A Response to Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein's Call to Obey Orders and Carry Out the Eviction Plan
by: Moshe Feiglin
Tamuz 5765 (July 05)
Rabbi Lichtenstein, one of the heads of the Har Etzion Yeshiva in Alon Shevut, recently published an article entitled Reflections regarding D-Day, in which he explains his opposition to refusal to obey orders by soldiers in the planned eviction of Jewish settlers from Gush Katif and Northern Shomron.
It is somewhat problematic for an unlearned person such as myself to challenge the views of a prominent rabbi such as Rabbi Lichtenstein. It is therefore necessary for me to first say that I don't believe that the rabbi himself maintains that his article is really Halachic, and not merely publicistic.
Perhaps this is the place to emphasize that in general those rabbis who write articles against the disengagement plan and in support of refusal to obey orders, base their arguments on scores of clear unambiguous sources and Halachic rulings. In contrast, those holding diametrically opposed views do not base these arguments on Halachic sources or express them in the customary Halachic matter.
I shall therefore permit myself to argue that Rabbi Lichtenstein's article falls into the second category, and I don't think that he would dispute this.
The key issue in the article is the use of the expressions "considered judgment" and "the saving of life". I shall therefore address this issue, even though I don't believe that there is any connection between the subject of the disengagement plan and the saving of life. This was not the real reason behind this vile plan, nor does the faithful public oppose it for security considerations.
This important rabbi wishes to give the impression that the issue of saving life dominates his thinking. However, we have to recall that Rabbi Lichtenstein and many others of his ilk placed all their weight behind what was known as the Oslo process.
Ten years ago the process began of handing over parts of Eretz Israel to the terrorist gangs. Most of the believing public understood then that this process was not only contrary to the Creator's wishes but would also lead to great bloodshed.
Rabbi Lichtenstein and a small group of rabbis gave their support to that process that has caused the deaths of about three thousand Jews, up to now. In the decade that has passed since that terrible bloody process (that was supported by Rabbi Lichtenstein and other rabbis holding similar opinions), more Jewish civilians have been murdered in Israel in terrorist attacks than in the entire period from the establishment of the State until the Oslo process.
I shall now address Rabbi Lichtenstein's arguments, that may be divided into two: the need for pragmatic judgment (in order to avoid danger to life) and the need for Halachic judgment.
Regarding the issue of pragmatic judgment, the rabbi presents three problems:
1) The fear that refusal to obey orders may also spread to the other side (the Left), weaken the army, and consequently lead to a risk to life.
2) The harm that will be caused to mutual relations normally achieved by jointly bearing the burden of military service.
3) Distancing the national religious public from State values in which they believed in the past.
It can clearly be seen that issues 2 and 3 have nothing to do with danger to life. Obviously they are of importance, but the role of the IDF is to protect the lives of Jews. It was not established as a society for improving mutual relations nor as a means of strengthening the inner beliefs of the religious Zionist public.
For many years the Left has adopted the technique of refusal to obey orders and it is widespread amongst them. Movements of this kind have sprung up amongst the Left and have been awarded legitimacy by the Israeli establishment, the judicial system, and the media. This has frequently involved refusal to obey orders in the face of the enemy.
A clear red line has been established regarding the IDF's activities. In today's Israel it is illegal to talk about the transfer of Arabs, because Amos Oz declared that in such circumstances he would blow up bridges, and Moshe Negbi said that he would break up the army and the State.
In other words, there's no need to fear that refusal to obey orders would spread to Leftist circles, because it's already there.
A totally different issue is involved: Will the Left's capability of setting up ideological lines which, if crossed, would lead to absolute refusal, be balanced by the capability of the belief-based public to establish its own red lines? If not, then it would seem advisable for us to give up in advance all the achievements of Zionism and settlement, and in fact to abandon the existence of Israel as a Jewish State.
The rabbi's logic does not necessarily lead only to the destruction of Gush Etzion where his yeshiva is located, but to the destruction of Israel as a Jewish State, because this is what the struggle is actually about.
We're not talking about Gush Katif, but about the Jewish identity of the State of Israel.
When the side that desires a state of all its citizens uses the weapon of refusal to achieve this aim, by destroying the settlements and evicting their residents, by sending female soldiers to combat units, and by acts of mass desecration of Shabbat, while the other, belief-based side, always accepts the situation, because Rabbi Lichtenstein's arguments will always be valid -- then in such circumstances it is a foregone conclusion that the extreme Left will achieve all its aspirations and the Jewish State of Israel will cease to exist.
Since Israel will be incapable of surviving as a state of all its citizens for any significant period of time (opinion polls have indicated that most people don't give it more than thirty years), and since our Arab neighbors don't seem to want us as citizens with equal rights, obviously the rabbi's logic will inevitably lead to the Final Solution for the Jews of Eretz Israel.
Those who think this is far-fetched should recall the cooperation during the Second World War between Hitler and the founding father of the "Palestinian" movement, the Jerusalem Mufti. Husseini planned to construct gas chambers in the Dotan Valley in Samaria for Rabbi Lichtenstein and his family. Because of the Oslo process and the humanist Palestinian education following it, Husseini's Final Solution is taught to first grade children in Kalkilya.
Consequently, soldiers who don't refuse to obey the eviction order will be responsible for a terrible blood bath, and endanger the very existence of the State of Israel, and the lives of millions of Jews.
The second argument presented by Rabbi Lichtenstein is the need for Halachic judgment.
In this argument, that is apparently a Halachic one, the rabbi explains that since the government claims that the disengagement plan will save the lives of many people, and since it is impossible to know whether or not the government is right, then we must accept the plan motivated by feelings of responsibility and love for the nation and the country.
Since the Halachic considerations of the rabbi are based on the purity of the intentions of Sharon and his son, and since everyone on both the Left and the Right is now aware that this purity does not exist, then the Halachic consideration based on the judgment of the decision makers is invalid. Rabbi Lichtenstein may not wish to hear this, but the disengagement plan was adopted for personal, cynical motives. Consequently the issue of considered judgment is irrelevant. Not only is there no logical explanation for the disengagement plan, but there is also no direct and real starting point for it.
The rabbi's declaration about "our responsibility and aspirations to support with all our strength the Jewish nation" obligates every officer and soldier to proudly refuse to take part in, or aid, the perpetrators of this crime.
Friday, July 29, 2005
Thursday, July 28, 2005
People are finally awaking from their slumber and realizing that Manhigut Yehudit is the way that the State of Israel will go.
The time has come for us believing Jews to stop being court Jews led by non-believing jewish leaders, who are mostly looking out for themselves and power (not the best interests of the Jewish poeple) and to start to take responsability for our own future as a people and a nation and start leading!
As written below in a Haaretz article, it seems that this message is sinking in.
Avi
Little by little the
At Kfar Maimon the State of the Faithful was founded
28/7/05
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/605606.html
By Kalman Neuman
Where is the Zionist religious public heading after the disengagement? There are those who are hoping that it will abandon the vision of the greater Land of Israel, return to the "historical partnership" with secular Zionism and hitch itself to social missions. Others are expecting a turning inwards and the emergence of a new model of "ultra-Orthodoxy in a crochet skullcap."
However, the conflict at Kfar Maimon indicates another direction.
Thirty years ago the attempt to settle at Sebastia in the West Bank became the cornerstone of a mass movement. The young people who came to Sebastia demanded to be real partners in fateful decisions. To a large extent they have succeeded in this. At Kfar Maimon this demand shifted into a higher gear. Here the State of the Faithful was founded, a state that will be led by leaders who are religious.
Advertisement
The public that gathered last week at Kfar Maimon - almost entirely from religious Zionism (apart from representatives of the messianic stream of Chabad) - does not see the future of the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria (West Bank) as a strictly political issue. It sees the disengagement plan as an expression of a value vacuum, mental tiredness and a loss of the dedication that characterized the generation of the state's founders. In their eyes, the struggle for Gush Katif is just the tip of the iceberg of the struggle for hegemony in the state. Many sat for hours in the broiling sun and listened to Torah lessons given by rabbis. There was no need to discuss the reasons for the opposition to the disengagement, and there was no reason to explain to the public why Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not worthy of their trust. The rabbis described the disengagement not only as a political mistake and not only as a transgression of traditional Jewish law, but rather as a real desecration of the Holy Name, something for which there is no atonement.
Crisis in identity
To them the source of the collapse is clear: There are those who stress the prime minister's personal responsibility, but all of them see in the plan an expression of a crisis in Jewish identity, with respect to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and the adoption of Western mass culture. As opposed to these, they describe the masses who gathered at Kfar Maimon as an idealist public that is sure of itself and prepared to take the reins from those who have grown tired. There is no need to convince the convinced. But the explanation touches the root: The struggle for Gush Katif is only the tip of the iceberg of the struggle for the State of Israel. The steering wheel of government must be passed into the hands of the religious public - it and only it is worthy of holding it.
On Wednesday morning many scores of them listened to a lesson by Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, the head of the hesder yeshiva (combined Torah study and military service program) in Ramat Gan and one of the most charismatic figures in the eyes of the national religious youth, who explained the parallel between the individual and the nation. According to Hasidic thought, he said, the individual is made up of the anima (the physiological aspect, which is common to all animals), the spirit (the abilities that are common to all human beings) and the soul (the spiritual quality that exists only in Jews). The anima comes to the individual at birth, whereas the spirit enters him only when he reaches the age of mitzvoth (the age of commandment observance, 13 for males). The difficulty of reconciling these forces is the reason for tshe self-destructive tendencies in adolescence. The same development exists in the collective, explained Shapira. The national organism has an "anima" - it is the state. The state has to see to the material needs of the nation. The state was born in 1948, but the second stage of its development occurred in the Six-Day War. The connection to the Divine presence opened the heart to the "spirit," which is supposed to enter into the existing political structures, which are equivalent to the anima. And here is the rub: He is not disappointed with Sharon, as he has no faith in any secular leader. "I do not believe in a leader who does not come from the beit midrash (religious study house). There cannot be a man of the anima who leads the Jewish people in the era of the spirit. The spirit can come only from the beit midrash." The difficulties that the Jewish people have faced are stages of maturation, of the birth of the spirit from within the anima, which also entail the danger of confusion and self-destructive tendencies. The disengagement plan is an example of this.
The unwillingness to recognize a secular leadership and the demand for a "believing" leadership were expressed in the past in groups like Moshe Feiglin's Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish leadership). Now, with the disappointment with Sharon and the secular right as a whole, this line is gathering momentum, and similar things were heard at Kfar Maimon from rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the rabbi of Safed.
As one of the settlement rabbis said to me, "It could be that we will lose this battle (for Gush Katif), but we will certainly win the whole fight." The big fight is for hegemony in the state, and religious Zionism is intending to take the place of secular Zionism, which has become tired and has collapsed.
The struggle for hegemony is expressed in various ways, and reservations are also heard. Rabbi Yehuda Zoldan of Neveh Dekalim in the Gaza Strip talks about the struggle over values and the spirit against "empty and miserable humanism," but warns that "we must continue to live together as a society and as a nation for many more years in this land."
Even clearer is the voice of Rabbi Elisha Vishlitzky, one of the most important educators of the Merkaz Harav school. In an emotional speech at Kfar Maimon, he called for distancing from any pride and any bullying. "The way of redemption demands nerves of iron and endless patience," he said and with a heavy hint stated that "the State of Israel is not a vessel that one throws away in favor of the kingdom of the House of David. The (process of) redemption must be accorded courtesy." In Vishlitzky's words there is an echo of the words of his teacher, Rabbi Zvi Tau, the head of the Har Hamor yeshiva in Jerusalem, In a document that was distributed anonymously over the Internet, but which without a doubt expresses his opinion, the students were warned of a situation "in which a weighty minority succeeds in imposing its opinion by force on the regime and the authorities. This crumbles the entire state." They are also urged to be wary of arrogance and pride: "It is true that there is a great deal of power in the national religious public ... but we are still very far from leading the this tremendous journey of the State of Israel."
Religious Zionism's direction
If this is the ultimate aim, how is religious Zionism supposed to perceive its appropriate place at the head of the camp? In conversations with many people the reply comes up again and again: "face to face." The organization of visits by inhabitants of Yesha (the settlers' acronym for the territories of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and yeshiva boys to "the masses" of Israel spurred the imagination. The idea of going from house to house to influence broad strata of the population begin during the period of the referendum among registered members of the Likud; following its success a network of face-to-face visits - or "engagement" - was established. According to Rabbi Yigal Kamintzky, visits have already been made to 350,000 households. The idea of the unmediated encounter can lead to a breakthrough of the siege on those who feel that there voice is not heard, and as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner puts it: "The engagement movement is traveling on a road that bypasses the media, bypasses politics and bypasses demonstrations." Rabbi Tau says that "it is necessary to meet with our brother Jews, to enable them to leave the television for a moment and encounter a different spirit, a pure spirit, and one with clear, true and eternal beliefs. A bit of light will dispel much of the darkness and everything will begin to flow in a different direction."
Despite the "Chabadization" of religious Zionism, which is reflected in this mode of action, it is not focusing on an attempt to "bring people closer to Judaism" individually but rather is trying to bring about a political, cultural and even religious change in Israeli society as a whole, through extensive work in the field.
Rabbi Kamintzky explains: At the root of the "disengagement sickness" lies the desire to disengage ... from the entire past of the Jewish people, from its history, from its values, from its beliefs, from the belief in the G-d of Israel, from the destiny of the people and so on. Going from door to door in thousands of homes ... has taught us that the Jewish people is longing , thirsting and yearning for the true values, for the words of the living G-d."
