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Israel's Unilateralism

Beyond Gaza

Hoover Institution Press

The Pullout

ON A WARM MID-AUGUST NIGHT, an estimated thirty to forty thousand Israeli civilians converged upon the northern Negev desert town of Netivot as a convoy of buses ferried them to what would become the critical front in their battle to halt Israel's military evacuation of the Gaza Strip and the dismemberment of twenty-one settlements located there. Their plan was to mobilize at Netivot, surge on foot to nearby Kfar Maimon serving as a staging area for a rush to a checkpoint called Kissufim, and then on to the largest and most significant settlement bloc in the Gaza Strip, Gush Katif. With tens of thousands of committed foes of withdrawal firmly planted in Gaza, the logic was that neither the police mobilized for the evacuation nor their Israeli Defense Force (IDF) allies would be able to execute their orders. The plan of the traitorous Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, would be thwarted. So confident of success were the demonstration's leaders, they had only chartered the busses for a one-way trip. The return rides, weeks or months into the future, could be organized at a later date.

Many in the anti-evacuation crowd wore orange T-shirts, shorts, trousers, or frocks, borrowing the official color from the local Gush Katif council. Most of those dressed in more traditional colors still wore orange ribbons, wristbands or laces. The majority of riders were residents not of Gaza but of settlements among the approximately 140 located in Judea and Samaria, what most of the world refers to as the West Bank. Nearly all the men and boys wore skullcaps, with cords of thread (tsitsis) hanging below shirt bottoms. These were religious Zionists, followers of Rabbi Avram Yitzhak Kook, chief rabbi during the pre-statehood period, and his son, Rabbi Tsvi Yehudah Cook, who held the same post years after 1948.

To the elder Rabbi Cook goes credit for developing the doctrine of religious Zionism during the 1930s, thereby breaking the near monopoly of the secular Zionists on the sociology of the nascent state. Devout Zionist Jews are vastly different from some of the Hassidic orthodox, the Haredi, who see Israel as a secular fraud, decline to serve in its military, and believe the faithful must spend their time preparing for the Messiah, whose visit will usher in the true state of Israel. The Zionist orthodox, on the other hand, dedicate themselves to working through the state to help bring about conditions conducive to the Messiah's arrival. In Rabbi Avram Yitzhak Kook's words, "The State of Israel is the foundation of God's throne on earth."

If the elder Rabbi Kook helped define what Israel is, then Rabbi Tsvi Yehudah Kook tried to define where it is. Following the Six Days' War of 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights, the younger Rabbi Kook pronounced the results symbolic of God's will that the entire biblical Land of Israel remain in Jewish hands. Thus did the concept of Greater Israel take hold and adherents of religious Zionism become the backbone of the West Bank settlers' movement. Their political and self-governing arm, the Yesha Council — Yesha being a Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza — led the opposition to the Gaza disengagement plan. Notably, the council's most powerful ally at the time was the more extreme Bayit Leumi (National Home) organization, many of whose members favored outright dispossession of resident Palestinians.

The intensity of devout Zionist fervor has been explained by the important role settlement has come to play in overcoming decades-old feelings of inferiority with respect to both secular Israelis and the Hassidim; historically, religious Zionists could not match the nation-building activities of the former or the religious scholarship of the latter. As Professor Avi Ravitsky of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told the newspaper Haaretz, "Clinging to settlement of the land solved both of these problems. We are both building the land and are devout. This gave an entire generation its identity, and now they are going to take this identity away from it. It is being told: You are being defeated by history."

The religious Zionists also serve in the military in numbers disproportionate to their share of the population. By virtue of an agreement with the government, students from their yeshivot hesder (religious schools) commit themselves to military service for sixteen months, after which they can return to their schools to complete their studies over a thirty-two-month period while remaining eligible for further service in the event of a reserve call-up. In this, they are part of what Israelis describe as a "religious revolution" within the IDF. The secular collective farming communities — the kibbutzim and moshavim — have long since become too sparse to satisfy the lion's share of IDF manpower needs. In addition, many of those from secular backgrounds have had difficulty reconciling their moral and political views with service in places like Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The religious have filled the void. Mostly they are trained for army tank and infantry service and many were on active duty over the summer of 2005, assigned to the units charged with enforcing the evacuation. Reflecting the events of the pullout from Gaza (to be discussed below), the IDF let it be known that it was rethinking the role of mixed units versus those reflected by the yeshivot hesder units.

