Introduction

Rabbi Schach was about to address his followers and instruct them on how they should vote in the forthcoming election. The nation had awoken to the fact that the balance of power was held by an aged rabbi with a top hat and side curls, who spoke a strange mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish that most of his secular listeners could not understand. That evening Rabbi Schach would determine the fate of Labor and Likud.
A peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was inching its way painfully forward, but it had split the National Coalition Government.
Both Labor and Likud began to seek alliances with the smaller parties, of which the religious formed the largest single bloc. Labor had made informal agreements with Agudat and Shas, but Rabbi Yosef, one of the leaders of Shas, feared that a Labor alliance would split the party.
The Sephardics tended to be ultra nationalists hated the Arabs, and were adamantly opposed to the territorial concessions envisaged by Labor. Rabbi Schach, co founder of Shas, came to the rescue. He would address his disciples in Shas and Degel ha-Torah and advise them about the imminent coalition talks.
The rabbi’s ten-minute speech was not only bewildering, but obscurely disturbing to the Israelis who watched him on their television sets. He did not mention the coalition talks directly and addressed none of the issues that obsessed the rest of the nation. He was clearly quite indifferent to such issues as Palestinian rights, national defense, or the feasibility of exchanging territory for peace. He had not a single good word to say about the State of Israel. Instead of seeing the Jewish state as a savior, he referred bleakly to the “terrible and awful” time in which the Haredim now lived. The wars that worried the rabbi were not the Arab-Israeli wars, but the long battle waged by the Zionists against religion.
“The wars we are fighting [against those who oppose tradition] did not begin today; they began already at the time of the First World War, and only the Master of the Universe knows what else is expected,” the rabbi said with great emotion. But the outcome was not in doubt: “The Jew cannot be destroyed. He may be killed, but his children will continue to cleave to the Torah.”
Bad enough that they were cast as the enemy; but, to their dismay, Laborites had to hear their sacred institutions and themselves denounced as not merely un-Jewish but positively anti-Jewish.
“Is Labor something holy?” asked the rabbi derisively.
“Have they not separated themselves from the past, and seek a new Torah? “ These kibbutzniks were no better than gentiles;
they did not even know what Shabbat or Yom Kippur was. How could such people be trusted to decide “critical and essential matters facing the Jewish people? “ There could be no deal with Labor politicians.
“When they are in the Knesset, they are not interested in strengthening religiosity. To the contrary, they seek to pass laws that will destroy the Jewish religion.”
The significance of that evening in Yad Eliahu Stadium did not lie simply in the fact that Rabbi Schach, alone and unaided, appeared effortlessly to have swung the balance in favor of Likud, but that it marked the extraordinary journey of the Haredim from a despised out-group to the heart of power. The occasion also showed that there were “two nations” in Israel, who scarcely understood one another’s language and shared none of the same concerns. It also revealed the deep hatred that inspired the piety of so many of the Haredim, a rage directed not merely against gentiles, but also against their fellow Jews.
The extreme religious Zionists and members of Gush Emunim were also ready for a fight. They were rebels, mounting what they saw as a revolution against secular nationalism on the one hand, and Orthodoxy on the other.
Life had changed drastically for Jews. They felt that there was no need for Jews to be constricted by the traditions belonging to the Diaspora, because the messianic age had begun. This was the first major outbreak of Jewish messianism since Shabbetai Zevi. At that time, too, Jews had felt in transition and believed that they were about to experience unprecedented change.
But where Shabbateans had rebelled against the restrictions of the ghetto, Gush members felt territorially circumscribed. They were as obsessed with boundaries as the Shabbateans, and though they focused chiefly on the frontiers of Eretz Israel, they were also fighting a battle to define the limits and borders of Judaism. They wanted to break down the barriers between secular and religious Jews. Kookists were convinced that, whatever the Haredim thought, it was possible to be at once fully Orthodox and Zionist;
they also insisted, against the secularists, that without a religious dimension, Zionism was incomplete. But these were difficult years.