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon, after whom Kfar Maimon is named, was the first minister of religious affairs in Israel. When he made the Shehekhiyanu blessing (thanking God for delivering us to this day) on the occasion of the declaration of the State of Israel by David Ben-Gurion, he established a pattern of religious recognition of a political act by a secular leader. Something of this model has been broken now. The damage to the settlement in Yesha is causing damage to the sense of partnership in the state. The scalpel that is cutting into the territories of the land cannot but puncture the aorta of the collective consciousness.
At Kfar Maimon the State of the Faithful was founded, which aspires to build itself up on the ruins and the crises of the existing State of Israel but it does not yet know how.
Kalman Neuman is a doctor of history and a graduate of the Mandel Institute for leadership.
The time has come for us believing Jews to stop being court Jews led by non-believing jewish leaders, who are mostly looking out for themselves and power (not the best interests of the Jewish poeple) and to start to take responsability for our own future as a people and a nation and start leading!
As written below in a Haaretz article, it seems that this message is sinking in.
Avi
Little by little the
At Kfar Maimon the State of the Faithful was founded
28/7/05
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/605606.html
By Kalman Neuman
Where is the Zionist religious public heading after the disengagement? There are those who are hoping that it will abandon the vision of the greater Land of Israel, return to the "historical partnership" with secular Zionism and hitch itself to social missions. Others are expecting a turning inwards and the emergence of a new model of "ultra-Orthodoxy in a crochet skullcap."
However, the conflict at Kfar Maimon indicates another direction.
Thirty years ago the attempt to settle at Sebastia in the West Bank became the cornerstone of a mass movement. The young people who came to Sebastia demanded to be real partners in fateful decisions. To a large extent they have succeeded in this. At Kfar Maimon this demand shifted into a higher gear. Here the State of the Faithful was founded, a state that will be led by leaders who are religious.
Advertisement
The public that gathered last week at Kfar Maimon - almost entirely from religious Zionism (apart from representatives of the messianic stream of Chabad) - does not see the future of the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria (West Bank) as a strictly political issue. It sees the disengagement plan as an expression of a value vacuum, mental tiredness and a loss of the dedication that characterized the generation of the state's founders. In their eyes, the struggle for Gush Katif is just the tip of the iceberg of the struggle for hegemony in the state. Many sat for hours in the broiling sun and listened to Torah lessons given by rabbis. There was no need to discuss the reasons for the opposition to the disengagement, and there was no reason to explain to the public why Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is not worthy of their trust. The rabbis described the disengagement not only as a political mistake and not only as a transgression of traditional Jewish law, but rather as a real desecration of the Holy Name, something for which there is no atonement.
Crisis in identity
To them the source of the collapse is clear: There are those who stress the prime minister's personal responsibility, but all of them see in the plan an expression of a crisis in Jewish identity, with respect to the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and the adoption of Western mass culture. As opposed to these, they describe the masses who gathered at Kfar Maimon as an idealist public that is sure of itself and prepared to take the reins from those who have grown tired. There is no need to convince the convinced. But the explanation touches the root: The struggle for Gush Katif is only the tip of the iceberg of the struggle for the State of Israel. The steering wheel of government must be passed into the hands of the religious public - it and only it is worthy of holding it.
On Wednesday morning many scores of them listened to a lesson by Rabbi Yehoshua Shapira, the head of the hesder yeshiva (combined Torah study and military service program) in Ramat Gan and one of the most charismatic figures in the eyes of the national religious youth, who explained the parallel between the individual and the nation. According to Hasidic thought, he said, the individual is made up of the anima (the physiological aspect, which is common to all animals), the spirit (the abilities that are common to all human beings) and the soul (the spiritual quality that exists only in Jews). The anima comes to the individual at birth, whereas the spirit enters him only when he reaches the age of mitzvoth (the age of commandment observance, 13 for males). The difficulty of reconciling these forces is the reason for tshe self-destructive tendencies in adolescence. The same development exists in the collective, explained Shapira. The national organism has an "anima" - it is the state. The state has to see to the material needs of the nation. The state was born in 1948, but the second stage of its development occurred in the Six-Day War. The connection to the Divine presence opened the heart to the "spirit," which is supposed to enter into the existing political structures, which are equivalent to the anima. And here is the rub: He is not disappointed with Sharon, as he has no faith in any secular leader. "I do not believe in a leader who does not come from the beit midrash (religious study house). There cannot be a man of the anima who leads the Jewish people in the era of the spirit. The spirit can come only from the beit midrash." The difficulties that the Jewish people have faced are stages of maturation, of the birth of the spirit from within the anima, which also entail the danger of confusion and self-destructive tendencies. The disengagement plan is an example of this.
The unwillingness to recognize a secular leadership and the demand for a "believing" leadership were expressed in the past in groups like Moshe Feiglin's Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish leadership). Now, with the disappointment with Sharon and the secular right as a whole, this line is gathering momentum, and similar things were heard at Kfar Maimon from rabbis like Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, the rabbi of Safed.
As one of the settlement rabbis said to me, "It could be that we will lose this battle (for Gush Katif), but we will certainly win the whole fight." The big fight is for hegemony in the state, and religious Zionism is intending to take the place of secular Zionism, which has become tired and has collapsed.
The struggle for hegemony is expressed in various ways, and reservations are also heard. Rabbi Yehuda Zoldan of Neveh Dekalim in the Gaza Strip talks about the struggle over values and the spirit against "empty and miserable humanism," but warns that "we must continue to live together as a society and as a nation for many more years in this land."
Even clearer is the voice of Rabbi Elisha Vishlitzky, one of the most important educators of the Merkaz Harav school. In an emotional speech at Kfar Maimon, he called for distancing from any pride and any bullying. "The way of redemption demands nerves of iron and endless patience," he said and with a heavy hint stated that "the State of Israel is not a vessel that one throws away in favor of the kingdom of the House of David. The (process of) redemption must be accorded courtesy." In Vishlitzky's words there is an echo of the words of his teacher, Rabbi Zvi Tau, the head of the Har Hamor yeshiva in Jerusalem, In a document that was distributed anonymously over the Internet, but which without a doubt expresses his opinion, the students were warned of a situation "in which a weighty minority succeeds in imposing its opinion by force on the regime and the authorities. This crumbles the entire state." They are also urged to be wary of arrogance and pride: "It is true that there is a great deal of power in the national religious public ... but we are still very far from leading the this tremendous journey of the State of Israel."
Religious Zionism's direction
If this is the ultimate aim, how is religious Zionism supposed to perceive its appropriate place at the head of the camp? In conversations with many people the reply comes up again and again: "face to face." The organization of visits by inhabitants of Yesha (the settlers' acronym for the territories of the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria in the West Bank, which also means "salvation" in Hebrew) and yeshiva boys to "the masses" of Israel spurred the imagination. The idea of going from house to house to influence broad strata of the population begin during the period of the referendum among registered members of the Likud; following its success a network of face-to-face visits - or "engagement" - was established. According to Rabbi Yigal Kamintzky, visits have already been made to 350,000 households. The idea of the unmediated encounter can lead to a breakthrough of the siege on those who feel that there voice is not heard, and as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner puts it: "The engagement movement is traveling on a road that bypasses the media, bypasses politics and bypasses demonstrations." Rabbi Tau says that "it is necessary to meet with our brother Jews, to enable them to leave the television for a moment and encounter a different spirit, a pure spirit, and one with clear, true and eternal beliefs. A bit of light will dispel much of the darkness and everything will begin to flow in a different direction."
Despite the "Chabadization" of religious Zionism, which is reflected in this mode of action, it is not focusing on an attempt to "bring people closer to Judaism" individually but rather is trying to bring about a political, cultural and even religious change in Israeli society as a whole, through extensive work in the field.
Rabbi Kamintzky explains: At the root of the "disengagement sickness" lies the desire to disengage ... from the entire past of the Jewish people, from its history, from its values, from its beliefs, from the belief in the G-d of Israel, from the destiny of the people and so on. Going from door to door in thousands of homes ... has taught us that the Jewish people is longing , thirsting and yearning for the true values, for the words of the living G-d."
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon, after whom Kfar Maimon is named, was the first minister of religious affairs in Israel. When he made the Shehekhiyanu blessing (thanking God for delivering us to this day) on the occasion of the declaration of the State of Israel by David Ben-Gurion, he established a pattern of religious recognition of a political act by a secular leader. Something of this model has been broken now. The damage to the settlement in Yesha is causing damage to the sense of partnership in the state. The scalpel that is cutting into the territories of the land cannot but puncture the aorta of the collective consciousness.
At Kfar Maimon the State of the Faithful was founded, which aspires to build itself up on the ruins and the crises of the existing State of Israel but it does not yet know how.
Kalman Neuman is a doctor of history and a graduate of the Mandel Institute for leadership.
Thought provoking scenes from the Mass March from Netivot and Kfar Maimon:
The Headline - Am Yisrael is beginning to awake from its slumber and its beautiful!!!
- Tens of thousands marching in the streets, miles long. Old and young, with strollers and bikes. Carrying bags of clothes and food.
- Every 100 meters seeing soldiers standing on both sides of the street, just standing there.
- In pitch black darkness, while walking between Netivot and Kfar Maimon, seeing in the distance lots of white lights.
- As getting closer to the lights seeing silouttes of thousands of soldiers lined up next to each other into the fields (on the sides of the road)
- Seeing lines of soldiers all lined up, arm in arm, line after line standing there to block us marching onwards
- Standing there, tens of thousands of marchers, face to face with fellow Israeli soldiers not letting us continue to march
- The feeling of utter depression that as fellow Jews are being killed by rockets in Gaza and Sderot, with our army and government doing absolutely nothing to protect them, having an army of soldiers prevent us, fellow Jews, from marching!
- Playing cat and mouse trying to get passed the soldiers to continue marching to Kfar Maimon.
- Standing face to face to soldiers, fellow Jews, who wouldn't talk to you or even take the water you offered to them, knowing that they are thirsty, waiting for their officers to bring them water
- A feeling of excitement when seeing hunders of marchers break through the soldiers and start running through the watermelon fields onwards to Kfar Maimon!!
- Breaking through the soldiers and getting run after by a Border Police Officer who threw me to the ground into a pit.
- Having the officer yell at me to get up and move away or else he would break my head open
- Asking the officer to help me get up
- Having the officer tell me 'Achi, you are my brother, I don't want to hurt you (which is illegal!) but if you don't move I will break your head open - (at the same time as hearing him call me "his brother", he has no problem breaking my head open for wanting to walk past him!)
- Sleeping in a sleeping bag in a 150 Dunam field outside of Kfar Maimon together with tens of thousands of fellow Jews, young and old.
- Being woken up in the morning at 5:45 to calls of "everyone wake up now, we are being surrounded by soldiers to evacuate us!"
- Standing up out of my sleeping bag and seeing thousands of soldiers surrounding the tent encampment
- Davening in a minyan and then being told to march quickly into Kfar Maimon before the soldiers evacuate come to evacuate us
- Running through lines of soldiers standing around surrounding the tent encampment (not yet stopping people from getting by them) in my tallis and tefillin
- Looking behind me and seeing the soldiers hook arm in arm to stop the thousands in the encampment from getting out and walking into Kfar Maimon
- Finding a shady place to sit down and wait for instructions in Kfar Maimon
- Settling down with my stuff outside a house in Kfar Maimon and asking to use a bathroom of the house owners.
- Officers pacing barbed wire in all the holes in the fences around Kfar Maimon
- Sleeping at nights with helicopters and mazlating (pilotless airplanes) flying overhead all night long
- All roads leading to Kfar Maimon blocked by army and police not allowing people to come
- Thousands of people get to Kfar Maimon by driving through the fields or walking from place where stopped by army/police
- Even roads through fields were blocked by army/police
- Seeing encampments of soldiers surrounding the whole of Kfar Maimon - looked like a scene of a warzone)
- Walking around the fence singing "ohavim et tzahal" and "chayal, shoter, ohavim otcha"
- Soldiers not allowed to speak or smile at us protestors locked up in Kfar Maimon
- Seeing people all day long talking serious talks with soldiers/policemen
- Seeing tens of thousands of people living for 3 days in a village of 180 families!
- Torah classes and children's activities taking place all day long for the thousands of people locked up in Kfar Maimon
- Seeing soldiers and citizens talking to each other through the fence (even though soldiers under orders not to talk to us). Many times it was friends, relatives and even brothers!
- Marching, 50,000 people strong to the gates of Kfar Maimon to continue march to Gush Katif
- 50,000 people being stopped in their tracks and sitting in place for an hour because 20,000 policemen and soldiers standing on other side of gate not letting us through
As Adir Zik used to say "Am Yisrael will prevail"
Am Yisrael is waking up and Am Yisreal will prevail. The powers of justice and faith will prevail over the powers of power, corruption and injustice!
Avi
The Headline - Am Yisrael is beginning to awake from its slumber and its beautiful!!!
- Tens of thousands marching in the streets, miles long. Old and young, with strollers and bikes. Carrying bags of clothes and food.
- Every 100 meters seeing soldiers standing on both sides of the street, just standing there.
- In pitch black darkness, while walking between Netivot and Kfar Maimon, seeing in the distance lots of white lights.
