The Israeli settlers’ mighty struggle for control
HAARETZ
A study tour by high school students to Hebron became a big success for the settlers. Not just because the police prevented people from the NGO Breaking the Silence from serving as guides, and not because right-wing activist Itamar Ben-Gvir took over the tour. The visit laid the cornerstone for the settlers’ lastest monopoly as they turn Israel into the state of a minority.
It was a short but decisive battle, and strategic. It recalls the settlers’ battle in the mid-to-late 1970s over the Elon Moreh settlement, after which – despite a High Court of Justice injunction – the settlers received a huge legal gift: “State land” was allowed to refer to occupied land in the territories. By invoking that term, the settlers would be able to establish “hundreds of Elon Morehs,” as then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin put it.
The study tour joined their victory in establishing outposts, whose high point was the open ridicule of the High Court in the Migron affair. And that’s no different from the legislation the settlers have dictated to the Knesset – and from there to all Israelis – prohibiting calls for a boycott of Israeli products, or the law that will soon be passed to legalize outposts.
The settlers’ takeover of the “molding of national memory,” or simply put, the curriculum on key issues like the Land of Israel’s history and geography, gives them the status of a state within an Israeli-settler federation. Each province of this federal state, Israel and Outpostia, has laws and leaders of its own. One has laws enacted by the Knesset and the other has ad-hoc laws, sometimes determined by rabbis and sometimes by the hilltop youth and other criminals.
But within this federated framework is a mighty struggle for control. Outpostia no longer makes do with partial independence that gives it the power to manage its affairs as it sees fit, to live according to its own interpretation of federal laws, to rob land at will and to establish settlements that become a burden and political threat to the entire federation. It no longer wants to rely on the mother state’s education and legal system, which has embraced Outpostia. The goal is to turn Israel into a minority satellite state and force the settlements’ laws and rules on the federation.
In the past, the settlers’ motto was “Yesha is here,” referring to Judea and Samaria. That meant Yesha was part of the State of Israel and Israeli citizens must embrace the Jewish extention in the occupied territories. Now the motto is becoming “Israel is Yesha,” with the state of the settlements willing to give Israel equal rights under conditions dictated by the invaders of the hills.
According to this recipe, Israel must adopt the settlements’ laws, view the settlers as a superior population, and accept that the settlements and the holy places in the territories belong first and foremost to the settlers. And it must accept that the Zionist, religious and national narrative is no longer controlled by the mother state.
With the easy part already behind the settler state, now it’s time for the settler narrative to push out the Zionist narrative. While the State of Israel presents the demographic threat of “its” Arabs as the most terrible menace, the settler state sees different demographics as a threat. The Guttman Institute recently reported in a survey that most Israelis “believe in God,” but secular people are still making too much noise. Those secular people tried to ignite the social protest, they still dare to portray the settlers as robbers of the public purse, they put on plays with Arab actors, they refuse to appear in shows in the capital of Outpostia, and they insist on pushing the Nakba into the school curriculum.
Having once been an invasive minority themselves, they fear, not unjustifiably of course, anyone who tries to preserve the traditional Zionism that might sabotage their narrative. A tour by high school students guided by Breaking the Silence might yet persuade young people that Baruch Goldstein was a murderer not a saint, that the Arab residents expelled from Hebron’s Shohada Street are victims, and that Hebron’s Jewish quarter is stolen Arab property.
The settlers have chalked up a major achievement in that the government and Education Ministry allow such tours of occupied territory – has anyone heard of American young people touring Iraq or Afghanistan? But when it comes to the minds of young people who are members of the foreign, secular minority, the settlers also want to be the only ones in control.
is it illegal to speak of Greater Israel in Israel?
It’s actually control of the Holy Mount that gives overall control. A rebuilt Temple will anyway be destroyed in the massive earthquake in Ezek 38. The Temple nevertheless needs to be rebuilt for the abomination to be set up in it.
It seems to me that a federal system will be in place at the end of the wars of Isaiah 17-19 when Israel has recovered all the land of the original mandate and beyond – that king David controlled. The day when Egypt and Assyria will serve Israel’s God!
Hunh!?
The “settler narrative” is the heart of the Zionist narrative.
I’m shocked. Shocked!
(Round up the usual suspects.)
Yamit, Amen!sign me up. I’m a carpenter/plumber for 24 yrs. I would devote my life to working on rebuilding the 3rd holy Temple. That was my prayer at the Kotel. I’m waiting to be hired… waiting to rebuild, waiting to come home….
