Settlers consider themselves 'latter day Sabbateans'

[maz]

Latter day Sabbateans

The settlers have not internalized the Zionist revolution that made us sovereign in our own land, preferring to be victims.

In an assault on Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Jacob Talmon, Israel Harel said in these pages last month that the two late Hebrew University professors were "hardly great visionaries, to put it mildly, as to the morality and future of the Jewish state." He depicts two of Israel's most important intellectuals as false prophets whose every prediction turned out to be untrue. But Harel perceives a prophet as a kind of fortune teller, whereas Martin Buber interprets the prophet's vocation otherwise: A thinker and public figure who stands at the city gates, points at two moral alternatives and says that we must select one of them.



Settlers (chosen people) celebrating in the West Bank.

After the Six-Day War, Israel was confronted with a choice between two kinds of nationalism: that of blood and soil or that of humanism and liberalism. Leibowitz and Talmon urged adherence to an enlightened Zionism that strives to act in accordance with universal principles.

Leibowitz's exhortations on behalf of human rights and minorities' rights, his abhorrence of the rabbinic establishment, his sympathy for the feminist struggle, and mainly his warnings about the corrupting effects of the occupation were various links in a coherent and systematic chain of values. He saw the War of Independence as a necessity that could therefore not be criticized on moral grounds, but he voiced alarm at the implications of the Qibya and Kafr Qasem massacres of Arab civilians by Israeli troops in the 1950s. He laid bare the danger of regarding the land as holy while possessing a messianic faith that begat Gush Emunim, the religious settlement movement.

Talmon the historian also feared messianism. In his great trilogy on totalitarian democracy he wondered, "Why does political messianism always turn from a vision of redemption into a trap and yoke of enslavement?" The people of Gush Emunim, he wrote, saw "the hand of God in the conquest of the territories."

Leibowitz and Talmon saw the settlers as latter-day Sabbateans. Referring to Gush Emunim, Leibowitz wrote: "When it turns out that the state has no glory, perpetuity and majesty, everything will blow up. This is exactly what happened to the followers of Sabbatai Zevi." And after the Six-Day War, Talmon cautioned that "a Sabbatean awakening and disappointment" could occur. Just as Harel failed to define "prophet" correctly, he also seems to be wrong about the meaning of "Zionist."

Harel and his settler friends are in fact anti-Zionists who have abandoned the classic religious Zionism. The last pre-1967 conference of the National Religious Party resolved that the NRP would not join a governing coalition that did not put peace with the Arab states at the top of its priorities. A lot of murky water has since flowed down the Jordan River. The rabbis and the settlers have taken control of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and instead of theological humility they have displayed a metaphysical arrogance. Instead of religious Zionists connected to the reality of Israeli society, they have become exploiters living in a bubble of alienation, an intellectual wilderness.

They have not internalized the Zionist revolution that made us sovereign in our own land, preferring to be victims. They have forsaken the nobility of a sovereign who is self-confident enough to be willing to compromise, choosing instead to be the hypocritical bully. They have ignored everyone around them, the secular Israelis and the Palestinians, the poor and the migrant workers, so they have never taken part in a struggle for social justice.

Leibowitz and Talmon warned against these and similar processes. Sometimes they erred in this formulation or that prediction, but they managed to see the slippery slope that may yet turn us into modern Sabbateans or the new Crusaders of the occupied territories.

A decade ago, when some inhabitants of Kiryat Shmona left town when Katyushas were falling on it, Harel deplored their "defeatism." In this newspaper, he compared them to the Crusaders. By their conduct, are Harel and his cohorts not testifying that they themselves have fallen from messianic peaks to defeatist depths? Was this not what Leibowitz meant when he predicted that the first to leave the country - metaphorically speaking, of course - would be the settlers?