U.S. taxpayers as well. Holding this symposium was also approved by the minister of religions, Rabin himself, and the minister of education, Shulamit Aloni, of the supposedly dovish Meretz list. In Rabin's case this approval can be understood in terms of his deliberate encouragement of political programs at variance with what he avows to stand for. In Aloni's case it can be understood as another manifestation of her weakness and carelessness. It is by no means irrelevant in this context that both Rabin and Aloni recently visited Germany, where they both fiercely condemned "German hatred of foreigners," while carefully avoiding to mention our racist rabbis and their recommendations on how foreigners should be treated. They could very well mention Rabbi Melamed's advocacy of transfer, even more inhuman than that which the Moledet party advocates, because the latter wants to expel "only" the Palestinian inhabitants of the territories, whereas the former wants to expel all non-Jews whatsoever. Mentioning such facts would be a perfect complement to Rabin's and Aloni's denunciation of German xenophobia. But somehow neither was up to the occasion.
Earlier, there was an attempt to form a new "Emunim" group, created in order to somehow reanimate the moribund Gush Emunim, headed by Rabbi Benny Alon. He is quoted by Nadav Shragai (Ha'aretz, September 18) to the effect that "the methods of the mid-1970s will no longer work under a government whose moral profile is defined by the Meretz party and whose members' hearts and minds are filled with scorn for the Entire Land of Israel and for the entire Judaism. . . . This government is spiritually rotten." Avi Raz (Ma'ariv, September 18) adds that according to Rabbi Alon, "politics rests on spirituality. A body politic needs a soul. Israel's security and even the survival of the Jewish nation are no more than material dimensions of the factor of spiritual depth. When we say that we must prevent the formation of a Palestinian state in order to save the Jewish State from extinction, we are not talking about things concrete but about things spiritual." As Raz acidly observes, "blessed with so profound a spirituality, Alon and his associates go for five days to the U.S." Not to Jewish supporters of their cause, though. Alon is clever enough to realize that his schemes require lots of money, which the religious settlers do not have: "They go to request the Christian Fundamentalists [in the United States] to support financially their activities." It strains belief that any important segment of the Jewish public in Israel apart from the religious settlers themselves really support Alon's views. Had it been so, people would have rushed to settle the West Bank under Shamir and Sharon and reap profits in the process. In actuality only a handful did so. But some U.S. fundamentalists are very rich, and they may well provide Emunim with lots of money. In that case, their plans do have a chance.
However, the majority of the Israeli public failed to take seriously the pronouncements of either the old Gush Emunim rabbis, or the new "Emunim" ones, in contrast to the serious concern exhibited towards the apocalyptic warnings of the secular settlers about the dangers of a withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The reason for this difference is, in my view, that while these settlers place their faith in the precedents of Israeli history and in Israeli armed power, the religious settlers place their faith in God, who will make, they claim, Israel powerful, but on conditions. His will, as interpreted by a select body of rabbis, must be obeyed unquestioningly. The doctrine does not enjoy too much popularity with the public, which knows that the same God who is supposed to make Israel powerful also demands that His inspectors spy on what the people eat or in general on how they behave, or else He will turn His back on His chosen people. Danny Rubinstein (Ha'aretz, October 5) quotes the religious settlers' claim that the real goal of Rabin's policies is "not only to destroy root and branch all the settlements in the Territories, but also all accomplishments of Zionism. ... The Washington negotiations amount to nothing else than a dialogue of human beings with a herd of ravenous wolves, aiming solely at turning the Entire Land of Israel into the Entire Land of the Arabs." But the majority of the public will accept neither the claim that all the Arabs, including the Egyptians, are "a herd of ravenous wolves," nor the claims about the "real" nature of "all Christians without exception, who hate the Jews and look forward to their death." After all, the president of the United States and the great majority of U.S. senators and congressmen, who year after year approve the huge sums of financial aid to Israel, happen to be Christians. The notion that they intend to destroy Israel while helping it so much may be acceptable to rabbinical minds, but hardly to any other Israeli Jews.
