Interview with Gush Etzion Foundation
On Sunday, I spent much of the day in Gush Etzion, the most concentrated bloc of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Currently home to 20 communities, the area has over 75,000 Jewish residents and is located south of Jerusalem and north of Hebron.
The largest municipality, Beitar Illit, and second largest, Efrat, have about 40,000 and 8500 residents respectively. The twenty smaller communities receive municipal services and public funding through theGush Etzion Regional Council (מועצה אזורית גוש עציון). While the Israeli government provides funding to the council as it does to each of the other 52 regional councils, the Gush Etzion Foundation collects private donations to address funding shortfalls and provide services over and above what the state considers necessary for the basic humanitarian services. Like theGolan Regional Council, privately collected funds contribute significantly to social, educational, cultural, and welfare activities run by in the Gush.
The foundation’s director, Shani Simkovitz, sat with me to discuss both the history of the Gush and its future. So first, the history: Modern Jewish settlement of this area began in 1927 with the establishment of Migdal Eder as a small farming community consisting of orthodox Jews. It was destroyed completely during the 1929 Arab riots and its population attacked and forced to flee. Jews returned a decade later to properties purchased by Shmuel Yosef Holtzman, who names the settlement Kfar Etzion, a rough translation of his family name. Jews again fled during the 1936 Arab riots and most of what they had built was again destroyed.
Between 1943 and 1947, Jews again returned to the area to settle what became known as the Etzion Bloc or Gush Etzion. The religious Zionist movement, Hapoel HaMizrahi, founded three kibbutzim: Kfar Etzion (1943), Ein Tzurim (1945), and Massu’ot Yitzchak (1945). This despite the area’s rocky and hilly terrain, poor soil, and remoteness from more well-established Jewish settlements and proximity to large Arab population centers in the pre-state period. Following on their successes, a secular kibbutz movement, Hashomer Hatzair, founded Revadim in February 1947.
For the religious settlers, they saw Gush Etzion as critical to bolstering the emergent Jewish state’s claim to Jerusalem. By developing Jewish populations which would ring the city, they, like the secular kibbutzniks, believed that their patterns of settlement would determine future political borders. Hashomer Hatzair was also motivated by an ideal of settlement of the land, but their political program was one of explicit binationalism. Its leadership saw settling in land surrounded by Arab villages not as strategic, but as a means to ensure that the two populations could not be separated in any political settlement. To the dismay of both movements, the United Nations Partition commission determined that the whole of the Gush was to be assigned to the proposed Arab state.
Its residents decided not to abandon their homes and the settlements suffered a five month siege at the hands of Arab irregulars and then the Transjordanian Arab Legion. In January 1948, most of the women and children of the bloc were evacuated. On 12 May 1948, the Legion broke through the defenses, killed twenty four of thirty two defenders at the old Russian Orthodox Monastery which served as a perimeter defense. On 13 May, they attacked Kfar Etzion and massacred 240 defenders leaving only thee men and one woman alive. Most of the inhabitants of the remaining kibbutzim were taken as prisoners of war and only released by Transjordan a year later.
Despite the massive losses suffered by the bloc’s defenders, it did succeed in long delaying a major Arab assault of Jerusalem. David Ben Gurion remarked following the war that if a Jewish Jerusalem exists today, it was because of the sacrifice of those who fought at Gush Etzion. In the 19 year period between the end of Israel’s War of Independence and the 1967 Six Day War, former residents of the Gush would gather every Independence Day to commemorate the bloc’s fall and express their hope that they would someday return. Indeed, the first Jewish communities to be rebuilt in the West Bank following the war was Kfar Etzion, led by some of the grown children whose parents had died defending it. Many too became leaders ofGush Emunim.
