Split right down the middle
By Nadav Shragai
Haaretz, March 18, 2004
Will the right-wing parties leave the government, and, if so, when? At this stage, two parties, the National Religious Party (NRP) and the National Union, are accepting the stance of Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman (National Union) and are wary of severing the connection with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Lieberman estimates that among the public and in the Knesset there will be a majority in favor of the plan. He says the only significant forum where there is a chance, albeit a small one, of beating Sharon, is the cabinet plenary.
"Resigning now is a terrible tactical mistake," says Lieberman. "We have to take full advantage of the opportunity, even if it's not great, to torpedo the plan in the cabinet. At a certain stage he will have to bring it up for a vote, and that's our one and only chance." However, Lieberman promises that "the moment the government adopts this insane plan, I am placing my letter of resignation on Sharon's table."
The NRP holds two positions on the issue of resignation. Housing and Construction Minister Effi Eitam, along with MKs Yitzhak Levy and Nissan Slomiansky, says the NRP has to resign immediately after the government adopts the disengagement plan, if and when that happens. Labor and Social Affairs Minister Zevulun Orlev and MKs Shaul Yahalom and Gila Finkelstein, first want to call a meeting of the faction, if and when such a decision is taken, in order to discuss the possibilities. Both in the NRP and in the National Union there is no tendency to rely on the Likud ministers, although many of them are opposed to Sharon's plan at the moment.
MK Uri Ariel of the National Union still remembers how, on the eve of the vote on the road map, Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was described as a certain opponent of the plan, and how at the last moment he abstained. Ariel is afraid of a similar occurence this time.
Likud power balances
As opposed to Ariel, members of the right-wing ideological circles in the Likud: Jewish Leadership, the Forum for Preservation of Likud Values, and the Eretz Israel Faithful Movement in the Likud are more optimistic. Dozens of activists from these circles have met in recent weeks with Likud ministers and have been encouraged by the information they have received. About a week ago Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom met some 40 members of the Likud Central Committee who belong to these groups, at the Likud headquarters at Metzudat Ze'ev.
He outlines the balance of power in the government: Some 10 ministers support the plan, seven are opposed, and of the six remaining ministers, four will vote against it - Education Minister Limor Livnat, Health Minister Danny Naveh, Public Security Minister Tzachi Hanegbi and Shalom himself. As for the other two ministers, Netanyahu and Minister in the Treasury Meir Sheetrit, Shalom had difficulty estimating how they will behave during the vote on the disengagement plan.
A call for mass refusal
Tzachi Hanegbi also met with a group of members of the central committee of similar ideological background. In the meeting a few weeks ago in the Migron Center with Likud activists from all over Judea and Samaria and from Jerusalem, Hanegbi expressed hope that Finance Minister Netanyahu would head the campaign against the unilateral disengagement plan, and estimated that the present balance of power in the government is 13 against the Sharon plan and 10 in favor. At the same meeting he clearly formulated the dilemma facing him and his colleagues in the Likud: "The problem is that the person presenting this dangerous plan is `one of ours,' the question is how to fight against your own man, while at the same time taking care not to be pushed into a move we will regret."
While on the parliamentary and governmental plane the right is preparing to torpedo the plan, the extra-parliamentary right is planning, alongside this possibility, for the chance the proposal will pass. Speaking about it openly three days ago at the Jerusalem Conference organized by the settler movement weekly B'Sheva, was former MK, attorney Elyakim Haetzni of Kiryat Arba. He, more than anyone else, is identified with nonviolent civil rebellion as a method of struggle that should be used against the evacuation of settlements.
In this context, Haetzni suggests calling for mass refusal to obey any orders there may be to evacuate settlements. The settlement establishment is rejecting Haetzni's line for the time being, and prefers a more moderate struggle. About a week ago, at the meeting of right-wing extra-parliamentary organizations, a proposal was raised to publish a public declaration, not necessarily based on halakha (Jewish religious law), for a conscientious refusal to obey orders based on principle. The suggestion was rejected, mainly due to the intervention of members of the Yesha Council of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria.
Haetzni's sharp words this week reveal a dispute that is dividing the right itself now, concerning the legitimacy of refusing orders. "Be careful not to fall into the trap of the left, be careful not to promise to honor majority decisions in the Knesset or among the public," said Haetzni at the Jerusalem Conference, the annual national-economic conference of B'Sheva, explaining that he believes an order to evacuate settlements is manifestly illegal.