Kookists felt betrayed by the Likud government, which had expelled them from Yamit, and, by making peace with the Arabs, had stalled the redemptive process. This seemed clearer than ever when the Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah (an Arabic term meaning “a shaking off”) broke out in 1987, and eventually impelled the Labor government to sign a peace treaty which, in Kookist eyes, was even more unacceptable than Camp David, because it promised to surrender parts of the holy land of the West Bank. Increasingly, Kookists felt that they were surrounded--rather as Jews had been in the Diaspora--by a hostile gentile world, but also by their fellow Jews, who were holding them back from the fulfillment they felt to be within their grasp.
As a result, the Gush’s mystical joy in the Land became an ecstasy of rage, which could on occasion erupt in terrifying violence, in the first instance against the Arabs. In the early, more hopeful days of their movement, Gush settlers declared that they had come to “help” the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and to break down the “wall of hatred” between the two peoples, though the very terms in which this offer was couched revealed implacable hostility: “We have come to cleanse you of the air of murder to which you have become accustomed,” Levinger had promised in the 1970s.
His behavior grew increasingly provocative. He used to walk aggressively, gun in hand, through Arab towns in the West Bank. If there had been a recent Palestinian attack on a settlement, he would lead activists in retaliatory, vigilante raids, smashing car windows or burning shops. After the outbreak of the intifadah, he said that whenever he approached Hebron, “there awakened within me raging spirits that did not give me peace.” In 1988, when his car was stoned by Palestinians in Hebron, Levinger jumped out and opened fire on his assailants, killing Khaled Salah, who was simply standing by his shoe store taking no part in the stoning. Afterward, Levinger ran amok, shooting indiscriminately, overturning vegetable carts, and cursing at the top of his voice. At his trial, he stated that though he had not murdered anybody, he wished he had had “the honour of killing an Arab.”
Gush members had different theories about what should be done about the Arabs in Eretz Israel. All agreed that the Palestinians had no rights to the land and that there was no place for them there. This theology of hatred and exclusion was, of course, a distortion of the Jewish faith. The Prophets of Israel, the Torah, and the rabbinical sages of the Talmud had all insisted on the paramount duties of justice and loving kindness even to “the stranger” who did not belong to their ethnic group but who lived with them in their Land. Rabbi Hillel, an older contemporary of Jesus, had summed up the teachings of Judaism in the Golden Rule: “Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you.” With fundamentalist selectivity, however, Kookists concentrated only on the more aggressive biblical passages, in which God commanded the Israelites to drive out the indigenous people of the Promised Land, to make no treaty with them, to destroy their sacred symbols, and even to exterminate them. They interpreted the belief that the Jews were God’s chosen people to mean that they were not bound by the laws obligatory for other nations, but were unique, holy, and set apart.
God’s command to conquer the land, argued Shiomo Aviner, was more important than “the human and moral considerations of the national rights of the gentiles to our land.”
Most Kookists believed that Arabs should be allowed to stay in Eretz Israel, but only as gerim toshavim (“resident aliens”). As long as they respected the State of Israel, they must be treated decently, but they could never become citizens or have political rights. Others would deny the Palestinians even this much consideration, and would press them to emigrate. A tiny minority have proposed extermination, using the biblical precedent of the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to slay them without mercy. In 1980, Rabbi Israel Hess published an article entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” in the official magazine of Bar-Ilan University. He argued that the Palestinians were to Jews what darkness was to light, and that they deserved the same fate as the Amalekites.
In the same year, the Gush settler Harm Tzuria wrote that hatred was “natural and healthy”:
In each generation we have those who rise up to wipe us out, therefore each generation has its own Amalek. The Amalekism of our generation expresses itself in the extremely deep hatred of the Arabs to our national renaissance in the land of our forefathers.
