[spectre] Inescapable review ssur Israel's question

[Aliette Guibert]

Inescapable review ssur Israel's question, where we find on one hand Alain
Joxe's hypothesis and on the other hand that of Leila Shahid?

Press Review

New Yorker
June 10, 2004 | home


AMONG THE SETTLERS
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
Will they destroy Israel?
Issue of 2004-05-31
Posted 2004-05-24


    THE ZEALOTS

    THE MEANING OF ZIONISM

    THE UNDERGROUND

    THE SHEIKH

    THE GENERAL

    ISRAEL'S FUTURE



----


    THE ZEALOTS


    On a late winter's day, a slight, blue-eyed boy rode a bicycle down an
empty street in the militant Jewish ghetto of Hebron, in the West Bank.
Clipped to the boy's hair was a green kipa, crocheted and oversized in the
style of the settlers. A damp wind was blowing, and a bank of clouds hovered
over the city, but the boy was jacketless. Scattered piles of rubble and
garbage, flecked with broken glass, lined the road.
    The buildings along what the Jews call King David Street and the Arabs
call Martyrdom Street are tightly packed and decaying. The Jews live mainly
on the east side of the street, and the Arabs live to the west. When I
visited, much of the area was under curfew. The Jewish zone, where some
Arabs live, is "sterile," a soldier told me: only Arabs who hold the proper
pass are allowed to enter. The soldier, a paratrooper in the Israeli Army's
Fighting Pioneer Youth Brigade, was guarding Hadassah House, a three-story
building where several families of settlers live. A brigade of soldiers,
coils of razor wire, and hundreds of concrete barriers stand between Hebron'
s fewer than eight hundred Jewish settlers and its hundred and fifty
thousand Arab residents.
    Across from Hadassah House is a school for Arab girls, called Córdoba,
after the once-Muslim Spanish city. On one of its doors someone had drawn a
blue Star of David. On another door a yellowing bumper sticker read, "Dr.
Goldstein Cures the Ills of Israel." The reference is to Baruch Goldstein, a
physician from Brooklyn, who, in 1994, killed twenty-nine Muslims when they
were praying in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, just down the road. Across the
closed door of a Palestinian shop someone had written, in English, "Arabs
Are Sand Niggers."
    Jewish invective is answered by Muslim insults; over another door was a
hand-painted verse from the Koran, attesting to the undying perfidy of the
Jews. Nearby, peeling off a wall, was a poster dedicated to a ten-month-old
Jewish girl named Shalhevet Pass, who was shot through the head three years
ago by a Palestinian sniper. "May God Avenge Her Blood," it read. Pass's
father is in jail in Israel; last July, the police found eight bricks of
explosives in the trunk of his car.
    A group of yeshiva students appeared, walking in the direction of the
Tomb of the Patriarchs, a two-thousand-year-old stone palace. It sits atop
the cave in which, tradition holds, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives
are buried. It is because of the tomb that Hebron is considered a holy city.
The yeshiva boys wore flannel shirts and jeans. They had the wispy beards of
young men who have never shaved.
    Two Arab girls, their heads covered by scarves, books clutched to their
chests, left the Córdoba School, and were walking toward the yeshiva boys.
"Cunts!" one of the boys yelled, in Arabic.
    "Do you let your brothers fuck you?" another one yelled. I stopped one
of the students and asked why he was cursing the girls. He was red-faced,
and his black hair was covered with a blue knit skullcap.
"What are you, a goy?" he asked.
    The girls fled down the street, and the boys disappeared. I asked the
soldier guarding Hadassah House why he hadn't intervened. "They didn't hurt
them," he said.
    The boy on the bicycle circled toward me and asked what I was doing
there. I told him that I was waiting for a woman named Anat Cohen. He said
that she was his mother, and that she had just gone to the market. Then he
pedalled away, toward barricades at the end of the street.