- As getting closer to the lights seeing silouttes of thousands of soldiers lined up next to each other into the fields (on the sides of the road)
- Seeing lines of soldiers all lined up, arm in arm, line after line standing there to block us marching onwards
- Standing there, tens of thousands of marchers, face to face with fellow Israeli soldiers not letting us continue to march
- The feeling of utter depression that as fellow Jews are being killed by rockets in Gaza and Sderot, with our army and government doing absolutely nothing to protect them, having an army of soldiers prevent us, fellow Jews, from marching!
- Playing cat and mouse trying to get passed the soldiers to continue marching to Kfar Maimon.
- Standing face to face to soldiers, fellow Jews, who wouldn't talk to you or even take the water you offered to them, knowing that they are thirsty, waiting for their officers to bring them water
- A feeling of excitement when seeing hunders of marchers break through the soldiers and start running through the watermelon fields onwards to Kfar Maimon!!
- Breaking through the soldiers and getting run after by a Border Police Officer who threw me to the ground into a pit.
- Having the officer yell at me to get up and move away or else he would break my head open
- Asking the officer to help me get up
- Having the officer tell me 'Achi, you are my brother, I don't want to hurt you (which is illegal!) but if you don't move I will break your head open - (at the same time as hearing him call me "his brother", he has no problem breaking my head open for wanting to walk past him!)
- Sleeping in a sleeping bag in a 150 Dunam field outside of Kfar Maimon together with tens of thousands of fellow Jews, young and old.
- Being woken up in the morning at 5:45 to calls of "everyone wake up now, we are being surrounded by soldiers to evacuate us!"
- Standing up out of my sleeping bag and seeing thousands of soldiers surrounding the tent encampment
- Davening in a minyan and then being told to march quickly into Kfar Maimon before the soldiers evacuate come to evacuate us
- Running through lines of soldiers standing around surrounding the tent encampment (not yet stopping people from getting by them) in my tallis and tefillin
- Looking behind me and seeing the soldiers hook arm in arm to stop the thousands in the encampment from getting out and walking into Kfar Maimon
- Finding a shady place to sit down and wait for instructions in Kfar Maimon
- Settling down with my stuff outside a house in Kfar Maimon and asking to use a bathroom of the house owners.
- Officers pacing barbed wire in all the holes in the fences around Kfar Maimon
- Sleeping at nights with helicopters and mazlating (pilotless airplanes) flying overhead all night long
- All roads leading to Kfar Maimon blocked by army and police not allowing people to come
- Thousands of people get to Kfar Maimon by driving through the fields or walking from place where stopped by army/police
- Even roads through fields were blocked by army/police
- Seeing encampments of soldiers surrounding the whole of Kfar Maimon - looked like a scene of a warzone)
- Walking around the fence singing "ohavim et tzahal" and "chayal, shoter, ohavim otcha"
- Soldiers not allowed to speak or smile at us protestors locked up in Kfar Maimon
- Seeing people all day long talking serious talks with soldiers/policemen
- Seeing tens of thousands of people living for 3 days in a village of 180 families!
- Torah classes and children's activities taking place all day long for the thousands of people locked up in Kfar Maimon
- Seeing soldiers and citizens talking to each other through the fence (even though soldiers under orders not to talk to us). Many times it was friends, relatives and even brothers!
- Marching, 50,000 people strong to the gates of Kfar Maimon to continue march to Gush Katif
- 50,000 people being stopped in their tracks and sitting in place for an hour because 20,000 policemen and soldiers standing on other side of gate not letting us through
As Adir Zik used to say "Am Yisrael will prevail"
Am Yisrael is waking up and Am Yisreal will prevail. The powers of justice and faith will prevail over the powers of power, corruption and injustice!
Avi
Nobody is listening
Haaretz 24/07/2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtDisengagement.jhtml?itemNo=603990&contrassID=23&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=4
By Ari Shavit and Yair Sheleg
Is Israel being torn apart? Does the protest campaign of the disengagement opponents signal a deep internal rift? Has the process of dividing the land become a challenge to Israeli sovereignty?
Rabbi Yaakov Meidan is not one of the extremist rabbis of Yesha (acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). On the contrary, over the years he has been engaged in attempts at dialogue with the secular public. He and Prof. Ruth Gavison of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law drew up a pact concerning religion-state affairs. Together with Major General (res.) Uzi Dayan, he formulated the "Brothers Dialogue" covenant to prevent refusal by soldiers to obey certain orders. Over the past few months, he also tried to draw up another covenant to cool down the struggle and define its rules.
But now, after the attempt at dialogue has failed, Rabbi Meidan is on fire. He is trying to control himself, but has difficulty doing so. He is mood-swinging between the desire to preserve the linchpin of the state framework and his feeling that a severe wrong has been done. Between the desire to express vigorous opposition to the uprooting and the desire not to refuse an order. Between disengagement and settlement. Between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel.
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Recently, he set forth his position on the disengagement question in terms drawn from the story of "King Solomon's judgment" - except that in his commentary, which is based on the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the real mother has to avoid simultaneously the rending of the child and giving him up altogether.
Meidan settled in Gush Etzion - a bloc of settlements south of Bethlehem - 36 years ago and is a graduate of the first class of the large Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (combining religious studies and military service) in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He will become the yeshiva head at Hanukkah. Fifty-five years old and the father of seven children, Rabbi Meidan is tall, light of foot, energetic and sharp. Even though he is not as well well-known as Rabbis Moshe Levinger, Yoel Bin-Nun and Menachem Fruman, his influence today is far greater than theirs. He is a member of the inner team of settler leaders trying to reach agreements with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on limiting and restraining the anti-disengagement struggle. He is the rabbinical authority who is the source of legitimization for those in the territories who are trying not to burn all the bridges and not enter into a total confrontation with the state and the army. Nevertheless, even Meidan finds himself being pushed into a corner. Hoping and despairing. Believing and distraught. On the brink of the abyss.
Rabbi Meidan, how difficult is this moment?
It is beyond terrible. Beyond terrible. Understand: we are being judged as the ruined city, of which it is said that it shall not be rebuilt. We are being judged as a camp of lepers.
How severe is the crisis?
"The crisis is of dual significance. One is to take Jews who finally arrived here after 2,000 years of exile so that they would never again be driven from their homes and to drive them from their homes forcefully. After 2,000 years of exile, in which we dreamed of having a state from which we would not be driven out, that dream has been shattered. Suddenly it turns out that Jews can be expelled. Suddenly it turns out that homes of Jews can be laid waste. That Jewish graves can be uprooted. After 50 years in which we thought that none of this was possible, this act returns us in large measure to the tragic Jewish situation of pre-Zionist times.
"But there is also a second crisis. Decades ago, our public, the religious-Zionist public, made a strategic decision to live together with secular Zionism; together with the public that is not religiously observant. We decided to forge an alliance. An alliance based on love for this land. On the desire for the revival of the state. Now that alliance has been broken. Those who went with us hand in hand to every place, including into the fire, have plunged a knife in our back."
Who plunged a knife in your back?
"I would prefer not to name names. That is the lesson I drew from what happened 10 years ago, before Rabin's assassination. But I say that there were those who were out to get religious Zionism in order to plunge a knife into its back. There were those who decided to thrust religious Zionism 30 years back, to restore it to its natural size, to its previous place."
What you are saying is very grave. You are saying that disengagement is not only the evacuation of territory and of settlements; that it is also an attempt by the secular public in Israel to assault the national-religious public.
"I am very sensitive to the word 'evacuation.' We are not dust. We are not hametz of Passover eve. We are not some dirt on the table that is evacuated. We have roots. We struck deep roots both in the dunes of Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlement bloc] and also in the hard rocks of Gush Etzion and other places. So this is not an evacuation. We are not being wiped off the table; we are being uprooted. And uprooted with great difficulty.
"To address your substantive point: my complaints are not against the secular public as a whole. In our meetings with the broad public, there is a good, warm feeling, which encourages support. Had it not been for that support, I would have found it difficult to survive these last months. The problem is with the secular elites. In the attitude of those elites I have the feeling of a knife in the back."
Do you truly believe the secular elite has risen up against you in order to destroy you?
"Yes."
So from your point of view the disengagement is not a strategic move - justified or not - but a deliberate attempt to break the religious Zionist movement?
"I must be accurate: for part of the secular elites breaking religious Zionism is the goal. For others, breaking us is not the goal, but a price they are willing to pay. And to pay easily. When someone rises up against you, it is a pain of a particular kind. When someone does not care at all whether you are broken and does not care where you will wallow after being broken, that is pain of a different kind."
For years you conducted a dialogue with the democratic-secular elite. That dialogue was important to you. You invested quite a bit in it. Do you feel today that the dialogue was a lie?
"There were a great many falsities in our alliance with the secular elites. In retrospect, it turns out that a great many of those who sat with us and dialogued with us were pretending. When the test came, they did not meet it. They turned their back on us."
Do you feel you have been betrayed?
"My dialogue with Prof. Ruth Gavison was good and remains good. Even when we did not reach agreement, she met the test. But when I sat in the Israel Democracy Institute with her reference group - senior jurists and senior academics and left-wing leaders - I had the feeling that I was meeting with people who are living in a glass tower. People who are looking at an entire public being uprooted from its life project and from everything it believes in and being thrown to who-knows where - without having the slightest understanding of what is facing them. When I sat across from them, I had the feeling they were looking at me the way you watch a movie and examining everything according to the minutiae of the law. As though the orders and the law have become God. Without justice, without morality, without anything. Only the order and the law.
"I felt that I was facing a sealed glittering wall. That I was being looked at through thick glass. Our public was observed like a laboratory animal. People raise their hand against me and tell me, If you want to shout, fine, but not between 2 and 4, during the siesta. That is something I could not accept. I could not accept it."
Did you draw operative conclusions?
"Yes. In order to forge an alliance with the secular elites, we neglected our more natural alliance with the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] public. Today I think that was a mistake. In the future we will behave differently. In the past, with all the disagreements, I thought there was also something we could learn from the secular elite. After I saw the secular elite stick a knife in my back and turn away from its own values - democracy and human rights - I have no more to learn from them. After all, from the standpoint of democracy, what happened here is a disgrace; and what happened here from the viewpoint of the judicial system's protection of human rights is a shame. The courts, the press, the research institutes - no one heard us. No one heard our outcry. But it is not just us. The democratic elite did not remain loyal to the values in the name of which it spoke all these years. Therefore there are no positive values I can get from them. I have a serious problem with them."
If so, your next dialogue will not be with the Democracy Institute but with the leader of Haredi Judaism, Rabbi Elyashiv.
"Correct. Only then, when religious Zionism and the Haredi public stand together, will our place be different, will we be treated differently."
What is the purpose of your large protest campaign this week?
"Our feeling is that our outcry is not being heard. [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon does not hear it, the courts do not hear it, north Tel Aviv does not hear it. Our feeling is that we are crying out and they are shutting their ears. Therefore, in this campaign we want to let forth an outcry that will not allow them to shut their ears any longer. It is a march of outcry. It is meant to breach the wall of your insensitivity."
But you are not marching against the Knesset. You are not marching against Sharon's ranch. You are marching against the IDF. You are endangering the IDF.
"The IDF is precious to us. It is not a hostage in our struggle. But whoever decided on the uprooting and whoever decided not to hold a referendum on the uprooting stole democracy. And when he stole democracy, he should have been aware that this would have a price. That price will trickle down into the army. After all, they are sending IDF equipment to destroy Jewish homes. They are sending the army rabbinate to uproot Jewish graves. They are sending the army to turn 50 synagogues into heaps of ruins. Obviously this is going to have a price."
Do you consider these acts to be transgressions, to be forbidden acts?
"Let us not say it is a transgression. Let us say it is a great commandment. But did anyone think about what effect deeds like these have on a Jewish soul? Look what happens to us when someone scrawls one slogan on one synagogue in Germany. And here they are going to destroy dozens of synagogues. They are going to do what the goyim did not dare do to us for 50 years anywhere. Understand the meaning of this. Understand the feeling of hurban [destruction]."
But there was a sovereign decision here, a decision by the government and the Knesset, a majority decision.
"Do you know what the meaning is of an IDF bulldozer driven by a soldier who was conscripted to defend the Jewish people smashing and breaking the walls of a synagogue and reducing it to rubble? And trampling with the treads the place where the Holy Ark stood, where Torah scrolls were placed. If I were that soldier, my soul would be so torn that I do not know how I would be able to withstand it. I do not know what I would do."
What would you do?
"That is a very difficult question. Very difficult. It is a question that touches also on dragging people from the home in which they have lived for 30 years. Dragging children, dragging mothers. Let me ask you: If your mothers were there, would you drag them out?"
What you are actually telling us is that if you were a soldier and you were ordered to demolish a synagogue structure, you would not carry out the order. You would not do it.
"I find it very difficult to see how I would be capable of doing it."
And when a student of yours asks you how he should behave during the disengagement?
"I hope the IDF will have the wisdom now to have soldiers who feel this is their milk and their blood do it. I am against refusing orders. I think it is important for our soldiers to be there. Especially so they can calm down the situation. But whoever sends soldiers to drag people from their homes is assuming a very heavy responsibility. He is committing an act without both reason and heart. I want to see [Chief of Staff] Dan Halutz drag his mother from her house. Is he capable of that? Let him not demand that others do what he is not capable of doing."
Effectively, you are preaching `gray disobedience.' On the face of it you are against refusal to obey, but in practice you are encouraging every religious soldier to go to his commanding officer and say: I can't do it.
"The IDF has enough soldiers who will do the dragging and the demolition without their hearts being wounded. It will be hard for them, too, but for our soldiers it is difficult to impossible."