On May 3, 1980, six yeshiva students were murdered in Hebron. This inspired some of the most extreme Kookists to take revenge. Menachem Livni, a settler at Kiryat Arba, and Yehuda Etzion, a veteran Gush settler, planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them, so that they should be living reminders of the consequences of anti-Jewish terror. When he heard the news, Rabbi Harm Drukman exclaimed in rapture: “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!” Most Israelis, however, were horrified by this attack, which, in the event, only maimed two of the targeted mayors. They were even more disgusted when they learned that for Livni and Etzion this act of terror was just a sideline. In April 1984, the government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground in Israel which had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the Islamic world.
During the Six Day War in 1967, the IDF had conquered and taken East Jerusalem and the Old City from Jordan, and, a few days after the war, Israel had annexed these districts and, in defiance of the international community, had declared Jerusalem to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state. It was a controversial decision, since in 1947 the United Nations had declared that Jerusalem should be an international zone, and after the Six Day War had demanded that Israel withdraw from all the territories occupied during the hostilities, including Jerusalem. Jerusalem had been a Muslim city since 638, apart from a brief period of Crusader rule (1099-1187); Jerusalem, which Muslims call al-Quds (“the Holy”) is the third-holiest city in the Islamic world, after Mecca and Medina. The Dome of the Rock, which was completed in 691, was the first major Muslim monument ever built and was believed to mark the spot where Abraham offered his son to God in sacrifice;
later tradition had it that the Prophet Muhammad had made a mystical ascent to heaven from this rock. This place is also deeply sacred in the Jewish world, since the Dome is on the Temple Mount, thought to be the site of the Temple built by King Solomon.

For centuries, however, there had been no tension between Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem; Jews had come to believe that their Temple, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 c.e.” could only be rebuilt by the Messiah, so they had no designs on the area, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif (the Most Noble Sanctuary). Since the sixteenth century, the single most sacred place in the Jewish world has been the Western Wall, just below the Dome of the Rock, the last relic of the Temple built by King Herod in the first century ce. The Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1494--1566) granted Jews permission to make this an official sanctuary and, it is said, his court architect, Sinan, designed the simple shrine there.

The Arab-Israeli conflict ended this period of harmony between Muslims and Jews in the Holy City, and this sacred district had seen much violence since the 1920s. During the period of Jordan’s occupation of East Jerusalem and the Old City, between 1948 and 1967, Jews were not permitted to visit the Western Wall and ancient synagogues in the Jewish district of the Old City were destroyed. The Jews’ return to the Western Wall in 1967 was one of the most emotional moments of the Six Day War and was experienced, even by secular Israelis, as a profoundly spiritual event.
When the Israelis annexed Jerusalem after the war, they promised that Christians and Muslims would have unrestricted access to their holy places.
Muslims continued to control the Haram al-Sharif, even though this official government policy was deeply unpopular with both ultra nationalist Israelis and the more extreme religious Zionists, who maintained that it should be returned to the Jewish people. However, the official Jewish position remained unchanged. The Temple could not be rebuilt until the Messiah had brought about the Redemption; it was a prohibition that over the centuries had acquired the force of a taboo.
By the early 1980s, however, this was beginning to change. Livni and Etzion were not the only Jewish extremists who dreamed of rebuilding the Temple as a prelude to the Redemption. How could the Messiah return when the sacred site was “polluted” by the Dome of the Rock?
Like other fundamentalists, they believed that they should take the initiative, cast caution to the winds, and clear the Temple Mount of this Muslim shrine in order to prepare the way for the Messiah. If they took the first step, God would certainly intervene and reward this act of faith by intervening in history, sending the long-awaited Messiah and redeeming the people of Israel. Livni and Etzion and their fellow-conspirators believed that the Israeli government had committed a great sin in permitting the Arabs to remain in control of the Haram al-Sharif, the Temple Mount. The Dome of the Rock, in their eyes, was an “abomination,” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.”
