WhatsappAs the most proud and nationalist Jewish government ever was just sworn in Jerusalem yesterday, I wanted to take us all back to how things were just 16 years ago to understand and appreciate, how far we have progressed since a low point in modern Israel’s short history, the Gaza “disengagement” in 2005. We still have much to work on, but we must internalize how blessed to be where we are today.
I wrote the following article together with my father for the Spring 2006 edition of the Jewish Action Magazine after I produced the following video clip in September 2005, to share the then-unknown story of the Jewish residents of Gush Katif, Gaza. The story was so important to tell, that I then produced Home Game the movie, to show the world their story in more depth. Home Game was the most successful independent Israeli movie ever, with no government/non-profit financial support. It is the most-watched movie about Gush Katif, still viewed by communities, organizations and educational institutions today.
Beginning of Spring, 2006 article:
Rachel Saperstein, now a resident of the Jerusalem Gold Hotel, is a friend of ours who lived in Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip for over twenty-five years before being expelled from her home. She recently returned from a fund-raising trip to the United States on behalf of the 10,000 refugees from Gush Katif and Northern Shomron. Her biggest disappointment was that many shuls refused to give her a forum because they did not want to take a stand on a political issue.
What a sad commentary on the state of the Orthodox community in America when the obligation to assist fellow Jews who are homeless, jobless and in desperate need of support, both financial and emotional, is twisted into an issue of politics. Their situation is as serious as that of the thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Yet the response to their needs has been very different.
This human disaster was not the result of a sudden, unanticipated act of nature but the consequence of a meticulously planned move by the Israeli government. In anticipation of the expulsion, police were thoroughly prepared—they were given detailed information about the Jews to be expelled including the number of people in each home, the ages of the children, the professions of the adults and their psychological profiles. But there seemed to have been far less concern and certainly far less planning for what would happen to the people the next day. The homes, livelihoods, schools, community centers and shuls of 10,000 Jews have been destroyed, and the victims have been cast out, for the most part, to fend for themselves. Even those who adhered to the government’s timetable and demands have not fared much better than those who did not. Should this not be the concern of every Jew everywhere?
One of the most tragic stories is that of the late Chezi Hazani, coincidentally of the destroyed community of Netzer Hazani. Chezi died suddenly of a heart attack one month after he and his family were expelled from their home. But there was no place to bury Chezi because he no longer had an official residence. Finally, after four hours of having the body lay in an ambulance on the road, the city of Rishon Letzion permitted Chezi to be buried in its cemetery, near the graves of his own parents. But he was not entitled to the free burial services granted to the residents of the city. His family had to pay an exorbitant 30,000 NIS (around $6,000) “non-resident” fee before the city’s chevrah kadishah (burial society) would proceed with the burial.
As of this writing, four months after the expulsion, more than half of the expellees are still living in hotels. Others are living in small, leaky caravans, a fraction of the size of the homes that they once lived in. According to a recent article in The Jerusalem Post, 78 percent are unemployed. Many have no access to their possessions that are locked away in storage containers. These are real people with real needs. They and their children have been scarred by the traumatic events of August 2005. The current plight of the refugees is a humanitarian, not a political, issue. Instead of being helped, people who built communities in which Torah study and observance flourished are harassed by the government institutions for their efforts to try to rebuild their lives and communities. Irrespective of whether or not one agrees with the disengagement, or whether or not a particular family left willingly or had to be carried out, we are obligated to assist these Jews in their time of need.
But the real issue that should be tugging at the conscience of American Orthodoxy is its response to the ongoing struggle to define the nature of the Jewish State. Shimon Peres has often asked if Israel is a Jewish or an Israeli state. When Peres was defeated by Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1996 elections, he was quoted as saying that “the Jews won and the Israelis lost.” Peres was Ariel Sharon’s chief political partner at the time of the disengagement. Although we cannot see into the minds of the architects of the disengagement, many Israelis believe that the evidence clearly points to an agenda to break up Religious Zionist communal life and undermine the movement’s idealistic spirit. This point is particularly critical to understand in light of the Road Map, which envisions the uprooting of many more religious, idealistic Torah-based communities, this time in the undisputed heart of Biblical Israel, throughout Judea and Samaria. Therefore, the question we must ask is this: Are we a nation that is guided by the principles of Jewish tradition and Jewish law, or a country, like every other country, run for and by people who happen to be Jewish?