The importance of what you are saying is that there will be a lone soldier who will say "I can't" and then another lone soldier who will say "I can't," until there will be an entire public of lone soldiers who do not carry out the army's orders and do not implement the decisions of an elected government.
"There will be a great many lone soldiers who might even total a large percentage of the army. But they will not be a public. And they will not refuse. They will ask to be assigned to a different task."
There is refusal already now. Rabbis are inciting soldiers and the spiritual leadership of the religious Zionist movement is bringing the IDF to a situation of crisis.
"One way or the other, the IDF is in a difficult situation. And it will find itself in a very difficult situation. But the responsibility lies with the prime minister and the defense minister, who are the father and mother of the IDF. They know what the IDF is made of. They know who its soldiers are. They created the crisis.
"Our goal is not to break the IDF. But we cannot prevent the difficulty for the IDF; that is impossible. We want to bring the IDF to a situation in which things will be difficult, but not to a situation in which it will not be able to cope."
Rabbi Meidan, you are pressuring the IDF to make it cry for help. You are trying to make the army tell the political echelon that it cannot carry out the mission. Your approach is a danger to life and limb.
"We will stay 2,000 cubits from any act of violence."
The problem is not only violence. The problem is disobedience that will break up the army.
"The IDF is being broken from two directions. The breaking begins when one sends soldiers to execute missions they are incapable of executing. In contrast, we are taking steps that the IDF can deal with.
"But allow me to ask you a left-wing question: What is your alternative? That's what people on the left like to ask, isn't it? `What is the alternative?' To tell the soldiers to break their hearts and do something totally contrary to everything they have been educated to believe?"
The alternative is to tell your students that they are soldiers of Israeli sovereignty and must carry out every legal decision made by that sovereign state.
"Our soldiers are certainly soldiers of Israeli sovereignty. But that is not a reason to shatter the values in which they were raised. To drag the people of Gush Katif from their homes is to trample our values without a justified reason."
Rabbi Meidan, because of your ideology, I, Ari Shavit, served in a detention facility for Palestinians. I did what ran contrary to my deepest beliefs in order to be loyal to the one Israeli sovereignty and to the alliance between us. Now, when your turn has come to fulfill your part in the sovereign alliance, you are not doing it.
"When you served as a warder it was no harder for you than for anyone else, it was required for the security of us all. On the other hand, here there is a specific matter of many people, perhaps a quarter of the army, who are being asked to do something contrary to their belief. I do not think it is right to break their belief."
For years people on the left manned checkpoints because of the settlers, served as warders because of them, guarded your settlements. That seared their hearts no less than the disengagement is searing your hearts.
"There is no resemblance. The checkpoints guarded Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The detention facilities did not protect the occupation, but security. It is true that left-wing people guarded the settlements, but there is no comparison between the difficulty they had and the difficulty of removing good people from their homes and demolishing them."
You show consideration for the feelings of your public, but have no pity at all for the feelings of others.
"Uzi Dayan told me explicitly that if he received an order to remove Arabs from their homes, he would refuse to obey it. And he was a candidate for chief of staff. Everyone on the left and in the center says that if he were told to expel Arabs from their homes, he would refuse. We are not even talking about refusal. We are only asking you not to force us to trample our values."
Your comments paint a harsh picture - two opposing Israeli stories are engaged in a frontal clash. Like two cars speeding toward each other, with neither of them willing to move to the shoulder.
"There will be a confrontation. There will be a serious jolt. But I believe that it will be a chassis accident, not a total loss. After a chassis accident, a car can still keep going. It sputters, it is damaged, but it still runs."
You are taking a tremendous responsibility on yourself: it is a very thin line.
"The line is thin because we were left only a thin line. We are doing what we are doing with a heavy heart. And we are taking care and making every effort not to cross the line that would mean the ruin of the IDF. But we have no choice. The alternative is not to protest the destruction of the major tenets of Zionism. That is impossible from our point of view. It would mean a donkey's burial for Zionism."
Where is the maturity the Zionist left showed for years? Where is the greatness that [Menachem] Begin showed in the "Altalena" episode? [In June 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the IDF to open fire on a gunship named "Altalena" which was off the Tel Aviv shore. The ship was carrying arms for the Irgun, a pre-state underground organization.] You are ready to risk everything.
"We are against violence. Heaven forbid that anyone should raise a hand against a soldier. Heaven forbid that anyone should verbally abuse a soldier. Under no circumstances will there be any form of violence. But like Rabbi Kook, I too think that even in the case of Solomon's Judgment, the real mother does not agree to her child being cut in half, but also does not yield. A son whose mother gave him up will not forgive her. And in this case, too, the son will not forgive us if we forgo everything for the sake of peace and tranquillity. And the son is not just Gush Katif. This son is the Land of Israel. This is the whole ideology of Zionism and settlement. And that ideology will not forgive us if we forgo it. Nor will we forgive ourselves if we give up so quickly. Therefore we will not bring things to a crisis point which has no remedy, but neither will we yield."
You are absolutely walking on the brink. You are endangering Israeli statehood. The rabbis of religious Zionism - Rabbi Eliahu and Rabbi Shapira - are encouraging refusal on the part of soldiers.
"With all my smallness, with all the fact that I am ignorant and small compared to them, I am ready to say the complete opposite of what those rabbis said. I think a religiously observant soldier should not refuse to obey an order. I say so explicitly: I do not accept refusal to obey an order. It is totally unacceptable to me. But when I am asked whether I would be capable of doing these terrible things I say that I do not know whether I would be capable. And I think when I say that I am not crossing the red line. Because if I do nothing, that will also have a price. If we are too afraid and leave Gush Katif without opposition, that will mean the destruction of Zionism. That is something we are forbidden to do. It is forbidden. Our loyalty to the land and to settlement obligates us to carry out a large protest."
Your campaign this week places Israeli democracy in jeopardy.
"On the contrary: it is a campaign in favor of democracy, a campaign against the destruction of democracy."
But you are not protesting; you are trying to scuttle a legal political decision by force.
"We are trying to execute a democratic preemption. To force the Knesset and the government to think again. After all, this is a move that contradicts Zionism. It involves the razing of an entire bloc of settlements. A decision like this could have been made in a referendum. Responsibility rests with whoever decided not to let the decision be made by a referendum. It is he who brought the dispute into the IDF, who created the rift in the nation. And he did it for malicious reasons, out of malicious intent."
Is the government of Israel a malicious government?
"No. I did not say that. But there was malice here."
What do you mean?
"Regrettably, Sharon is acting out of a feeling that the prevention of violence is not his highest priority. In a cold analysis, one can arrive at the conclusion that from his point of view, if there is bloodshed, it will ensure the success of the uprooting and also ensure the success of the acts of uprooting to come."
What you are saying is extremely grave.
"I will put it cautiously. I know preventing violence is the chief consideration of the Yesha Council. Preventing violence is very high among the IDF's considerations. I am afraid that in the prime minister's milieu, the prevention of violence does not have the highest priority. I heard the assessment of a senior intelligence person who maintains that Sharon has an interest in the eruption of violence, because it will reduce the pressures for additional withdrawals. And I add: also because violence will send an internal signal that only Sharon is capable of coping with the settlers. That is why I agreed to this interview: because what is now incumbent on all of us - on the IDF, on the elites of the left and on us - is to prevent violence. To prevent bloodshed."
But it is your struggle that is liable to bring bloodshed. It is liable to endanger the very existence of Zionism.
"Our struggle is a last attempt to save Zionism. To save Zionism. Without Zionism we have no existence here. And Zionism is the belief that Jews come to their homeland and redeem it so that no one will move them. That is Zionism. I am not familiar with any other Zionism. And the act of uprooting strikes down Zionism.
"I do not want to think about the possibility of the annulment of Zionism. That possibility is beyond my line of thought. But to send the IDF to raze Gush Katif is to deliver a very severe blow to Zionism, a very severe blow. And what we are doing now is trying to prevent that. Until the last minute to try and prevent it."
In fact, the real danger is that the disengagement is turning into a religious war.
"`Religious war' is an incorrect term. But this summer will be a very dramatic period in the contest for the internal identity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel."
And where will you and we be at the end of this summer?
"You will certainly interview all kinds of people about the determination with which they carried out the act. I may be in prison."
Do you really think it will come to that?
"I do not flinch from that possibility. I am taking it into account. I will not be violent. I will carry out deeds I consider legitimate. But if the law wants to punish me for them, I will go to prison without batting an eyelash."
In other words, one casualty of this campaign is already the supremacy of the law.
"I have never recognized the supremacy of the law. Justice and morality are far more important to me than the supremacy of the law. When the law stands opposite justice and morality, I stand on the other side."n
Haaretz 24/07/2005
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArtDisengagement.jhtml?itemNo=603990&contrassID=23&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=4
By Ari Shavit and Yair Sheleg
Is Israel being torn apart? Does the protest campaign of the disengagement opponents signal a deep internal rift? Has the process of dividing the land become a challenge to Israeli sovereignty?
Rabbi Yaakov Meidan is not one of the extremist rabbis of Yesha (acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). On the contrary, over the years he has been engaged in attempts at dialogue with the secular public. He and Prof. Ruth Gavison of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law drew up a pact concerning religion-state affairs. Together with Major General (res.) Uzi Dayan, he formulated the "Brothers Dialogue" covenant to prevent refusal by soldiers to obey certain orders. Over the past few months, he also tried to draw up another covenant to cool down the struggle and define its rules.
But now, after the attempt at dialogue has failed, Rabbi Meidan is on fire. He is trying to control himself, but has difficulty doing so. He is mood-swinging between the desire to preserve the linchpin of the state framework and his feeling that a severe wrong has been done. Between the desire to express vigorous opposition to the uprooting and the desire not to refuse an order. Between disengagement and settlement. Between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel.
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Recently, he set forth his position on the disengagement question in terms drawn from the story of "King Solomon's judgment" - except that in his commentary, which is based on the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the real mother has to avoid simultaneously the rending of the child and giving him up altogether.
Meidan settled in Gush Etzion - a bloc of settlements south of Bethlehem - 36 years ago and is a graduate of the first class of the large Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (combining religious studies and military service) in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He will become the yeshiva head at Hanukkah. Fifty-five years old and the father of seven children, Rabbi Meidan is tall, light of foot, energetic and sharp. Even though he is not as well well-known as Rabbis Moshe Levinger, Yoel Bin-Nun and Menachem Fruman, his influence today is far greater than theirs. He is a member of the inner team of settler leaders trying to reach agreements with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on limiting and restraining the anti-disengagement struggle. He is the rabbinical authority who is the source of legitimization for those in the territories who are trying not to burn all the bridges and not enter into a total confrontation with the state and the army. Nevertheless, even Meidan finds himself being pushed into a corner. Hoping and despairing. Believing and distraught. On the brink of the abyss.
Rabbi Meidan, how difficult is this moment?
It is beyond terrible. Beyond terrible. Understand: we are being judged as the ruined city, of which it is said that it shall not be rebuilt. We are being judged as a camp of lepers.
How severe is the crisis?
"The crisis is of dual significance. One is to take Jews who finally arrived here after 2,000 years of exile so that they would never again be driven from their homes and to drive them from their homes forcefully. After 2,000 years of exile, in which we dreamed of having a state from which we would not be driven out, that dream has been shattered. Suddenly it turns out that Jews can be expelled. Suddenly it turns out that homes of Jews can be laid waste. That Jewish graves can be uprooted. After 50 years in which we thought that none of this was possible, this act returns us in large measure to the tragic Jewish situation of pre-Zionist times.
"But there is also a second crisis. Decades ago, our public, the religious-Zionist public, made a strategic decision to live together with secular Zionism; together with the public that is not religiously observant. We decided to forge an alliance. An alliance based on love for this land. On the desire for the revival of the state. Now that alliance has been broken. Those who went with us hand in hand to every place, including into the fire, have plunged a knife in our back."
Who plunged a knife in your back?
"I would prefer not to name names. That is the lesson I drew from what happened 10 years ago, before Rabin's assassination. But I say that there were those who were out to get religious Zionism in order to plunge a knife into its back. There were those who decided to thrust religious Zionism 30 years back, to restore it to its natural size, to its previous place."
What you are saying is very grave. You are saying that disengagement is not only the evacuation of territory and of settlements; that it is also an attempt by the secular public in Israel to assault the national-religious public.
"I am very sensitive to the word 'evacuation.' We are not dust. We are not hametz of Passover eve. We are not some dirt on the table that is evacuated. We have roots. We struck deep roots both in the dunes of Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlement bloc] and also in the hard rocks of Gush Etzion and other places. So this is not an evacuation. We are not being wiped off the table; we are being uprooted. And uprooted with great difficulty.
"To address your substantive point: my complaints are not against the secular public as a whole. In our meetings with the broad public, there is a good, warm feeling, which encourages support. Had it not been for that support, I would have found it difficult to survive these last months. The problem is with the secular elites. In the attitude of those elites I have the feeling of a knife in the back."
Do you truly believe the secular elite has risen up against you in order to destroy you?
"Yes."
So from your point of view the disengagement is not a strategic move - justified or not - but a deliberate attempt to break the religious Zionist movement?
"I must be accurate: for part of the secular elites breaking religious Zionism is the goal. For others, breaking us is not the goal, but a price they are willing to pay. And to pay easily. When someone rises up against you, it is a pain of a particular kind. When someone does not care at all whether you are broken and does not care where you will wallow after being broken, that is pain of a different kind."
