Following the Israeli Right's mass demonstration against PLO
Chairman Yasser Arafat's non-visit to Jerusalem on July 2, 1994,
the weekend of his initial return to Gaza, Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin angrily declared that "an evil partnership has been created
between the Hamas murderers and the extreme Right in Israel, who
have set as their goal the destruction of the peace process." He
was undoubtedly reacting to the signs "Death to Arafat" and "Rabin
is a traitor", held by the demonstrators, and to the mini-pogrom
which a few dozen demonstrators carried out against Palestinian
property in the Old City.
Rabin was also disturbed by a personal letter sent to him a few
weeks earlier by Aharon Domev, a member of the Yesha Council (The
Council of the Settlements of Judea, Samaria and Gaza), who warned
him about the extreme and peripheral Right's plans for "political
murder". Domev said that while he had no specific knowledge about
such a plan, he had heard, "too often in the recent past, works of
desperation which talk about a solution based upon a political
murder, aimed at the Prime Minister, at Minister Shulamit Aloni and
other ministers."
A lecturer in Political Science at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem since 1972, Professor Ehud Sprinzak is considered
Israel's leading academic authority on the Israeli Right. Since the
Oslo Agreement was announced, he has been warning, in print and in
many public forums, that the Government and the majority of the
Israelis who support the peace process, do not understand the depth
of the trauma and sense of despair felt by the Israeli radical
Right, and particularly by the Israeli religious Right.
Professor Sprinzak's book, The Ascendance of Israel's Radical
Right, is an extremely timely analysis and survey of the components
of the Israeli radical Right. In a sense, it serves as a road map
which enables the reader to make his or her way through the
labyrinth of personalities and movements on the right.
Sprinzak says he was galvanized into writing the book when the
existence of an Israeli right-wing anti-Arab underground was
revealed. In 1984, twenty-seven Israelis were arrested for planning
to blow up five buses full of civilian Arab passengers on the West
Bank. He was particularly concerned by the fact that the group had
an elaborate plan to blow up the Dome of the Rock on Jerusalem's
Temple Mount, the third most sacred site for Muslims. Like others
he was also surprised to discover that the members of the
underground were not just a bunch of paranoids from the Israeli
lunatic fringe, but rather respected members of the Gush Emunim
(Bloc of the Faithful) religious settlement movement, considered a
legitimate part of the Israeli society and body politic. That key
year of 1984 also introduced another unexpected event, the election
of Rabbi Meir Kahane, leader of the notorious Kach (Thus) Party to
the Knesset, voted in by nearly 26,000 Israelis including 2.5% of
the Israeli soldiers.
The author states that the contemporary Israeli radical Right has
roots within the ultra-nationalist camp of historic Zionism. These
roots include aspects of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionist
Movement, the Lehy (Stern Gang) group, and the small Brit
Habirionim (Covenant of the Thugs) among secular right-wing
Zionists, as well as elements within the activist wing of Labor
Zionism. He notes that the concept of "transfer" (of Arabs from the
Land of Israel) currently advocated by General (res.) Rehavam
Ze'evi's Moledet (Homeland) Party had first emerged within Labor
circles. Sprinzak quotes Josef Weitz, director of the JNF (Jewish
National Fund), who wrote in his diary in 1940: "it must be clear
that there is no room in the country for both peoples ... If the
Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us
... "
Sprinzak maintains that the first religious Zionists, who rebelled
against the predominant religious view that the Jews must wait for
the Messiah's arrival before they return to Israel, were moderate
pragmatists. However, Rabbi Avraham Itzhak Hacohen Kook, a
messianic Zionist who became the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi in
Palestine in 1921, introduced a strong maximalist component to the
thinking of the Mizrachi Movement (the forerunner of today's
National Religious Party). Kook considered secular Zionism to be
"the beginning of redemption." Under his guidance Mizrachi became
totally opposed to ideas of partition, drawing close to the
maximalist ultra-nationalist circles within the yishuv (Jewish
community in pre-state Palestine).
Following the Holocaust and the widespread realization that "a
Jewish state in part of Palestine was preferable to no safe place
for the Jews at all," the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews
supported Ben-Gurion's pragmatic stance in favor of partition.
Sprinzak even provides an extraordinary quotation from Rabbi
Fishman, one of the leaders of Mizrachi, who expressed his painful
renunciation of the dream of the entire Eretz Yisrael in 1947 by
saying: "if God intends to leave us without Jews, then I am ready
to give up on Eretz Yisrael and the Messiah. I know this is heresy,
but if this is the case then I am a heretic."
