Strange Alchemy

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Daniella Weiss has a soft smile and a round face that is remarkably unwrinkled for a woman of 66 known for most of her adult life as an incendiary activist. A cloth cap covers her hair, in keeping with a strict reading of Orthodox Jewish rules for married women. In her living room in the West Bank settlement of Kedumim, west of Nablus, religious texts fill the bookshelves. Glass cases display a silver crown for a Torah scroll, filigreed spice boxes, and other Jewish ritual objets d’art.

Vehithazakem: Transforming theft into  virtue.

Weiss dates her career on Israeli’s religious right to the mid-1970s, when she helped organize the efforts of Gush Emunim — the Believers Bloc — to settle in this part of the West Bank in defiance of Yitzhak Rabin’s government. Until 2007, she was mayor of Kedumim. Since then, she has been organizing youth of the radical right to establish illegal settlement outposts. She introduces herself as a devoted disciple of Rabbi Moshe Levinger, founder of the Jewish settlement inside Hebron. I visited her recently to find out how she thought settlers should respond to looming West Bank political developments, including the expected bid for U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state.

“A diplomatic tsunami is coming,” Weiss told me, adding that “mental stagnation” afflicts settlement leaders. Their focus on construction only inside existing settlements is “poison,” because settlers need to spread out in order to strengthen the Jewish hold on the land rather than stay in “ghettoes.” Her proposal for “drastic action” to wake settlers up to the looming danger — an idea she said was “burning in her” but that she needed to run by Levinger — was that “we must set up settlements on the Sabbath.”

For a moment, I was startled. I’m also an Orthodox Jew, and the prohibition against working on the Sabbath is basic to Orthodox Jewish life. It must be ignored when a person’s life is in danger. But violating it to build settlements for the political purpose of determining Israel’s borders stands traditional Judaism on its head. It’s like hearing one’s rabbi suggest adultery.

Yet I really had no reason to be surprised. The religious settler movement has made permanent rule over the “Whole Land of Israel” — including the territories that Israel conquered in 1967 – -into Judaism’s cardinal principal, its axis mundi. Theology has swallowed whole the hard-line nationalism of soil, power, and ethnic superiority and taken on its shape. And even within West Bank settlements, residents from the Nablus and Hebron areas have a reputation for radicalism. Driving home toward Jerusalem, I thought over Weiss’s comments. They were, I realized, merely a reminder of greater distortions of Judaism that have been cultivated in the settlements ringing Nablus.

A few minutes from Kedumim, I passed the turn to Havat Gilad, a ramshackle settlement outpost where the Sing Unto the Lord Yeshivah, or religious academy, is located. In the surrounding Palestinian villages, as in much of the West Bank, the premier crop is olives, used for making a renowned full-bodied oil. Visiting the outpost once during the autumn olive harvest, I discovered a handbill tacked to the yeshivah bulletin board. Written in the diction of Jewish religious law, it said that the way to show who really had title to the land of Israel was to “bring its good fruit from its temporary occupants” — meaning Palestinians — “to its true owners” — meaning Jews. In places where harvesting olives from Palestinian groves was impractical, the unsigned author continued, the proper alternative was to cut down the trees. …

Read the rest at The American Prospect, and comment there or back here at SoJo.