Gaza Disengagement and the expulsion’s impact on religious-Zionism
The religious trauma was felt by many in the religious-Zionist camp who, though not residents of the uprooted settlements, also shared the divine drama ideal.
By HERB KEINONMOURNING, KFAR DAROM, August 18, 2005(photo credit: REUTERS/NIR ELIAS)
For the nearly 9,000 Jews expelled from their homes in Gush Katif 15 years ago, the trauma was multi-dimensional.There was the physical trauma of being forcefully uprooted from one’s own home; the psychological trauma of having to start anew; the social trauma of being torn away from friends and community; and the financial trauma of having to find new jobs and figure out how to make a living.And there was also – potentially – a religious trauma, a theological trauma.Many of the Gush Katif residents were religious, who went there firm in the belief that their actions represented another small step forward in the Divine scenario of Israel’s redemption.This faith allowed many to remain in the region despite bombings and stabbings and shootings and extremely challenging living conditions. They were willing to suffer slings and arrows because they felt what they were doing had cosmic significance for the Jewish people.And then they were uprooted and expelled.And not only were they uprooted and expelled, but they were uprooted and expelled by their brothers – by soldiers with an Israeli flag patched onto their uniform – not by the enemy. Talk about redemption deferred!So what to do? How to cope?In a testament to the amazing resilience of those driven out of their homes, the former Gush Katif residents have – for the most part – moved on with their lives.It has not been easy, it has not been without extreme pain and intense longing, but most have built new communities or integrated into existing ones, found new jobs or transitioned to new professions, kept in touch with old neighbors and cultivated relations with new ones.
The physical, psychological, social and financial traumas were borne primarily by themselves and their loved ones. The religious trauma, however, was also felt by many in the religious Zionist camp who, though they did not live in the uprooted Gaza settlements, also shared the ideal that this type of settlement was part of the divine drama of God bringing the Jewish people back home.As a result, with the hindsight of 15 years, the question needs to be asked: What lasting impact has the withdrawal from Gaza and the expulsion of every last one of its Jewish residents had on the religious-Zionist camp? How did it impact both the religious outlook of this camp, and its attitude towards the state and the army? ‘ALL THE human chains – they didn’t matter to anyone’: Right-wing students demonstrate in front of Tel Aviv’s Azrieli Mall on July 28, 2005. (Flash90)YOSSI KRAKOVER, a father of seven who now lives in Sussiya in the south Hebron Hills, lived for 13 years in Netzarim, a settlement of some 80 families on the outskirts of Gaza City. He was the principal of the regional elementary school in Neveh Dekalim, which was the largest settlement in Gush Katif.Netzarim was the very last of the settlements to be evicted, and Krakover remembers leading the last prayer service – the afternoon Minha service – in that community’s synagogue.“It was very difficult,” he recalled. “We recited the ‘Prayer for the Welfare of the State’ and prayed that God would ‘bestow His light and truth upon the government’s leaders, ministers and advisors.’ We prayed with great pain and hoped that they would correct their mistakes. I’ll never forget that.”Krakover, who after the Gaza withdrawal became the principal of the Ohel Shlomo Bnei Akiva yeshiva in Beersheba, called the Gaza withdrawal “a huge fracture.” But he said this fracture led more to an “internal clarification” among those who went through it, rather than a crisis of faith.In 2005, the year of what Ariel Sharon termed the “disengagement,” he remembers that many in his school continuously sang a song affiliated with the anti-Zionist Satmar hassidic sect: “We do not believe in the government of the atheists; we will walk in fire and water and sanctify God’s name.”“When that suddenly became the students’ anthem, it set off alarm bells for me,” Krakover said, explaining that the students sang this half in jest, half in earnest.“They had anger, frustration and a feeling that the state had turned its back on them,” he said. “That reflects the spirit of the moment, with many asking whether they should or shouldn’t stand during the prayer on Shabbat morning for the Welfare of the State.”Krakover said he realized there was a need for those in his school to understand that “our allegiance to the state is deep and faith-infused” and will not and cannot be upturned by “the actions of a failed prime minister [Sharon] and what he did.”Because of one prime minister “who committed a crime against the Land of Israel, gave a part of the Land of Israel to our enemies, and made terrible mistakes that endanger us up until this very day, shall I break my allegiance to all of Jewish history, the Bible, the Land of Israel and the State of Israel?” he asked. “On the contrary, I will deepen my roots and I will replace the prime minister.”And that final thought, about replacing Sharon as prime minister, was internalized by many who went through or witnessed the Gush Katif trauma. Krakover asserted that one of the main lessons for the religious-Zionist camp as a result of that experience is that “we are not willing to sit in the backseat anymore, but want to sit near the steering wheel, hold the steering wheel in our hand and be in a position of national leadership.”The experience of Gush Katif rammed home to many the idea that it was no longer enough to have a small sectorial party– such as the late National-Religious Party – primarily interested in the Education Ministry, but rather “a party that wants to be in the Defense Ministry, the Finance Ministry and even the Prime Ministry,” he said. “That is the aspiration that was created.”YOSSI KRAKOVER at his home in Netzarim before the expulsion. (Courtesy)ONE OF the biggest beneficiaries of that way of thinking was Naftali Bennett, who seven years after the disengagement entered the Knesset on the Bayit Yehudi list which supplanted the NRP, and whose ambitions went far beyond securing funds for synagogues, mikvaot and religious schools.