The Six-Day War
The first two decades of the State of Israel were dominated by
Mapai (Labor) politics and relative political pragmatism. The old
radical Zionist right was just a marginal phenomenon in Israeli
politics - until 1967.
"The Six-Day War transformed the Israeli political psyche," writes
Sprinzak, changing political thinking in the entire Middle East. He
claims that "for nearly half of Israel's citizens the outcome of
the Six-Day War created a new political psychology and new
identity: Israel's territorial maximalism."
Within secular Israel, this gained expression with the creation of
The Movement for a Greater Israel, whose September 1967 founding
manifesto states that "the whole of Eretz Yisrael is now in the
hands of the Jewish people, and just as we are not allowed to give
up the State of Israel, we are not allowed to give up the land of
Israel..." According to Sprinzak, "it was an unequivocal assertion
that the conquest of vast Arab territories was irreversible." He
notes that what made the manifesto, and the movement, of particular
significance was that, along with right-wing Revisionists, many of
the seventy-two signatories were identified with the Labor
Movement, including some of Israel's leading writers and generals.
Yet most of them also remained committed to Israel's traditional
democratic values. "They truly believed," Sprinzak writes, "that
there was no contradiction between the new Israel that had just
been formed by the Six-Day War and the principles of the old
Israel" as expressed in its Declaration of Independence.
However, it was a different story for the Zionist religious Jews,
who "were especially stunned by the outcome of the Six-Day War. It
did not square with the non-messianic pragmatic stance most of them
had maintained for years. It could only be comprehended as a
miracle," And the messengers of this miracle were the group who
gathered around Yeshivat Merkaz Harav, the religious seminary in
Jerusalem headed by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook, the son of the
above-mentioned Chief Rabbi. I personally heard Rabbi Yochanan
Fried, one of the founders of Gush Emunim, describe a key episode
in the book: Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook's sermon, performed three weeks
before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, in which "he bewailed the
partition of historic Eretz Yisrael and the inability of the Jews
to return to the holy cities of Hebron and Nablus. His faithful
disciples were told that the situation was intolerable and must not
last." This "prophecy" became the foundation of "a new messianic
and fundamentalist ideology." The redemptive process had gained
significant momentum. Among Rabbi Kook's students were (MK) Hanan
Porat and (Rabbi) Israel Shtieglitz (Ariel), paratroopers, who were
soon to participate in the conquest of the Western Wall, and were
later to become leaders of Gush Emunim and Kach.
The Rise of Gush Emunim
While many assume that Gush Emunim and the militant radical Right
emerged immediately after the Six-Day War, Sprinzak relates that it
was a combination of the unease created by the trauma of the 1973
Yom Kippur War and the sense of betrayal by a presumed ally, Likud
leader Menahem Begin in 1978. These factors served as a catalyst
for the growth of the radical Right. Gush Emunim was founded in the
gloomy post-war days of 1974, while American Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger was helping to negotiate the first interim
agreements with Egypt and Syria which involved territorial
compromises. Sprinzak categorically states that "the Israeli
radical Right was born on September 17, 1978, the day the Camp
David Accords were signed by Prime Minister Menahem Begin and
Presidents Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Jimmy Carter of the United
States, stunning the new territorial maximalists." They saw Begin's
autonomy plan as "a Palestinian state in the making." Thus the
struggle was on for the future of the Land of Israel.
Sprinzak presents a fascinating description and analysis of the
rise of Gush Emunim and the emergence of the Tehiya (Renaissance)
Party as the political focal point of the radical Right. Special
attention is devoted to the struggle to prevent the evacuations
from Sinai, the Jewish underground, and the impact of the Intifada.
The author also presents riveting portraits of key personalities on
the radical Right such as Professor Yuval Ne'eman, Geula Cohen,
Rabbi Moshe Levinger, Benny Katzover, General (res.) Raphael Eitan,
lawyer Elyakim Ha'etzni, Hanan Porat and others.
A particularly informative chapter entitled "Religious
Fundamentalism and Political Quasi-Fascism" deals with "Kach and
the Legacy of Rabbi Meir Kahane." Here Sprinzak describes Kach as a
"bitter anti-establishment" movement with "simplistic catch-all
solutions." He maintains that the movement lacks both content and
organization, particularly after the death of its authoritarian
founder and leader. However, the single exception was the Kiryat
Arba group.