    Cohen pulled up a few minutes later, in a station wagon, its windshield
cracked from stone-throwing attacks. She is one of the leaders of the Hebron
Jews. A short woman in her early forties, she had a taut, windburned face
and muscular arms, and her fingernails were chewed and dirty. As we walked
through her front door, into a stone-walled living room, I asked her how she
could let her son play amid the barbed wire and soldiers and barricades, and
with snipers in the hills above.
    "Hebron is ours," she said. "Why shouldn't he play?
"Because he could get killed," I said.
"There's a bullet out there for each one of us," she said. "But you can
always die. At least his death here would sanctify God's name."
    Cohen and other settlers say that they are obliged to fulfill God's
command that Jews settle the land of Israel. But there are safer places to
live than King David Street in Hebron. I asked Cohen how she reconciled her
decision to settle here with an even greater imperative of Judaism, the
saving of lives-in this case, those of her children.
She glared at me. "Hellenizers"-secular Jews-"will never understand," she
said with contempt.
    Anat Cohen is known, even among Hebron's Jews, who are some of the least
placatory of all the settlers, for her ferocity. According to Army
commanders, she has cursed and insulted soldiers, and assaulted Arabs. The
first time we met, she told me that she was a soldier of God.
    Cohen has about ten children-like certain religious Jews, she refused to
specify the number, in order to confuse the evil eye. The Cohen house is
cramped and dark, and there are few toys. On one wall hangs a framed
photograph of Meir Kahane, the zealot rabbi from Brooklyn, who advocated the
expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. Behind a stone pillar hangs a photograph
of Baruch Goldstein, with the inscription "The Saint Dr. Goldstein." A
candle burned in a makeshift shrine, in memory of Cohen's brother, Gilad
Zar. He was the security chief of the settlements in Samaria, the territory
of the northern West Bank. He was killed three years ago by terrorists.
    Cohen's one-year-old son, who is named after her late brother, burst
into the room, spilling Cheerios. Cohen swept him off the floor, and said,
"You don't live just to keep living. That's not the point of life."
    In an earlier conversation, we had talked about Abraham's willingness to
sacrifice his son Isaac, at God's command; only God's intervention saved
Isaac. Cohen admired Abraham's dedication, unabashedly. She was, I came to
see, suffering from something that could be called a Moriah complex. Mt.
Moriah, in Jerusalem, is the traditional site of the binding of Isaac, and
symbolizes a Jew's absolute devotion to even the most inexplicable and cruel
demands of God. The First and Second Jewish Temples rose on Mt. Moriah. So,
later, did the Dome of the Rock, built on the site from which, Muslims
believe, Muhammad ascended to Heaven. (In Cohen's house, there is an image
of the Temple Mount in which the Dome of the Rock has been replaced by a
rendering of an imagined Third Temple, which, tradition holds, will rise
when the Messiah comes.) The Moriah complex is characterized by a desire to
match Abraham's devotion to God, even at the price of a child's life.
    Cohen brought up the story, from the Second Book of the Maccabees, of a
God-loving mother of seven boys, partisans in the Jewish revolt against
Hellenistic rule twenty-two hundred years ago. The boys were called before
King Antiochus, who ordered them to eat swine, as a loyalty test. The sons
refused.
    "Do you know what the Greeks did to these boys?" Cohen asked. "They
ripped out their tongues and boiled them alive."
    Just before the last son was martyred, the mother gave him a message to
deliver in Heaven: "Go and say to your father Abraham, 'Thou didst bind one
son to the altar, but I have bound seven altars.'"
    After the seventh son was killed, the mother threw herself off a roof.
The Talmud says that, on her death, a voice was heard from Heaven, singing,
"A happy mother of children."


