The Last Issue of "Nekuda"

Nekuda, which has been publishing monthly for the past 30 years, has closed up, or down. (On Nekuda in Hebrew)

Nekuda, the official organ of the Council of Jewish Communities in Yesha, was always held in high regrd, too often by others looking in rather than the residents themselves (see this article as an example; another.). Ian Lustick used it for his "For the Land, For the Lord". It was even quoted in a UN document from 1987.


I have an article in about Counterpoint but it is in Hebrew. Counterpoint was published in English between 1981-1989 for 30 issues and it too was quoted in Lustick's book (see note 8 for example).

Here it is:






Here is Tom Segev in 2005 on Nekuda:

Nekuda, a monthly put out by the settlers, is an interesting journal because it reflects the culture war that is being waged in Israel. The first issue since the disengagement embodies political and ideological stocktaking as well as much hate and calls of revenge toward the left and the government. The writers also debate their attitude toward the state; many of them want to disengage from it.

Rabbi Dan Be'eri calls on his colleagues to take over the country from within, instead of disengaging from it. "There is no need to be angry with the state," he writes, and suggests that the settlers infiltrate the country's elites...

However, the majority of the writers convey a sense of alienation, estrangement and even political and cultural persecution. Nadav Shenrav, a physicist who teaches at Bar-Ilan University and lives in the settlement of Revava, writes: "It may be that we have to move to a new way of thinking and understand that three peoples live in the Land of Israel today: Arabs, Jews and leftists." The leftists are not traitors, he says, they are strangers. "To a certain degree they are existential enemies of the Jewish people across the generations, in a deeper mode than the Arabs, because with them it is an identity question of to be or not to be...

...Yehuda Etzion, from Ofra proposes "leaving the political system, the un-Jewish [areli, literally, uncircumcised] democratic regime, the pointless culture that prevails here. Not to vote in the Knesset elections and not to run in them ... To come together in the new study house, to be strengthened, for each person to strengthen his brother... and to lead our people to a new covenant, the Covenant of Moriah."

It never went online and the new owners really weren't enthused about its staid format.

Oh well.