"It's not enough to define the transfer, the expulsion of Jews from their homes, as a crime," he added. "If it's a crime, that crime cannot be accepted, and it makes no difference by what majority the decision to carry it out is made. Even if the Knesset decides by a majority, and even if a national referendum decides by a majority of 99 percent to carry out this thing, to remove me from my home, this isn't only a crime, it's first and foremost a blow to democracy.
"One cannot decide to carry out a pogrom, and this is a pogrom: We are taking our soldiers and policemen to carry out a pogrom, to destroy houses, to drag people out of their homes, to remove the bones of the dead from the cemeteries. Democracy cannot do such things according to the rules of democracy itself. A local newspaperman came to me and asked me, `And what if there's a majority?' I told him: `We are five in a boat and there's no food. We're going to die of starvation, and decide by a referendum, four against one, to eat you. Does that obligate you? Will you still say `democracy'?"
As opposed to the rabbis, Haetzni draws his inspiration for refusing orders from realms far removed from halakha. He speaks of the limits of obedience drawn by such personalities as Martin Luther King and Gandhi, and recalls Rosa Parks, who sat in a bus in Alabama on a seat that was designated for whites only. "She behaved in contradiction to the law that was valid at the time, and only after masses of black people violated this racist and criminal law, did the Supreme Court there rule that according to the constitution, the law was not legal," explained Haetzni.
His conclusion is that "violating any order or law, and it makes no difference how they were passed - to uproot us from our homes - such violation is a mitzvah, and the courts in Israel will rule in the future that we observed the law by preventing it by force, en masse." And in order to remove any doubt as to what force he means, he added: "Except for real violence. Not that. The soldiers who refuse will, by doing so, preserve democracy, and in the distant future the court will affirm that, just as it would do at present if it were discussing the issue of transfer for the Arabs - which we know the Supreme Court would reject, even if the Knesset were to approve it today.
"We talk here about `the Arab vote,' about `a referendum' - no democratic tool can remove me from my home, just as no legislation or referendum can determine that I should be killed, or force religious people to eat pork, or decide to stone someone who violates Shabbat, or stop the aliyah [immigration] of Jews to Israel. These are things that are outside the bounds of democracy. Democracy isn't the dictatorship of the majority. In that way we will observe democracy and the rule of law, and will point to the black flag, and to the fact that any thoughts of uprooting and evacuation are patently illegally."
The end of secular Zionism
The fact that it is Ariel Sharon, the man who laid the foundations of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, who is now laying the foundations for dismantling it, makes the approaching evacuation even more difficult and more bitter for the settlers. "On the ground, where we have built another settlement and another outpost, we have won," said Uri Elitzur, a member of the Yesha Council, recently, adding: "But on the level of awareness, the left has won." But even more people among the settlers and their supporters speak today not in terms of left and right, but about the end of secular Zionism in general, or at least the end of its role.
This viewpoint is no longer exclusive to the members of a circle of Jewish leadership that has for several years been claiming that secular Zionism has reached the end of the road, and has even laid down a literary and ideological infrastructure for the claim. The most blatant manifesto on this issue was expounded in the book "The Belief-Based Revolution," by Motti Karpel, the editor of the newsletter of Lechatchila, the right-wing movement for Jewish Leadership, and a member of the settlement of Bat Ayin, who claims the role of secular Zionism has ended and now the turn has come for belief-based Zionism, which draws its strength from religion and from Jewish sources, to take over the leadership and to replace secular Zionism.
This week it was MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union), who is not observant, who said at the Jerusalem Conference that "when Sharon, the builder of the settlements, calls the Jewish people in its land an `occupier,' and declares his intention of destroying settlements and uprooting tens of thousands of Jews from their homes, this undermines the legal, moral and security foundation of Zionism.
"In this step, taken by Sharon of all people," says Eldad, "the end may have come for secular Zionism. Anyone for whom the Land of Israel is only a geopolitical tool for implementing Zionism, and a tool whose handle he is giving up, is declaring in effect that the system - that the entire superstructure of political Zionism, the Zionism of Herzl as well as that of Ben-Gurion - has become bankrupt. Therefore, the only thing left for the Jewish people after Sharon is Judaism, religious Zionism, which says the Land of Israel is a value in itself rather than a tool." Eldad estimates that "in the long run it will turn out that Sharon's revolution is similar in a way to MK Avraham Burg's Zionist conversion - a step whose intention is to relinquish Zionism as the liberation movement of the Jewish people."