    One afternoon, I went to the Tomb of the Patriarchs. The detachment of
Border Police that day was commanded by an Ethiopian immigrant who was
wearing a knit kipa. He seemed tense; Rabbi Levinger, he said, was inside.
Moshe Levinger, who is in his sixties, is Hebron's first Jewish settler, a
fierce man, and a source of vexation for the Army and the police.
A flight of broad stone steps leads to the main hall of the tomb. The Muslim
rulers of Hebron once banned Jews from climbing higher than the seventh
step. Levinger was the first modern-day Jewish settler in Hebron, but there
were Jews in Hebron before Islam was founded. In 1929, a pogrom erased the
Jewish presence, when sixty-seven Jews were murdered by their Arab
neighbors. The British, then in charge of Palestine, removed the Jewish
survivors from Hebron, for their own safety. I entered the main prayer hall.
Benches that had been placed in rows in front of an Ark were mostly empty.
Elderly men prayed alone. Underneath the stone floor, in the
double-chambered Cave of the Machpelah, the bones of the Jewish patriarchs
and matriarchs are said to rest. According to Genesis, Abraham bought the
cave as a burial place for his wife, Sarah. It was his first, fateful
purchase of land in Canaan.
    Rabbi Levinger approached. For many years, he has been the face of the
settlement movement, which is no favor; his head is small, but his eyes are
bulbous and his teeth outsized. His voice is deep, and his beard seems
constructed of iron shavings. I said hello. He grunted a reply.
    I told him that the police seemed uneasy about his presence in the tomb,
and I asked whether they were worried that he would lash out at the
Palestinians.
    "The Arabs know to behave like good boys around us," he said.
Levinger first came to Hebron in 1968, after Israel seized the West Bank in
the Six-Day War. He rented rooms in an Arab hotel, in order to hold a
Passover Seder. Then he refused to leave. He struck a deal with the Israeli
government, and moved his family and his followers to a hill just northeast
of Hebron, where, with the state's coöperation, they built the settlement
called Kiryat Arba. There are now seven thousand settlers there. In 1979,
his wife, Miriam, led a group of settler women in an unruly takeover of the
Hadassah House building. The squatters stayed, and a community grew up
around them.
    In 1988, Levinger killed a Palestinian shoe-store owner in Hebron.
Levinger told the police that he was defending himself from a group of stone
throwers. He served thirteen weeks in an Israeli jail for the killing. He
told me once, "I'm not happy when any living creature dies-an Arab, a fly, a
donkey."
    In the Israel he envisaged, Levinger said, Arabs would be allowed to
stay only so long as they "behave themselves. Foreign residents"-Levinger's
designation for Arabs-"will be allowed to stay in Israel if they follow our
laws and don't demand privileges." He added that they might vote "for mayors
and such" but not for Prime Minister. He did not believe that the Arabs
would acquiesce to such an arrangement, and that is why he advocated
"transfer"-a euphemism for mass expulsion. "Whoever hurts Jews will be
expelled," he said.
    I had first met Levinger last year, at his small apartment in Hebron,
and I had asked him to help me understand the scriptural basis for his claim
to the city, and to all of the Biblical land of Israel. He reached into a
bookshelf and brought down the Torah, the five books of Moses, and opened it
to Genesis.
    "I will read you a verse," he said. "'Now the Lord said to Abraham, get
out of the country, and from the kindred, and from the father's house, to
the land that I will show you, I will make of you a great nation, and I will
bless you, and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing, and I will
bless them that bless you, and curse them that curse you.'"
Levinger looked up. "Shall I read more?
    "All my ideas are formed from the Torah," he went on. "It's not complex.
This land is ours. God gave it to us. We're the owners of the land."