The Israeli public also has other reasons for holding the religious settlers in low esteem. This public is well informed about the ignominious collapse of all the settlements that were established in order to provoke U.S. Secretary of State James Baker during his recurrent visits to Israel. As soon as Rabin's new settling policies became known, almost all "settlers" ran away from such settlements, thus proving
that they had been lured to settle there only by promises of monetary gain. Aviva Sha'abi and Ronny Shaked (Yediot Ahronot, August 28) describe how grim is the situation in all such settlements, stressing the decay of abandoned housing and equipment and the incredible waste of money thus incurred. In some "settlements" of this kind no more than one or two families have remained!
The attempts of the religious settlers to mobilize other segments of the population to attend their demonstrations, legal or illegal, began at the end of July and continued through October. The attempts failed dismally, in spite of lots of money spent on publicizing the demonstrations. For example, posters all over West Jerusalem were calling upon the people "to rescue Jerusalem" from Rabin's sinister schemes "to sell it to the Arabs." Yet the particular demonstration the posters called for, in spite of being attended by major right-wing politicians, succeeded in attracting no more than about 150 people, most of them functionaries of the movement itself. The case was far from unique: the failure to attract demonstrators in Jerusalem, with its high proportion of religious believers, even when settlers were injured or killed, was even more pronounced in other, less religious Israeli localities. Rubik Rosenthal (Hadashot, August 28) observed that "the only supporters of the religious settlers are the religious settlers themselves," and that they have no chance "to launch a civil war in Israel" through such demonstrations.
THE GOLAN SETTLERS
In contrast to the feeble resistance of the religious settlers, there stands the strong, well-organized and already politically influential opposition of the Golan Heights settlers. It was spearheaded by the members of the area's kibbutzim and moshavim. In order to grasp both the actual and the
potential impact of this opposition on the Israeli Jewish public, some preliminary information, little known outside Israel, is needed. As Boaz Evron rightly pointed out (Politika, September 1992), Israeli Jews of the younger generation had tended to avoid touring the West Bank (let alone the Gaza Strip), long before the intifada, in the late 1970s. True, not the whole of the West Bank: East Jerusalem and its surroundings, the Jordan valley and the Dead Sea shores were exceptions. In other words, with the exception of East Jerusalem and its surroundings, only very few Israeli Jews have been willing to appear in places of dense Palestinian habitation. But, as Evron points out, the Golan Heights have been attracting quite massive Israeli Jewish tourism. As noted by Hagar Enosh and Edna Yish ("The economic realities in the Golan Heights," Yediot Ahronot Financial Supplement, September 18), 1.5 million Israelis (mostly Jewish, of course) visited the Golan Heights in 1991 alone. This figure should be juxtaposed with the total Israeli Jewish population which at the beginning of 1991 amounted to roughly four million. Evron interprets the contrast between the reluctance to visit the West Bank or Gaza Strip and massive tourism in the Golan Heights as an indicator of the differing Israeli-Jewish attachment to the respective territories. Compared to this attachment, religious cant is of little political import. Evron doesn't probe the reasons for the contrast he describes and the underlying emotions he detects. Nevertheless, it is not too difficult to identify those reasons through reviewing the history of the Golan Heights after their conquest in June 1967.
As recounted by Yerakh Tal (Ha'aretz, September 10), "the first settlement in the Golan Heights was established barely 5 weeks after the fighting in 1967 stopped, and it was a kibbutz," named Merom Hagolan. Other kibbutzim and moshavim followed soon. For a considerable amount of time no other kinds of settlement existed there. People old enough to remember the ideologically inspired and puritanical Jewish culture of pre-1948 Palestine who visited the Golan Heights after 1967 could well see the place as a pageant of Zionist pioneerism come to life again. It was a myth, of course, pregnant with politically pernicious effects. But few (even I was in their number) could remain immune from it after touring the Golan Heights. Tal also recounts that the Golan Heights were already covered by settlements when no one yet thought of settling any more of the West Bank than East Jerusalem and a small enclave to its south ("Gush Etzion") which had been inhabited by the Jews long before 1948.
The choice of sites for the first settlements on the Golan Heights is telling. They were neither located close to the international borders, where before 1967 the Syrians had indeed shelled the Israeli settlements from an elevated terrain, nor anywhere in the middle of the Golan Heights, but almost right on the new cease-fire lines. A Merom Hagolan kibbutz member, who is now on a hunger strike outside the Knesset, explained the underlying rationale to Nerri Livneh (Hadashot, September 10): "In the socialist camp within Zionism there has always been a sacrosant rule that the borders of the Jewish State extend as far as the Jewish settlements reach, and remain there forever." Livneh's interviewee then went on to accuse Rabin of betraying this sacred dogma, naming Rafael Eitan as his preferred choice among those who have kept their faith with it.