Out of the Blue
This chapter should be of particular interest to IDF Chief of Staff
General Ehud Barak and the members of the Shamgar Commission, who
claimed that Dr. Baruch Goldstein's frenzied travesty in the Hebron
Mosque came "out of the blue," with "no early warning." Sprinzak
writes that "Kach activists [in Kiryat ArbaJ are capable and
experienced settlers who initiate many activities on their own.
They also participate in the public life of Kiryat Arba and Hebron,
and take part in many extra-legal deeds and vigilante operations.
About fifteen percent of the Kiryat Arba residents are Kach
supporters; it is the only place in Israel where party
representatives succeeded in being voted into the city council and
even becoming for a time coalition partners of the mayor."
Goldstein was a Kach activist and a member of the city council. And
the book was published back in 1991.
Another key chapter is called "Beyond Routine Politics: The
Cultural Radicals and the Struggle for the Temple Mount." Here the
reader is introduced to the little known Shabtai Ben-Dov and his
student, the unrepentant convicted Jewish underground leader Yehuda
Etzion, who wrote that "the expurgation of the Temple Mount will
prepare the hearts for the understanding and further advancing of
our full redemption." The chapter also contains a renewed encounter
with Rabbi Ariel, who wrote, that "the military should have used
its demolitions to level the mount." He considers the rebuilding of
the Temple on the mount to be the key to a worldwide Jewish
renaissance. Sprinzak boldly asserts that the Temple Mount "is
today the most volatile spot in the Middle East, perhaps on Earth.
Both Jewish and Arab extremists must know that a single operation
in the site can destroy years of slow and careful peace process." A
simulated war game at Harvard University suggested that such an
action could trigger a third world war.
Sprinzak completed the book in January, 1991. It is interesting to
examine how well it has held up in light of the frantic pace of
events since its publication, which include: the Gulf War, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the Madrid Conference, the victory of
the Labor-Meretz coalition, the Oslo Agreement, Gaza-Jericho First,
and now the Israeli-Jordanian Washington Declaration.
Notwithstanding, Sprinzak describes Tehiya, an attempt to merge the
secular and the religious radical Right, the third largest
political party in the 1984 elections, as a parliamentary success
story, claiming that it will remain a permanent presence in Israeli
politics. Yet by 1992, Tehiya was wiped out of the Knesset, and by
1994 it had disbanded. As for Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who Sprinzak
calls the single most influential leader of Gush Emunim, he also
failed in his 1992 bid for election to the Knesset. But, if the
great Pele could predict that Colombia would win the 1994 World
Cup, and if most Sovietologists could fail to foresee the collapse
of the Soviet Union, Sprinzak can be forgiven these lapses.
I also gained the impression that Sprinzak attributes to the
radical Right a greater sense of self-confidence than it actually
has. In my own experience with Gush Emunim activists and leaders, I
sense that they are very much on the defensive. Yet, the truth is
that there are very few encounters between secular Israeli
supporters of the peace process and members of the fundamentalist
religious Right who live on the West Bank and Jerusalem, except
perhaps within the framework of periodic military reserve duty.
Unlike the Palestinian members of Fatah who have an ongoing
dialogue with Hamas members as part of the routine of their daily
lives, we in Israel live in different and separate worlds. And if
the radical Right is on the defensive perhaps it makes them that
much more desperate and dangerous.
Sprinzak concludes that "the future of the radical Right appears
uncertain… If most Israeli leaders conclude that Israel has
to terminate the occupation in order to survive ... as in the
period after the 1947 partition of Western Palestine, the Israeli
radical Right is likely to lose its historical relevance ... " Yet,
he believes the phantom of civil war will haunt Israel. He asserts
that such a civil war will become possible "only if the territorial
compromise is imposed by a Labor-led government representing no
more than fifty to sixty percent of the Israeli voters." This is
precisely the scenario we are experiencing today, but so far, the
radical Right has been unable to muster significant opposition to
the agreement. However Sprinzak feels that, in the final analysis,
it is highly unlikely that a civil war or a sophisticated revolt
will be staged against the IDE He bases this conclusion on Gush
Emunim's tendency to defer to Israeli government authority when the
chips are down, and their sense that the army is sacred and that it
is therefore forbidden to fire on Israeli soldiers. In dozens of
discussions with Gush Emunim activists he further heard the
"repeated reminders of bloody Jewish civil war that led to the
destruction of the Second Temple and two thousand years of Jewish
exile".
The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right is highly recommended for
anyone concerned with the future of the peace process. It is a must
for the Israeli intelligence community, so that they won't be able
to claim next time, if there is a next time, that they didn't know,
and were therefore not prepared.