For years you conducted a dialogue with the democratic-secular elite. That dialogue was important to you. You invested quite a bit in it. Do you feel today that the dialogue was a lie?
"There were a great many falsities in our alliance with the secular elites. In retrospect, it turns out that a great many of those who sat with us and dialogued with us were pretending. When the test came, they did not meet it. They turned their back on us."
Do you feel you have been betrayed?
"My dialogue with Prof. Ruth Gavison was good and remains good. Even when we did not reach agreement, she met the test. But when I sat in the Israel Democracy Institute with her reference group - senior jurists and senior academics and left-wing leaders - I had the feeling that I was meeting with people who are living in a glass tower. People who are looking at an entire public being uprooted from its life project and from everything it believes in and being thrown to who-knows where - without having the slightest understanding of what is facing them. When I sat across from them, I had the feeling they were looking at me the way you watch a movie and examining everything according to the minutiae of the law. As though the orders and the law have become God. Without justice, without morality, without anything. Only the order and the law.
"I felt that I was facing a sealed glittering wall. That I was being looked at through thick glass. Our public was observed like a laboratory animal. People raise their hand against me and tell me, If you want to shout, fine, but not between 2 and 4, during the siesta. That is something I could not accept. I could not accept it."
Did you draw operative conclusions?
"Yes. In order to forge an alliance with the secular elites, we neglected our more natural alliance with the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] public. Today I think that was a mistake. In the future we will behave differently. In the past, with all the disagreements, I thought there was also something we could learn from the secular elite. After I saw the secular elite stick a knife in my back and turn away from its own values - democracy and human rights - I have no more to learn from them. After all, from the standpoint of democracy, what happened here is a disgrace; and what happened here from the viewpoint of the judicial system's protection of human rights is a shame. The courts, the press, the research institutes - no one heard us. No one heard our outcry. But it is not just us. The democratic elite did not remain loyal to the values in the name of which it spoke all these years. Therefore there are no positive values I can get from them. I have a serious problem with them."
If so, your next dialogue will not be with the Democracy Institute but with the leader of Haredi Judaism, Rabbi Elyashiv.
"Correct. Only then, when religious Zionism and the Haredi public stand together, will our place be different, will we be treated differently."
What is the purpose of your large protest campaign this week?
"Our feeling is that our outcry is not being heard. [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon does not hear it, the courts do not hear it, north Tel Aviv does not hear it. Our feeling is that we are crying out and they are shutting their ears. Therefore, in this campaign we want to let forth an outcry that will not allow them to shut their ears any longer. It is a march of outcry. It is meant to breach the wall of your insensitivity."
But you are not marching against the Knesset. You are not marching against Sharon's ranch. You are marching against the IDF. You are endangering the IDF.
"The IDF is precious to us. It is not a hostage in our struggle. But whoever decided on the uprooting and whoever decided not to hold a referendum on the uprooting stole democracy. And when he stole democracy, he should have been aware that this would have a price. That price will trickle down into the army. After all, they are sending IDF equipment to destroy Jewish homes. They are sending the army rabbinate to uproot Jewish graves. They are sending the army to turn 50 synagogues into heaps of ruins. Obviously this is going to have a price."
Do you consider these acts to be transgressions, to be forbidden acts?
"Let us not say it is a transgression. Let us say it is a great commandment. But did anyone think about what effect deeds like these have on a Jewish soul? Look what happens to us when someone scrawls one slogan on one synagogue in Germany. And here they are going to destroy dozens of synagogues. They are going to do what the goyim did not dare do to us for 50 years anywhere. Understand the meaning of this. Understand the feeling of hurban [destruction]."
But there was a sovereign decision here, a decision by the government and the Knesset, a majority decision.
"Do you know what the meaning is of an IDF bulldozer driven by a soldier who was conscripted to defend the Jewish people smashing and breaking the walls of a synagogue and reducing it to rubble? And trampling with the treads the place where the Holy Ark stood, where Torah scrolls were placed. If I were that soldier, my soul would be so torn that I do not know how I would be able to withstand it. I do not know what I would do."
What would you do?
"That is a very difficult question. Very difficult. It is a question that touches also on dragging people from the home in which they have lived for 30 years. Dragging children, dragging mothers. Let me ask you: If your mothers were there, would you drag them out?"
What you are actually telling us is that if you were a soldier and you were ordered to demolish a synagogue structure, you would not carry out the order. You would not do it.
"I find it very difficult to see how I would be capable of doing it."
And when a student of yours asks you how he should behave during the disengagement?
"I hope the IDF will have the wisdom now to have soldiers who feel this is their milk and their blood do it. I am against refusing orders. I think it is important for our soldiers to be there. Especially so they can calm down the situation. But whoever sends soldiers to drag people from their homes is assuming a very heavy responsibility. He is committing an act without both reason and heart. I want to see [Chief of Staff] Dan Halutz drag his mother from her house. Is he capable of that? Let him not demand that others do what he is not capable of doing."
Effectively, you are preaching `gray disobedience.' On the face of it you are against refusal to obey, but in practice you are encouraging every religious soldier to go to his commanding officer and say: I can't do it.
"The IDF has enough soldiers who will do the dragging and the demolition without their hearts being wounded. It will be hard for them, too, but for our soldiers it is difficult to impossible."
The importance of what you are saying is that there will be a lone soldier who will say "I can't" and then another lone soldier who will say "I can't," until there will be an entire public of lone soldiers who do not carry out the army's orders and do not implement the decisions of an elected government.
"There will be a great many lone soldiers who might even total a large percentage of the army. But they will not be a public. And they will not refuse. They will ask to be assigned to a different task."
There is refusal already now. Rabbis are inciting soldiers and the spiritual leadership of the religious Zionist movement is bringing the IDF to a situation of crisis.
"One way or the other, the IDF is in a difficult situation. And it will find itself in a very difficult situation. But the responsibility lies with the prime minister and the defense minister, who are the father and mother of the IDF. They know what the IDF is made of. They know who its soldiers are. They created the crisis.
"Our goal is not to break the IDF. But we cannot prevent the difficulty for the IDF; that is impossible. We want to bring the IDF to a situation in which things will be difficult, but not to a situation in which it will not be able to cope."
Rabbi Meidan, you are pressuring the IDF to make it cry for help. You are trying to make the army tell the political echelon that it cannot carry out the mission. Your approach is a danger to life and limb.
"We will stay 2,000 cubits from any act of violence."
The problem is not only violence. The problem is disobedience that will break up the army.
"The IDF is being broken from two directions. The breaking begins when one sends soldiers to execute missions they are incapable of executing. In contrast, we are taking steps that the IDF can deal with.
"But allow me to ask you a left-wing question: What is your alternative? That's what people on the left like to ask, isn't it? `What is the alternative?' To tell the soldiers to break their hearts and do something totally contrary to everything they have been educated to believe?"
The alternative is to tell your students that they are soldiers of Israeli sovereignty and must carry out every legal decision made by that sovereign state.
"Our soldiers are certainly soldiers of Israeli sovereignty. But that is not a reason to shatter the values in which they were raised. To drag the people of Gush Katif from their homes is to trample our values without a justified reason."
Rabbi Meidan, because of your ideology, I, Ari Shavit, served in a detention facility for Palestinians. I did what ran contrary to my deepest beliefs in order to be loyal to the one Israeli sovereignty and to the alliance between us. Now, when your turn has come to fulfill your part in the sovereign alliance, you are not doing it.
"When you served as a warder it was no harder for you than for anyone else, it was required for the security of us all. On the other hand, here there is a specific matter of many people, perhaps a quarter of the army, who are being asked to do something contrary to their belief. I do not think it is right to break their belief."
For years people on the left manned checkpoints because of the settlers, served as warders because of them, guarded your settlements. That seared their hearts no less than the disengagement is searing your hearts.
"There is no resemblance. The checkpoints guarded Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The detention facilities did not protect the occupation, but security. It is true that left-wing people guarded the settlements, but there is no comparison between the difficulty they had and the difficulty of removing good people from their homes and demolishing them."
You show consideration for the feelings of your public, but have no pity at all for the feelings of others.
"Uzi Dayan told me explicitly that if he received an order to remove Arabs from their homes, he would refuse to obey it. And he was a candidate for chief of staff. Everyone on the left and in the center says that if he were told to expel Arabs from their homes, he would refuse. We are not even talking about refusal. We are only asking you not to force us to trample our values."
Your comments paint a harsh picture - two opposing Israeli stories are engaged in a frontal clash. Like two cars speeding toward each other, with neither of them willing to move to the shoulder.
"There will be a confrontation. There will be a serious jolt. But I believe that it will be a chassis accident, not a total loss. After a chassis accident, a car can still keep going. It sputters, it is damaged, but it still runs."
You are taking a tremendous responsibility on yourself: it is a very thin line.
"The line is thin because we were left only a thin line. We are doing what we are doing with a heavy heart. And we are taking care and making every effort not to cross the line that would mean the ruin of the IDF. But we have no choice. The alternative is not to protest the destruction of the major tenets of Zionism. That is impossible from our point of view. It would mean a donkey's burial for Zionism."
Where is the maturity the Zionist left showed for years? Where is the greatness that [Menachem] Begin showed in the "Altalena" episode? [In June 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the IDF to open fire on a gunship named "Altalena" which was off the Tel Aviv shore. The ship was carrying arms for the Irgun, a pre-state underground organization.] You are ready to risk everything.
"We are against violence. Heaven forbid that anyone should raise a hand against a soldier. Heaven forbid that anyone should verbally abuse a soldier. Under no circumstances will there be any form of violence. But like Rabbi Kook, I too think that even in the case of Solomon's Judgment, the real mother does not agree to her child being cut in half, but also does not yield. A son whose mother gave him up will not forgive her. And in this case, too, the son will not forgive us if we forgo everything for the sake of peace and tranquillity. And the son is not just Gush Katif. This son is the Land of Israel. This is the whole ideology of Zionism and settlement. And that ideology will not forgive us if we forgo it. Nor will we forgive ourselves if we give up so quickly. Therefore we will not bring things to a crisis point which has no remedy, but neither will we yield."
You are absolutely walking on the brink. You are endangering Israeli statehood. The rabbis of religious Zionism - Rabbi Eliahu and Rabbi Shapira - are encouraging refusal on the part of soldiers.
"With all my smallness, with all the fact that I am ignorant and small compared to them, I am ready to say the complete opposite of what those rabbis said. I think a religiously observant soldier should not refuse to obey an order. I say so explicitly: I do not accept refusal to obey an order. It is totally unacceptable to me. But when I am asked whether I would be capable of doing these terrible things I say that I do not know whether I would be capable. And I think when I say that I am not crossing the red line. Because if I do nothing, that will also have a price. If we are too afraid and leave Gush Katif without opposition, that will mean the destruction of Zionism. That is something we are forbidden to do. It is forbidden. Our loyalty to the land and to settlement obligates us to carry out a large protest."
Your campaign this week places Israeli democracy in jeopardy.
"On the contrary: it is a campaign in favor of democracy, a campaign against the destruction of democracy."
But you are not protesting; you are trying to scuttle a legal political decision by force.
"We are trying to execute a democratic preemption. To force the Knesset and the government to think again. After all, this is a move that contradicts Zionism. It involves the razing of an entire bloc of settlements. A decision like this could have been made in a referendum. Responsibility rests with whoever decided not to let the decision be made by a referendum. It is he who brought the dispute into the IDF, who created the rift in the nation. And he did it for malicious reasons, out of malicious intent."
Is the government of Israel a malicious government?
"No. I did not say that. But there was malice here."
What do you mean?
"Regrettably, Sharon is acting out of a feeling that the prevention of violence is not his highest priority. In a cold analysis, one can arrive at the conclusion that from his point of view, if there is bloodshed, it will ensure the success of the uprooting and also ensure the success of the acts of uprooting to come."
What you are saying is extremely grave.
"I will put it cautiously. I know preventing violence is the chief consideration of the Yesha Council. Preventing violence is very high among the IDF's considerations. I am afraid that in the prime minister's milieu, the prevention of violence does not have the highest priority. I heard the assessment of a senior intelligence person who maintains that Sharon has an interest in the eruption of violence, because it will reduce the pressures for additional withdrawals. And I add: also because violence will send an internal signal that only Sharon is capable of coping with the settlers. That is why I agreed to this interview: because what is now incumbent on all of us - on the IDF, on the elites of the left and on us - is to prevent violence. To prevent bloodshed."
But it is your struggle that is liable to bring bloodshed. It is liable to endanger the very existence of Zionism.
"Our struggle is a last attempt to save Zionism. To save Zionism. Without Zionism we have no existence here. And Zionism is the belief that Jews come to their homeland and redeem it so that no one will move them. That is Zionism. I am not familiar with any other Zionism. And the act of uprooting strikes down Zionism.
"I do not want to think about the possibility of the annulment of Zionism. That possibility is beyond my line of thought. But to send the IDF to raze Gush Katif is to deliver a very severe blow to Zionism, a very severe blow. And what we are doing now is trying to prevent that. Until the last minute to try and prevent it."
In fact, the real danger is that the disengagement is turning into a religious war.
"`Religious war' is an incorrect term. But this summer will be a very dramatic period in the contest for the internal identity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel."
And where will you and we be at the end of this summer?
"You will certainly interview all kinds of people about the determination with which they carried out the act. I may be in prison."
Do you really think it will come to that?
"I do not flinch from that possibility. I am taking it into account. I will not be violent. I will carry out deeds I consider legitimate. But if the law wants to punish me for them, I will go to prison without batting an eyelash."