Yitzhak Ben Aharon, relatively dovish and a former secretary general of Histadrut, has shed further light on the story of that early Golan settlement (Yediot Ahronot, September 15). In his version, the initiative for settling was provided by an overwhelming majority of the United Kibbutz Movement. Ben Aharon himself was supposedly (never in public) in a minority which opposed the initiative. He says:
The decision was to locate the first settlements on the very edge of the Heights. The Chief of Staff and the Northern Command recommended (and I still keep wondering why it was no more than a mere recommendation) that a strip of 15-20 kilometers be reserved for army positions, with no settlements. The idea was to establish the closest kibbutz behind the fortified lines of the army. But the recommendation was rejected as pigheadedly as only a messianic movement can. Moreover, besides rejecting the army's recommendations, the kibbutz movement insisted with all the stubbornness it could muster that all its new kibbutzim be located as close to the new border as possible, ahead of the army fortification lines. (Emphasis mine.)
Ben Aharon goes on to analyze the political identity of the Golan Heights settlers, whom he can indeed be assumed to know. He describes them as
remaining steadfast in their conviction that since Israel is in the state of perpetual war with the Syrians, which perforce means with all the Arabs, the entire security of Israel depends only on them and their demagogic right-wing allies. This is why the nationalistic and security-obsessed philosophy of the Golan Heights settlers assumes that any attempts, by nations large or small, to terminate bloodshed by contractual peace or other agreements, amounts to nothing less than an abysmal folly. Security of both Israel and theirs, which for them is the same thing, supposedly requires aggravating the enmities, escalating the arms race, and above all else, shattering the widespread preference for peace over war.
Ben Aharon's portrayal of the settlers' essentially feudal mentality and aims is undoubtedly correct. But there has been another factor contributing to the emergence of this gung-ho ideology, a factor known to many Israelis since 1967, but too inglorious to be admitted openly. During several weeks in the aftermath of the 1967 conquest, Israel carried out in the Golan Heights what now goes under the name of "ethnic purification." In absolute numbers, the Syrian expellees, totaling around 180,000, were fewer than the Palestinians expelled or otherwise forced into exile between June 1967 and August 1968, who probably totaled somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000. But there also was a qualitative difference between the two cases. Affected by those expulsions were all Golan Heights Syrians with the exception of about 6,000 Druze, compared to only some Palestinians of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since the Druze villages are compactly located in a single corner of the Golan Heights, the expulsions produced a virtual demographic vacuum. The Heights still remain sparsely populated, because the Jewish settlers total barely 12,000 or 15,000 (one can find both figures in the sources). In either case, this is much less' than the population of the Heights before 1967.
The militaristic and paranoiac features of the Golan Heights settlers' ideology are shaped by the memory of these expulsions and the resulting emptiness of the land they inhabit. Unless resisted, such an ideology is bound to run its noxious course. The extent of the conspiracy of silence about the 1967 mass expulsions can best be illustrated by one single fact. Of all the commentators who recently wrote about the Golan Heights, only Nahum Barnea ("We are the state," Yediot Ahronot, September 11) dared to at least mention the systematic destruction of Syrian villages by the settlers, who were careful not to leave any trace of their existence. But even Barnea did not mention the expulsion of human beings.
In the club of Merom Hagolan kibbutz members, a group of rather elderly people assembled last Tuesday to reminisce about the glorious beginnings of the Golan Heights settlement. A videotape recorded every word and each gesture. . . . Shlomo Rotschild, who meantime left to live in Karmiel, says: "It was an act of supreme justice on our part, since whatever we, the Jews, do is just." Gyora Levkovitz adds: "We have settled here in conviction that we had the right to, because, being a pivot of the universe we had the right to do what we wanted." Levkovitz too already lives in Karmiel. With total openness mixed with a playfully expressed nostalgia, each of them recounts his own part in the systematic "levelling" or "ironing" of the Syrian villages in the Golan Heights. They also recount how, out of all government ministers of that time, only Menachem Begin, then a minister without portfolio in the Levi Eshkol government, professed to have been "shocked" after learning by chance that the village of Banyas was slated for destruction. All other ministers were sympathetic.