    In June, 1967, Israel launched successful preëmptive strikes against
Egypt and Syria, which had been jointly planning an invasion. When Jordan,
which then occupied the West Bank, entered the war on the side of the
Syrians and the Egyptians, Israel defeated it as well, seizing the Old City
of Jerusalem and the West Bank. Israel's victory also left it in control of
the Golan Heights, Gaza, and the Sinai Peninsula (which was returned to
Egypt in 1982). Thirty-seven years later, there are roughly two hundred and
thirty-five thousand settlers in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. There are
an additional hundred and eighty thousand Israelis living on land in eastern
Jerusalem, captured in the 1967 war. Israel's Jewish population is about
five million; more than a million Israeli citizens are Arab. The West Bank
and the Gaza Strip are home to more than three and a half million additional
Arabs, who do not hold Israeli citizenship.
    Perhaps three-quarters of the Jews in the West Bank and Gaza could be
considered economic settlers. Many of them moved to the West Bank for
benefits unattainable inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel: space, tax
breaks, and mountain air. They are reliable supporters of right-wing
parties, but many of them are secular in their outlook.
    The remainder of the settlers, fifty thousand or so, came to the
territories for reasons of faith. Although many of the settlements are near
the Green Line, the 1949 armistice line that separated Israel from the West
Bank, the national-religious settlements tend to be isolated from Israel and
from each other. Many of them are along Route 60, the main north-south
highway that runs near the mountain spine of the West Bank. This is the
heart of the land known in the Bible as Judaea and Samaria-the part of
ancient Israel most thickly crowded with sites that figure in Jewish
history. It is also the part of the West Bank most densely populated by
Arabs.
    The national-religious camp can be divided into two main groups. The
Jews of the central West Bank, in settlements such as Beit El and Ofra, are
Biblical literalists, but they tend to respect the authority of the elected
government in Jerusalem. If the Israeli Army evacuated such settlements-and
this is not happening soon-the people might resist, but it is believed that
they will not shoot.
    The more unremitting settlers are the Jews living in Hebron, in Kiryat
Arba, and in a chain of settlements in the mountains near Nablus, the main
Arab city in the northern West Bank. The zealots include those who build
"illegal" frontier outposts, which are not approved by the Israeli Cabinet,
although they are protected by the Army. Most international legal
authorities believe that all settlements, including those built with the
permission of the Israeli government, are illegal.
    The seventy-five hundred Jews of Gaza represent the absurdist wing of
the settlement movement. In the Israeli mind, Gaza-a strip of land shaped
like a sardine can, and running from south of Tel Aviv to the Egyptian
border-is synonymous with sand dunes and refugee camps, wilting heat and the
fierce anti-Semitism of the Islamic terror group Hamas, whose most fervent
followers are based there. Gaza is marginal to Jewish history; its biggest
moment came when Samson pulled the temple of the Philistines there down on
his head. The most isolated settlers are those in Gaza. They are killed
regularly by terror groups (over all, a hundred and fifty settlers have been
killed); their school buses are armored, a precaution that hasn't prevented
their occasional demolition; and they require the presence of thousands of
Israeli soldiers, who are also being killed in consequential numbers.
    The most hard-core settlers are impatient messianists, who profess
indifference, even scorn, for the state; a faith in vigilantism; and
loathing for the Arabs. They are free of doubt, seeing themselves as taking
orders from God, and are an unusually cohesive segment of Israeli society.
Hard-core settlers and their supporters make up perhaps two per cent of the
Israeli populace, but they nevertheless have driven Israeli policy in the
occupied territories for much of the past thirty years.
    The settlement movement has long been aided by Israel's parliamentary
system, which gives single-issue parties an inordinate say in government
decisions. The movement has also been effective at placing supporters in key
government ministries. And it has been helped by the doubt that many secular
Israelis feel about the Palestinians' willingness to recognize the
legitimacy of a Jewish state-and by anger at Palestinian violence.
    Many Israelis believe that evacuation of many settlements-even all of
the settlements-would not satisfy the Palestinians. The Palestinian leader
Yasir Arafat, even while negotiating with Israel in the framework of the
Oslo accords of the nineteen-nineties, never prepared his people for
compromise. Palestinian schools continued to teach about the evils not only
of occupation but of the very idea of Israel. Arafat refused to recognize
any historical Jewish connection to Palestine, and, in the climactic
negotiations at Camp David in 2000, he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak's offer of the entire Gaza Strip, nearly all of the West Bank, and a
capital in east Jerusalem, and abandoned the talks. Many of Barak's critics
accused the Prime Minister of mishandling the negotiations and of making
miserly concessions that were impossible for Arafat to accept. But the
dispositive fact of Camp David is this: Barak made an offer, and Arafat
walked out without making a counter-offer. Three months later, after Ariel
Sharon, then the leader of the opposition Likud Party, visited the Temple
Mount, surrounded by Israeli police, the Palestinians ignited the second
intifada, which continues today. Sharon capitalized on the violence in 2001,
defeating the compromise-minded Barak in the election for Prime Minister.


