Introduction

Elon Moreh, now renamed Kedamim, was finally established during the season of Hanukkah, the festival that celebrates the liberation of Jerusalem by the Maccabees from the Seleucids in 164 bee and the rededication of the Temple. In the mythology of Gush Emunim, the ga ring became a new Hanukkah, a divine breakthrough, and a victory for God. It was a formative moment: the tide seemed to have turned; secular Zionism had been forced to submit to the divine will. Levinger had put history back on track.
The years 1974--77 marked the golden age of the Gush. Members toured the country, giving lectures and recruiting young men and women, secularists as well as religious, who were prepared to settle in the territories. Gush branches opened all over the country. The cadre formed a master plan for the settlement of the whole of the West Bank:
the aim was to import hundreds of thousands of Jews into the area and to colonize all the strategic mountain strongholds. Experts on the geography of the region, on demography, and on settlement were consulted. Administrative bodies were established for planning and propaganda. One of these was Mate Mirtzai, which organized settlement operations. Squatters, often led by Levinger, would drive their old, battered trailers to a desolate West Bank hilltop in the dead of night. When the army arrived to expel them, the right-wing parties in the Knesset accused the Labor government of behaving exactly the same way as the British in pre-state days. It was a clever stratagem. The Israeli government was now cast in the role of oppressor, and it was the Gush settlers who seemed to embody Israel’s heroic past.
The Gush managed to establish only three settlements during these years, however. Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was anxious to conciliate Egypt and Syria during this postwar period, and was ready to make small territorial concessions. He continued to resist the combined pressure of the Gush and the Right. But the Gush continued its propaganda efforts, organizing huge rallies and hikes across the West Bank. In 1975, crowds carried Torah scrolls through the occupied territories, singing, dancing, and clapping, secularists joining the religious Zionists. On Independence Day 1976, nearly twenty thousand armed Jews attended a West Bank “picnic,” marching from one part of Samaria to another. These militant hikes and demonstrations were often timed to coincide with the establishment of a new settlement or with another illegal squat. All these actions encouraged some Israelis to see the territories as essentially Jewish, and helped to break down the taboo against settling in occupied land.
Gush was pragmatic, clever, and resourceful. It appealed to atheists and secularists, but for its Orthodox members it was an essentially religious movement. From the Rabbis Kook, they had inherited a kabbalistic piety.
Establishing a settlement in what the Gush believed to be Jewish land was to extend the realm of the sacred and to push back the frontiers of the “Other Side.” A settlement was what Christians would call a sacrament, an outward symbol of hidden grace that made the divine present in the profane world in a new and more effective way. It was what Isaac Luria had called tikkun, an act of restoration that would one day transform the world and the cosmos.
The hikes, marches, battles with the army, and illegal squats were a form of ritual that brought a sense of ecstasy and release. After years of feeling inferior to both the secular pioneers and the scholarly Haredim, Kookists suddenly felt that they were at the center of things and on the front line of a cosmic war. By hastening the advent of Redemption, they felt at one with the fundamental rhythms of the universe. Observers noted that when they prayed, they swayed backward and forward, with their eyes tightly shut, their faces contorted and pained, and wailed aloud. These were all signs of what the Kabbalists called kawwanah, an effort of intensive concentration during the performance of one of the commandments that enables the Jew to see through its symbolic form to the essential significance of the rite. An act performed with kawwanah not only brings the worshipper closer to God but helps to rectify the imbalance that separates the mundane world from the divine. Gush activists not only experienced this ecstasy when they prayed;
they saw their political activities in the same light. The spectacle of Rabbi Kook preaching and weeping before a huge crowd at the inauguration of a new settlement was a “revelation.” So was the occasion when squatters wrapped themselves, screaming, in their prayer shawls, clinging with bleeding fingers to the sacred land, while the army pried them away from a hill near Ramallah. These were not simply political moments. Activists believed that they had looked through the earthly shell of these events to the divine drama at the core of reality.