Moving from the history of the area to political substance, I asked Shani why Israelis should be living in this territory. She responded that it is her belief that the Jewish claim to this space is, first and foremost, historical. The most important sites of Jewish history began in the area of the Gush (Judea), the “cradle of Jewish civilization. It is further notable for several key landmarks. The first, the Path of the Patriarchs (דרך אבות), weaves between the Judean hills and is popularly held to be the path by which the Patriarchs traveled between Hebron and Jerusalem. It follows the remains of a Roman highway built during the Second Temple period and has numerous archaeological ruins along the way. The second, Herodium, is a man-made mountain believed to be the burial place of King Herod and later used by Bar Kokhba as a headquarters in his revolt against Roman rule. It was just added to Israel’s list of national heritage sites.
Secondly, she cited a religious claim to the land. According to the Torah, those who support the Jewish people in the land will be blessed and those that do not will be cursed. The realization of Jewish national destiny, such a perspective holds, cannot be accomplished anywhere else in the world. Eretz Yisrael, she insists, is not up for bid or division and Judea and Samaria are inseparable parts of the whole of the country. While she does not believe that everything the state does is correct and that many reforms are necessary to make the country a better place, this will not be achieved through territorial partition.
This approach leads to her third, which is that Israeli control of the hills and mountains of Judea and Samaria are critical for Israel’s defense. Still today, Israel is engaged in a war for its survival which did not end in 1949, 1967, or 1973. Just as the Arab world declared that it would not accept the UN Partition Plan of 1947, demanding all or nothing, so too today does she believe that the surrounding Arab states and the Palestinians do not seek peace with Israel but its destruction.
As such, she cannot accept assessments which claim the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is based on the expansion of Israeli settlements. “Is it because of my little house on the prairie that there is no peace? No, it is because of my little house that we are surviving.” Pointing to the experience of the Disengagement from Gaza, she noted that this did not lead to a fundamental change in the Palestinian approach to Israel. Nor did Yasser Arafat accept Ehud Barak’s offer for a Palestinian state in 95% of the West Bank and Gaza in 2000 because he wanted it all.
Many Israelis today share this perspective. Indeed, as recently as October 2010, 80.4% of Jewish Israelis surveyed by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research noted their agreement with the statement, “The Palestinians have not accepted the Jewish State and would destroy it if they could,” while only 26.8% disagreed. Yet, this had not prevented a majority from supporting continued negotiations with the Palestinian Authority: 72.1% in support and only 25.8% opposed in the same survey in the same month. One plausible thesis is the fear that a large and growing Palestinian Arab population will make Jews a minority in their own state, forcing them to either give up Israel’s democratic or Jewish character.
As with many in the settlement community, Shani rejects this calculus. Pointing to the “Million Person Gap” study led by Yoram Ettinger, they dismiss such demographic alarmism as premature and far from empirically sound. The problem still remains of living in peace with Arab neighbors which Israel and Palestinians surely must do, partition or not. This, she asserts, is significantly less of a problem on a day-to-day basis than it is in the political arena. For instance, the Gush Etzion Regional Council engages in annual emergency drills to which they regularly invite the surrounding Palestinian villages to participate. Several years previously, they abstained while the next year they actively engaged. What changed? The prior year, they asked Ramallah for permission, which was denied, and the second year they chose direct cooperation with the Jewish communities for the advancement of mutual interests, ignoring the dictates of Ramallah.
Moreover, living in the relatively remote community of Tekoa on the eastern reaches of Gush Etzion, Shani insists that her town has always had good relations with its Arab neighbors. During the intifada, Gush Etzion lost 25 residents to terror attacks, including 2 young boys from Tekoa. Considering all this, they still have a positive relationship. The two communities mutually benefit from their interaction. The Jewish communities gain the employment of reliable manual labor and relatively inexpensive consumer goods while the Palestinian communities enjoy access to a much larger labor market able to pay them better than most employment available in Palestinian administered areas. They also attend each other’s family and community celebrations.
Asking her Arab contractor what he teaches his children about the Jews, she said that he says the Jews give us work and so we can eat. In this instance, mutual respect is the model behavior. Unfortunately this pattern clearly does not hold for everyone, but its existence at all, she believes, offers promise for coexistence in the future. In any case, the Palestinian Authority has moved to close off these relationships by passing laws which make it illegal for individual Palestinians to seek employment in the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. More recently, they officially made the selling of land to Jews a capital crime.
