Session Number: 3.11
Session The Settlers Community and the Disengagement Plan
In August 2005, Israel evacuated the Jewish settlements in Gaza Strip - mainly in Gush Katif - as well as four settlements in northern Samaria. This action, known as the “Disengagement,” constituted a profound crisis for a significant section of the Israeli population most closely identified with religious Zionism and with the settlement movement in the Territories. The crisis was not only on the national level, as the state dismantled communities that it had established and nurtured for decades, but also on the communal level, as thousands of people were evacuated and their homes destroyed. The Disengagement also stirred a religious crisis, testing the very foundation of the beliefs that had guided the political and religious behavior of this section of the population.
The disengagement plan accelerated the tension between State an Religion. The fast and almost smooth way that the plan was implemented had shown to all that further withdrawals could be done. And indeed, a proposal to evacuate further settlements is being proposed by the winning party of the Israeli elections- Kadima headed by Ehud Olmert. Therefore, the settlement movement Gush Emunim is facing one of its crucial moments. This panel shall address several aspects concerning the settlers’ reaction to the disengagement, and suggest a framework for understanding some of the processes the Israeli society is currently going through.
Chair, Samuel M. Edelman (University of Judaism)
Motti Inbari (University of Florida, Gainesville)
The Attitude of the Rabbinical Leadership of Gush Emunim toward the
Disengagement
The disengagement plan, as a result of which Israel demolished Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, created a dramatic and profound religious dilemma. After the Six Day War (1967), an increasing number of religious Zionists saw the realization of Zionism as a manifestation of God’s desire to redeem His people. This perception led thousands of religious Israelis to join the Gush Emunim settlement movement in the territories occupied in the war. However, the Israeli governments failed to act as expected and instead decided to return territory to Palestinian control, which was perceived as a violation of God’s order. The peak of this process came with the disengagement. This process raised a difficult theological
question regarding the proper approach toward a Jewish state that relinquishes territory and destroys settlements: What supreme religious significance could be attributed to these events? Was the State of Israel no longer to be considered a Divine tool for the redemption of the Jewish people?
In my lecture, I shall examine the internal mechanism applied by a group of religious Zionist rabbis in response to their profound disillusionment with the
behavior of the state, reflected in an increase in religious radicalization due to
the need to cope with the feelings of religious and messianic failure.
Elisheva Rosman (Bar-Ilan University)
Empowering People? The Gaza Disengagement as a Test Case for the Mediating Function in the Gari’nim Program of Women’s Midrashot
Despite various religious prohibitions cited by those opposing compulsory military service for women, approximately 30 percent of female religious highschool graduates serve in IDF ranks, both as recruits and as officers. Approximately 70 graduates per year choose to defer their service, spend a year in an institution of religious study (midrasha), after which they enlist together as a group called a 'garin' (nucleus). Before the actual implementation of the disengagement from Gaza, the media and public discourse focused on the pre-army programs for men; speculating whether these soldiers would disobey orders en masse or participate in the evacuation
of settlements. No one considered that students from the women's programs would be charged with the task of bodily carrying protesters to buses.
Surprisingly, it was female garin members -- more than male hesder, shiluv or mekhina students -- who found themselves faced with this dilemma. As a rule, female students did not disobey orders and were supported in most cases by the staff of their study program. The study programs also attempted to assist their students in a more concrete way, holding preparatory seminars before the disengagement and debriefing them after it. Interviews conducted immediately after the Gaza redeployment with female participants, clarified that most students felt their study programs helped them cope with a difficult situation. This did not necessarily influence the students' decision to ultimately obey orders. They all stressed that they made their own decision and that the midrasha’s input was not the only factor they considered. But knowing their teachers' opinions did reassure them once they made their decision to obey orders. Interviewees also said they were aware that their teachers did not necessarily agree with the disengagement politically, but nevertheless attempted to support their students to the best of their ability.