Politics had thus become an act of worship (avodah). Before a Jew attends a synagogue service, he bathes in the mikveh, a ritual bath. In the same way, Gush rabbis have declared: “Before we sink into the gutter of politics, we should purify ourselves in the mikveh, as it is like delving into the secrets of the Torah.” This is a revealing remark, because it shows the dualism at the heart of Gush piety.
Politics is as holy as the Torah, but--as Kook the Elder had pointed out so long ago--it is also a gutter. Since 1967, Kookists had often experienced the shock of historical events as a “burst of light,” a favorite image of Kook the Elder, but they were also acutely aware of the darkness of political failure, setbacks, and obstacles. Israeli victories were hailed as great miracles, but they were also recognized to have been brought about by modern technology and military expertise.
Kookists, therefore, were actually strongly aware of the profane as well as the sacred. Their yearning for the divine was balanced by an experience of the opacity and intransigence of recalcitrant mundane reality. Hence the extremity and anguish of their prayer and activism.
Their mission was to bring the whole of life--even those aspects that are most impure, banal, and perverse--under the canopy of the sacred.
But where the Hasidim found joy and a new lightness in this task, the ecstasy of the Gush was often imbued with rage and resentment. They are men and women of the modern era. The divine is more distant, and it is more of a strain to transcend the pressing and insistent reality of the profane, which, as many now think, is all there is.
Gush activists overcame their personal alienation in the secular State of Israel by attempting to wrest the land from the alien Arabs. They settled their own minds by uprooting themselves, going beyond the borders of Israel, and colonizing the long-lost land. The “return” to Eretz Israel was an attempt to retrieve a value and a state of mind that is more fundamental than the confusing present.
There are obvious difficulties in this spirituality of rage and reconquista.
In 1977, for the first time in Israeli history, Labor was defeated in a general election and the new right-wing Likud party, headed by Menachem Begin, came to power. Begin had always advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan, so his election seemed at first to be another act of God.
This seemed clear shortly after the election, when Begin visited the aged Rabbi Kook at Merkaz Harav, knelt at his feet, and bowed before him.
“I felt that my heart was bursting within me,” Daniel Ben Simon, who was present at this “surrealistic scene,” recalled later.
“What greater empirical proof could there be that [Kook’s] fantasies and imaginings were indeed reality.”
Begin was an outspoken admirer of Levinger, he liked to call Gush Emunim his “very dear children,” and often used biblical imagery when expounding his hawkish policies.
After the election, the Likud government began a massive settlement initiative in the occupied territories. Ariel Sharon, the new head of the Israel Lands Commission, declared his intention of settling one million Jews on the West Bank within twenty years. By the middle of 1981, Likud had spent $400 million in the territories and built twenty settlements, manned by some 18,500 settlers. By August 1984, there were about 113 official government settlements, including six sizable towns, all over the West Bank. Surrounded by 46,000 militant Jewish settlers, the Arabs became frightened and some resorted to violence.
This should have been the perfect political environment for the Gush Emunim, who received much government support.
In 1978, Raphael Eitan made each West Bank settlement responsible for the security of its own area, and hundreds of settlers were released from their regular army units to protect their community and police the roads and fields. They were given a great deal of sophisticated arms and military equipment. In March 1979, the government established five regional councils on the West Bank with the power to levy taxes, supply services, and employ workers. Gush members usually had key roles, even though they now supplied only 20 percent of the West Bank settlers.
They had become in effect state officials, but their years of confrontation had made the Gush skeptical of government, however friendly, and after the Likud victory, members established Amana (“Covenant”) to organize and unify their own settlement activities, and Moetzet Yesha, a council of Gush settlements, to give them some independence.
The Gush were right to be skeptical, for the honeymoon with Likud was short. On November 20, 1977, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt made his historic journey to Jerusalem to initiate a peace process and, the following year, Begin and Sadat signed the Camp David Accords. Israel would return the Sinai peninsula, conquered in 1967, to Egypt and, in return, Egypt recognized the State of Israel and guaranteed security along their common borders.
