Full Text

The Settlers: And the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism, by Gadi Taub. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. 167 pages. Appendix to p. 187. Notes to p. 205. Index to p. 207. $32.50 cloth. Reviewed by Cheryl Rubenberg Among quite a number of good books on religious Zionist settlers, Gadi Taub’s The Settlers: And the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism stands out for its originality, analytical astuteness, and conceptual focus. On issues not directly related to the religious settler movement, however, there are several serious problems. Taub concentrates on ideas “because settlement has become the issue over which Israel’s moral foundations and its identity—its heart and its mind—are contested. . . . It is a struggle over the very meaning of Zionism” (p. 21). The crucial difference between secular Zionism and the messianic settlers, he argues, resides in their obligation toward the Land of Israel, not the State of Israel: their commitment to redemption of land, not the establishment of political independence, sovereignty, and democracy. The book presents the evolution of the ideological struggle to reconcile the settlers’ view with mainstream Zionism and argues that despite the different adaptations through which religious ideology underwent, in the end “the two visions . . . could not be reconciled” (p. 21) and the messianic movement was thwarted. In his first chapter Taub examines secular Zionism and emphasizes its democratic foundations as he believes them to have been. He defines Zionism as an idea whose essence was the drive for liberty both in the context of a Europe hostile to Jews but nevertheless engaged in ideas of modern democratic self-determination, and the emancipation/assimilation of Jews, which required them to give up their identity. He further writes: “Like other democracies Israel has often deviated from its proclaimed ideas . . . 1948. . . postpon[ing] keeping its promise of full civil rights to its Arab citizens. . . . But by far, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is Israel’s most glaring violation of democratic rights and liberal values” (p. 32). The latter he attributes primarily to the core value of the settlers, derived from Nahmanides’ definition of the “mitzvah dalet” (fourth mitzvah), that sanctified settlement of the land and became the central theological grounding for the whole settlement enterprise. The messianic settlers had their origin in the Mizrachi movement (which later became the National Religious Party) established by Rabbi Yitzchak Ya’akov Reiness and Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook in the early twentieth century. Rabbi Kook believed that the secular Zionists were playing a part, a stepping stone, in the divine process of redemption. Rabbi Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Hacohen Kook, reinterpreted his father’s premise, stripping it of its “ideological ambiguity and turned it into a political platform” (p. 41). It was Rabbi Kook Jr. who elevated Nahmanides’ mitzvah dalet to a sanctified position. Rabbi Kook and his followers in the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva interpreted the 1967 War as a sign of the imminence of redemption, and the necessity of settling all the Land of Israel became their overarching priority, carried forth by the Gush Emmunim and later the Yesha Council. Taub details the ability of the religious settlers to influence government policies; their changing tactics (though never their commitment to the mitzvah dalet) when it was politically expedient (e.g., when they adopted the rational of “national security”); and their successful circumvention of the state when necessary to achieve their goals. The influence and achievements of the messianic settlers are quite remarkable given that “only about a third to a half of the West Bank’s Jewish population, some 100,000 to 130,000 people are religious Zionists. This group, then, is less than 1.5 percent of Israel’s total population” (pp. 20–21). Taub illustrates repeatedly the complexity and dilemma of the religious settlers. For example, he writes that the messianic settlers behaved as if they were idealistic pioneers “while the consequences of their pioneering endeavors, the moral and political problems it created, were none of their business. But the silence that distanced the settlers from Zionism was also what enabled them to deny the rift” (p. 58). “The question of sovereignty was marginalized and the [secular] criticism of settlement labeled irrational” (p. 63). Moreover, the irony in the pioneering trope was that while reenacting the days of the prestate pioneers, the settlers mimicked their means but negated their meaning. Taub argues that the final dissolution of the messianic movement was the peaceful evacuation of the settlements in Gaza in 2005, followed by the violent evacuation of the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona in 2006 during which settlers violently clashed with security forces and some 200 were injured, though he considers the Gaza disengagement more important than Amona. Interestingly, Taub writes little about the nonreligious settlers or about the policies of secular governments—Labor and Likud—that directly or indirectly propelled the settlement movement. He is exceedingly preoccupied with convincing the reader of Israel’s inherently democratic nature. When discussing secular politics, he repeatedly refers to “the democratic left” and “the democratic right,” and he devotes an entire chapter, labeled Appendix, to “proving” that Israel is a democracy. He is scathing in his remarks about post-Zionists, declaring in one comment that “Post-Zionists . . . have more in common with the settlers than with the Zionist left . . . both reject the idea of a Jewish democratic state” (p. 114). But despite Taub’s sophisticated arguments about Israel’s fundamental democratic character, democracy is more than an ideal and the right to participate in the political process. Democracy means equal access by all the citizens of a polity to its social, economic, and cultural goods. It is simply undeniable that the 20 percent of Israel’s Palestinian citizens do not have an equal share in these goods. Moreover, Taub is dishonest about the objectives of the Palestinians, in one instance writing about rockets from Gaza: “The continued shooting seemed to confirm the lesson of Camp David: the Palestinians did not opt for partition. They did not aim at liberating the occupied territories but at liberating the whole of Palestine” (p. 157). While at the beginning Taub writes that the occupation is Israel’s most glaring violation of democratic rights and liberal values, near the end he appears to contradict himself when discussing Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert’s policy change from negotiations to unilateralism: “But above all the Lebanon war [2006] drove home for many Israelis the lesson that Gaza rockets had not: unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank would expose the majority of Israel’s citizens—in its most densely populated areas, including Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Israel’s international airport—to Quassam [sic] rockets. If the whole force of the IDF, which was not used against the evacuated Gaza by then, cannot stop these primitive weapons, withdrawal from the West Bank may well end in paralyzing the whole country” (pp. 158–59). For Taub, then, democratic Israel has a serious and potentially unresolvable dilemma: since the Palestinians want to destroy it, negotiations are irrational while unilateral withdrawal will result in Israel’s near dissolution. Taub would have been wiser to remain with his analysis of the religious settlers.