The struggle over the identity of the Jewish State is nowhere more evident than in the political realm. The Shinui Party, whose platform called for Israel to be run as a secular state, was the third largest vote getter in the last elections. After the election, Orthodox politicians were outraged, accusing party leader Tommy Lapid of virtually declaring war on Judaism. Nevertheless, Sharon had no problem making Shinui a key member of his coalition. In the United States, a party with a Shinui agenda would most likely be labeled anti-Semitic and would probably never make it onto a ballot. The Anti-Defamation League and the American Civil Liberties Union would see to that. Moreover, every OU congregation would be up in arms. In Israel, a platform that espouses disdain for observant Jews and Jewish practice is given full credibility while right-wing religious parties that dare to dream of a Jewish state within what they understand to be the Divine mandates as expressed in the Torah, are ostracized, marginalized and even banned.
Unfortunately, the successful execution of the expulsion plan is a strong indication that many of the official institutions of the State of Israel are “anti-Jewish.” This is apparent, not because the State of Israel decided to expel Jews from areas that many believe to be within Biblical Israel or because it decided to give over parts of the Land to our enemies. Rather this is apparent in the ways the State of Israel dealt with those who disagreed with its decision to expel fellow Jews from their homes.
Israel, like America, cherishes the basic democratic rights of its citizens, including free speech and peaceful assembly. Yet, these democratic rights were trampled by the State of Israel when it dealt with the anti-expulsion protestors, or the “ketumim,” (literally, oranges—orange was the color worn by those protesting the disengagement) as we were called. Furthermore, the rules of proper judicial procedure and punishment were trampled on as well by the justice system when it came to dealing with the anti-expulsion protestors.
This is explained very clearly in a report issued by the Israel Policy Center and sponsored, in part, by the Orthodox Union, called Israeli Government Violations of Disengagement Opponents’ Civil Rights (for the full report, visit www.merkazmedini.org). The report reveals that Attorney General Menahem Mazuz made it clear to state prosecutors in public remarks that they were to treat non-violent protesters as if they were involved in a rebellion against State authorities with the purpose of destroying the State and its institutions. Not only was the protestors’ democratic right to non-violently demonstrate taken away from them but they were classified as rebels out to destroy the State of Israel. A very harsh judicial precedent indeed against the (mostly) teenagers of the religious/settler establishment.
The report states:
By choosing to reclassify nonviolent offenses such as blocking roads and passively resisting arrest—usually considered misdemeanors—as crimes against public security, and by invoking what the accused thought while performing them, Israeli courts justified draconian measures of pre-trial detention against adults and minors alike. In the case of three minors detained for lengthy periods of time, summarized below, the presumed ideological tendency of the minors’ parents was used as justification for refusing to return the minors to their parents’ custody. The conflation of the parents’ presumed ideology with their evident religious lifestyle is hard to miss.
The report cites a number of cases. In one, the prosecution wanted to arrest a group of girls prior to their trial in order to “prevent them from making their dangerous opinions heard, even inside their own homes”; it also argued that “reeducation could be an appropriate reason for restricting their freedom.”
The report clearly points out that the phrase “ideological crime” (“avaryanut ideologit”) pops up again and again in court decisions regarding opponents of the disengagement.
The picture that emerges from the report is that the government allowed its judicial arm to pass judgment against protestors based on their ideology and beliefs and not based on human rights and rule of law.
Gary Rosenblatt, editor of New York’s Jewish Week, wrote: “Reading the report on the government’s alleged violation of the disengagement opponents’ civil rights is a sad and painful exercise for anyone who values Israel’s reputation as an outstanding democracy.”1 Furthermore, in a second report, Dr. Avital Molad of the Israel Public Defender’s Office, wrote that she saw in the police and in the court system “a selective enforcement of the law based on political affiliation, trampled rights and a light trigger finger.”2 Dr. Molad also found that for the sake of the disengagement the State created “new rules,” under which hearings for minors were conducted collectively, rather than investigating evidence against each defendant separately.
Neither report received much publicity and so there was not much of a public reaction in Israel. (The role of the Israeli media in relation to the disengagement was the subject of an extensive article in the September/October issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.) Statements by high-ranking government officials often reflected this same attitude of intolerance. Yair Lapid, Tommy Lapid’s son, was quoted as saying that he is not afraid of a civil war in Israel because the settlers are not “our” brothers.3 And Knesset Member Ephraim Sneh, in an interview with the Israeli daily Maariv, called for a civil war against Religious Zionists. Using the American Civil War as a precedent, Sneh wrote:
Eighty-five years after its establishment, the United States of America was drawn into a cruel and destructive civil war, but the results of that war formed the democratic character of the giant country. The confrontation among [Israelis] is also unpreventable.4
A similar sentiment was expressed publicly by Ami Ayalon, a former head of Shabak, the Israeli counter-intelligence and internal security service, and until recently, a contender for the Labor Party leadership, when he said that “it is about time for Israel to have another Altalena.”