Finally, no matter how opposed she and other residents of Judea and Samaria may be to territorial withdrawal, it is difficult to ignore that successive Israeli governments in the past two decades have been vocal about their willingness to evacuate territory for peace. So do they take Netanyahu’s Bar Ilan speech (14 June 2009) in which he declared support for a Palestinian state seriously? Absolutely not. It is a mistake for Israel to put all its bets on peace, while the state neglects issues of everyday survival and social welfare.
The Israeli government has a much longer history of supporting Jewish settlement in the territories than blocking it. Having provided tax breaks and benefits for the creation and expansion of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as well as Gaza and the Golan, Jewish residents have the feeling that they are not only fulfilling their own interests by living here but those of the state. Moreover, while every government has come up with new terms for partition(withdrawal, disengagement, convergence), the fact of widespread Jewish life and settlement in the territories coupled with growing awareness of Jewish history in the region has blocked further serious withdrawals.
Of course, many in the settler camp, reject this assessment. The examples of Homesh, Amona, and other smaller scale Israeli military dismantling of Jewish outposts have stoked a greater militancy among anti-withdrawal activists to block such actions. I raised the example of Netzer, whereWomen in Green activists have been fighting a daily battle to secure Jewish ownership of designated “state lands” from seizure by Arab farmers. Here a difference in philosophy and practical approach was clear. She is vocally opposed to the government’s policy of limiting Israeli settlement on the land, but it was elected democratically. While she respects their energy and commitment to Israeli sovereignty over the “whole of the land,” Shani believes it is critical to “play by the rules” and build and plant only where the state issues permits.
Although this is a struggle for land “all of which is ours,” if the struggle does not follow the law, chaos will replace it. A large protest was also recently raised over the demolition of a Jewish home in her own community of Tekoa. While she cannot condone the destruction of homes and displacement of families, and while there are many other homes which have been built without proper permits, the state chose to make an example of this one. This could have been avoided if building had been done by the book. And indeed, without a new building freeze in place, Tekoa is expanding housing on hundreds of lots with government approval.
Given the history of Jewish settlement of the Gush, broad popular support for Jewish return to this area post-1967, and a near consensus belief among Israelis that it will remain a part of Israel in any territorial compromise, the more moderate tactics used by the Gush Etzion leadership are hardly surprising. Yet even as the residents of Gush Etzion are generally considered to be much less radical and much more mamlachtithan their counterparts in more remote areas, they, along with many Israelis outside the territories, share a belief that the land on which they are living is rightfully theirs.
The international conversation may be one of how to force, compel, or “encourage” Israel to withdraw from illegally occupied territories which must become a Palestinian state. Yet Israelis, particularly those who live in the territories, do not see these spaces in this light. To many, it is a security asset, a land in which they have poured their life and labor, and an inalienable historical birthright. If peace in the region is to be achieved, either on the basis of territorial partition or something more “creative,” and for it to be popularly accepted by Israelis as well as Palestinians, these narratives will likely need to be substantively acknowledged and incorporated into the discussion.
Interview with Yisrael Harel
On Monday, I met with Yisrael Harel, one of the founders of the Yesha Council, a founder and long-time editor-in-chief ofNekuda, a leading Israeli settlers’ periodical, and current chairman of theInstitute for Zionist Strategies. Yisrael was active from young adulthood in Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), the religious Zionist movement for Jewish settlement in the territories captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.
My conversation with Yisrael in many ways paralleled my interview withPinchas Wallerstein, the former Director of the Yesha Council. Both were significant early leaders in the Yesha settlement movement and both were actively involved in building the institutional infrastructure which ensured that the charismatic early successes of Gush Emunim were translated into solid and sustainable political and material gains. In this interview, I focused on the ideas and attitudes of religious Zionists prior to 1967, the ideological and organizational development of the religious settlement movement after the Six-Day War, and the conflicts which had crystalized between religious Zionism and the secular kibbutz movements by the 1970s.
