Having said that, there’s religious and religious. The behaviour displayed during the disengagement from Gaza by some of the settlers portrayed on TV – as opposed to most of the religious and non-religious settlers who departed with impressive decorum and dignity – was a shocking perversion of religion. The way in which they insisted that the land was somehow sacred was not merely historically inaccurate but was itself sacrilegious. Jews do not worship land. To do so is a desecration of God’s name.

Their religious histrionics were all carefully staged for the watching media – prayers timed for the cameras, lamentations and the rituals of mourning signified by the ripping of clothes, as if they were suffering a fascist pogrom. You would hardly have believed that this expulsion from Eden merely amounted to Israel moving its citizens into Israel itself in order better to protect both them and the state. The exploitation of their children, moreover, whose distress at leaving their homes was enormously compounded by such hysterical manipulation, was nauseating. The nadir was a family leaving their home with their children screaming in terror, with Stars of David pinned to their clothing and their hands in the air, as if they were being dragooned by the Gestapo into the cattle trucks. Such an equation of the disengagement with the Nazi genocide was monstrous and obscene, a ghastly mirror image of the disgusting equation being made between Israelis and Nazis by British and European Jew-haters. For religious Jews to make such an equation was barely credible.

Moreover, as one Israeli newspaper article pointed out, territory never used to be a religious issue. Zeev Maoz wrote in Haaretz:

‘The religious establishment did not raise an outcry when the Old City [of Jerusalem] was evacuated in 1948, or when toward the end of the War of Independence it was within the Israel Defence Forces’ power to conquer the West Bank but David Ben-Gurion refrained. It is hard to find written evidence of even a single rabbi who opposed the evacuation of the Gaza Strip at the end of the Sinai campaign for religious reasons. Nor did the religious Zionist ministers who sat in Levi Eshkol’s government enlist the Jewish religion in the cause of land. They supported the June 1967 decision to condition Israel’s return to the international border on a peace agreement with Egypt – a decision that had it been implemented would apparently also have included the Gaza Strip.’

Having said all that, the disengagement was extremely upsetting to watch. As readers know, I believe that it was the right thing to do (see my post on July 28); from the start I had never thought it was right to settle the territories. I hope that Israel will – whatever Ariel Sharon has said to the contrary – withdraw its citizens from most of the settled areas, retaining only those that are truly essential to its security and well-being.

Yet I nevertheless found the disengagement from Gaza deeply affecting. It wasn’t simply that people were losing their homes of nearly forty years. It wasn’t even that the hysteria of crypto-religious land-worship itself painfully illustrated the deep and dangerous dysfunctionality in the national psyche created by fifty years of unbroken national siege. It was more the sense that, as has happened time and again in the history of Israel, the Jews are swallowing the fact that a wrong is being done to them in order to avoid a greater wrong. The greater wrong to be avoided here was the moral and strategic trap of ruling a million disaffected Arabs in Gaza (and a further three million in the West Bank). That is very different from the reason most people want Israel out of the territories – that they think Israel has stolen Palestinian land. This is a fundamental error which is a principal cause of the hatred of Israel that has developed in Britain and Europe. It is an error because of the following:

1) The territories did not belong to the Palestinian Arabs but were no man’s land, as they remain;
2) Unlike the previous illegal occupation of these territories by Jordan and Egypt, Israel’s presence was a defensive act taken for its own security, and was sanctioned under international law until such time as the Arabs ceased their annihilatory belligerency against Israel;
3) Far from Israel driving the Palestinian Arabs out, it is the Arabs who have tried to drive the Jews out of lawfully constituted Israel -- an act of aggression for which America, Britain and Europe believe they should be rewarded with a state of their own;
3) The land settled by the Israelis in Gaza was not ‘stolen’ from individual Palestinians. Much of it was originally vacant; much of it was bought by the Jews from the Arabs.

Take the evacuation of Kfar Darom, where some of the worst violence of the disengagement took place when settlers hurled missiles and chemicals from the roof of a synagogue – a synagogue! – at Israeli troops. You watch such scenes in horror and fury and disgust at the settlers. And then you learn that the Jewish settlement of Kfar Darom was founded in 1946, two years before Israel itself, on land legitimately purchased by the Jews from the Arabs. Not stolen; not appropriated; not occupied. Freely bought from those who freely sold. As was so much of Israel itself. And you also learn that this tiny community of Kfar Darom halted the Egyptian advance for several days during the attempt by the Arabs to strangle the Jewish state at birth in 1948. And then you begin to realise what leaving this land actually means in terms of rightful ownership and the rule of law and a price paid in blood. And you watch the astonishing scenes of tough army commanders ejecting these settlers with their arms comfortingly round their shoulders and with tears streaming down their cheeks, and you weep with them even though you still think it is right that the settlers must go because it is not in Israel’s interests that they should stay, but you also understand that in this unique situation there is no one right thing and no one wrong thing because Israel is trapped between that rock and that hard place, with not one country in the world -- no, not even America -- prepared to release it from its lethal predicament.

Now, after disengagement, the ball is firmly in the Palestinians’ court. Even Amos Oz acknowledges that. The Palestinian Arabs now must reciprocate by dismantling their infrastructure of terror. Even to type the words, however, is to realise the hollowness of the expectation. Yet if this does not happen, will the so-called civilised world hold Arab feet to the fire – or will it remain mute in the face of renewed Arab terror, only to blame Israel once again when it takes further inevitable action to defend its people?

Whatever Israel does is not enough. And that is the single most important reason for the continuation of the Middle East impasse – the persistent refusal by America, Britain and Europe to hold the true aggressor to account, rewarding it instead at every stage for its aggression, and expecting its victim to meet impossible expectations within indefensible borders. In its own terms, the disengagement from Gaza was a triumph, an act of moral heroism and consummate military professionalism. But alas, as we are once again reminded by yesterday's random murder of a British boy in Jerusalem and the wounding of another as they went about their innocent routines of piety, it is almost certainly but another staging post in Israel's unending tragedy.

Posted by melanie at August 26, 2005