One of the chief ideologues of the Jewish underground was Yeshua ben Shoshan, a gentle, soft-spoken Kabbalist who believed that the Dome of the Rock was the abode of the evil forces of the “Other Side” that were impeding redemption. It was he who had approached Livni and Etzion with the idea of purging the “abomination” during the Camp David negotiations, which, in his view, had been inspired by these demonic influences.
Their power would be neutralized by the destruction of the Dome, and the accursed peace process would come to an abrupt end. At the very least, the dramatic action would shock the Jewish people worldwide into a proper awareness of their religious responsibilities, and cause them to abandon this talk of reconciliation with the enemy.
It had been a perilous moment. Not only would the bombing of the Dome of the Rock have ended the peace process, it would almost certainly have resulted in a war in which, for the first time, the whole Muslim world would have joined forces against Israel. Strategists in Washington agreed that, in the context of the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States, Israel, the destruction of the Dome of the Rock could well have sparked World War 3. The specter of nuclear catastrophe did not trouble these extreme Kookists, however. They were convinced that by instigating an apocalypse here on Earth, they would activate powers in the divine world and “oblige” God to intervene on their behalf and send the Messiah to save Israel.
This was kabbalistic thinking gone mad. It is a terrifying example of the fundamentalist tendency to use mythology as a blueprint for action.
On the practical level, there was nothing irrational about the conspirators’ plans. Livni had been trained as an explosives expert in the I.D.F. He had studied the Haram al-Sharif meticulously for two years, and purloined a large quantity of explosives from military camps in the Golan Heights.
He had manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings. They were entirely ready for the attack. All that stopped them was that they could find no rabbi who was willing to sanction their plan.
The Dome of the Rock plot represented an abdication of reason, a reliance upon the miraculous, and a nihilism that could have entirely destroyed the Jewish state. This catastrophic messianism exhibited the death wish that has long been part of the modern experience. It was also self-destructive in that it badly damaged the credibility of Gush Emunim, which never recovered the admiration it had won in certain sectors of the Israeli public during its golden age.
A moral nihilism also characterized the movement founded by Rabbi Meir Kahane, who, to the distress of most Israelis, was elected to a seat in the 1984 Knesset with 1.2 percent of the vote. His career had begun in New York City, where he had organized the Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews made by black youths. In 1974, he had arrived in Israel, and eventually settled in Kiryat Arba, where he changed the name of his organization to Kach (“Thus!”). His objective now was to harass the Arabs and force them to leave Eretz Israel. Kahane’s fundamentalism was almost archetypal. His Judaism was so reductionist and ruthlessly selective that it become a deadly caricature of the faith.
“There are not several messages in Judaism,” he explained to an interviewer.
“There is only one. And this message is to do what God wants.” The message was simply this: “God wanted us to come to this country and create a Jewish state.” The Jewish doctrine of holiness kodesh:
“separateness”
“a setting apart”), which had symbolically celebrated the distinction of things by means of ritual, now had, in Kahane’s interpretation, a uniquely political meaning: “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.” That meant that the Arabs must go. The promise to Abraham was as valid today as in the patriarchal period, so the Arabs were usurpers. The mythos of Genesis thus became the rationale for a political program of ethnic cleansing. This reductive vision led logically to a messianic vision of utter horror. After the victory of the Six Day War, Jews had stood “on the brink of redemption.” Because of the single directive of Judaism, their mission was clear. They should have occupied the territories, expelled the Arabs, and expunged “the gentiles’ abomination from the Temple Mount.” If they had done all this, redemption would have come effortlessly and joyously. Because Israel failed, the Messiah would still come, but in a huge anti-Semitic catastrophe, far worse than the Holocaust, which would finally force all Jews to obey God’s one commandment and settle in Israel.