This paper will describe how generally the study program attempted to assist and support students during the disengagement and how students behaved during the
occurrences of August 2005. It will also discuss how students viewed the situation and how they related to their respective midrashot in light of the
Michael Feige (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)
The Disengagement and the National Religious Camp: A Sociological Perspective
Most of the active opposition to the disengagement plan came from the National Religious camp. Mobilizing all its resources, this camp regarded the plan as a key event in its relationship with the Israeli society in general. While it is doubtful whether the evacuation will register as a major Israeli trauma, it is signaled as a defining moment in the complex history of nationalism and religion in Israel. This paper examines the events of August 2005 from a sociological viewpoint, using a comparison to the April 1982 events - namely the evacuation of the Yamit region – to reach insights on the social and political processes involved. Such a perspective reveals a change in the Greater Israeli discourse and national symbolism, the rise of new social forces, and the deployment of new strategies vis-à-vis the government and the army.
Years of settling in the occupied territories created new groups and interests, all highlighted in the struggle over Gush Katif. With the destruction of the settlement region, the encounter moves to the realm of memory wars: the way in which the events will be constructed in Israeli memory will influence, maybe determine, how the National Religious camp will position itself with and against the rest of Israeli society.
Rebecca Stein (Duke University)
Souvenirs of Conquest: The Israeli Occupation as Tourist Event
Missing from most historical accounts of the 1967 war are the ways it functioned as a tourist event. The gradual easing or dissolution of borders between Israel and its newly occupied territories in 1967 generated numerous new possibilities for travel between territories that had been divided by militarized borders since 1948. This meant the sudden availability of the newly occupied territories as tourist sites, landscapes, and/or markets for Israeli Jews and Palestinians.
To take 1967 seriously as a tourist event is not merely to interrogate the relationship between Israeliness and tourism, but to complicate the ways we understand this crucial moment in Israeli history – that is, the immediate aftermath of the war that established Israel as an occupying power in the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and Golan Heights. To do so, I turn away from the issues that have traditionally animated historians of the war (notably, issues of postwar diplomacy, and the Israeli government debate over the future of the occupied territories) and turn towards another set of issues regarding the popular, quotidian practice of Israelis (particularly Israeli Jews) as they encountered and explored the occupied territories and peoples in the days immediately following the cessation of violence in June, 1967.
My suggestion is that this encounter took shape in and through tourism in crucial
ways; more pointedly, that tourism was a (if not the) primary register by which
Israeli civilians experienced and found value in the occupation -- its territories,
peoples, vistas, and markets. Such a line of questioning helps us reanimate the traditional historical questions about occupation, territorialism, settler expansion, et al. I will argue that the mass tourist phenomenon of 1967 was crucial in laying the groundwork for the subsequent state investment in the occupation. Using the tools of postcolonial discourse analysis, this paper is based on a close reading of the Hebrew press from the weeks after the cessation of violence in 1967. As such, it is also a meditation on the utility, and the limits, of postcolonial theory for making sense of Israeli colonial
And at another session:-
Aaron Hahn Tapper (University of California, Santa Barbara)
From Gaza to the Golan: Religious Nonviolence and the Politics of Interpretation
“Jews hate Muslims. Muslims hate Jews.” It’s an understatement to call
generalizations such as these stereotypes, as they are rampant throughout the world, especially in the Middle East. In Palestine and Israel communities have inflicted violence against one another for decades, often justifying their actions using religiously charged rhetoric. Citing ayat from the Quran or pesuqim from the Torah zealots continue to murder 'others' in the name of God. Jewish Israeli and Muslim Palestinian religious leaders have issued teshuvot and fataawa, respectively, to defend the violence. Yet there are other rabbis and sheikhs who have distributed religious responsa supporting an entirely different theological means to achieve a similar end, one that is extremist in its own right. These leaders endorse nonviolent action as a means of political gain -- nonviolence carried out in the name of God. Rooting their ideologies in passages from the Torah and the Quran they are using religious tenets to raze the walls of perceived political injustice, fighting a battle often construed as political using theology. The hermeneutics of this process is clearly intertwined with politics; the line separating the political and theological character of these beliefs appears nebulous. This study analyzes the
boundary that ostensibly separates the political and theological ‘essence’ of
nonviolent, explicating the process that encapsulates how distinct interpretations of the same text can – and do -- lead to polar opposite behaviors.
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