Pox on Harretz. I’ve yet to read a piece in their online edition that doesn’t leave a foul taste in my mouth, and I wouldn’t even use the NYT to house train my dog!
Right on, yamit.
I believe Yamit’s statement says it all. Unification and a Jewish statement to the world is definitely needed.
The statement would ring loud and clear with the full support including financial assistance of the Christian world in rebuilding the temple.
I agree but if I have learned one thing from my years in Israel it is that conventional reason and logic never works here.
(Mann traoch, Gott Lauch) “Man plans, God laughs”
Sometimes G-d plans and Man Laughs.
I am not sure that we really are endowed with free will.
Yes, the temple should be built now. But with these corrupt and inept Bozos in position of leadership, I don’t expect they could or would erect an outhouse.
The Jerusalem post is no better.
Aw Shucks:
Accepted. 🙂
Dear Ron, I never knew Yamit had lost his mojo. What makes you think he did? He does seem to have gone up another gear lately though. All kudos to him.
Yamit (Uncle Nahum) you are starting to sound like your old self again, thank goodness. Yes the Temple is very important and it just may be G-d’s will to be built. The pinnacle of the Holy Land.
I like your plan for the future. Sign me on.
Yes, Haaretz is owned by the Schocken – Salman Schocken, a wealthy German Jewish who owned a chain of department stores in Germany, bought the paper in 1937. It could be said “toungue-in-cheek” to be a cousin of The New York Times.
From “Buried By The Times” ön why the NY Times Buried the Holocaust in its back pages (Also see Yoram Hazony’s “The Struggle for Israel’s Soul” on Post-Zionism and its fostering by the German Jewish Intellectuals).
Some Prominent German Jewish Intellectuals who were the forerunners of Post-Zionism (Most were members of Brit Shalom – “Covenant of Peace”):
Samuel (Schmuel) Hugo Bergman(n), born: December 25, 1883, Prague, died: June 18, 1975, Jerusalem) was a German and Israeli Jewish philosopher. He emigrated to Palestine in 1920, and founded, together with Martin Buber, a movement promoting a “dual-national” area where Jews and Arabs could live under equal conditions. He became a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and later on the dean of the university.
Magnes’s responded to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine with a call for a Binational solution to Palestine.[9] Magnes dedicated the rest of his life to reconciliation with the Arabs; he particularly objected to the concept of a specifically Jewish state. In his view, Palestine should be neither Jewish nor Arab. Rather, he advocated a binational state in which equal rights would be shared by all, a view shared by the group Brit Shalom, an organization with which Magnes is often associated, but never joined.[10] When the Peel Commission made their 1937 recommendations about partition and population transfer in Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm:
With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands […] Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made [..] New York Times, July 18, 1937.
With increasing persecution of European Jews, the outbreak of World War II and continuing violence in Palestine, Magnes realized that his vision of a voluntary negotiated treaty between Arabs and Jews had become politically impossible. In an article in January 1942 in Foreign Affairs he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of mandated Palestine. The Biltmore Conference in May that year caused Magnes and others to break from the Zionist mainstream’s changed demand for a “Jewish Commonwealth”.[11][12] As a result, he and Henrietta Szold founded the small, binationalist political party, Ihud (Unity).[13]
Magnes opposed the Partition plan. He submitted 11 objections to partition to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.[14] Later, in a conversation with George Marshall in May 4, 1948, he asked the US to impose economic sanctions on both sides. Calling the Yishuv an “artificial community”, he predicted that sanctions would halt “the Jewish war machine”.[15]
Just before his death in New York, October 1948, he withdrew from the leadership of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a committee he had helped establish. The reason was that the organization had not answered his plea for help for the Palestinian refugees: “How can I continue to be officially associated with an aid organization which apparently so easily can ignore such a huge and acute refugee problem?” (p. 519, Magnes 1982)
Magnes opposed the Partition plan. He submitted 11 objections to partition to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.[14] Later, in a conversation with George Marshall in May 4, 1948, he asked the US to impose economic sanctions on both sides. Calling the Yishuv an “artificial community”, he predicted that sanctions would halt “the Jewish war machine”.[15]
Just before his death in New York, October 1948, he withdrew from the leadership of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a committee he had helped establish. The reason was that the organization had not answered his plea for help for the Palestinian refugees: “How can I continue to be officially associated with an aid organization which apparently so easily can ignore such a huge and acute refugee problem?” (p. 519, Magnes 1982)
He emigrated to Palestine in 1920, and founded, together with Martin Buber, a movement promoting a “dual-national” area where Jews and Arabs could live under equal conditions..