In other words, one casualty of this campaign is already the supremacy of the law.
"I have never recognized the supremacy of the law. Justice and morality are far more important to me than the supremacy of the law. When the law stands opposite justice and morality, I stand on the other side."n
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
I personally am having a very hard time going on with my daily life
with all that our evil government is doing and planning with regards
to our fellow Jews in Gush Katif and the Northern Shomron.
What is going on around us - police brutality, injustices by the
justice system, demonization of ourselves, "settlers and rightists",
in the press - is having and will have much impact on how our lives
are going to be in another month or two and onwards.
Even sworn leftists, who are happy with the explusion plan, know that
the levels of corruption and deciept that Sharon has led this
government to will have deep reprocussions on Israel the day after
the expulsion plan is/isn't carried out. To all of our detriment.
I have no trust in the Israeli government, no trust in the Israeli
justice system and no trust in the Israeli press. And I'm not alone!
Yes I have a family to support, and I have a job to attend to,
but...now is not the time to sit at home and read the newspapers on
what is going on or watch it on the news. Now is the time to be
involved in making the news to influence our future and our
children's future.
I plan to go down to Gush Katif. That is where today we can stop the
plan. The larger the numbers of people the more chance we have to
stop the plan.
When I'm going and how, I do not know yet - still to be decided,
obviously as soon as possible. How I will get out of work - I have no
idea. But somethings in life have to done regardless of the personal
hardships it will cause.
Avi
with all that our evil government is doing and planning with regards
to our fellow Jews in Gush Katif and the Northern Shomron.
What is going on around us - police brutality, injustices by the
justice system, demonization of ourselves, "settlers and rightists",
in the press - is having and will have much impact on how our lives
are going to be in another month or two and onwards.
Even sworn leftists, who are happy with the explusion plan, know that
the levels of corruption and deciept that Sharon has led this
government to will have deep reprocussions on Israel the day after
the expulsion plan is/isn't carried out. To all of our detriment.
I have no trust in the Israeli government, no trust in the Israeli
justice system and no trust in the Israeli press. And I'm not alone!
Yes I have a family to support, and I have a job to attend to,
but...now is not the time to sit at home and read the newspapers on
what is going on or watch it on the news. Now is the time to be
involved in making the news to influence our future and our
children's future.
I plan to go down to Gush Katif. That is where today we can stop the
plan. The larger the numbers of people the more chance we have to
stop the plan.
When I'm going and how, I do not know yet - still to be decided,
obviously as soon as possible. How I will get out of work - I have no
idea. But somethings in life have to done regardless of the personal
hardships it will cause.
Avi
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
There is so much to write about. So many thoughts, so many fears, so many sights that I have seen with my own eyes!!
I marched from Netivot to Kefar Maimon and spent 3 full days there. I saw it all, and I experienced it all. I must write it down for all to know.
In the meantime, nobody has expressed better what so many in Israel feel than Rav Meidan in an interview he gave to the Haaretz paper.
It is an interview that must be read.
With G-ds help Am Yisrael will prevail!!
Avi
Nobody is listening
By Ari Shavit and Yair Sheleg
Is Israel being torn apart? Does the protest campaign of the disengagement opponents signal a deep internal rift? Has the process of dividing the land become a challenge to Israeli sovereignty?
Rabbi Yaakov Meidan is not one of the extremist rabbis of Yesha (acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). On the contrary, over the years he has been engaged in attempts at dialogue with the secular public. He and Prof. Ruth Gavison of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law drew up a pact concerning religion-state affairs. Together with Major General (res.) Uzi Dayan, he formulated the "Brothers Dialogue" covenant to prevent refusal by soldiers to obey certain orders. Over the past few months, he also tried to draw up another covenant to cool down the struggle and define its rules.
But now, after the attempt at dialogue has failed, Rabbi Meidan is on fire. He is trying to control himself, but has difficulty doing so. He is mood-swinging between the desire to preserve the linchpin of the state framework and his feeling that a severe wrong has been done. Between the desire to express vigorous opposition to the uprooting and the desire not to refuse an order. Between disengagement and settlement. Between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel.
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Recently, he set forth his position on the disengagement question in terms drawn from the story of "King Solomon's judgment" - except that in his commentary, which is based on the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the real mother has to avoid simultaneously the rending of the child and giving him up altogether.
Meidan settled in Gush Etzion - a bloc of settlements south of Bethlehem - 36 years ago and is a graduate of the first class of the large Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (combining religious studies and military service) in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He will become the yeshiva head at Hanukkah. Fifty-five years old and the father of seven children, Rabbi Meidan is tall, light of foot, energetic and sharp. Even though he is not as well well-known as Rabbis Moshe Levinger, Yoel Bin-Nun and Menachem Fruman, his influence today is far greater than theirs. He is a member of the inner team of settler leaders trying to reach agreements with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on limiting and restraining the anti-disengagement struggle. He is the rabbinical authority who is the source of legitimization for those in the territories who are trying not to burn all the bridges and not enter into a total confrontation with the state and the army. Nevertheless, even Meidan finds himself being pushed into a corner. Hoping and despairing. Believing and distraught. On the brink of the abyss.
Rabbi Meidan, how difficult is this moment?
It is beyond terrible. Beyond terrible. Understand: we are being judged as the ruined city, of which it is said that it shall not be rebuilt. We are being judged as a camp of lepers.
How severe is the crisis?
"The crisis is of dual significance. One is to take Jews who finally arrived here after 2,000 years of exile so that they would never again be driven from their homes and to drive them from their homes forcefully. After 2,000 years of exile, in which we dreamed of having a state from which we would not be driven out, that dream has been shattered. Suddenly it turns out that Jews can be expelled. Suddenly it turns out that homes of Jews can be laid waste. That Jewish graves can be uprooted. After 50 years in which we thought that none of this was possible, this act returns us in large measure to the tragic Jewish situation of pre-Zionist times.
"But there is also a second crisis. Decades ago, our public, the religious-Zionist public, made a strategic decision to live together with secular Zionism; together with the public that is not religiously observant. We decided to forge an alliance. An alliance based on love for this land. On the desire for the revival of the state. Now that alliance has been broken. Those who went with us hand in hand to every place, including into the fire, have plunged a knife in our back."
Who plunged a knife in your back?
"I would prefer not to name names. That is the lesson I drew from what happened 10 years ago, before Rabin's assassination. But I say that there were those who were out to get religious Zionism in order to plunge a knife into its back. There were those who decided to thrust religious Zionism 30 years back, to restore it to its natural size, to its previous place."
What you are saying is very grave. You are saying that disengagement is not only the evacuation of territory and of settlements; that it is also an attempt by the secular public in Israel to assault the national-religious public.
"I am very sensitive to the word 'evacuation.' We are not dust. We are not hametz of Passover eve. We are not some dirt on the table that is evacuated. We have roots. We struck deep roots both in the dunes of Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlement bloc] and also in the hard rocks of Gush Etzion and other places. So this is not an evacuation. We are not being wiped off the table; we are being uprooted. And uprooted with great difficulty.
"To address your substantive point: my complaints are not against the secular public as a whole. In our meetings with the broad public, there is a good, warm feeling, which encourages support. Had it not been for that support, I would have found it difficult to survive these last months. The problem is with the secular elites. In the attitude of those elites I have the feeling of a knife in the back."
Do you truly believe the secular elite has risen up against you in order to destroy you?
"Yes."
So from your point of view the disengagement is not a strategic move - justified or not - but a deliberate attempt to break the religious Zionist movement?
"I must be accurate: for part of the secular elites breaking religious Zionism is the goal. For others, breaking us is not the goal, but a price they are willing to pay. And to pay easily. When someone rises up against you, it is a pain of a particular kind. When someone does not care at all whether you are broken and does not care where you will wallow after being broken, that is pain of a different kind."
For years you conducted a dialogue with the democratic-secular elite. That dialogue was important to you. You invested quite a bit in it. Do you feel today that the dialogue was a lie?
"There were a great many falsities in our alliance with the secular elites. In retrospect, it turns out that a great many of those who sat with us and dialogued with us were pretending. When the test came, they did not meet it. They turned their back on us."
Do you feel you have been betrayed?
"My dialogue with Prof. Ruth Gavison was good and remains good. Even when we did not reach agreement, she met the test. But when I sat in the Israel Democracy Institute with her reference group - senior jurists and senior academics and left-wing leaders - I had the feeling that I was meeting with people who are living in a glass tower. People who are looking at an entire public being uprooted from its life project and from everything it believes in and being thrown to who-knows where - without having the slightest understanding of what is facing them. When I sat across from them, I had the feeling they were looking at me the way you watch a movie and examining everything according to the minutiae of the law. As though the orders and the law have become God. Without justice, without morality, without anything. Only the order and the law.
"I felt that I was facing a sealed glittering wall. That I was being looked at through thick glass. Our public was observed like a laboratory animal. People raise their hand against me and tell me, If you want to shout, fine, but not between 2 and 4, during the siesta. That is something I could not accept. I could not accept it."
Did you draw operative conclusions?
"Yes. In order to forge an alliance with the secular elites, we neglected our more natural alliance with the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] public. Today I think that was a mistake. In the future we will behave differently. In the past, with all the disagreements, I thought there was also something we could learn from the secular elite. After I saw the secular elite stick a knife in my back and turn away from its own values - democracy and human rights - I have no more to learn from them. After all, from the standpoint of democracy, what happened here is a disgrace; and what happened here from the viewpoint of the judicial system's protection of human rights is a shame. The courts, the press, the research institutes - no one heard us. No one heard our outcry. But it is not just us. The democratic elite did not remain loyal to the values in the name of which it spoke all these years. Therefore there are no positive values I can get from them. I have a serious problem with them."
If so, your next dialogue will not be with the Democracy Institute but with the leader of Haredi Judaism, Rabbi Elyashiv.
"Correct. Only then, when religious Zionism and the Haredi public stand together, will our place be different, will we be treated differently."
What is the purpose of your large protest campaign this week?
"Our feeling is that our outcry is not being heard. [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon does not hear it, the courts do not hear it, north Tel Aviv does not hear it. Our feeling is that we are crying out and they are shutting their ears. Therefore, in this campaign we want to let forth an outcry that will not allow them to shut their ears any longer. It is a march of outcry. It is meant to breach the wall of your insensitivity."
But you are not marching against the Knesset. You are not marching against Sharon's ranch. You are marching against the IDF. You are endangering the IDF.
"The IDF is precious to us. It is not a hostage in our struggle. But whoever decided on the uprooting and whoever decided not to hold a referendum on the uprooting stole democracy. And when he stole democracy, he should have been aware that this would have a price. That price will trickle down into the army. After all, they are sending IDF equipment to destroy Jewish homes. They are sending the army rabbinate to uproot Jewish graves. They are sending the army to turn 50 synagogues into heaps of ruins. Obviously this is going to have a price."
Do you consider these acts to be transgressions, to be forbidden acts?
"Let us not say it is a transgression. Let us say it is a great commandment. But did anyone think about what effect deeds like these have on a Jewish soul? Look what happens to us when someone scrawls one slogan on one synagogue in Germany. And here they are going to destroy dozens of synagogues. They are going to do what the goyim did not dare do to us for 50 years anywhere. Understand the meaning of this. Understand the feeling of hurban [destruction]."
But there was a sovereign decision here, a decision by the government and the Knesset, a majority decision.
"Do you know what the meaning is of an IDF bulldozer driven by a soldier who was conscripted to defend the Jewish people smashing and breaking the walls of a synagogue and reducing it to rubble? And trampling with the treads the place where the Holy Ark stood, where Torah scrolls were placed. If I were that soldier, my soul would be so torn that I do not know how I would be able to withstand it. I do not know what I would do."
What would you do?
"That is a very difficult question. Very difficult. It is a question that touches also on dragging people from the home in which they have lived for 30 years. Dragging children, dragging mothers. Let me ask you: If your mothers were there, would you drag them out?"
What you are actually telling us is that if you were a soldier and you were ordered to demolish a synagogue structure, you would not carry out the order. You would not do it.
"I find it very difficult to see how I would be capable of doing it."
And when a student of yours asks you how he should behave during the disengagement?
"I hope the IDF will have the wisdom now to have soldiers who feel this is their milk and their blood do it. I am against refusing orders. I think it is important for our soldiers to be there. Especially so they can calm down the situation. But whoever sends soldiers to drag people from their homes is assuming a very heavy responsibility. He is committing an act without both reason and heart. I want to see [Chief of Staff] Dan Halutz drag his mother from her house. Is he capable of that? Let him not demand that others do what he is not capable of doing."
Effectively, you are preaching `gray disobedience.' On the face of it you are against refusal to obey, but in practice you are encouraging every religious soldier to go to his commanding officer and say: I can't do it.
"The IDF has enough soldiers who will do the dragging and the demolition without their hearts being wounded. It will be hard for them, too, but for our soldiers it is difficult to impossible."
The importance of what you are saying is that there will be a lone soldier who will say "I can't" and then another lone soldier who will say "I can't," until there will be an entire public of lone soldiers who do not carry out the army's orders and do not implement the decisions of an elected government.
"There will be a great many lone soldiers who might even total a large percentage of the army. But they will not be a public. And they will not refuse. They will ask to be assigned to a different task."
There is refusal already now. Rabbis are inciting soldiers and the spiritual leadership of the religious Zionist movement is bringing the IDF to a situation of crisis.
