The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg

Author:Gershom Gorenberg [Gorenberg, Gershom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, bought-and-paid-for, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780805082418
Google: 7_fWu8v0fgAC
Amazon: B0012QGZTG
Barnesnoble: B0012QGZTG
Goodreads: 27653
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

EVERYTHING holds a spark of holiness, yeshivah student Dov Indig wrote. For example, there were “Hashomer Hatza’ir members who smear the roads of the Gaza Strip in order to defend ‘victimized Arabs.’” One could disagree with them, mock the contradictions in their arguments. But still, they revealed “sincere desire to repair” the world, and that desire reinforced a believer’s faith that the messiah would come, “the hope that all the positive desires…will become a mighty stream, sweeping away evil and falsehood.”31

Indig was twenty years old in the spring of 1972 when he wrote that letter, splitting his time between yeshivah studies and service in the Armored Corps. One day at a base in the Golan Heights, a middle-aged secular kibbutz member on reserve duty quizzed him about religion. Afterward he received a letter from the man’s daughter, packed with her own questions. Soon he was spending late nights corresponding with her, then with two other secular kibbutz girls as well, about faith, human purpose, and the meaning of Jewish history.32

Trying to convince one of the girls that true happiness could be achieved only through dedication to an ideal, and that religion held the highest ideal, he enlisted Molière and Victor Frankl as well as the Talmud.33 His description of Hashomer Hatza’ir’s defense of the Bedouin as both misdirected and showing a “spark of holiness” that would help bring redemption echoed the writing of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, who had described an earlier generation of socialist Zionist pioneers as “good sinners” and “the lights of chaos,” bringing the messiah without knowing it.

But the theology also fit a mood among intent young religious Zionists—arguing to oneself, most of all, that faith was the best path, that it made sense to keep praying three times a day while in the army, and all the while feeling that the model to match or exceed was set by secular Zionists who had settled the land. Having grown up on a kibbutz, “you lack the principal thing we ask of life, true happiness,” he wrote in another letter. Yet “to a certain extent I envy you,” he wrote. He was studying “the Torah of the living God, and nothing is likely to be more satisfying.” Nonetheless, “a person also needs the opportunity to realize his ideals,” which he implied she was doing simply by living in a kibbutz. “That opportunity has not yet been given to me,” Indig wrote, “though I hope to merit it one day.”34

While serving in Quneitrah, he dropped by Kibbutz Merom Golan for a look. He found small houses surrounded by gardens and lawns, a green corner of paradise in the shadow of the black volcanic mountains. A kibbutz member grabbed him, he wrote. “‘Why don’t the Orthodox establish settlements in the Golan Heights?’ he asked me. ‘The Heights…cry out for more settlers. What happened to the commandment of settling the Land of Israel?’ I was a little embarrassed, but it seems to me he’s right. Thousands of settlers should be brought to the Golan, to fill the Heights with light and life.

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