POLITICS NOW
by Abraham Berkowitz &
Tom Milstein
March 14, 2007
Religious
Zionism, and the broader modern Orthodox movement, must call themselves to account:
the opponents of the peace process have killed twice since the Oslo accords
were signed, and both murderers were shelanu,
from our camp. Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 innocent Arabs at the Maarat HaMachpaila — Hebron’s Tomb of
the Patriarchs — graduated from American modern Orthodoxy’s flagship institutions.
And Yigal Amir, the admitted assassin of Yitzhaq Rabin, was a product of
Israel’s Hesder program which
combines Tora study with military
service and is a current student at the Law School of Israel’s leading modern
Orthodox university.
To
be sure, by the time these men killed they were no longer true partisans of
Religious Zionism or of modern Orthodoxy. Baruch Goldstein had become a
follower of Meir Kahane long before he entered the Tomb of the Patriarchs on
that fateful Purim day, while Yigal Amir appears to have been deeply entangled
with Israel’s GSS when he pulled the trigger on Yitzhaq Rabin. But these facts,
at most, only mitigate the responsibility.
They do not absolve us. Both
killers were educated at our institutions and grew up under our flag. In some
perverse way, the education we gave them — or failed to give them — allowed
them to be turned into deadly instruments. And so we must call ourselves to account
and take stock of our movement.
But
no honest accounting can be rendered until we first release ourselves from our
humiliating dependence on the political ideologies our opponents. In recent
times, this self-imposed political addiction has driven our movement to the
Right side of the political spectrum. Since the early 1980’s, from about the
time that Yitzhaq Shamir replaced Menachem Begin as the leader of the Likud
Bloc, Religious Zionism practically ceased to function as an independent
political movement. Instead Religious
Zionism nearly dissolved into the secular neo-conservatism and Cold War
geopolitical calculations of Shamir’s Likud. During this period, Religious
Zionism contributed little more than a religious or Biblical patina to the
security arguments which Likud’s secular neo-conservatives advanced against
world pressure to trade land for peace — pressure which they pretended was
Communist (or “Leftist”) inspired. When the fall of the Soviet Union revealed
that the true source of this pressure was not Communist or Leftist but rather
American, our reliance on the Likud’s security-based arguments left us utterly
disarmed. Most distressing of all, as part of our surrender to the secular
Right, we allowed the tens of thousands of religious settlers in Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza, the flower of our movement, to be turned into human pawns,
hostages to the vicissitudes of the Likud’s strategic calculations and
political ambitions.
But
freeing ourselves from the suffocating embrace of the Right most emphatically
does not mean returning to the arms of the Left. Israel’s political Left, the
former socialist Zionists of the Labor Party and their anti-religious partners
who currently constitute the Meretz Bloc, represents a political culture from
which we were lucky to escape in 1977 following Menachem Begin’s first
electoral victory. Already at that time, when the religious settlers in Judea,
Samaria, and Gaza were still portraying themselves as the new halutzim, long before their settlements
became “strategic assets,” it was already clear that the so-called traditional
alliance between socialist and Religious Zionism had run its course. This alliance,
which began in the pre-State period and lasted for the first thirty years of
our national independence, led us to distort our world historical mission so as
to better fit the socialist paradigm of our allies. And so, instead of building
institutions to facilitate the ideals of Religious Zionism and the broader
modern Orthodox movement we created miniature religious replicas of socialism’s
grand institutions — a religious kibbutz movement,
the Mizrachi bank, a religious
workers union, and so on — which we then invested with great significance and
too much influence.
But
in 1967 we began a new course. The new generation of Religious Zionists who had
grown up under Jewish sovereignty and who had been schooled by the late Rabbi
Zvi Yehuda Kook, determined to settle all of the new lands which had been won
in the recent war in order to complete the Zionist revolution of “returning the
children to their boundaries.” Their bold creation of “facts on the ground”
propelled Religious Zionism onto the center stage of Israeli politics. Taking an independent stand on the “domestic”
question of the territories brought Religious Zionism face-to-face with the
single most important issue in Israeli foreign
policy: the question of Israel’s
final territorial boundaries. This issue
would shape not only Israel’s role in the Middle East but also its relationship
with the great powers beyond the region and especially with its superpower patron,
the United States of America, and thus also with the American Jewish Establishment.
Religious
Zionism now more than ever needed its own approach to international relations,
to the role of Israel among the nations.
But no such approach was forthcoming.
In
the years since the 1967 war, modern Orthodoxy failed to advance any systematic
approach to understanding the connection between Israel’s territorial
boundaries and its relations to the nations. At a time when the strongest
partisans of Religious Zionism were building settlements throughout the length
and breadth of the Land of Israel, up to the Biblical borderline, modern Orthodoxy
ignored the implications of this enterprise for the other nations of the world.
Worse yet, we treated the entire matter as an internal Jewish affair, a battle
between religion and secularism, as if the world outside was quite irrelevant
to the debate over Israel’s proper boundaries. It was this blithe disregard of
the outside world — so completely at variance with the engaged spirit of Modern
Orthodoxy — that tore a gaping hole in our movement. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Into the political vacuum which we created by
our refusal to face the foreign policy implications of our own “domestic
policy” values — i.e., our demand for recognition of the sanctity of the
boundaries of Eretz Israel — flowed
the looney messianism of Meir Kahane and his sad band of hardened police
provocateurs and gullible teenagers. It
was this absurd, apolitical messianism which sprouted in our midst with such
tragic consequences.
And
so, when we call ourselves to account, we must recognize that what we need is
politics now. As a first step in this
direction, we must provide our partisans with a sound and serious political
alternative to the capitulation counseled by the Left and the hollow security
arguments espoused by the Right. This
alternative must address the worldly significance of the Zionist revolution and
especially of the “return of the children to their borders” without raising
unrealistic, other-worldly expectations about the imminence of the Redemption. The Redemption will no doubt come in its
time, with or without a clap of thunder or a hail of bullets. Meanwhile, we must go about our business of
building the land while developing an answer to the very difficult question
which we have avoided asking for the past thirty years: what will the “goyim”—the nations—say, and more importantly
do, when we succeed in holding on to our entire patrimony, up to the Biblical
boundary lines?