The Accords looked forward to a “Framework for Peace,” possible future negotiations between Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the “representatives of the Palestinian people” about the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. On both sides, Camp David was a pragmatic agreement. Egypt got important territory back, and Israel gained a measure of peace.
The Sinai was not sacred land; it was not included within the borders of the Promised Land described in the Bible. Begin had always been adamant that there was no question of returning the West Bank to the Arabs; he was also confident that the Framework for Peace discussions would never happen, since no other Arab state would countenance them.
On the day the Camp David treaty was signed, Begin announced that the government would establish twenty new settlements on the West Bank.
This did not appease the religious Zionists, the Gush Emunim, or the Israeli right in general. On October 8, 1979, the new Tehiya (“Renaissance”) party was officially launched, with the blessing of Rabbi Kook, to fight Camp David and prevent further territorial concessions. Religious and secular radicals now worked together in the same political party. In 1981, the Kookist and former Gahelet member Harm Drukman founded his own Morasha (“Heritage”) party to press for more West Bank settlement. For the Gush, Camp David was no peace. They pointed out the etymological connection between the words shalom (“peace”) and shiemut (“wholeness”):
true peace meant territorial integrity and the preservation of the complete land of Israel. There could be no compromise. As Gush rabbi Eleazar Waldman explained, Israel was engaged in a battle against evil, on which hung the fate of the entire world:
The Redemption is not only the Redemption of Israel, but the Redemption of the whole world. But the Redemption of the world depends upon the Redemption of Israel. From this derives our moral, spiritual, and cultural influence over the entire world.
The blessing will come to all of humanity from the people of Israel living in the whole of its land.
But it appeared to be impossible to implement this mythical imperative in a world run along pragmatic, secular lines. However hawkish or biblical Begin’s rhetoric, he had no intention of letting mythos interfere with the practical logos of politics. From the very beginning, efficiency and effectiveness had been the watchwords of the modern spirit. Absolute principles had to be accommodated to practical political considerations and policies. Begin had to remain in good odor with the United States, which wanted the peace process.
This would always be one of the main problems for fundamentalists who tried to battle for God in the modern political world. Gush Emunim did make some gains during these years. In 1978, a French graduate of the Sorbonne and Merkaz Harav, Shiomo Aviner, set up the Ateret Cohanim (“Crown of Priests”) yeshiva in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem.
The yeshiva overlooked the Temple Mount, now occupied by the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world, and }he yeshiva s purpose was the study of texts relating to the priestly cult and sacrifices in the biblical Temple, in preparation for the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of the Temple on its ancient site. Since a new Jewish Temple would mean the destruction of the Muslim shrine, the founding of the yeshiva was itself provocative, but Ateret Cohanim also initiated a settlement project in the Old City of Jerusalem, which Israel had annexed, in defiance of the international community, in 1967. The yeshiva began secretly to purchase Arab property in the Muslim quarter and to reconstruct old synagogues there in order to establish a strong Jewish presence in Arab Jerusalem. The second gain made during these years occurred in 1979, when Gush Emunim challenged a ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court that ordered their new settlement of Elon Moreh, southeast of Nablus, to be dismantled. Gush Emunim threatened civil war and a hunger strike, and eventually, at the end of January 1980, the cabinet set up a special committee to find means of safeguarding existing settlements and to create new opportunities within the constraints imposed by the Supreme Court. On May 15, the government announced a five-year plan to establish fifty-nine new settlements in the West Bank.
But despite these isolated successes, Gush Emunim’s glory days were over. The new peace was popular with the Israeli public and in 1982, the Gush suffered a serious defeat. To comply with the Camp David Accords, Israel had evacuated the settlement of Yamit, a thriving secular town built by the Labor government on the shores of the Sinai.
Moshe Levinger declared that Zionism had been infected by the “virus of peace.” He led thousands of West Bank settlers back to Yamit, where they camped in the abandoned houses, daring the IDF to force them out.
It was a desperate step. Levinger reminded the settlers of the Jewish wars against Rome (66--72 CE), during which 960 men, women, and children had committed suicide in the fortress of Masada rather than submit to the Roman army.
