Most Israelis seek some form of national reconciliation after the trauma of the recent Gaza withdrawal. That was evident in the largely sympathetic media coverage of those evicted from their homes.
Novelist David Grossman viewed the Gaza settlement project as madness from the inception. But that did not keep him from describing the evacuation as “days of mourning for all Israelis,” or warning against treating the settlers as “political and religious arguments rather than human beings.”
Not everyone, however, is so eager to mend the tear in Israeli society. Meretz Party chair Yossi Sarid, for one, seems disappointed that the feared civil war with the settlers did not take place.
Writing recently in Ha’aretz, Sarid could not contain his contempt for those “whose specialty is mending broken hearts, the professional conciliators” and other seekers of grounds for national consensus.
Before there can be reconciliation, Sarid argued, Israeli society must first make a basic decision: What source of authority will prevail — democracy or Halacha (traditional Jewish religious law)?
Sarid would have us believe that Israel is faced with the choice between democracy and theocracy. “Should we be like Iran?” he titled his piece.
Leaving aside the fact that the “peace camp” has always been far more concerned with winning than with whether the means of doing so conform to the niceties of democratic theory, Sarid’s styling of the issue is nonsense.
There are no theocrats in Israel today. Not the haredim, who relate to the State of Israel as they have always related to the sovereign, i.e., according to the halachic principle of dina d’malchuta dina — the civil law of the land is the law. Not the national religious either, despite the role some rabbis played in the opposition to disengagement.
The real target
The small number of soldiers who ultimately refused orders and the largely passive response of the Gaza settlers attest to the national religious community’s loyalty to the state.
It is clear that this community’s leaders recognized at a certain point that if disengagement failed because of mass refusal by religious soldiers, the response would be equally large-scale refusal by secular soldiers to serve in the territories. And that would signal the end of the Israel Defense Force and Israel — something far worse than the uprooting from Gaza.
Sarid’s real target is participation of people motivated by religious beliefs in the democratic process, not, as he pretends, an impending theocracy.
True, deep religious belief generates inherent tension with sovereign power. But that tension need not undermine democracy if the rules of the game are honored and those who disobey laws requiring them to violate their deepest religious beliefs are prepared to accept the legal consequences.
Nor is the tension necessarily a bad thing. The essential Jewish political teaching, argues Yoram Hazony, is: “the state has no right to rule if it rules unjustly, [and] conscience and not the state must be the ultimate arbiter of the actions of every man.”
Had those basic principles not come to be generally accepted by the Western world, he noted, the Nuremberg Trials of the German Nazis after World War II would have been inexplicable.
Not even democracy is immune to the moral challenge of conscience, religious or otherwise. Hitler’s anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws and the American racist Jim Crow laws against which Martin Luther King, Jr., marched were enacted by democratically elected legislatures.
Modern Western society has a very strong impulse to classify religion-based arguments as less morally informed than other bases for legislation. In his book “The Culture of Disbelief,” Yale law professor Stephen Carter wrote that many people want religion to be “something without political significance, less an independent moral force than a quietly irrelevant moralizer, never heard, rarely seen.”
Or as Sarid writes, “With all due respect to God, the proper place for Him is the heart…”
The trivialization of religious devotion need not even rest on deep-seated animus to religion. A recent Jerusalem Post editorial longed wistfully for the old days when the rabbis pronounced the state “holy” and did not make a fuss. The editorialist laments that former chief rabbi Avraham Shapira did not choose one of the “multiple interpretations” of Halacha more in keeping with the writer’s political views.
But the proper way to counter Shapira is either on halachic grounds, as Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein has done, or on the basis of secular political values. It is not to deny him the right to be heard because he is a rabbi. Moral intuitions are not less valid because based on religious tradition.
Sarid’s great fear is religious Jews and their influence on Israeli public life — an influence which demography suggests can only grow over time.
That is even clearer in the post-disengagement writing of his predecessor as Meretz Party chairman, Shulamit Aloni, who far excelled him in venom against settlers. The settlers’ actions, she wrote in Yediot Aharonot, are the greatest embarrassment to the Jewish people in all its long history.
Aloni legitimately blasts the settlers’ appropriation of Holocaust symbols and those who called soldiers and police “Nazis.” But she herself has been free with Holocaust analogies, once calling former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu “a good student of [German Nazi propaganda minister Josef] Goebbels.”
As education minister, she sought to stop trips of high-school pupils to Auschwitz, lest they foster nationalistic identity. And her favorite lesson from the Holocaust is heard constantly in Europe today: Jews, too, can act like Nazis. Hatred of settlers, not affection for the IDF or sensitivity to the Holocaust, inspires Aloni’s invective.
The last thing Israel needs today is such championship caliber haters.
Jonathan Rosenblum, based in Jerusalem, is a public relations professional specializing in the haredi community. This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post.
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