Adolph Simon Ochs (March 12, 1858–April 8, 1935) was the American newspaper publisher and former owner of The New York Times and The Chattanooga Times (now the Chattanooga Times Free Press). Ochs was born to German-Jewish immigrants, Julius and Bertha Levy Ochs, in Cincinnati, Ohio. Arthur Hays Sulzberger (12 September 1891 – 11 December 1968) was the publisher of The New York Times from 1935 to 1961. Both Sulzberger and his father-in-law, Adolph Ochs, were descendants of German Jews. Ochs’ father, Julius, was born in Furth, Bavaria, and emigrated to the United States in 1845 at the age of 19. An active, supportive Reform Jew, and member of Congregation Emanu-El in New York City, he believed that Judaism was solely a religion; Jews were neither a race nor a people. The highest duty of Americans of Jewish faith–the term he preferred–was to be good citizens of the land in which they lived and to reject all manifestations of separatism, whether in social clubs, charity groups, or political movements. That meant Sulzberger and his newspaper strenuously opposed the persecution of Jews, but it also meant a reluctance to recognize such persecution, and more importantly, a reluctance to call for special help to end it. Classical Reform Judaism also led Sulzberger to oppose Zionism as the worst manifestation of separatism. Because he objected to a national homeland on theological grounds and feared for the war effort on practical grounds, Sulzberger eagerly took on the Zionists. The Times’ vaunted neutrality, his own detachment from political squabbles, did not matter as much as pushing his brand of Judaism.
Nothing wrong with Israeli politi except the model chosen to govern.
What we need is a constitutional monarchy limited by the Jewish constitution (The Torah) and whose power is checked by a real Sanhedrin.
First we need a political party whose main platform is the rebuilding the Temple. Everything else relevant to Israel will be derived from that position. This position is Political. The Temple will unify all Jews and many Christians. Oddly the most opposed to this idea are the religious Jews. I see it as a politically unifying act. A Jewish statement to the World.
“Thus declared HaShem, Master of Legions, saying, ‘This [Jewish] people has said: “The time has not yet come!” [But I say:] “It is time for the Temple of HaShem to be rebuilt!”‘” (Haggai 1:2)
The Temple will stake the land for the Jews: it’s hard to talk about Arab civil rights while the smoke of sacrifices rises to heaven. The construction of the Temple will necessitate a major nationalist breakthrough: razing the Islamic structures on the Temple Mount. It’s hard to seek peace with Arabs by giving them Judea or the Golan Heights after you’ve just razed the Aqsa.
Dare to Dream/Dare to Build
Rebuild the Temple Now.
Haaretz is every bit the repugnant liars as the NY slimes is. All of these loaded terms like “rob”, “settlements”, “occupied territories”, “invaders” to describe land that legally and rightfully is part of the Jewish homeland and paint an ugly portrait of its Jewish residents while portraying the true Arab invaders and occupiers as victims.
The owners of Haaretz are mostly German Jews. I’m glad most Israelis don’t know it exists. Most of what their owners imagine about Israel probably doesn’t exist either.
Actually, I favor some sort of federal government for Israel. It’s the only practical solution I can see for how to absorb a couple more million Arabs (in Tulkarem, Sh’chem and Hevron) into Israel without making them kingmakers in Israeli politics. I don’t think “Outpostia” would be one of those states; but if the Israelis want it, they can have it: It’s their country.
It must be a good day indeed when Israel’s Hebrew Palestinian daily Haaretz is in utter despair the Land Of Israel is truly eternal.
There will be no Palestinian Arab state in our lifetime. The Arabs reject any peace that is conditioned on their recognition of Jewish Statehood. No matter how much Bibi would like to give most of Yesha away, the Arabs are implacable foes.
Despite a hostile world and Israeli establishment and media, the Jews of Yesha have multiplied and grown. And I do not expect this to change in the future to the bitter frustration of those who prematurely declare Zionism is dead.
Its still flourishing and the more Jews that settle in Yesha, the likelier it is the most dangerous threat to Israel’s future can be definitively averted. A Palestinian Arab state makes as little sense today as it was at any time it was proposed in the past decade.