The Gush rabbis consulted Israel’s two chief rabbis, who ruled against martyrdom, however, and once again Rabbi Levinger tore his garments in mourning. When the IDF arrived to remove the settlers, no Jewish blood was spilled but the Gush had been ready for a showdown and, for a moment, religious and secular Israel had seemed to stand on opposite sides of a battlefield.
The last stand at Yamit may have been an unconscious stratagem to deny a terrible truth. The Great Awakening that the Kookists had so confidently expected had not taken place; maybe Redemption was not, after all, imminent?
How could a state which made such craven territorial concessions be holy? The religious members of the Gush were experiencing “the great disappointment” of a messianic hope, which could lead to more desperate measures.
Despite their best endeavors, the Gush could not make God’s politics work in the real world. Shortly before the withdrawal from Sinai, Rabbi Kook died, which increased this sense of abandonment. No single figure emerged as Kook’s undisputed successor, and the movement split.
Some advocated patience, prayer, and a new focus on education to revive the true spirit of Israel. Others were ready for violence.
begin was not alone in encountering religious opposition to Camp David.
Anwar Sadat, his Egyptian opposite number, had met with the Muslim opposition in that country. Sadat’s peace initiative made him beloved and admired in the West, but, even though the peace was popular with many sectors of society, Egyptians felt more ambivalent about their president.
Despite the catastrophe of the Six Day War, Nasser had been greatly loved by most of the people. Sadat never inspired the same affection.
He had always been regarded as a lightweight politically, and on first coming to power in 1971, he had had to defeat an attempted palace coup against him.
The comparative success of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 did much to establish Sadat’s legitimacy, however. Having proved himself on the battlefield and restored Arab confidence, he was able to take his people into the peace process, which, he believed, would help Egypt and repair relations with the West.
After the 1967 defeat, Nasser had retreated somewhat from socialism and had initiated a rapprochement with the United States. He had also acknowledged the new religious mood in the Middle East, and, though the Muslim Brothers remained in prison, Nasser began to lard his speeches with Islamic references once again. These two tendencies became more marked under Sadat. In 1972, he dismissed the 1500 Soviet advisers installed by Nasser, and, after the Yom Kippur War, announced a new policy designed to bring Egypt into the capitalist world market. He called this new economic initiative infitah (“Open Door”). Sadat, however, was no economist and Egypt’s financial problems, always an Achilles’ heel, were exacerbated by infitah. It certainly opened Egypt up: foreign currency and foreign imports poured into the country.
Western investors were wooed by advantageous tax deals, and Egypt did become closer to the United States. Open Door also benefited a small percentage of the rising bourgeoisie, and a few Egyptians made a great deal of money. But the vast majority suffered.
Inevitably, Egyptian businesses could not cope with this foreign competition; there was corruption, and the ostentatious consumerism of the elite aroused intense disgust and discontent. The young especially felt alienated. Only about 4 percent of them could expect a decent job; the rest had to survive on very meager public-sector salaries, which they were forced to supplement by moonlighting in their spare time, working--often ineptly--as taxi drivers, plumbers, and electricians. Decent accommodation was prohibitively expensive, and this meant that a young couple often had to wait for years before they could marry and set up house together. Their only hope was emigration.
Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians were forced to leave home for long periods to find work in the wealthy oil states, where they could earn a good salary, send money to their families, and save for the future.
Peasants also joined this exodus to the Gulf, returning only when they had enough money to build a house or buy a tractor. Infitah endeared Sadat to the West, but it meant that most Egyptians simply could not afford to live in their own country, and were forced into exile.