"One way or the other, the IDF is in a difficult situation. And it will find itself in a very difficult situation. But the responsibility lies with the prime minister and the defense minister, who are the father and mother of the IDF. They know what the IDF is made of. They know who its soldiers are. They created the crisis.
"Our goal is not to break the IDF. But we cannot prevent the difficulty for the IDF; that is impossible. We want to bring the IDF to a situation in which things will be difficult, but not to a situation in which it will not be able to cope."
Rabbi Meidan, you are pressuring the IDF to make it cry for help. You are trying to make the army tell the political echelon that it cannot carry out the mission. Your approach is a danger to life and limb.
"We will stay 2,000 cubits from any act of violence."
The problem is not only violence. The problem is disobedience that will break up the army.
"The IDF is being broken from two directions. The breaking begins when one sends soldiers to execute missions they are incapable of executing. In contrast, we are taking steps that the IDF can deal with.
"But allow me to ask you a left-wing question: What is your alternative? That's what people on the left like to ask, isn't it? `What is the alternative?' To tell the soldiers to break their hearts and do something totally contrary to everything they have been educated to believe?"
The alternative is to tell your students that they are soldiers of Israeli sovereignty and must carry out every legal decision made by that sovereign state.
"Our soldiers are certainly soldiers of Israeli sovereignty. But that is not a reason to shatter the values in which they were raised. To drag the people of Gush Katif from their homes is to trample our values without a justified reason."
Rabbi Meidan, because of your ideology, I, Ari Shavit, served in a detention facility for Palestinians. I did what ran contrary to my deepest beliefs in order to be loyal to the one Israeli sovereignty and to the alliance between us. Now, when your turn has come to fulfill your part in the sovereign alliance, you are not doing it.
"When you served as a warder it was no harder for you than for anyone else, it was required for the security of us all. On the other hand, here there is a specific matter of many people, perhaps a quarter of the army, who are being asked to do something contrary to their belief. I do not think it is right to break their belief."
For years people on the left manned checkpoints because of the settlers, served as warders because of them, guarded your settlements. That seared their hearts no less than the disengagement is searing your hearts.
"There is no resemblance. The checkpoints guarded Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The detention facilities did not protect the occupation, but security. It is true that left-wing people guarded the settlements, but there is no comparison between the difficulty they had and the difficulty of removing good people from their homes and demolishing them."
You show consideration for the feelings of your public, but have no pity at all for the feelings of others.
"Uzi Dayan told me explicitly that if he received an order to remove Arabs from their homes, he would refuse to obey it. And he was a candidate for chief of staff. Everyone on the left and in the center says that if he were told to expel Arabs from their homes, he would refuse. We are not even talking about refusal. We are only asking you not to force us to trample our values."
Your comments paint a harsh picture - two opposing Israeli stories are engaged in a frontal clash. Like two cars speeding toward each other, with neither of them willing to move to the shoulder.
"There will be a confrontation. There will be a serious jolt. But I believe that it will be a chassis accident, not a total loss. After a chassis accident, a car can still keep going. It sputters, it is damaged, but it still runs."
You are taking a tremendous responsibility on yourself: it is a very thin line.
"The line is thin because we were left only a thin line. We are doing what we are doing with a heavy heart. And we are taking care and making every effort not to cross the line that would mean the ruin of the IDF. But we have no choice. The alternative is not to protest the destruction of the major tenets of Zionism. That is impossible from our point of view. It would mean a donkey's burial for Zionism."
Where is the maturity the Zionist left showed for years? Where is the greatness that [Menachem] Begin showed in the "Altalena" episode? [In June 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the IDF to open fire on a gunship named "Altalena" which was off the Tel Aviv shore. The ship was carrying arms for the Irgun, a pre-state underground organization.] You are ready to risk everything.
"We are against violence. Heaven forbid that anyone should raise a hand against a soldier. Heaven forbid that anyone should verbally abuse a soldier. Under no circumstances will there be any form of violence. But like Rabbi Kook, I too think that even in the case of Solomon's Judgment, the real mother does not agree to her child being cut in half, but also does not yield. A son whose mother gave him up will not forgive her. And in this case, too, the son will not forgive us if we forgo everything for the sake of peace and tranquillity. And the son is not just Gush Katif. This son is the Land of Israel. This is the whole ideology of Zionism and settlement. And that ideology will not forgive us if we forgo it. Nor will we forgive ourselves if we give up so quickly. Therefore we will not bring things to a crisis point which has no remedy, but neither will we yield."
You are absolutely walking on the brink. You are endangering Israeli statehood. The rabbis of religious Zionism - Rabbi Eliahu and Rabbi Shapira - are encouraging refusal on the part of soldiers.
"With all my smallness, with all the fact that I am ignorant and small compared to them, I am ready to say the complete opposite of what those rabbis said. I think a religiously observant soldier should not refuse to obey an order. I say so explicitly: I do not accept refusal to obey an order. It is totally unacceptable to me. But when I am asked whether I would be capable of doing these terrible things I say that I do not know whether I would be capable. And I think when I say that I am not crossing the red line. Because if I do nothing, that will also have a price. If we are too afraid and leave Gush Katif without opposition, that will mean the destruction of Zionism. That is something we are forbidden to do. It is forbidden. Our loyalty to the land and to settlement obligates us to carry out a large protest."
Your campaign this week places Israeli democracy in jeopardy.
"On the contrary: it is a campaign in favor of democracy, a campaign against the destruction of democracy."
But you are not protesting; you are trying to scuttle a legal political decision by force.
"We are trying to execute a democratic preemption. To force the Knesset and the government to think again. After all, this is a move that contradicts Zionism. It involves the razing of an entire bloc of settlements. A decision like this could have been made in a referendum. Responsibility rests with whoever decided not to let the decision be made by a referendum. It is he who brought the dispute into the IDF, who created the rift in the nation. And he did it for malicious reasons, out of malicious intent."
Is the government of Israel a malicious government?
"No. I did not say that. But there was malice here."
What do you mean?
"Regrettably, Sharon is acting out of a feeling that the prevention of violence is not his highest priority. In a cold analysis, one can arrive at the conclusion that from his point of view, if there is bloodshed, it will ensure the success of the uprooting and also ensure the success of the acts of uprooting to come."
What you are saying is extremely grave.
"I will put it cautiously. I know preventing violence is the chief consideration of the Yesha Council. Preventing violence is very high among the IDF's considerations. I am afraid that in the prime minister's milieu, the prevention of violence does not have the highest priority. I heard the assessment of a senior intelligence person who maintains that Sharon has an interest in the eruption of violence, because it will reduce the pressures for additional withdrawals. And I add: also because violence will send an internal signal that only Sharon is capable of coping with the settlers. That is why I agreed to this interview: because what is now incumbent on all of us - on the IDF, on the elites of the left and on us - is to prevent violence. To prevent bloodshed."
But it is your struggle that is liable to bring bloodshed. It is liable to endanger the very existence of Zionism.
"Our struggle is a last attempt to save Zionism. To save Zionism. Without Zionism we have no existence here. And Zionism is the belief that Jews come to their homeland and redeem it so that no one will move them. That is Zionism. I am not familiar with any other Zionism. And the act of uprooting strikes down Zionism.
"I do not want to think about the possibility of the annulment of Zionism. That possibility is beyond my line of thought. But to send the IDF to raze Gush Katif is to deliver a very severe blow to Zionism, a very severe blow. And what we are doing now is trying to prevent that. Until the last minute to try and prevent it."
In fact, the real danger is that the disengagement is turning into a religious war.
"`Religious war' is an incorrect term. But this summer will be a very dramatic period in the contest for the internal identity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel."
And where will you and we be at the end of this summer?
"You will certainly interview all kinds of people about the determination with which they carried out the act. I may be in prison."
Do you really think it will come to that?
"I do not flinch from that possibility. I am taking it into account. I will not be violent. I will carry out deeds I consider legitimate. But if the law wants to punish me for them, I will go to prison without batting an eyelash."
In other words, one casualty of this campaign is already the supremacy of the law.
"I have never recognized the supremacy of the law. Justice and morality are far more important to me than the supremacy of the law. When the law stands opposite justice and morality, I stand on the other side."
I marched from Netivot to Kefar Maimon and spent 3 full days there. I saw it all, and I experienced it all. I must write it down for all to know.
In the meantime, nobody has expressed better what so many in Israel feel than Rav Meidan in an interview he gave to the Haaretz paper.
It is an interview that must be read.
With G-ds help Am Yisrael will prevail!!
Avi
Nobody is listening
By Ari Shavit and Yair Sheleg
Is Israel being torn apart? Does the protest campaign of the disengagement opponents signal a deep internal rift? Has the process of dividing the land become a challenge to Israeli sovereignty?
Rabbi Yaakov Meidan is not one of the extremist rabbis of Yesha (acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). On the contrary, over the years he has been engaged in attempts at dialogue with the secular public. He and Prof. Ruth Gavison of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Law drew up a pact concerning religion-state affairs. Together with Major General (res.) Uzi Dayan, he formulated the "Brothers Dialogue" covenant to prevent refusal by soldiers to obey certain orders. Over the past few months, he also tried to draw up another covenant to cool down the struggle and define its rules.
But now, after the attempt at dialogue has failed, Rabbi Meidan is on fire. He is trying to control himself, but has difficulty doing so. He is mood-swinging between the desire to preserve the linchpin of the state framework and his feeling that a severe wrong has been done. Between the desire to express vigorous opposition to the uprooting and the desire not to refuse an order. Between disengagement and settlement. Between the State of Israel and the Land of Israel.
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Recently, he set forth his position on the disengagement question in terms drawn from the story of "King Solomon's judgment" - except that in his commentary, which is based on the writings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Kook, the real mother has to avoid simultaneously the rending of the child and giving him up altogether.
Meidan settled in Gush Etzion - a bloc of settlements south of Bethlehem - 36 years ago and is a graduate of the first class of the large Har Etzion hesder yeshiva (combining religious studies and military service) in the settlement of Alon Shvut. He will become the yeshiva head at Hanukkah. Fifty-five years old and the father of seven children, Rabbi Meidan is tall, light of foot, energetic and sharp. Even though he is not as well well-known as Rabbis Moshe Levinger, Yoel Bin-Nun and Menachem Fruman, his influence today is far greater than theirs. He is a member of the inner team of settler leaders trying to reach agreements with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on limiting and restraining the anti-disengagement struggle. He is the rabbinical authority who is the source of legitimization for those in the territories who are trying not to burn all the bridges and not enter into a total confrontation with the state and the army. Nevertheless, even Meidan finds himself being pushed into a corner. Hoping and despairing. Believing and distraught. On the brink of the abyss.
Rabbi Meidan, how difficult is this moment?
It is beyond terrible. Beyond terrible. Understand: we are being judged as the ruined city, of which it is said that it shall not be rebuilt. We are being judged as a camp of lepers.
How severe is the crisis?
"The crisis is of dual significance. One is to take Jews who finally arrived here after 2,000 years of exile so that they would never again be driven from their homes and to drive them from their homes forcefully. After 2,000 years of exile, in which we dreamed of having a state from which we would not be driven out, that dream has been shattered. Suddenly it turns out that Jews can be expelled. Suddenly it turns out that homes of Jews can be laid waste. That Jewish graves can be uprooted. After 50 years in which we thought that none of this was possible, this act returns us in large measure to the tragic Jewish situation of pre-Zionist times.
"But there is also a second crisis. Decades ago, our public, the religious-Zionist public, made a strategic decision to live together with secular Zionism; together with the public that is not religiously observant. We decided to forge an alliance. An alliance based on love for this land. On the desire for the revival of the state. Now that alliance has been broken. Those who went with us hand in hand to every place, including into the fire, have plunged a knife in our back."
Who plunged a knife in your back?
"I would prefer not to name names. That is the lesson I drew from what happened 10 years ago, before Rabin's assassination. But I say that there were those who were out to get religious Zionism in order to plunge a knife into its back. There were those who decided to thrust religious Zionism 30 years back, to restore it to its natural size, to its previous place."
What you are saying is very grave. You are saying that disengagement is not only the evacuation of territory and of settlements; that it is also an attempt by the secular public in Israel to assault the national-religious public.
"I am very sensitive to the word 'evacuation.' We are not dust. We are not hametz of Passover eve. We are not some dirt on the table that is evacuated. We have roots. We struck deep roots both in the dunes of Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip settlement bloc] and also in the hard rocks of Gush Etzion and other places. So this is not an evacuation. We are not being wiped off the table; we are being uprooted. And uprooted with great difficulty.
"To address your substantive point: my complaints are not against the secular public as a whole. In our meetings with the broad public, there is a good, warm feeling, which encourages support. Had it not been for that support, I would have found it difficult to survive these last months. The problem is with the secular elites. In the attitude of those elites I have the feeling of a knife in the back."
Do you truly believe the secular elite has risen up against you in order to destroy you?
"Yes."
So from your point of view the disengagement is not a strategic move - justified or not - but a deliberate attempt to break the religious Zionist movement?
"I must be accurate: for part of the secular elites breaking religious Zionism is the goal. For others, breaking us is not the goal, but a price they are willing to pay. And to pay easily. When someone rises up against you, it is a pain of a particular kind. When someone does not care at all whether you are broken and does not care where you will wallow after being broken, that is pain of a different kind."
For years you conducted a dialogue with the democratic-secular elite. That dialogue was important to you. You invested quite a bit in it. Do you feel today that the dialogue was a lie?
"There were a great many falsities in our alliance with the secular elites. In retrospect, it turns out that a great many of those who sat with us and dialogued with us were pretending. When the test came, they did not meet it. They turned their back on us."