Caroline Glick, a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, summed up the situation in the following way:
In the year and a half which preceded the implementation of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal and expulsion plan from the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria, the leftist elites in Israel waged an unrelenting cultural war against the Israeli Right generally and against religious Zionists specifically. Religious Zionists were portrayed by the media, by entertainment icons, by Sharon’s advisers, and by his political allies on the Left as blood-crazed zealots, parasites, and the single largest danger to Israel’s well-being.5
As the months dragged on, the attacks against religious Israelis intensified. In July, Haaretz editorialized: “The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the disengagement, Religious Zionism’s status will be different.” The editorial went on to castigate Religious Zionists as “a Trojan horse that has infiltrated Zionism in order to destroy it from within.”
The Council of Jewish Settlements in Yehudah, Shomron and Gaza, which organized the campaign against the expulsion plan, was unable to find a public relations firm that was willing to take it on as a client. Its leaders were told time after time by public relations executives that working with “the settlers” would wreck their reputations.
These reports allow us to see that a governmental, judicial and media war was waged against the mostly religious anti-expulsion protestors, as if they were the biggest threat to the stability of the State of Israel. The Religious Zionist public, which once viewed itself as the modern-day Israeli pioneers who claimed the idealistic activism that once belonged to Labor Zionism, now finds itself branded as the existential enemy of the State of Israel. Even while the Israeli political and judicial bodies have adopted the view that the conflict with the Arabs is between Israel and “terrorists” (and not the Palestinian people), they have made the religious Right an enemy of the state. The Palestinians are our “peace partners,” while the visionaries and idealists within the “settler” population are the “obstacles to peace.”
Israeli government institutions have a vested interest in preventing the truth of their anti-religious agenda from being revealed. There is clearly a plan for further massive expulsions that will make Gaza look like a drop in the bucket. But if the Israeli government couldn’t get it right for 10,000 people after eighteen months of planning, how can they expect to get it right for 50,000 or 100,000 expellees? So it covers-up or downplays the reality—after all, the expulsion went smoothly, soldiers and residents cried in each other’s arms, everything is fine! But it wasn’t fine and it still isn’t fine. Just ask the Jews whose vibrant communities were destroyed or those who are living in Ir Ha’emunah, or Yad Mordechai, or Nitzan or in hotels without any permanent housing solution in sight.
How is the committed Orthodox community supposed to act vis-à-vis the State of Israel now that we know the truth? Are we exempt from learning from what happened and from adopting a new action plan for our community vis-à-vis the State of Israel? A specific answer will not be found in this article, but these questions must be the basis of further introspection and soul searching for our community.
Relying on official government press releases and the media regarding the situation in Israel and the expulsion plan (and its outcomes) has left most of world Jewry believing half-truths and PR spin. Brothers who care must make sure they really understand the plight of their fellow brethren in order to then act accordingly.
The Land of Israel is our homeland, and the State of Israel is the official institution that allows us to fulfill the two-thousand-year-old dream of “vetechezenah eineinu beshuvcha leTzion berachamim” and “vehavienu leshalom mearba kanfot Ha’aretz.” In order to steer the State of Israel in the right direction, as part of the redemption process, we must fully understand the reality of what the State of Israel is today.
The ideal solution is that committed American Orthodox Jews should be making aliyah. Israel is the only place where you can truly make a difference! Until that time, it behooves the Orthodox world to seek the truth and strive in whatever ways it can to fulfill God’s promise to Avraham: “To you and your descendents I have given this Land … to be a light unto the nations.”
Avi Abelow is an organizational psychologist who lives in Efrat. He was a volunteer in Gush Katif at the time of the disengagement and was expelled with the residents of Netzer Hazani. His father, Peter, who writes a regular column for Jewish Action, also lives in Efrat.
Notes
- “A Sad Chapter for Israeli Justice,” 25 November 2005.
- See “Abusive Policemen, Biased Judges,” Haaretz, 24 November 24 2005.
- Quoted by Caroline Glick, “Avoiding Israel’s Self-Destruction,” Jewish World Review.
- Quoted by Caroline Glick, “The Scarlet Letter,” The Jerusalem Post, 5 November 2005.
- “The Scarlet Letter,” 5 November 2005.