    Polls have consistently shown that the majority of Israelis want the
settlers to withdraw from Gaza in particular. Sharon had told me while he
was campaigning, "The settlements represent the best of Israel. To abandon
them would go against Jewish history and morality." And yet, three years
later, Sharon has turned against some of the settlers, and is now proposing
to evacuate settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank.
    Sharon seems to have recognized-belatedly-Israel's stark demographic
future: the number of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea will be roughly equal by the end of the decade. By 2020,
the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola has predicted, Jews will make
up less than forty-seven per cent of the population. If a self-sustaining
Palestinian state-one that is territorially contiguous within the West
Bank-does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a
binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea
of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled
by a Jewish minority.
    A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank. Inside the borders
of Israel proper, Arabs and Jews are judged by the same set of laws in the
same courtrooms; across the Green Line, Jews live under Israeli civil law as
well, but their Arab neighbors-people who live, in some cases, just yards
away-fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws,
administered by the Israeli Army. The system is neither as elaborate nor as
pervasive as South African apartheid, and it is, officially, temporary. It
is nevertheless a form of apartheid, because two different ethnic groups
living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws.
    Sharon is considered to be one of the most effective fighters in Israel'
s history (he is certainly thought to be one of the most brutal). He came to
power promising to use force in order to end Palestinian violence. But he
has not succeeded. What he is proposing now is a two-pronged survival
strategy: the building of a security fence separating the Arabs of the West
Bank from Israel; and a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which will remove
more than a million Palestinians from Israel's direct control. "The
Palestinians have created this bloody mess," the Vice-Prime Minister, Ehud
Olmert, told me recently. But, he added, "We realized long ago we would have
to share this land."
    This is not to say that Sharon and his party, the Likud, have done much
to encourage negotiations. Sharon's proposals are not anchored in any larger
peace plan. At best, the proposals are half measures. The fence will not
follow the Green Line; in places it will penetrate deep into the West Bank,
encompassing highly populated settlement blocs. Most settlements beyond the
fence will remain in place as well, as will battalions of soldiers to
protect them. In Gaza, Israel will still control the borders, the coastal
waters, and the airspace, making it, in essence, a recalcitrant
protectorate.
Modest though these measures seem to many Israelis (they are seen as
comically parsimonious by most Palestinians), to the settlement movement
they are a betrayal. The borders of Israel, in the view of Jewish religious
nationalists, are drawn by God, and one does not negotiate with God. So the
settlers have, golem-like, risen against one of their creators, and pledged
to stop any attempt-including Sharon's provisional attempt-to disentangle
Jews and Arabs. The settlers reject the idea of a demographic crisis. They
still see themselves as Sharon once saw them-as the avant-garde of Zionism,
heirs to the pioneers of the early twentieth century who restored the Jews
to Palestine. But, should they somehow prevent the emergence of a viable
Palestinian state, they may well be the vanguard of Israel's demise as a
Jewish democracy.
    They are, for the moment, prevailing. Earlier this month, the settlers
humiliated Sharon, organizing the defeat, in a Likud Party referendum, of a
plan to evacuate seventeen settlements in the Gaza Strip. Sharon has
promised to pursue some version of his evacuation plan, but this pursuit
might cause his coalition government to break apart.
The harshest critic of the settlers in the government is Tommy Lapid, the
justice minister. He heads the Shinui Party, which argues for the separation
of synagogue and state and is a member of Sharon's ruling coalition. He told
me recently that the settlers have three reasons for hope: "They believe
there will come a point in the critical clash between us and the
Palestinians when it would come time to transfer the Palestinians to Jordan;
the second thing they hope for is the great American aliyah-a million more
Jews coming to Israel. The third, and by far the most stupid, thing is that
they believe God will help them."
    Indeed, some of the leading ideologues of the settlements, far from
supporting the idea of a Jewish democracy, hope to establish a Jewish
theocracy in Israel, ruled by a Sanhedrin and governed by Jewish law. Moshe
Feiglin, a Likud activist who lives in a West Bank settlement and heads the
Jewish Leadership bloc within the Party-he controls nearly a hundred and
fifty of the Likud central committee's three thousand members-believes that
the Bible, interpreted literally, should form the basis of Israel's legal
system. "Why should non-Jews have a say in the policy of a Jewish state?"
Feiglin said to me. "For two thousand years, Jews dreamed of a Jewish state,
not a democratic state. Democracy should serve the values of the state, not
destroy them." In any case, Feiglin said, "You can't teach a monkey to speak
and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic. You're dealing with a culture
of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer
and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches."