The Yesha Council took account but not full advantage of the changing composition of the IDF and never formulated a coherent political strategy for addressing such soldiers. As a result, rabbis and other leaders were free to follow individual instincts. A handful of the more extreme rabbis urged soldiers to disobey military orders to dislodge settlers. Others simply pleaded with the military to be tolerant of soldiers who felt they could not in conscience execute the order to evacuate the Gaza settlements, forcefully if necessary. Adi Mintz, former Yesha Council CEO and still a reservist, had told his reserve unit to go on without him. Still smarting in his Lod office just days before the first planned evacuation from what he regarded as a betrayal by Sharon, Mintz said he thought there was a chance the army would disintegrate under the burden of its task. "I hope that the commanders of the army will understand people like me who cannot do it, orders like this," he said. "I think that this order is immoral. I think that this is dangerous to the people of Israel. I think that this order is against all the Zionist movement." Yet he added that whatever the outcome in Gaza, the nation had to continue living together as one people, and that meant no violence. "In all our demonstrations we have told our people not to use violence," he added. "It is a very, very important point to us during all our demonstrations. All the people in the Yesha Council think like me. Not all of the people in the settlements, but all of the people in the Council."

It had, in fact, been an act of violence that led to the settlers' first defeat in July with the forced evacuation of the Maoz Yam hotel at Gush Katif. In the early spring, outside settler sympathizers began infiltrating into the hotel, hoping to eventually attract numbers large and aggressive enough to resist evacuation. But a stone-throwing incident in which a Palestinian boy was allegedly lynched by the outsiders led security forces to clear the hotel a month ahead of schedule. The task took about fifteen minutes, a strong indication that evacuating Jewish militants from their fortresses of choice might turn out to be less difficult than imagined.

Stopping the human rush to Gush Katif in July was a combined military and police operation of about twenty thousand, one of the largest of its kind in Israel's history. Security officials were divided as to where to draw the line. Police Lieutenant Commander Nisso Shaham, serving as Police commander of the Negev region, wanted the buses carrying protesters halted on the roads and turned back to their points of origin even before reaching Netivot, an idea endorsed by Police Major General Yohanan Danino. On the other hand, Police Commissioner Moshe Karadi argued that citizens in a free society should be allowed to express their views. He maintained that the Yesha Council should be told that the police could tolerate a rally at Netivot and a procession to Kfar Maimon so long as the demonstrators made no effort to march to Gush Katif in Gaza. That way the rally would create only a minor "breach of order." Moving into Gush Katif would be a flagrant "breach of law."

The debate became academic when Dudi Cohen, director of Police Intelligence and Communications, confirmed that rally organizers had purchased only one-way tickets aboard the 650 buses hauling the demonstrators, conclusive evidence that they intended to remain at Gush Katif for an extended period. The commanders changed their plans abruptly. Now security forces were told to intercept and turn back as many of the buses as they could prevent from reaching Netivot. No one could know with precision the number of settlers who never made it to the tiny desert town but guesses ranged to the tens of thousands. Those who did press on to their destination conducted their rally and then marched to Kfar Maimon where most encamped for the night, confident that the morrow would find them in Gush Katif as the leading wedge of a campaign of civil disobedience that would defeat the Gaza pullout.

They were mistaken. That night, IDF forces and police under Southern District commander Uri Bar-Lev surrounded the sleeping minions and, at daybreak, prevented them from moving toward the Kissufim checkpoint. They were trapped at Kfar Maimon, described by one Haaretz reporter as "an isolated site that is difficult to access and is surrounded by fences." Infuriated and offended, the demonstrators lashed out verbally at the soldiers, calling them "traitor," and even "Nazi." But to no avail. The line of soldiers — often a big circle with hands joined, rotating around the demonstrators — held. As the day became hot, the ranks of settlers began to thin. Permitted to walk through the line of military personnel in groups of twos and threes, many could be seen on cell phones talking to friends and relatives who had stayed behind, trying now to organize transportation back to the West Bank, their one-way buses having long since departed. To all intents and purposes, the battle to save Gush Katif (so it could be destroyed) ended before it began: with protestors turned back, the residents were left with few tools at their disposal, solely able to evoke human sympathy as the victims of a lost cause.

This was evident a few days later when the disengagement foes mobilized in the Negev development town of Sderot, a regional mini-hub and a harder place to isolate, for what could have been a second effort to reach Gaza. Instead, leaders of the Yesha Council met with security forces before the event and agreed to march only to nearby Ofakim, just outside the entrance to Gaza. Rather than firing up the crowd, the speeches at Sderot seemed more like policy statements intended to run long enough to give the many late-arriving buses a chance to disgorge their passengers.