Do you feel you have been betrayed?
"My dialogue with Prof. Ruth Gavison was good and remains good. Even when we did not reach agreement, she met the test. But when I sat in the Israel Democracy Institute with her reference group - senior jurists and senior academics and left-wing leaders - I had the feeling that I was meeting with people who are living in a glass tower. People who are looking at an entire public being uprooted from its life project and from everything it believes in and being thrown to who-knows where - without having the slightest understanding of what is facing them. When I sat across from them, I had the feeling they were looking at me the way you watch a movie and examining everything according to the minutiae of the law. As though the orders and the law have become God. Without justice, without morality, without anything. Only the order and the law.
"I felt that I was facing a sealed glittering wall. That I was being looked at through thick glass. Our public was observed like a laboratory animal. People raise their hand against me and tell me, If you want to shout, fine, but not between 2 and 4, during the siesta. That is something I could not accept. I could not accept it."
Did you draw operative conclusions?
"Yes. In order to forge an alliance with the secular elites, we neglected our more natural alliance with the Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] public. Today I think that was a mistake. In the future we will behave differently. In the past, with all the disagreements, I thought there was also something we could learn from the secular elite. After I saw the secular elite stick a knife in my back and turn away from its own values - democracy and human rights - I have no more to learn from them. After all, from the standpoint of democracy, what happened here is a disgrace; and what happened here from the viewpoint of the judicial system's protection of human rights is a shame. The courts, the press, the research institutes - no one heard us. No one heard our outcry. But it is not just us. The democratic elite did not remain loyal to the values in the name of which it spoke all these years. Therefore there are no positive values I can get from them. I have a serious problem with them."
If so, your next dialogue will not be with the Democracy Institute but with the leader of Haredi Judaism, Rabbi Elyashiv.
"Correct. Only then, when religious Zionism and the Haredi public stand together, will our place be different, will we be treated differently."
What is the purpose of your large protest campaign this week?
"Our feeling is that our outcry is not being heard. [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon does not hear it, the courts do not hear it, north Tel Aviv does not hear it. Our feeling is that we are crying out and they are shutting their ears. Therefore, in this campaign we want to let forth an outcry that will not allow them to shut their ears any longer. It is a march of outcry. It is meant to breach the wall of your insensitivity."
But you are not marching against the Knesset. You are not marching against Sharon's ranch. You are marching against the IDF. You are endangering the IDF.
"The IDF is precious to us. It is not a hostage in our struggle. But whoever decided on the uprooting and whoever decided not to hold a referendum on the uprooting stole democracy. And when he stole democracy, he should have been aware that this would have a price. That price will trickle down into the army. After all, they are sending IDF equipment to destroy Jewish homes. They are sending the army rabbinate to uproot Jewish graves. They are sending the army to turn 50 synagogues into heaps of ruins. Obviously this is going to have a price."
Do you consider these acts to be transgressions, to be forbidden acts?
"Let us not say it is a transgression. Let us say it is a great commandment. But did anyone think about what effect deeds like these have on a Jewish soul? Look what happens to us when someone scrawls one slogan on one synagogue in Germany. And here they are going to destroy dozens of synagogues. They are going to do what the goyim did not dare do to us for 50 years anywhere. Understand the meaning of this. Understand the feeling of hurban [destruction]."
But there was a sovereign decision here, a decision by the government and the Knesset, a majority decision.
"Do you know what the meaning is of an IDF bulldozer driven by a soldier who was conscripted to defend the Jewish people smashing and breaking the walls of a synagogue and reducing it to rubble? And trampling with the treads the place where the Holy Ark stood, where Torah scrolls were placed. If I were that soldier, my soul would be so torn that I do not know how I would be able to withstand it. I do not know what I would do."
What would you do?
"That is a very difficult question. Very difficult. It is a question that touches also on dragging people from the home in which they have lived for 30 years. Dragging children, dragging mothers. Let me ask you: If your mothers were there, would you drag them out?"
What you are actually telling us is that if you were a soldier and you were ordered to demolish a synagogue structure, you would not carry out the order. You would not do it.
"I find it very difficult to see how I would be capable of doing it."
And when a student of yours asks you how he should behave during the disengagement?
"I hope the IDF will have the wisdom now to have soldiers who feel this is their milk and their blood do it. I am against refusing orders. I think it is important for our soldiers to be there. Especially so they can calm down the situation. But whoever sends soldiers to drag people from their homes is assuming a very heavy responsibility. He is committing an act without both reason and heart. I want to see [Chief of Staff] Dan Halutz drag his mother from her house. Is he capable of that? Let him not demand that others do what he is not capable of doing."
Effectively, you are preaching `gray disobedience.' On the face of it you are against refusal to obey, but in practice you are encouraging every religious soldier to go to his commanding officer and say: I can't do it.
"The IDF has enough soldiers who will do the dragging and the demolition without their hearts being wounded. It will be hard for them, too, but for our soldiers it is difficult to impossible."
The importance of what you are saying is that there will be a lone soldier who will say "I can't" and then another lone soldier who will say "I can't," until there will be an entire public of lone soldiers who do not carry out the army's orders and do not implement the decisions of an elected government.
"There will be a great many lone soldiers who might even total a large percentage of the army. But they will not be a public. And they will not refuse. They will ask to be assigned to a different task."
There is refusal already now. Rabbis are inciting soldiers and the spiritual leadership of the religious Zionist movement is bringing the IDF to a situation of crisis.
"One way or the other, the IDF is in a difficult situation. And it will find itself in a very difficult situation. But the responsibility lies with the prime minister and the defense minister, who are the father and mother of the IDF. They know what the IDF is made of. They know who its soldiers are. They created the crisis.
"Our goal is not to break the IDF. But we cannot prevent the difficulty for the IDF; that is impossible. We want to bring the IDF to a situation in which things will be difficult, but not to a situation in which it will not be able to cope."
Rabbi Meidan, you are pressuring the IDF to make it cry for help. You are trying to make the army tell the political echelon that it cannot carry out the mission. Your approach is a danger to life and limb.
"We will stay 2,000 cubits from any act of violence."
The problem is not only violence. The problem is disobedience that will break up the army.
"The IDF is being broken from two directions. The breaking begins when one sends soldiers to execute missions they are incapable of executing. In contrast, we are taking steps that the IDF can deal with.
"But allow me to ask you a left-wing question: What is your alternative? That's what people on the left like to ask, isn't it? `What is the alternative?' To tell the soldiers to break their hearts and do something totally contrary to everything they have been educated to believe?"
The alternative is to tell your students that they are soldiers of Israeli sovereignty and must carry out every legal decision made by that sovereign state.
"Our soldiers are certainly soldiers of Israeli sovereignty. But that is not a reason to shatter the values in which they were raised. To drag the people of Gush Katif from their homes is to trample our values without a justified reason."
Rabbi Meidan, because of your ideology, I, Ari Shavit, served in a detention facility for Palestinians. I did what ran contrary to my deepest beliefs in order to be loyal to the one Israeli sovereignty and to the alliance between us. Now, when your turn has come to fulfill your part in the sovereign alliance, you are not doing it.
"When you served as a warder it was no harder for you than for anyone else, it was required for the security of us all. On the other hand, here there is a specific matter of many people, perhaps a quarter of the army, who are being asked to do something contrary to their belief. I do not think it is right to break their belief."
For years people on the left manned checkpoints because of the settlers, served as warders because of them, guarded your settlements. That seared their hearts no less than the disengagement is searing your hearts.
"There is no resemblance. The checkpoints guarded Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The detention facilities did not protect the occupation, but security. It is true that left-wing people guarded the settlements, but there is no comparison between the difficulty they had and the difficulty of removing good people from their homes and demolishing them."
You show consideration for the feelings of your public, but have no pity at all for the feelings of others.
"Uzi Dayan told me explicitly that if he received an order to remove Arabs from their homes, he would refuse to obey it. And he was a candidate for chief of staff. Everyone on the left and in the center says that if he were told to expel Arabs from their homes, he would refuse. We are not even talking about refusal. We are only asking you not to force us to trample our values."
Your comments paint a harsh picture - two opposing Israeli stories are engaged in a frontal clash. Like two cars speeding toward each other, with neither of them willing to move to the shoulder.
"There will be a confrontation. There will be a serious jolt. But I believe that it will be a chassis accident, not a total loss. After a chassis accident, a car can still keep going. It sputters, it is damaged, but it still runs."
You are taking a tremendous responsibility on yourself: it is a very thin line.
"The line is thin because we were left only a thin line. We are doing what we are doing with a heavy heart. And we are taking care and making every effort not to cross the line that would mean the ruin of the IDF. But we have no choice. The alternative is not to protest the destruction of the major tenets of Zionism. That is impossible from our point of view. It would mean a donkey's burial for Zionism."
Where is the maturity the Zionist left showed for years? Where is the greatness that [Menachem] Begin showed in the "Altalena" episode? [In June 1948, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the IDF to open fire on a gunship named "Altalena" which was off the Tel Aviv shore. The ship was carrying arms for the Irgun, a pre-state underground organization.] You are ready to risk everything.
"We are against violence. Heaven forbid that anyone should raise a hand against a soldier. Heaven forbid that anyone should verbally abuse a soldier. Under no circumstances will there be any form of violence. But like Rabbi Kook, I too think that even in the case of Solomon's Judgment, the real mother does not agree to her child being cut in half, but also does not yield. A son whose mother gave him up will not forgive her. And in this case, too, the son will not forgive us if we forgo everything for the sake of peace and tranquillity. And the son is not just Gush Katif. This son is the Land of Israel. This is the whole ideology of Zionism and settlement. And that ideology will not forgive us if we forgo it. Nor will we forgive ourselves if we give up so quickly. Therefore we will not bring things to a crisis point which has no remedy, but neither will we yield."
You are absolutely walking on the brink. You are endangering Israeli statehood. The rabbis of religious Zionism - Rabbi Eliahu and Rabbi Shapira - are encouraging refusal on the part of soldiers.
"With all my smallness, with all the fact that I am ignorant and small compared to them, I am ready to say the complete opposite of what those rabbis said. I think a religiously observant soldier should not refuse to obey an order. I say so explicitly: I do not accept refusal to obey an order. It is totally unacceptable to me. But when I am asked whether I would be capable of doing these terrible things I say that I do not know whether I would be capable. And I think when I say that I am not crossing the red line. Because if I do nothing, that will also have a price. If we are too afraid and leave Gush Katif without opposition, that will mean the destruction of Zionism. That is something we are forbidden to do. It is forbidden. Our loyalty to the land and to settlement obligates us to carry out a large protest."
Your campaign this week places Israeli democracy in jeopardy.
"On the contrary: it is a campaign in favor of democracy, a campaign against the destruction of democracy."
But you are not protesting; you are trying to scuttle a legal political decision by force.
"We are trying to execute a democratic preemption. To force the Knesset and the government to think again. After all, this is a move that contradicts Zionism. It involves the razing of an entire bloc of settlements. A decision like this could have been made in a referendum. Responsibility rests with whoever decided not to let the decision be made by a referendum. It is he who brought the dispute into the IDF, who created the rift in the nation. And he did it for malicious reasons, out of malicious intent."
Is the government of Israel a malicious government?
"No. I did not say that. But there was malice here."
What do you mean?
"Regrettably, Sharon is acting out of a feeling that the prevention of violence is not his highest priority. In a cold analysis, one can arrive at the conclusion that from his point of view, if there is bloodshed, it will ensure the success of the uprooting and also ensure the success of the acts of uprooting to come."
What you are saying is extremely grave.
"I will put it cautiously. I know preventing violence is the chief consideration of the Yesha Council. Preventing violence is very high among the IDF's considerations. I am afraid that in the prime minister's milieu, the prevention of violence does not have the highest priority. I heard the assessment of a senior intelligence person who maintains that Sharon has an interest in the eruption of violence, because it will reduce the pressures for additional withdrawals. And I add: also because violence will send an internal signal that only Sharon is capable of coping with the settlers. That is why I agreed to this interview: because what is now incumbent on all of us - on the IDF, on the elites of the left and on us - is to prevent violence. To prevent bloodshed."
But it is your struggle that is liable to bring bloodshed. It is liable to endanger the very existence of Zionism.
"Our struggle is a last attempt to save Zionism. To save Zionism. Without Zionism we have no existence here. And Zionism is the belief that Jews come to their homeland and redeem it so that no one will move them. That is Zionism. I am not familiar with any other Zionism. And the act of uprooting strikes down Zionism.
"I do not want to think about the possibility of the annulment of Zionism. That possibility is beyond my line of thought. But to send the IDF to raze Gush Katif is to deliver a very severe blow to Zionism, a very severe blow. And what we are doing now is trying to prevent that. Until the last minute to try and prevent it."
In fact, the real danger is that the disengagement is turning into a religious war.
"`Religious war' is an incorrect term. But this summer will be a very dramatic period in the contest for the internal identity of the Jewish people and the State of Israel."
And where will you and we be at the end of this summer?
"You will certainly interview all kinds of people about the determination with which they carried out the act. I may be in prison."
Do you really think it will come to that?
"I do not flinch from that possibility. I am taking it into account. I will not be violent. I will carry out deeds I consider legitimate. But if the law wants to punish me for them, I will go to prison without batting an eyelash."
In other words, one casualty of this campaign is already the supremacy of the law.
"I have never recognized the supremacy of the law. Justice and morality are far more important to me than the supremacy of the law. When the law stands opposite justice and morality, I stand on the other side."
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