On
The Road To Civil War
By Uri Avnery
25 October, 2004
Gush-Shalom
Everybody
in Israel is talking about the Next War. The most popular TV channel
is running a whole series about it.
Not another war
with the Arabs. Not the nuclear threat from Iran. Not the ongoing bloody
confrontation with the Palestinians.
The talk is about
the coming civil war.
Only a few months
ago, that would have sounded preposterous. Now, suddenly, is has become
a possibility, and a very real one. Not another blown-up media sensation.
Not yet another of Sharons political manipulations. Not just a
new blackmail attempt by the settlers. But the real thing on the ground.
They talk about
it at cabinet meetings and in the Knesset, on TV talk-shows, in editorials
and the news pages. The Chief-of-Staff has publicly warned that the
army may fall apart. One of the ministers says that the very existence
of the State of Israel is in danger. Another minister prophesies a bloodbath
like the Spanish civil war.
Quietly and not
so quietly, the Shin Bet is taking precautions. The prison service has
been ordered to prepare facilities for mass detentions. The army leadership
is planning the call-up of 10 thousand reserve soldiers and starting
to think about the steps they must take in the case of
No, its a
very real threat.
On the face of
it, it may seem to have appeared from nowhere. But whoever has eyes
to see knew that it is going to happen, sooner or later.
The seeds of the
civil war were sown when the first settlement was put up in the occupied
territories. At the time, I told the Prime Minister in the Knesset:
You are laying a land mine. Some day you will have to dismantle
it. As a former soldier, let me warn you that the dismantling of land
mines is a very unpleasant job.
Since then, hundreds
of mines have been laid. The minefields are being extended even now.
The process was
led by religious cranks. Their declared aim, as they said then and never
tire of repeating, is to drive all the Arabs out of the country that
God promised us. And the land God promised us, as one of them reminded
us on TV the other day, is not the Palestine of the British
mandate, but the Promised Land - including Jordan, Lebanon and parts
of Syria and Sinai. Quoting the Bible, another one declared that we
have come to this country not only to inherit, but also to disinherit
the others, to drive them out and take their place.
Since the then
Minister of Defence, Shimon Peres, implanted the first settlement, Kedumim,
in the middle of the Palestinian population on the West Bank, the settlements
have spread like locusts. Every settlement has gradually stolen the
lands and water of the neighboring Palestinian villages, uprooted their
trees, blocked their roads and built new roads, barred to Palestinians.
Almost all the settlements have spawned satellite outposts on the nearby
hills.
This is continuing
at this very moment. After Sharon solemnly promised President Bush to
dismantle some of the outposts, dozens of new one have sprung
up. All the ministries are actively helping the outposts that were officially
defined as illegal. Not only is the army defending them,
thereby putting its soldiers in harms way, but it is actually
telling the hill-boys where to set up their outposts and
secretly advising them how to go about it.
When we warned
of the danger, we were told to relax. Only a small minority of the settlers,
we were comforted, are fanatical freaks. These are indeed crazy and
will forcibly resist any attempt to remove them. But that will not be
a big problem, because the vast majority of Israeli citizens detest
them and consider them a sect of crackpots.
Most of the settlers,
we were told, are not fanatics. They went there because the government
presented them with expensive villas, which they could not even dream
about in Israel proper. They were looking for quality of life.
When the government tells them to move, they will take the compensation
and move on.
That is, of course,
a dangerous delusion. As Karl Marx observed, peoples consciousness
is determined by their situation. The good Laborites who were implanted
by the Labor government on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip now talk
and behave like the worst followers of the late fascist rabbi Meir Kahane.
Moreover, we were
told, even the weirdos recognize Israeli democracy. Nobody will raise
his hands against soldiers of the Israeli army. When the government
and the Knesset decide to evacuate settlements, they will obey. They
may raise a ruckus and put up a show of resistance, as they did during
the evacuation of the North Sinai settlements in 1982, but at the end
of the day they will give in. After all, even in North Sinai not one
single settler refused, in the end, to accept their compensation.
But this disdain
for the settlers is no less dangerous than the disdain for the Arabs.
What had been hidden all the time is now becoming clear: the settlers
dont give a damn for democracy and the institutions of the state.
Their hard core spells it out: when the resolutions of the Knesset contradict
the Halakha (Jewish religious law), the Halakha has priority. After
all, the Knesset is just a gang of corrupt politicians. And what value
have the secular laws, copied from the Goyim (Gentiles), compared to
the word of God, blessed be his name?
Many settlers do
not yet say so openly and pretend to be insulted when such attitudes
are attributed to them, but in fact they are dragged along by the hard
core that has already thrown off all the masks. They challenge not only
the policy of the government, but Israeli democracy as such. They declare
openly that their aim is to overthrow the State of Law and put in its
place the State of the Halakha.
A State of Law
is subject to the will of the majority, which enacts the laws and amends
them as necessary. The State of the Halakha is subject to the Torah,
revealed once and for all on Mount Sinai and unchangeable. Only a very
small number of eminent rabbis have the authority to interpret the Halakha.
That is, of course, the opposite of democracy. In any other country,
these people would be called fascists. The religious coloration makes
no difference.
The religious-rightist
rebels are powerfully motivated. Many of them believe in the Kabbala
not Madonnas fashionable Kabbala, but the real one, which
says that todays secular Jews are really Amalekites who succeeded
in infiltrating the People of Israel at the time of the exodus from
Egypt. God Himself has commanded, as everyone knows, the eradication
of Amalek from the face of the earth. Can there be a more perfect ideological
basis for civil war?
Why has this become
a threat at this point in time? It is not yet clear whether Sharon really
intends to dismantle the few settlements in the Gaza Strip. But as the
settlers see it, even the idea of removing one single settlement is
a casus belli. It attacks everything that is holy to them. Sharon tried
to convince them that it is only a ploy to sacrifice a few small
settlements in order to save all the others. In vain.
In preparation
for the Great Rebellion, the settlers have unveiled their potential.
The most eminent rabbis of the Religious Zionist movement
have declared that the evacuation of a settlement is a sin against God
and have called upon the soldiers to refuse orders. Hundreds of rabbis,
including the rabbis of the settlements and the rabbis of the religious
units in the army have joined the call.
The voice of the
few opponents is being drowned out. They quote the Talmudic saying the
law of the kingdom is law, meaning that every government has to
be obeyed, much as Christians are required to render unto Caesar what
is Caesars, etc. But who listens to these moderate rabbis
now?
The conquest of
the army from the inside began long ago. The arrangement
with the yeshivot (religious schools), that serve in the army as separate
units, has allowed the entry of a huge Trojan horse. In any confrontation
between their rabbis and their army commanders, the soldiers of the
arrangement yeshivot will obey the rabbis. Worse: for years
now, the settlers have systematically penetrated the ranks of the officers
corps, where they now constitute an even more dangerous Trojan horse.
The right-wing
refusal to obey orders is unlike the left-wing conscientious objection.
The leftist refusal is a personal stand, the rightist refusal a collective
mutiny. On the left, a few hundred refused to serve the occupation,
on the right, many thousands, even tens of thousands, will obey their
rabbis orders to refuse. As the Chief-of-Staff has warned, the
army may disintegrate.
Altogether, the
settlers, together with their close allies in Israel including the yeshivot
students, may amount to something like half a million people
a mighty phalanx for rebellion.
As of now, the
settlers are only using this threat as an instrument for blackmail and
deterrence, in order to choke off any thought of evacuating settlements
and territories. But if the blackmail does not do the job, the Great
Rebellion is just a matter of time.