The Settlers: And the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism by Gadi Taub

Author:Gadi Taub [Taub, Gadi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-300-16863-1
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Role of “the Left”

The settlers invested a great deal in the portrait of “the left”—all those opposed to the occupation—as post-Zionist, in contrast to the patriotic settlers; materialistic, in contrast to the spiritual yeshiva graduates; individualistic, as opposed to self-sacrificing, as the settlers were, for the common good; and nihilistic, as opposed to moral, which is how the settlers saw themselves, with their values engraved in stone and anchored in religion.

Much of this description of “the left” was based not so much on knowledge as on ignorance. The religious Zionist system of public education is tightly isolated and encourages the strengthening of faith and the prevention of doubt, and one of its by-products is a lack of knowledge, even at a basic level, of world history and Western political thought, including Zionist thought (except in its religious variants). The perception of the much-vilified “left” seems, more often than not, to be based on what one sees on commercial TV channels, which also supposedly represent Western culture in general. So the Israeli version of American Idol and the shopping mall21 offer catchy metaphors to explain, or rather explain away, the concerns of those who do not support settlement. The fact that religious Zionists are a small minority among Israel’s educated classes, and a small minority among college and university students, easily disappears from view, along with the whole republic of Israeli letters, behind the all-encompassing image of Channel 2 (Israel’s first and most popular commercial TV channel).

If secular learning plays any role in the settlers’ public sphere it is usually the work of post-Zionists that they focus on—the so-called New Historians and Critical Sociologists (along with a host of “postcolonial” adherents of Edward Said and various postmodern academics, mostly bent on delegitimizing Zionism as such). There is, indeed, a growing and very vocal group in Israeli academia for whom Israel is a colonial enterprise, born in sin, which, in accord with the UN resolution of 1975, is inherently racist. This group would probably not receive the attention it does except Israel’s single highbrow daily gives them disproportional attention and support.22 The settlers made much use of this trend. It made it easy for them to reduce any opposition to the occupation to an opposition to Zionism at large; it helped conceal from view the Zionist arguments against settlement; and it strengthened the reductionist view of Zionism as a physical hold on the holy land. In this view every added acre means more Zionism, and every subtracted acre is less Zionism. The fact that post-Zionists are a negligible minority—there is not one member of the Knesset, with the exception of some in the Arab parties, who subscribes to the views of post-Zionist intellectuals — has failed to make an impression on the settlers. Post-Zionism was just too useful to support all that’s implied by Yisrael Harel’s hand gesture.

This strategy of reducing “the left” to post-Zionism required a considerable measure of intellectual dishonesty, Harel-style. It ignored the fact that the great majority

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