This dark vision of destruction and death is profoundly nihilistic. It is also suffused with hatred and a desire for revenge. Kahane ‘s horribly distorted version of the faith shows the effects of long persecution and suppression, which can, if permitted to do so, enter deeply into the soul and warp it. Kahane’s theology sees enemies everywhere, enemies that are ultimately one and the same, whether they are Christians, Nazis, blacks, Russians, or Arabs. Everything is seen from the perspective of Jewish suffering, and vengeance for that suffering. The State of Israel was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles:
God created this state not for the Jew and not as a reward for his justice and good deeds. It is because He, be blessed, decided that He could no longer take the desecration of His Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him, so He ordered the State of Israel to be, which is a total contradiction of the Diaspora.
God’s name was desecrated every time a Jew was beaten or raped by a gentile:
“When the Jew is humiliated, God is shamed! When the Jew is attacked--it is an assault upon the Name of God!” But the opposite was also true. Violent retaliation was kiddush ha-Shem, a sanctification of God’s name: “A Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums, this is kiddush ha-Shem.”
This ideology inspired a Kahanist, Baruch Goldstein, to shoot twenty nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25,1994. He acted to avenge the massacre of the fifty-nine Jews murdered by Palestinians on August 24, 1929. This act of revenge led to an escalation of Islamically inspired terror in the territories and in Israel itself.
The Palestinians had not been caught up in the religious renewal that had seized the Muslim world after 1967. Their response to the Arab defeat was political, secularist, and nationalist. Yasir Arafat reorganized the Palestine Liberation Organization and initiated a campaign of guerrilla action, terrorism, and diplomacy to find a solution to the Palestinian problem. This was a decisively secular movement. But after the PLO nationalists were suppressed in the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon in 1971, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin founded an Islamic movement which he called Mujamah (“Congress”), which initiated the type of welfare program that was associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1987, Mujamah had established a charitable empire in the Strip, consisting of clinics, drug-rehabilitation programs, youth clubs, sporting facilities, and Koran classes, supported by zakat (the Islamic tax), by the oil-rich Gulf states, and by Israel, which hoped to undermine the PLO by supporting Mujamah. For Yasin at this point was not interested in armed struggle against Israel. He was a reformer, who wanted to bring the fruits of modernity to the refugees of Gaza in an Islamic setting. He was also contending for the soul of Palestine against the nationalists: the cultural identity of the Palestinian people, he believed, should be Muslim rather than secular.
The popularity of Mujamah showed that many Palestinians agreed. They were proud of Arafat, but his secularist ethos only made perfect sense to an elite who had the benefit of a modern Western education.
Quite different was the ideology of Islamic Jihad, an underground network of cells similar to the Jihad organization in Egypt. Islamic Jihad applied the ideology of Sayyid Qutb to the Palestinian tragedy, which they interpreted in religious terms. At present, they believed, Palestinian secular society was jahili. Members of Islamic Jihad saw themselves as a vanguard, fighting a battle “against the forces of arrogance--against the colonial enemy all over the world,” explained their ideologue, Sheikh Auda. They were fighting a battle for the future of the entire ummah. Unlike Mujamah, Islamic Jihad was interested in armed struggle against Israel, and its targets were religious. In October 1985, for example, activists threw hand grenades into a crowd of soldiers and civilians at an IDF induction ceremony at the Western Wall, killing the father of one of the new recruits. By this date the organization had spread from Gaza to the West Bank.
On December 9, 1987, the popular Palestinian uprising known as the intifadah broke out in Gaza and spread to East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Since 1967, a whole generation of Palestinians had grown up in these territories under Israeli occupation; they were impatient with the old PLO leadership, which had not managed to achieve Palestinian independence, and frustrated by the daily humiliations and hardships of living under what they perceived as an oppressive, alien power. The Israelis had hoped that the Arabs in the occupied territories would become resigned to their rule in time, but resentment against Israel had reached boiling point by 1987, and the desire for a Palestinian state had become intense. The young leadership of this new revolt concentrated on undermining the occupation; they encouraged every single Palestinian to take part, so women and children threw stones at the Israeli soldiers, braving their guns and superior strength.