Israel Matzav

Why Israel won't abandon the revenants

While Yossi Klein HaLevy reaches some wrong conclusions (there is no need to extend the 'settlement freeze' - the last ten months have already demonstrated yet again that it's not 'settlements' that are stopping peace), he gets this much about the relationship between the revenants and the IDF right (for those without Wall Street Journal access, full article is also here).

The story of the Peretz and Klein houses has significance beyond what it tells us about Israeli sensitivities. Increasingly, Israel’s military elite is coming from West Bank settlements and, more broadly, from within the religious Zionist community that produced the settlement movement and passionately supports it.

Perhaps 40% of combat officers are now religious Zionists (not to be confused with ultra-orthodox Haredim), nearly three times their percentage in the general population. In the early 1990s, the number of religious combat officers was barely 2%. The newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Yair Naveh, is a religious Zionist.

Once it was kibbutzim, or collectivist farms, that produced the nation’s combat elite. Now it is the religious Zionist community that raises its sons to sacrifice. Every Sabbath day the same scene is repeated throughout the settlements: Young men wearing knitted skullcaps precariously pinned to close-cropped hair gather outside the synagogue and exchange stories from their combat units—while their younger brothers eavesdrop and decide which units they will one day join.

The prominence of religious Zionists in the Israel Defense Force (IDF) explains in part why the prospect of a West Bank withdrawal is so traumatic to policy makers and to IDF commanders. If the army is sent to dismantle settlements in the West Bank—as it did in Gaza in 2005—there is the very real threat of widespread disobedience and the collapse of entire units.

During the Gaza withdrawal, only a handful of radical rabbis urged soldiers to refuse orders. Today that sentiment has grown among even mainstream religious Zionists like the former Supreme Court justice, Zvi Tal, who recently declared that if he were a soldier sent to evacuate a settlement, he would refuse.

The “settler” has assumed a near demonic image around the world, but most Israelis know that only a radical fringe is responsible for uprooting Palestinian olive trees and vandalizing mosques. Most settlers are part of the mainstream. Israelis encounter them in the army, in the workplace, and in the universities.

Read the whole thing. I suspect that there would be mass disobedience in the IDF if they were told to dismantle a significant or large number of 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria. This country will never go back to the 1967 lines. And if that means that there is never a formal peace with the 'Palestinians,' so be it.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:42 PM