In the 19 years between 1948 and 1967, many scholars have noted that there was an absence of public debate in Israel about Eretz Yisrael Hashlayma (the Whole Land of Israel). Irredentist sentiment, even toward reuniting Jerusalem, was largely muted. Yet after the Six Day War, these sentiments of national history and yearning for the ancient homeland symbolized by the Old City of Jerusalem and Yehuda and Shomron (the West Bank) dominated the public sphere. Very few scholars have meaningfully explored this apparent shift in public perception; among them Rael Jean Isaac and Shmuel Sandler.
Given Yisrael’s personal experience with this shift and his deep involvement with the movements whom many have argued engineered or led this change in Israeli territorial perceptions, I asked him first about the absence of popular claims. He confirmed that Israeli political claims to the whole land were indeed not active in anyone’s mind. However, these conversations continued in both nationalist and religious Zionist circles, particularly within Bnai Akiva and Beitar, the youth movements of theMizrachi and Revisionist Zionists respectively.
In Bnai Akiva, of which Yisrael was a member, although they were certainly educated about the history of the whole of the land and the Jewish connections to the territory under Jordanian occupation, they were not educated to seek its annexation. This he described as an “authentic but not outspoken” loyalty to the Land of Israel. This contrasted with the ideology of Beitar which, in the tradition of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, continued to claim the whole of the British Mandate territory including Transjordan, as rightfully part of the Land of Israel. As scholars have noted, however, the Revisionists political party, Herut, substantially moderated its positions over time in an effort to enter the political mainstream, including a softening of its rhetoric regarding the Hashemite monarchy.
As indicated earlier, after 1967, Israel public opinion underwent a dramatic reversal and popular enthusiasm for Israeli control (if not annexation) of the territories became commonplace. So what changed? Many have argued that religious Zionism experienced a great revival on the belief that Israel’s victory and conquest of the biblical heartland heralded the beginnings of a messianic age. Such characterizations are pervasive in historical and political studies of the post-1967 popularization of religious Zionism and the emergence of Gush Emunim in particular. They have also been integral to branding the movement’s followers as religious fundamentalists.
Yisrael’s outlook as an insider is remarkably different. First, in Bnei Akiva, as in the other kibbutz-oriented Zionist youth movements, he noted that they were educated to value three main elements: hityashvut(settlement), haganah (defense), and aliyah (immigration). However, it was always the secular Zionists who took the leading role in all three area. Not only did they dominate settlement of the land, they also controlled the most powerful pre-state institutions which folded into domination of the emergent State of Israel. Although well established in their own right by 1967, those who grew up in Bnai Akiva carried with them the stigma and “humiliation” of being religious Zionists in a world dominated by secular socialist Zionism.
This feeling of inferiority was significantly compounded by the loss of the territorial “heart of the movement,” those religious kibbutzim of Gush Etzion: Kfar Etzion, Ein Tzurim, and Masu’ot Yitzchak, which were destroyed by the Jordanian Arab Legion in 1948 along with the secular kibbutz of Revadim. The May 1948 battles in Gush Etzion during which the Legion massacred the entire population of Kfar Etzion exception three men and one woman are remembered both for the great sacrifice of the Gush’s defenders and their ostensibly critical role in slowing the Jordanian advance on Jerusalem. Indeed, several orphans of those killed at Kfar Etzion became prominent leaders in Gush Emunim, most notably Hanan Porat. While the graduates of Bnai Akiva had Gush Etzion “in their veins,” they never thought that they would one day take up arms to liberate their lost lands.
With the sweeping territorial gains of 1967, religious and secular Israelis alike could not help but be astounded by their return to all those places to which they felt close through their reading of the Torah. Indeed, the “bible as history” was widely taught in secular as well as traditionally-oriented state schools. Even today, many secular Israelis can quote biblical verses with a proficiency that puts many religious diaspora Jews to shame. In a single day, Israel had taken back all that was once closed to them. The question quickly emerged, “What am I going to do about it?”