    The community of Yitzhar, in the mountains near Nablus, is one of the
flagship settlements of the zealots. I went there one day in search of
Yehuda Liebman, an official of the Joseph Still Lives Yeshiva. Until the
second intifada, the yeshiva had been situated next to the tomb that many
Jews believe holds the remains of Joseph, the son of Jacob, in Nablus.
During the Oslo peace process, which ended the first intifada, Yasir Arafat
promised Israel that the Palestinian Authority would protect Jewish holy
sites that came under its control, but the Joseph's Tomb compound was
torched and vandalized by Palestinian militias a number of times, and the
yeshiva moved to Yitzhar.
    I was told that I could find Liebman at an outpost down a gravel road
from the main settlement. The outpost, called Yitzhar Lookout, consisted of
two mobile homes and a temporary synagogue. The buildings sat on a gently
sloping hill. Halfway down were olive trees that belong to the neighboring
Arab villages of Ein-Abus and Burin. Settlers from Yitzhar have repeatedly
attacked these olive trees. When I visited, the branches of trees just below
the outpost looked as though they had recently been sawed off. A Palestinian
farmer named Ibrahim Muhammad Zaban had told me that he no longer brought
his children to help during the olive harvest. "The settlers come and they
curse at us and attack us. They beat up a man with a metal pipe." The
settlers, he said, stole the olives, then burned the trees. "These trees
were for my sons," he said. His children had lost their inheritance, and he
had lost his livelihood. "I have to work in another man's fields now," he
said.
    As I looked for Liebman, I came across David Dudkevitch, a rabbi in
Yitzhar. Dudkevitch, a sour-faced man in his thirties who was dressed in a
black suit and a white shirt, is a person of influence among yet another
type of radical settler, the "hilltop youth"-teen-agers and young men who
have built makeshift settlements, sometimes out of nothing more than rusting
shipping containers, on remote mountaintops. They are seen as troublemakers
by the Israeli Army and the Palestinians, but some settlers consider them
heroic. Many of the hilltop youth are unruly high-school dropouts who are
fluent in the mystical concepts of the Kabbalah and are adept in
marksmanship. They also have a reputation for marijuana use.
    I asked Dudkevitch whether the youth of Yitzhar were cutting down the
Arabs' olive trees.
"I'm not hearing you," he replied. I asked again. "I'm not hearing what you'
re saying. You don't understand me. I'm not hearing and I will continue not
to hear." Then he walked away.
    Liebman was outside one of the ramshackle trailers, talking on a cell
phone. He is a thin and jumpy man, quick to show irritation. One of his
brothers was murdered in Yitzhar six years ago by Arabs. Another brother was
accused by the Shabak, the Israeli internal security agency, of being a
member of a Jewish terrorist network.
    I asked who was destroying the olive trees. The destruction of
fruit-giving trees, even those belonging to an enemy, is considered a grave
sin in Judaism. But the only subject that concerned Liebman was Joseph's
Tomb.
    "What is an olive tree compared to the burial place of Joseph, the son
of Jacob?" he said.
To the farmer who supports his family with the tree, I said, the tree is
important. "But the farmer is an Arab," Liebman replied. "He shouldn't be
here at all. All this land is Jewish land. It is meant for the Jews by God
Himself."
And if the Army comes to carry off the Jews of Yitzhar? "Let them try," he
said.
    In May, more than eight hundred Israeli soldiers and policemen attempted
to dismantle the outpost. They were confronted by seven hundred settlers,
who fought them for several hours. Forty-one settlers were arrested, before
the outpost was torn down. After the police left, the settlers returned, and
erected two new buildings.