The last point, Barnea clarifies, was meant as an anti-Likud barb.
The power of this ideology also rests on its similarity to Israel's official ideology from before the 1956 Suez war and later twice revived: between 1967 and 1977 and in 1982. Referring to the 1981-82 alliance of the Golan Heights settlers with Ariel Sharon and to their enthusiastic support for the invasion of Lebanon, Ben Aharon (Yediot Ahronot, September 15) asks: "How come that you keep calling our not-long-past Lebanese war adventure 'the peace for Galilee War' and at the same time do all you can to prevent any chance of peace? Haven't you learned anything from that adventure, however indirectly?" Ben Aharon himself, far from acknowledging any Syrian rights to the Golan Heights, merely wants a "territorial compromise" with all existing Jewish settlements preserved intact. But for the settlers, even this is unacceptable. Together with their past and probably future ally Ariel Sharon, they are against any territorial concession, no matter how small. To justify their opposition, they invoke as precedents all the holy cows of Labor Zionism of the latter days, claiming that "no stone" and "no tree" in the Golan Heights can be upturned because, once Jewish, it has already become "sacred." Then it logically follows that "no stone" and "no tree" can be returned to the Syrians.
The thinking of the Golan Heights settlers can be contested on two grounds, both running counter to the invoked traditions of Labor Zionism. The first is a grand strategy consideration, likely to affect Rabin and his advisers, whereas the second is bound to have a popular appeal. The strategic considerations have been cogently presented by the chief political commentator of Ha'aretz, Uzi Benziman (September 11). He conjectures that "Rabin may well be already preparing the public for Israeli concessions to Syria, albeit only small ones." Then he stresses how suspicious Rabin is. "Like all security-minded previous Prime Ministers, he looks at the entire Arab world, and in the first place at the fox of Damascus, only through the barrel of a rifle." Then Benziman proceeds to disclose Rabin's probable intentions:
It was Menachem Begin who, with Rabin's admission, blazed the trail which Rabin can now follow. . . . It was Begin who signed the peace with Egypt with the aim of thus inducing the Americans into the assumption of control over Egyptian affairs. A long-range process of rearming the Egyptian army was subsequently but one aspect of keeping Egypt under permanent U.S. control. What keeps Israel secure from a surprise Egyptian attack is not only the strict enforcement of the agreement regarding the slim-sized troops allowed to be stationed in Sinai and in the Suez Canal zone, and not only the watchful eyes of U.N. inspectors overseeing that enforcement. The best guarantee of Israel's security is total dependence of Egypt on American weaponry supplies.
Benziman speculates that after the collapse of the USSR, "the day is not far ahead when Syria will have to look for sources of weaponry supplies in the West." The implication runs that a possibly secret clause of an Israeli-Syrian peace treaty will be intended to make sure that Syria becomes as dependent on U.S. weaponry supplies (and presumably U.S. intelligence) as Egypt has been. In Benziman's estimate, however, even for an accomplishment of that scale, Rabin will agree to cede to Syria no more than some tiny chunks of the Golan Heights. Since, as mentioned above, the Druze villages occupy a corner of the Heights and no Jewish settlement is located in their midst, this corner is the obvious choice for such a deal.
Insofar as the Israeli public is concerned, the factor militating against the Golan settlers and in favor of some deal with Syria is the memory of the Iraqi Scud strikes during the Gulf War. This memory, after all, activates the fears that in some not-too-distant future the Syrians might do the same, from missile launchers located much closer to Israel's borders, and therefore wreak much greater devastation. The spokesmen of the Golan Heights settlers are aware of that factor: the proof being that they define the Iraqi Scud strikes of 1991 as "the greatest misfortune that our cause has ever sustained." But being cleverer than the religious settlers in their appeals to the public, they don't try to ignore those fears, nor promise in God's name that the Syrian Scuds will be diverted by a miracle. Such promises they leave to their religious counterparts in the West Bank. Instead, they admit that the fears are not groundless and propose to face them squarely. In this way they already win some kudos by appearing honest. Then, they resort to two arguments, one historical, the second military. First, they invoke the memory of the relatively high Israeli casualties during the War of Independence. The pertinent figures have never been officially published. Private estimates vary, but they tend to oscillate around 10,000 killed, with a much greater but totally unknown number of wounded, out of a population which then totaled about 700,000. In the settlers' argument, however, those huge losses are assessed as "worthwhile." Israeli public education, far from concealing those losses, has emphasized them in study programs of the Independence War. So, the settlers' argument runs, the losses in the inevitable next war against Syria are bound to be huge, but lower still than those entailed by any concessions to Syrians made now. This inevitability needs to be faced in the spirit of heroism.