Consistent with the ethnos of settling the land which had ensured the founding of the state just 19 years earlier, leaders within the kibbutz movement turned with a similar attitude toward Yehuda and Shomron.Yitzchak Tabenkin, one of the founders of the kibbutz movement, called for the establishment of 100 kibbutzim in the conquered territories, but, notes Yisrael, no one followed. The secular kibbutz movement simply no longer had the people, might, or determination to settle the land. A number of elite secular Israelis on the left and right, including Tabenkin, then joined together to form the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel in an effort to press the government to keep control of the land. While the movement was incredibly successful in bringing its agenda to the forefront of the Israeli public debate, they were unable to spark widespread settlement.
“It was into this vacuum,” Yisrael maintains, “that we entered.” While the Land of Israel Movement acted as the ideological entrepreneurs of Jewish settlement in the territories, in Yehuda and Shomron, it was largely the graduates of Bnai Akiva who provided the bodies. Motivated by a “desire to prove ourselves which sparkled out after the Six-Day War, we were the most active movement to settle and not relinquish the land.” After long playing second-fiddle to the secular kibbutzniks, the religious Zionists who spearheaded settlement of the territories saw themselves as finally being able to follow the path of the founding fathers of Israel. It then comes as no surprise that their first move after the war was to resettle Kfar Etzion in September 1967, only three months later.
While many of the elites were one-in-the-same, it is important to note that Gush Emunim did not emerge as a formal organization until after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, a puzzle which I have remarked upon elsewhere. Yet was Gush Emunim a messianic movement? This well established argument is based on several key facts: Gush Emunim claimed to be guided by the teachings of R’Avraham Yitzchak Kook and his son R’Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who both saw the State of Israel as an instrument in bringing in the redemption of the Jewish people. Moreover, many of its leaders studied together at Merkaz HaRav yeshiva founded by the elder Kook. Finally, the early leadership of Gush Emunim was not shy to characterize its activities in terms of their self-perceived role in the redemptive process.
Yet, Yisrael insists, Gush Emunim was not a messianic movement. Such a perspective takes account of the elites while largely ignoring the followers. While certainly a religious movement, he maintains that some 90 percent of the original followers had never stepped foot inside Merkaz HaRav, nor had they been personally exposed to the teachings of either Rav Kook. Having lived in Ofra, the first Gush Emunim settlement, since its founding in 1974, Yisrael cannot recall more than one or two resident families in its first 20 years whom he would consider to be messianic.
Yisrael himself never had any contact with Merkaz HaRav until R’Tzvi Yehuda requested to meet the young man who had been so instrumental in founding the Yesha Council and Nekuda. Nor did he begin reading the work of R’Kook until he had become deeply involved in Gush Emunim and had to field regular questions and inquiries from politicians and journalists. The early followers of Gush Emunim were, like him, veterans of Bnai Akiva who had been educated like all other Zionists that the borders of the State of Israel had always been practically determined by Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.
While Jewish settlement was sparse in the Negev and Galilee, at the time these regions were considered secure, and did not have the demographic problems which face the state today. By contrast, Yehuda and Shomron in particular were seen as lands in need of settlement to assert a Jewish and Israeli claim. Similarly, although conversations about a demographic threat posed by a large and concentrated Arab population in the territories existed among Israel’s political elite, it was not part of the popular conversation.
Religious Zionists seeking to settle the territories, like the secular Zionists who came before them and who secured the territorial and demographic basis for the State of Israel, were determined not to allow a prospective demographic challenge deter them from establishing facts on the ground. Coupled with a desire to prove themselves as “authentic” Zionists and a deep personal need to overcome the shame of marginality in a secular dominated society, religious Zionists were able to provide the lifeblood of new settlement where the children of the secular Zionist pioneers either could not or would not.
The picture which Yisrael provides of early Jewish settlement in Yehuda and Shomron is significant for at least two reasons. It provides a counter-narrative to common descriptions of Gush Emunim and by extension the modern settlement movement as composed largely of religious fundamentalists removed from calculations of “rational” secular politics. This caricature is useful for the political left who wish to separate the ostensibly despicable goals and methods of the settlement movement from their idyllic visions of their own pioneering achievements.
