Why No Antipathy and Why Not Interlopers

In Why Israel Won't Abandon the Settlers, Yossi Klein Halevi suggests that while once it was the kibbutzim that produced the nation's combat elite. Now it is the West Bank settlements communities.

After touching on the issue of the HaYovel neighborhood in Eli, near my home in Shiloh, Klein writes:

Increasingly, Israel's military elite is coming from West Bank settlements and, more broadly, from within the religious Zionist community that produced the settlement movement and passionately supports it.

Perhaps 40% of combat officers are now religious Zionists (not to be confused with ultra-orthodox Haredim), nearly three times their percentage in the general population...Once it was kibbutzim, or collectivist farms, that produced the nation's combat elite. Now it is the religious Zionist community that raises its sons to sacrifice...The prominence of religious Zionists in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) explains in part why the prospect of a West Bank withdrawal is so traumatic to policy makers and to IDF commanders. If the army is sent to dismantle settlements in the West Bank—as it did in Gaza in 2005—there is the very real threat of widespread disobedience and the collapse of entire units.

He then continues and deals with the issue of Zionist identity, in a sense:

The "settler" has assumed a near demonic image around the world, but most Israelis know that only a radical fringe is responsible for uprooting Palestinian olive trees and vandalizing mosques. Most settlers are part of the mainstream. Israelis encounter them in the army, in the workplace, and in the universities...Crucially, few Israelis regard settlers as interlopers on another people's land. The political wisdom of the settlement project is intensely debated here, but only a leftwing fringe denies the historic right of Jews to live in what was the biblical heartland of Israel.

And then he comes in with the punch-line:

But given the absence of a credible Palestinian partner able to deliver a majority of his people for a compromise Israelis could live with, the public will continue to avoid a traumatic confrontation with settlers that could rupture the military and lead to civil war...if the international community wants to understand why the Israeli public doesn't share its antipathy toward the settlers or its urgency to uproot settlements, a good place to begin is with Mr. Barak's effort to legalize two houses on a West Bank hilltop.

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