But the settlers also resort to a military argument, and they do it by drawing on a recent pronouncement by Rabin. In his interview with Yoel Markus (Haaretz, August 28), Rabin admitted the existence of an option of war between Syria and Israel. He described this option in the following terms:
In case of a war with a nearby [Arab] state, such as Syria, there are two aspects of the problem: (a) To make it clear that in response to any attack on the Israeli rear by conventional weapons Israel will retaliate by inflicting a massive conventional devastation on the cities of the country concerned. (b) To win such a war with maximum speed, without letting things develop into a situation like during the 'Desert Storm' when our rear remained exposed for as long as 45 days.
The argument of the settlers' supporters is that the best way of deterring Syria from ever hitting the Israeli rear with missiles is to attack Syria first and terminate such a war with maximum speed. It is too early to say what resonance this argument can have on the public at large. Two things can be assumed, though. A lot depends on whether this argument is voiced by Rabin or only by the settlers in the course of their opposition to Rabin. Meanwhile the success of the purely secular arguments of the Golan Heights settlers among the Israeli public is much greater than that of any arguments advanced by the religious settlers and their rabbis.
The Golan Heights settlers realize that their only chance to win the struggle against Rabin lies in their appeal to their supporters within the present coalition. This is why they stay aloof from the politicians of right-wing parties, especially from those who represent the religious settlers. On the other hand, they need right-wing support to help them mount pressures upon the Knesset and add weight to their media publicity.
Still, among the opposition parties there is one whose support the Golan settlers welcome: the Tsomet party. The conflicting needs of the Golan settlers often lead to downright comic but instructive situations. For example, the hastily formed "United Knesset Front of Golan Faithful" nearly collapsed, barely days after its formation, over the fateful issue (raised by the head of Tsomet, Rafael Eitan) of whether food served the MKs touring the Golan Heights was kosher enough (Al Hamishmar, September 14). When the dispute was settled to his satisfaction, Eitan declared: "It is a delusion that we can ever have peace with the Arabs. This is why the Heights must remain Israeli" (Yediot Ahronot, September 14).
Even more farcical is the grand "battle of the quotes" fought by different rabbis over whether the Golan Heights are "really" a part of the Land of Israel in the understanding of the Religious Law (the Halacha). Actually, the Halacha contains several different concepts of the Land of Israel, each with its own but far from clearly defined boundaries. Recently, in an altogether different context, Rabbi Shlomo Goren (whose opinions about autonomy as a kind of infidelity were quoted above), told the press that the Golan Heights are outside of the real Land of Israel as conceived of by the Halacha. According to the rabbi, the eastern border of the Land of Israel begins between Eilat and Aqaba, and then runs northward via the Jordan River, the valley between the Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon mountains, and then within Syria up to the Turkish border, at which point it turns westward to the sea. The concept implies that the Alawi-inhabited homeland of Assad is a part of the Land of Israel, but the Golan Heights are not. Rabbi Goren is recognized as a great Halachic authority, but he is hated by all other rabbis and hates them in return. Yet his Halachic opinion happens indeed to accord best with most biblical descriptions of the boundaries of "the Promised Land," and it has been followed by most Talmudic sages throughout the ages.
Far from being excited by what Goren said about northern Syria, the journalists paid belated attention to what he had said about the Golan Heights and approached him for further comment. Since he loves nothing as much as to be interviewed by the media and to use such occasions for scorning other rabbis, he reiterated his previous statement, adding for good measure that the Golan Heights, like any territory located outside of the Land of Israel, are "impure." As such, they should in their entirety be returned to Syria, which according to Rabbi Goren should in turn reciprocate by "recognizing Israel's possession of Judea, Samaria and Gaza District as rightful," and by agreeing to the reconstruction of the Temple next to the Dome of the Rock, which has always been Goren's pet project. Rabbi Goren's statement was immediately greeted by unprecedented abuse on the part of the majority of other rabbis. A Rabbi Shugerman went so far as to canonically outlaw Goren, which means that any pious Jew is not only permitted by the Halacha to kill him, but has the duty to do so (Hadashot, September 16 and 18). Even more entertaining was the reaction of members of a Golan Heights moshav earning their livelihood by pig-breeding. They threatened to bring their pigs to picket in front of Goren's house in the Old City of Jerusalem "and thus to pollute it" (Hadashot, September 14). 1 regret that they were in the end dissuaded from going ahead with the project.