“Disengagement is a trauma that will remain etched in the heart of everyone from the religious-Zionist camp,” Bennett said, recalling that he and his wife – pregnant with their first child – stood at the Ra’anana Junction during that super-charged period and handed out material against the withdrawal.Bennett said that what he remembers most about that period – an aspect that Krakover also painfully recalled – was the apathy of the general public. Bennett, who at the time was the director-general of a hi-tech company, said he went to work on the day the disengagement began and was struck by the degree to which the 140 people in his office were blasé about what was happening.“I was amazed at the degree to which no one talked about it. It did not interest anyone – it is not as if they wept and danced for joy, but there was apathy. That made clear to me how much of a disconnect there was between a big part of the country and the settlement enterprise and religious Zionism.”The second thing that Bennett said stung him was a feeling of complete helplessness.“It made no difference what you did; you were not being counted. It simply didn’t interest anyone – all the demonstrations, all the human chains – they didn’t matter to anyone.”While this was not the reason Bennett dove into politics – he attributed that to the failures of the Second Lebanon War – he did say that disengagement had a big impact on his thinking, and that there likely was a connection between the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the IDF’s operational failures during the Second Lebanon War.“The government celebrated the disengagement as a great victory of the IDF and the security services, and this created a rift in the heart of a large number of soldiers and officers, many of whom were from religious-Zionist backgrounds,” he said.Bennett said that while he cannot prove a connection, and that it is only a thesis, he believes there is “likely’’ a link between the disengagement and the IDF’s sub-par performance during the war in Lebanon.Bennett commanded a unit searching for Hezbollah rockets and recalled a “crazy moment” in early August 2006 – while the war was still raging – when then-prime minister Ehud Olmert told the foreign press that a victory in Lebanon would give “new momentum” for his push to replicate the Gaza disengagement in parts of Judea and Samaria.“I was at the time about to enter Lebanon, and had not heard about this,” Bennett recollected. “Suddenly one of my soldiers came to me and said that he could not go into Lebanon.“When I asked him why not, he told me what Olmert said, and also that he himself had been evicted from Homesh [one of the four settlements in northern Samaria also uprooted at the time]. His wife told him, ‘What, you are going into Lebanon and risking your life so there will be another expulsion?’”In the end, this soldier – Bennett said – did go into Lebanon, and together they wrote a letter of protest to Olmert about his remarks. But that incident was indicative of a feeling extant among a good number of soldiers.According to Rabbi Noam Perl, head of Yeshivat Bnei Akiva For Environmental Studies in Sussiya – a school that over the years has educated dozens of students whose families once lived in Gush Katif – there has not been a drop-off among this youth in their motivation to serve in IDF combat units.“Of those whom I know, the percentage of those going into the army has not changed, nor has the percentage changed of those going into the elite combat units. If anything, those numbers have gone up,” he said. The same is also true of religious-Zionist youth in general – the disengagement did not register an appreciable decline in their desire to serve in top units.”This seems counterintuitive to a certain degree, as it might have been expected that following the IDF’s forcible eviction of the Gush Katif settlements, the number of religious-Zionist youth interested in putting their lives on the line in the elite units would have dropped.“There was disappointment in the state, in the politics and politicians,” Perl said. “People were mad at Sharon and [former IDF chief-of-staff] Dan Halutz. But this did not mean they would stop serving the state.”As to the religious disappointment – a notion that perhaps if settlements are uprooted the whole idea that there is a Divine scenario at play is fiction – Perl said that with the settlement enterprise now over 50 years old, people living in the settlements no longer necessarily see them “as a pioneering act to bring on the redemption. They live there because they live there, this is the second and third generation [in the settlements]. It is more natural.”Perl, who lives in the community where he teaches, said he believes there is a redemptive process, and that he is happy to be a part of it and trying to move it forward.“But I know there are ups and downs, that the process is dynamic. It is not an existential question, as if I do or do not believe in God based on whether there is one more settlement or not, or whether one settlement or another was destroyed.”The concept of Israel’s redemption, he said, is like Waze.“Where there is a mistake in navigation, you just take an alternate route.”The destination remains the same, even if the route changes a bit.‘ONE OF the biggest beneficiaries of that way of thinking [expanding national-religious political scope] was Naftali Bennett (seen May 14).’ (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)TOVA GANZEL, a professor at Bar-Ilan University’s Midrasha Institute for Advanced Torah Studies, an institution she headed until last year, said the borders of the Land of Israel have forever been changing, intimating that this need not be an issue to challenge one’s faith.“In the Prophets and the Writings we see that the borders in the southern part of Israel were very dynamic, even during the First Temple period, and also during the Second Temple period. They moved forward and backward.”Ganzel said there is a need to convey a Biblical perspective to students today, and that perspective is that the borders that made up Israel and Judah were always dynamic.“This gives you a perspective that we can live here in the Land of Israel, that God is here, and that there is a process of the People of Israel returning to its land, even without the need to say that the process is dependent on any given border,” she said. “The Bible, which teaches us about what the standard is and what to expect, also teaches us that nothing is forever and that there is no such thing as a border that is not dynamic.”Adam Ferziger, a professor of modern and contemporary Judaism at Bar-Ilan University, also counsels putting disengagement in historical perspective, saying that while it was a “challenging moment that had an impact” on religious Zionism, disengagement did not represent a “before and after” moment akin to other historical events such as the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars.Ferziger said that although there were certainly some Gush Katif residents who drifted away from a religious lifestyle as result of the withdrawal, he does not believe those numbers are significantly greater than the number in the religious-Zionist camp as a whole.Theology, he said, “is not iron, it is malleable by its definition.” What that means, he explained, is that it represents a path to “construct a viable way to maintain belief and commitment to a religious system when facing outside circumstances – whether they be philosophical challenges, historical, social or personal challenges.”Orthodox Judaism – and most of those in Gush Katif were Orthodox – is as much about law and practice and lived religion as it is about theology, he said. In his telling, the impact of disengagement has been less at the theological level and more on the level of how people live their lives.“Some of the most ideologically oriented groups in the Gush Emunim settlement camp actually changed their direction [after disengagement],” he said. “They didn’t abandon the idea of the holiness of the Land of Israel, and of the importance of the entire Biblical Land of Israel, but one of the things that gained traction was the creation of garinim Toranim: core groups of young religious families who instead of settling in the post-’67 areas, settled in places like Lod and Karmiel and other areas of the country.”The reason for this, he maintained, was “a recognition that their ideas had not filtered down into the mainstream and therefore they had to communicate their ideas more directly.” One way to do so was to move out of self-contained religious communities in the settlements, and into the broader society.Another effect of disengagement, he said, has been the strengthening of the hardal (haredi national-religious) camp and its flagship Jerusalem yeshiva, Har Hamor, led by Rabbi Zvi Tau.This strain of religious Zionism, he said, celebrates mamlachtiyut (statism), which “certainly challenges not following orders or not accepting government decisions, something related to Gush Katif at a certain level.”Moreover, he said, the issues waved by the hardalim are more social issues than territorial ones, concerned with issues such as feminism, LGBTQ matters and whether conversion therapy is legitimate, the stringency of Halacha.Ferziger questioned how often the top rabbis of this school of thought have talked about Gush Katif and the settlements.“Those are ’70s, ’80s and ’90s topics,” he said. “The 21st-century elite, hyper-ideological followers of Rabbi [Abraham Issac] Kook [one of the most influential spiritual fathers of religious Zionism] are not singing that tune. And I think that is related to disengagement.”Furthermore, he said the uprooting of settlements – which for so long were the focus of so much national-religious attention – has led to the opening of another portal for this religious energy.“It gave an energy to the neo-hassidic aspect that has become prominent in the religious-Zionist world, something you see in places like Tekoa, Otniel and Bat Ayin, and at Shlomo Carlebach minyans.“Hassidism is a spiritual portal, and when the land portal has demonstrated its limitations, then one group looks to settle the cities and connect with the people, and another group looks toward spirituality.”Or, as Noam Perl said, the spiritual energy that was channeled in and through Gush Katif “did not disappear, it simply went through a metamorphosis and is now being channeled into other lanes.”During the Gush Emunim heyday of a previous generation, the religious spirit of the national Zionist camp was directed in one direction,” Perl said. “It was one size fits all – Ya’ala, to the hills [of Judea and Samaria, and the dunes of Gaza]. Today there are more options. It allows people to think, ‘Who am I?’ and find their own letter in the Torah.”
![‘ONE OF the biggest beneficiaries of that way of thinking [expanding national-religious political scope] was Naftali Bennett (seen May 14).’ (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)](https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/t_Article2016_ControlFaceDetect/462067 "‘ONE OF the biggest beneficiaries of that way of thinking [expanding national-religious political scope] was Naftali Bennett (seen May 14).’ (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)")