    One day a few months ago, Moshe Saperstein, who lives in Neveh Dekalim,
the biggest Jewish settlement in Gaza, picked me up at the junction that
marks the border between Gaza and Israel. The junction, called Kissufim, is
an armored camp. Three dozen tanks and bulldozers were lined up in order to
pass through the gates. The only civilians here are the settlers of the Gush
Katif bloc, a string of settlements-Neveh Dekalim among them-along the
beaches of southern Gaza, between the Palestinian city of Khan Younis and
the Mediterranean.
    Saperstein was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and came to
Israel thirty-six years ago with his wife, Rachel, who is originally from
Brooklyn. As a soldier in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he lost part of an arm
and part of his vision in an Egyptian rocket attack. He is a heavyset man
who smokes bad cigars and has perhaps the most profane mouth in Orthodox
Judaism.
    The road from the border to the settlement is under Israeli
control-concrete pillboxes are planted intermittently along the way-but
Palestinians regularly fire on the settlers' cars. Two years ago, Saperstein
was ambushed near Kissufim; Palestinian gunfire tore off two fingers of his
remaining hand. He had the presence of mind to push down on the accelerator,
and struck a Palestinian gunman.
    As we drove, Saperstein pointed to the spot on the road where the attack
had taken place. "Here's where I tried to run over the peace-loving Muslim,"
he said. Sometimes, he told me, he gets the feeling that "Ahmed is trying to
kill me." Saperstein refers to Arabs generically as "Ahmed."
    Just before we reached the fortified entrance to the Gush Katif bloc, we
passed the ramshackle Bedouin village of Muwassi. "They like to live like
pigs in shit," Saperstein said. I disagreed, vehemently, and he said, "I'm
sorry, that's politically incorrect. 'They have a different cultural
aesthetic.' Is that what I'm supposed to say?"
    The Sapersteins came to Neveh Dekalim to retire; their children are
grown, and live elsewhere in Israel. The couple's ranch house, which
overlooks the sea, would not look out of place in the Jewish neighborhoods
of South Florida. The settlement is a community of dozens of whitewashed
houses and sand-dune playgrounds, and it is the frequent target of
Palestinian attacks. A fifty-foot wall of concrete slabs sits about five
hundred yards from the Sapersteins' house, separating the Jews from the
Arabs.
    Over lunch, I asked Saperstein and Rachel, who teaches English in the
settlement's girls' school, why they had chosen a remote and dangerous
settlement in Gaza rather than one of the urban settlements near Jerusalem.
"We like the weather," he said. "We never lived near the sea. And I'm here
because of a religious commandment, believe it or not, as irrational as that
may seem to you." The Sapersteins see a unilateral pullout from Gaza as
theological heresy and political suicide. They moved here from Jerusalem in
1997, as a protest against the Oslo peace process. "Oslo meant the
abandonment of land that was meant for the Jews," Saperstein said. "In this
respect, I'm a fundamentalist. . . . Call me an extremist. I don't care."
    I raised the question of whether Jewish parents who place their children
within range of Palestinian rockets had their priorities in order.
Exasperated, Rachel said, "If I believe in holy law, that the settlement of
the land of Israel is a commandment of God, and I want my children to be
raised as Jews, I have to take them where they're going to fulfill this
mitzvah. I have to take my child and physically he has to settle the land
with me. I can't say I won't do things because I don't want him to suffer."
Saperstein said, "If I believed that if all the settlers disappeared
tomorrow then peace and happiness would reign forever, that we could live in