RIGHT-WING ALLIANCES
But let us leave such matters, however entertaining they may be, aside. The evidence under discussion reveals how deep is the difference between the approach of the religious politicians and of the partners in the powerful alliance, forged across party loyalties, between the Golan Heights settlers and the secular parties of the Israeli right. The alliance is based on shared fears, which in my view are not just exploited for political gains, but authentically believed. Fear is the most important psychological trait of the Israeli right. They are frightened first by the West and its public opinion, second by the Palestinians and their intifada, and third by the Arab world at large. Curiously, it does not cross their minds that Arabs may be frightened by them. They consider themselves virtuous folk whom no one could possibly perceive as a threat. In addition to their fears of external enemies they are also terribly afraid of what they call "the Jewish leftists," a term broad enough to cover most if not all of Labor. This "left" is constantly accused of not being Jewish enough, because it supposedly prefers the Palestinians to its fellow Jews, and also because it lives in delusions, stupidly and masochistically failing to "know life," and refusing to recognize that the world is governed by laws of the jungle. As masochists, the left is dangerous because as it steps up its demands it succeeds in attracting new recruits to its ranks, especially from the country's intellectual elites. In short, the left is about to reject all the old sacred dogmas. As shown above, the Golan Heights settlers now believe that even Rabin has been contaminated by the spirit of treason.
Nevertheless, Likud politicians are more skilled in exploiting such fears than are the Golan Heights settlers. Doron Rosenblum ("A Right-Wing Apocalypse," Ha'aretz, October 6) relies on disparate sources to find the pronouncements of Likud leaders intended "to show to the Israelis how grave are the risks of the peace process, yet without ceasing to boast that they themselves had initiated that process." Likud MK Uzi Landau is quoted as warning the inhabitants of Galilee "that if Rabin's policies toward Syria are carried through, one morning they will awake to see the columns of Syrian tanks descending down from the Golan Heights like herds of sheep," adding that "the settlements of the Galilee will then be attacked by a fire-power stronger than in 1973." Landau's conclusion is that "since the concept of the extermination of Israelis remains topical in Syrian consciousness. . . any withdrawal from the Golan Heights could only precipitate the moment at which the Syrian knives would approach the throat of every single inhabitant of Galilee." The ultimate reason for this sorry state of affairs is, according to MK Landau, genetic. "Syrian policies are fixed by a genetic code not subject to rapid changes." Of course, the Western media would have raised a hue and cry had any non-Jewish politician attributed Israeli policies to "a Jewish genetic code not subject to rapid changes." But, as is known, Israel benefits from the Western media's privileged treatment, which works especially in favor of the Israeli right wing. So much so that Jewish racism, even of a distinctly racist variety, as in the just quoted statement, is simply classed as unfit for print, whereas similar or even milder Arab abuses of good sense receive maximum publicity.
Rosenblum also quotes MK Benny Begin, a serious contender for top Likud leadership, who anticipates that "Syria is going to open a frontal attack on Israel, unbeknownst to the Israeli ambassador already comfortably seated in Damascus." The aims of this Syrian invasion will, according to Benny Begin, be the same as "the aims of pogromists of Kishinev [in 1903]: to just cut Jewish throats." But he adds that, unlike in Kishinev, "this time the nuclear scientists will help in the venture." Another contender for top Likud leadership, Benjamin Netanyahu, predicts that Rabin's policies will result in "spilling Jewish blood." I refrain from quoting Ariel Sharon, who predictably manages to sound even more apocalyptic than Landau, Begin and Netanyahu combined. All such predictions are notable for their vagueness, especially since none of them relates to any specific idea of Rabin's. But precisely because of that, they sound all the more frightening.