As American business and culture took root, Egypt began to seem alien and Westernized to many Egyptians. Sadat was also becoming estranged from many of his people. He and his wife, Jihan, had a glitzy Western lifestyle, were frequently seen entertaining foreign celebrities and film stars, were known to drink alcohol, and lived in luxury in their numerous magnificent rest-houses, refurbished at the cost of millions of dollars, isolated from the hardship endured by most of the population. This accorded ill with Sadat’s carefully cultivated religious image. In the Sunni tradition, a good Muslim ruler is commanded not to separate himself from the people, but to live simply and frugally, and to ensure that the wealth of society is distributed as fairly as possible. By calling himself “the Pious President” in an attempt to align himself with the new religious mood in the country, and by encouraging the press to photograph him in the mosques, with a prominent “ash mark” on his forehead to show that he prostrated himself five times daily in prayer, Sadat inevitably invited Muslims to make unflattering comparisons between his own actual behavior and the ideal.
Yet, on the surface, Sadat was good to religion. He needed to create an identity for his regime that was different from Nasser’s. Since the time of Muhammad All, Egyptians had repeatedly tried to enter the modern world and find their own niche there. They had imitated the West, adopted Western policies and ideologies, fought for independence, and tried to reform their culture along modern European lines. None of these attempts had been successful. Like the Iranians, many Egyptians felt that it was time to “return to themselves” and create a modern but distinctively Islamic identity. Sadat was happy to capitalize upon this. He was attempting to make Islam a civil religion on the Western model, firmly subservient to the state.
Where Nasser had persecuted Islamist groups, Sadat appeared to be their liberator. Between 1971 and 1975, he gradually released the Muslim Brothers who had been languishing in the prisons and camps. He relaxed Nasser’s strict laws controlling religious groups, and allowed them to meet, preach, and publish. The Muslim Brotherhood was not allowed to reestablish itself as a fully functioning political society, but the Brothers could preach and establish their own journal, al-Dawah (“The Call”). There was much mosque-building and more air time was given over to Islam. Sadat also courted Islamic student groups, encouraging them to wrest control of the campuses from the socialists and Nasserites. Nasser had tried to suppress religion and found that this coercive policy was counterproductive. It had led to the rise of the more extreme religiosity promoted by Sayyid Qutb.
Now Sadat was attempting to co-opt religion and use it for his own ends.
This would also prove to be a tragic miscalculation.
At first, however, Sadat’s policy seemed a success. The Muslim Brotherhood, for example, appeared to have learned its lesson. The older generation of leaders released from the jails seemed determined to disown Sayyid Qutb and the Secret Apparatus, and wished to return to the nonviolent, reforming policies of Hasan al-Banna. The Brothers wanted a state ruled by Muslim law, but saw this as a long-term goal which could only be achieved by peaceful and legal methods. Yet even though the Brotherhood claimed to be returning to the pristine spirit of the Society, it was now in fact a very different organization. Where Banna had appealed especially to the working and middle classes, in the 1970s what scholars sometimes call the Neo Brotherhood attracted those members of the bourgeoisie who had profited from Sadat’s Open Door.
They were prosperous, comfortable, and ready to cooperate with the regime. This new Brotherhood would not appeal to the majority, who felt increasingly alienated from Sadat’s Egypt and endured a wearisome deprivation. In the absence of any other permitted form of opposition to the regime, many of the most discontented would seek a more extreme Islamic alternative.
But soon Sadat’s policies even antagonized the Neo-Brotherhood. Each month, its journal, al-Dawah, which had a circulation of about 78,000, published news about the four “enemies” of Islam: Western Christianity (habitually called al-Salibiyyah, the Crusade, to highlight its perceived imperialism), communism, secularism (typified by Ataturk), and Zionism.
“Jewry” in particular was regarded as the ultimate abomination, linked inextricably with the other three enemies. Articles in al-Dawah quoted passages in the Koran that speak of those Jews who rebelled against the Prophet in Medina, and ignored those other verses that speak positively of the Jewish faith. The anti-Semitism of al-Dawah claimed to go back to the Prophet, but was in fact a recent Islamic innovation, which relied heavily on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion rather than on Islamic sources. It was, therefore, impossible for the Neo-Brotherhood to remain loyal to Sadat after Camp David. Throughout 1978, al-Dawah called the Islamic legitimacy of the regime into question. The cover of the issue for May 1981 depicted the Dome of the Rock ringed with a chain, and locked with a padlock displaying the Star of David.