peace as Jews in what's left of our homeland, then I would seriously
consider picking up and going somewhere else." Rachel looked at her husband.
"I wouldn't," she said.
    Saperstein is skeptical about this scenario, however. He considers the
idea that peace will come to Israel only when it cedes territory to the
Arabs to be a Diaspora psychosis. "We've lived for so many years in exile,
we've forgotten what it is to be a powerful and ruling people," he said. "We
have always depended on the kindness of strangers, wherever we were. The
tsar, or some Polish landowner. We had to kiss ass because we couldn't
defend ourselves. Now that we have the strength to defend ourselves, we don'
t know how. "Most of this country has an exile mentality," Saperstein went
on. "Most of the population here takes the attitude that the Jews are at
fault. But what have we done to provoke those poor Palestinians?" "Do we
have to kill ourselves? Is that Jewish?" Rachel said. "You have to teach
them: 'No more. You want to do evil, you're going to take the consequences.'
This is what America did to Germany. You finish them. Bomb the hell out of
them. Just bomb the hell out of them."
    I asked Rachel about her youth, in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
"The blacks hit me, of course," she said. "She doesn't know the difference
between being hit and being hit on," Moshe said. "They also did that,"
Rachel said. "We were raised in a very Jewish area," she said. "Then the
blacks came in and the Jews ran. The first blacks came in and the Jews flew
out of there so fast. Everybody went to Crown Heights. I don't want to run
away. I always see Jews running and running."
    American-born settlers often recollect encounters with anti-Semitic
roughnecks, and many of them see an explicit link between the Palestinians
and the shvartses, a word I heard several times in interviews: the Jews were
chased from Brooklyn, and they won't be chased again.
    Saperstein, too, has a story of street anti-Semitism. "I was about ten
or eleven. I looked out of our window. Some yeshiva guy was walking and
these two drunk Italians started pushing him, yelling at him, slapping him.
He just covered himself up. One of my parents yelled out the window,
'Police! Police!' They went away. Then my mother said, 'I wonder what he did
to provoke that.'
    "It was at that point I knew I had to come to the Jewish country and be
proud. 'Goyim used their hands. Jews used their brains'-well, that's nothing
more than a justification for weakness." I suggested that he try to imagine
himself in the place of a Palestinian. "You're a Palestinian, you're here,
you have your farm, your grandparents are from here, and-"
But Moshe interrupted me. "Stop being Jewish!" he yelled. "Stop being
Jewish! Only a Jew would say, 'Imagine yourself as a Palestinian.' Could you
imagine a Palestinian imagining himself as a Jew?" Neveh Dekalim is one of
the settlements that Ariel Sharon has promised to shut down. What seemed to
offend Saperstein most was that Arabs might one day live in his house. "I
had this Ahmed in here once, doing repairs, and he said, 'Do you know why I'
m doing such good work? Because one day I'm going to live here.' And I told
him, 'If I'm kicked out of here, I'm going to blow this place up before I
let someone like you have it.'"


 (...)

The following chapters THE MEANING OF ZIONISM, THE UNDERGROUND, THE SHEIKH,
THE GENERAL, ISRAEL'S FUTURE
are online (to be reached from the first page):
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040531fa_fact2_a/

Interview (sound)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/?040531onco_covers_gallery

Thema
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/previous/?040614frprsp_previous1

http://www.newyorker.com/

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