Rosenblum perceives all such imagery as incongruous. In Landau's version, for example, "the Syrians are compared to the sheep. Can it be that he means to say that we are the wolves?" Yet Rosenblum does not doubt that the described rhetoric is bound to have resonance. I agree. Rosenblum, however, does make an effort to find out wherein the persuasive power of that rhetoric lies. He traces its sources to Jabotinsky's advice (in the 1930s) to his followers: "Never try to communicate to the public what you believe is the objective truth. Instead, use the most emotion-loaded vocabulary you can find, in order to sharpen the contours of an issue of your choice as much as possible." Rosenblum also describes the personality type apt to revel in this approach:
Since quite a long time there have been grounds for suspecting that the power-mad rhetoric of 'the national camp' covers their subliminal existential fear of the entire world. This fear was not dispelled even in the slightest when the State of Israel was founded. The Labor Movement, for all its faults, has succeeded, by whatever means, to cast aside this fear and replace it with a constructive and pragmatic world-outlook. But Likud, which in no time and with perfect ease resumed its historical role of hysterical opposition whose only function was to play on all kinds of fears, has not.
The power of such hysteria is, in my view, unlimited, the best example being its use by Begin in 1981-82.
Naturally, most susceptible to such fears are those right wingers who talk with utmost confidence about Israel's power and its ability to impose its will on the entire Middle East and even beyond. Their extreme fear and their extreme self-confidence coexist in harmony. This schizophrenic blend of inordinate fear and inordinate self-confidence common among Israeli right wingers resembles that of the antiSemites, who usually view the Jews as at the same time very powerful and very easy to defeat. This is why the attitudes of the Israeli right toward Gentiles, especially Arabs, resemble so closely the attitudes of anti-Semites toward Jews.
At present, the pivotal issue of Israeli politics is whether Rabin is willing to carry out his avowed policies and cede at least a portion of the Golan Heights at the risk of confronting the settlers' implacable opposition to himself. In this context we should recall that Rabin's majority in the Knesset depends on a mere 62 (44 Labor, 12 Meretz and 6 Shass) out of 120 members, three of whom (two of Labor and one of Meretz) are Arabs, and on the tacit support of five Knesset members from the so-called Arab parties. Of these, the Shass party support is problematic, because Rabin promised to hold new elections before any withdrawal agreement is ratified. But even if the Shass factor were discounted, the question still stands whether Rabin would be ready to sign any such agreement when he commands only a narrow majority. A tentative answer to this question can be provided by quoting the opinions of the well-connected Yeshayahu Ben-Porat (Yediot Ahronot, October 23). Ben-Porat describes what he was told "by one of Rabin's closest associates, who has all the grounds to assume that he knows not only the Prime Minister's thoughts but also his feelings." (The description fits best the person of the director-general of the prime minister's office, Shimon Sheves, whose influence on Rabin is known to be practically unlimited.) This source told Ben-Porat that Rabin will not admit the MKs from the Arab parties into his coalition, because he asks himself what would happen if "the Arab MKs would condition their support on the immediate release of all Palestinian prisoners? Or else, can you imagine what would happen if their further support for the government is conditioned on Rabin's agreement to meet Yasser Arafat forthwith? How many other possible outcomes of such a coalition need to be imagined in order to realize that sheer contemplation of such prospects can only make the Prime Minister's flesh crawl?" Ben-Porat assumes that Rabin and his advisers agree that "in a government which is supported by a minority of Israeli Jews, no Prime Minister should consider himself entitled to sign any agreement involving a territorial compromise with Syria or conceding anything to the Palestinians." Ben-Porat believes that this is Rabin's "decisive consideration."
I myself have no doubt that Ben-Porat is right not only about the real views of Rabin, but also about the real views of the overwhelming majority of Labor. It follows that Rabin's options are now strictly limited, due to nothing else but the success of the Golan Heights settlers. No doubt there will be an attempt to continue the negotiations with Syria. But, except in the unlikely event of some irresistible pressure by the United States, they have little chance to lead anywhere. In my view, rather than risk moving toward peace, Rabin will stick to the previously mentioned Golan Heights settlers' article of faith: "In the socialist camp within Zionism there has always been a sacrosant rule that the borders of the Jewish State extend as far as the Jewish settlements reach, and remain there for ever." He himself is likely to share this article of faith, in which he has been educated and which he has never renounced. And almost certainly he also shares all the fears of Likud and the Golan Heights settlers. |
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