This time, few insults and epithets were hurled at the security forces. Instead, the largely orthodox group — most accompanied by wives and many by infants and toddlers — broke into chants of camaraderie with those keeping them out of Gaza. "Hayal, shoter, any ohev otcha," they chanted. (Soldier, Policeman, I love you.) "Hayal, shoter, haim ata ochev oti?" (Soldier, Policeman, do you love me?) Yesha Council leaders raced alongside the marchers urging good behavior. No attempt to get to Gaza, they reminded the marchers. Please keep in mind that our march ends in Ofakim. That would be the last big event in the desert.

The change in tone was not entirely random. High-level backstage talks between police, IDF commanders, and rabbis associated with the settler movement had established mutually respected ground rules for the events. Also, in preparatory evacuation discussions with the settlers and to assist authorities during the desert confrontations, the IDF had dispatched members of its Special Negotiation team. Formed in the early 1970s to deal with hostage taking and other terrorist incidents, the team was now tasked for the first time to handle highly emotional, sometimes hysterical Israelis who had put their lives into the settlements and now felt themselves abandoned. From all reports these IDF teams, advised by psychiatrists accompanying them to the settlements, contributed to the success of the operation. So did a substantial representation of female soldiers from the Special Negotiatinig unit assigned to deal with women settlers and their children.

The government also showed it could contain the damage from two nightmare incidents, the murders of eight Palestinian civilians by fanatical Israeli settlers in two incidents occurring two weeks apart. The first took place in the Druze Galilee town of Shfaram when Eden Natan-Zada, a military deserter, opened fire aboard a bus, killing four non-Jewish Israelis, including two sisters returning from school. The killer was subsequently overpowered by local police, handcuffed, and then beaten to death by the irate crowd while the police scampered to safety. Sharon immediately branded the shooting "a heinous act by a blood-thirsty terrorist" and was clever enough to note that the victims were also "Israeli citizens." A few days later he was pictured offering condolences to the father of the two murdered girls. An interfaith delegation of Jews, Christians and Muslims called on the aggrieved families to offer condolences. An announced plan to investigate those responsible for Natan-Zada's death was quietly dropped.

Two weeks later and just days after the evacuation at Gush Katif had begun, a settler shot and killed four Palestinian workers at the industrial zone in the settlement of Shiloh. The murderer, Asher Weissgan, lived in the settlement of Shvut Rahel, many of whose residents tend to follow the militant leadership of Rabbi Moshe Levinger. Several such followers have allegedly been involved in acts of violence and intimidation of nearby Palestinian villages. Once again Sharon was quick to condemn "this Jewish terror attack, aimed at innocent Palestinians out of a warped belief that this would prevent the disengagement plan." Sharon's senior advisor, Dov Weissglas, phoned President Mahmoud Abbas' top assistant to apologize and Abbas quickly issued a statement urging Palestinians not to retaliate. Like the Shfaram killings, the Shiloh murders quickly disappeared from the front pages with few apparent repercussions. In both cases the families of the dead received compensation from a special government fund reserved for the victims of terrorism.

As the August 15 deadline for the first evacuations approached, the Yesha Council staged massive events at the Wailing Wall and Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands but, according to the polls, changing few minds. A steady majority of 55-60 percent of Israelis favored the pullout, and while the number of demonstrators was impressive, the rallies at times tended to resemble stops on a bus tour for religious West Bank settlers, many of the same ones appearing at each "performance." Their speakers continued to passionately condemn the violation of the principle tracing back to pre-statehood days that "Jews don't expel Jews." Many continued to believe the withdrawal would never occur. Some were led to that conclusion by their rabbis. Mordecai Eliyahu, for example, chief rabbi of the Sefardi community, contemplated the withdrawal and concluded "it is not going to happen." Many of his followers echoed those words. Yet their assessments sounded more and more unworldly. Here on earth — or at least that sandy patch of it — the IDF and cooperating law enforcement agencies were in control.

Inside Gaza, perhaps half of the eight thousand Jewish settlers — including nearly all the secular ones — were already gone, having accepted government relocation assistance which was later extended to the recalcitrants as well. Those who remained attracted enormous national and international attention. In just two days, seventeen soldiers per housing unit would make sure the Gush Katif settlers were removed. Homes, rejected by the Palestinians as too small and with too few rooms for their large families, would be demolished by the departing Israelis. The synagogues would be left standing until the Palestinians turned them to rubble. Torah scrolls would be lovingly removed. The remains of the dead would be disinterred for reburial on Jewish soil.

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Excerpted from Israel's Unilateralism by Robert Zelnick. Copyright © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Hoover Institution Press.
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