It also suggests that those who initially subscribed to the movement were motivated largely by mainstream, well-established Israeli values. Yet if the dominant narrative is unproblematically accepted, the settlement movement’s claims must be seen as entirely outside the pale of rational discourse. As such, they are alternatively marginal to resolution of the conflict or dangerous spoilers who, by their very marginality, force the Israeli government into policies which are in no way representative of the Israeli public. Neither approach, upon closer examination, seems to hold water.
The History of Gush Etzion
Known as the southern gateway to Jerusalem, this strategic area comprises the block of communities that defended the southern approach to Jerusalem against the invading armies in the 1948 Israel War of Independence.Historically, the area is replete with Biblical scenes and stories of heroism and bravery starting with the time of our forefathers. It was here that Abraham and Isaac passed through on their sojourn from Hebron to Mount Moriah, in its pastoral landscape Ruth gathered the sheaves from the fields of Bethlehem, upon its hilltops David shepherded his father`s sheep and then went on to proclaim his kingdom, and in its deep caves the Maccabees and the Jewish fighters of Bar Kochba sought shelter.
Four brave attempts were made in the last century to populate the area, until finally on the fourth, after the 1967 Six Day War, the Jewish people were successful in settling the area permanently. The first attempt was in 1927, but harsh physical conditions forced the settlers to abandon the settlement they had established, Migdal Eder. The second attempt was made by Shmuel Holtzman in 1935, who established the village of Kfar Etzion and after whom Gush Etzion is named (Holtz=tree=etz). Repeated Arab attacks drove the pioneers away. The third attempt was in 1943, when different affiliated groups established four settlements, the rebirth of Kfar Etzion, Masuot Yitzchak, Ein Tzurim, and Revadim, for a total population of 450 adults. In 1948, all four settlements were totally destroyed. The Arabs murdered 240 men and women, with another 260 being taken into captivity. Prime Minister Ben Gurion in 1948 eulogized the defenders of Gush Etzion and their heroic stand against the Jordanian Legion as such. "I can think of no battle in the annals of the Israel Defense Forces which was more magnificent, more tragic or more heroic than the struggle for Gush Etzion … If there exists a Jewish Jerusalem, our foremost thanks go to the defenders of Gush Etzion". (An excellent show in Kfar Etzion documents these events.)
For 19 years, until the stunning victory of the 1967 Six Day War, the children of those parents who tragically fell and those who survived could only catch a glimpse from afar of the ancient oak tree located in the heart of Gush Etzion that symbolized for them their yearning to return and reclaim their heritage.
Today, the area, a crucial security buffer for the capital, is just a short 10 minute drive from Jerusalem through the new tunnels road, and is comprised of 20 dynamic and thriving communities with a population of over 20,000.
Historic pictures of Gush Etzion 1933-1948
Click on the pictures to see the original size
Credit to the Kfar Etzion Archives in Kibbutz Kfar Etzion
The Communities of Gush Etzion
In order to find out more about any of the exciting communities in Gush Etzion, just click on the community and read about the location, character and makeup of the community, what opportunities exist for real-estate and employment and what services are offered. Gush Etzion communities range from communal Kibbutz to villages, with secular, religious and mixed populations.
In order to arrange a visit to Gush Etzion or to any community in particular please contact gushezif@zahav.net.il or call 972-2-993-9917. We look forward to seeing you soon!
Alon Shevut Hebrew: www.alonshvut.org.il English: www.gush-etzion.org.il/alonshevut.asp
Bat Ayin
Carmei Tzur, Tzur Shalem www.carmatz.com
Elazar www.elazar.org.il
Gevaot
Har Gilo - www.hargilo.co.il
Ibey Hanachal
Kedar
Kfar Etzion
Ma`ale Amos
Masuot Yitzchak
Metzad
Migdal Oz, Givat Hamivtar
Nokdim, El David
Neve Daniel www.nevedaniel.net
Rosh Tzurim
Sde Bar
Tekoa
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