Stones against the Iron Fist, Terror within the Nation: Alternating Structures of Violence and Cultural Identity in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Politics & Society

Volumn 18, Issue 4, 1990, Pages 481-526

  Atran, Scott ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84977200189     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: 15527514     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/003232929001800404     Document Type: Article

References (138)

1. Jerusalem Post, 30 March 1989.
2. N. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
3. Minutes of Second Meeting of the Zionist Commission, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), Jerusalem, file Z4/483, 14 March 1918.
4. Palestinian violence against repeated propaganda by “responsible Zionists” that the country was “deserted and derelict” was perceived as a continuing cause of Britain's inability to administer its mandate peacefully (Haycraft Report, Palestine Disturbances in May, 1921 [London: HMSO, 1921], p. 57).
5. L. Kohn, “Proposals for the Preparation of a Memorandum on the Land Question in Palestine,” CZA, Jerusalem, file Z4/1260/II, November 1918.
6. Reception of Islamo-Christian Association by Inter-Allied Commission, 18 June 1919; report by Abraham Elmaleh, CZA, Jerusalem, file L4/794, August 1919.
7. Zionist Executive to Colonial Office, CZA, Jerusalem, file Z4/10655, 1 June 1921.
8. Conversation held at Mr. Balfour's House, CZA, Jerusalem, file Z4/16055, 22 July 1921.
9. See B. Wasserstein, The British in Palestine: The Mandatory Government and the Arab-Jewish Conflict 1917-1929 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978).
10. Minutes of the Palestine Zionist Executive, CZA Library, 21 May 1925.
11. Shaw Report, Palestine Commission on the Disturbances of August, 1929 (Lon don : HMSO, 1930).
12. Histadrut memorandum submitted to Palestine Commission of Inquiry, December 1929, in Documents on Jewish Labour Policy in Palestine (Tel Aviv: Achdut, 1930).
13. Minutes of the Jewish Agency Executive, CZA Library, November 1929.
14. Cf. Y Porath, The Palestine Arab National Movement 1929-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1977).
15. S. Atran, “The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939,” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (November 1989): 719-744.
16. August 1938 in D. Ben Gurion, Letters to Paula and the Children (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1968 [in Hebrew]).
17. Z. Jabotinsky, Writings (Jerusalem: Eri Jabotinsky, 1959 [in Hebrew]), pp. 251- 266.
18. London Sunday Times, 15 June 1969.
19. In Menachem Shalev, “The True Believer,” Jerusalem Post, 16 December 1988.
20. The initiative came from Nayef Hawatma's Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP); it was not formally adopted, however, until 1977 by the PLO's policy-determining body, the Palestine National Council (Al-Majlis al-Watani al-filastini [PNC]). In the 1970s, the DFLP was also the first PLO group to seek to enlist the support of the Israeli left and to call for Israelis born after 1948 to join them in forming a “popular democratic state.” In the early 1980s the DFLP appeared willing to negotiate a peace settlement and recognize Israel as indicated by its acceptance of the Fez Plan issued at the twelfth Arab summit (9 September 1982). But it joined the PFLP in opposing the Amman Accord signed between Arafat and Jordan's King Hussein (11 February 1985) on the grounds that any peace talks with Israel based on UN resolution 242 failed to guarantee mention of the Palestinians except as refugees.
21. Le Monde, 5 May 1989.
22. L. Kadi, Political Documents of the Armed Palestinian Resistance Movement (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1969 [in Arabic]), pp. 137–141.
23. Ha'aretz, 18 September 1989
24. International Herald Tribune, 11 August 1988.
25. M. Begin, The Revolt (New York: Schuman, 1951), p. 335.
26. Occupying seven Knesset seats in all, the secular far right has two of the Government's nineteen cabinet posts, with Tsomet controlling science and energy, and Tehiya in charge of agriculture. Although Moledet has no place in the cabinet, without its two parliamentary votes the Shamir government would lose its majority (62 of 120 seats). Moledet's leader, Rehavam Ze'evi, makes his Party's support conditional on not “making mistakes like going to Cairo” for peace talks or “having elections in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza” (International Herald Tribune, 5 June 1990). Together, Shas and the NRP have eleven Knesset seats. Shas controls three cabinet positions, including the interior, while the NRP's two posts include education. Likud (along with Yitzhak Modai's allied Move ment for Zionist Renewal) possesses all the remaining cabinet ministries.
27. S. Lachman, “Arab Rebellion and Terrorism in Palestine 1929-1939: The Case of Shiekh Izz al-Din al-Qassam and His Movement,” in Zionism and Arabism in Palestine and Israel, eds. E. Kedourie and S. Haim (London: Frank Cass, 1982).
28. Cf. AI-Fajr, 20 November 1981.
29. “An Open Letter to the Jews” and “An Appeal to the English Soldiers,” CZA, Jerusalem, file S25/9783, 1936; cf. Palestine. Correspondence with the Palestine Arab
30. Delegation and the Zionist Organisation, Cmd. 1700 (London: HMSO, 1922); also testimony of Hajj Amin al-Husseini before the Shaw Commission, Shaw Report, 3 December 1929.
31. Y. Haim, Abandonment of Illusions: Zionist Political Attitudes Toward Palestinian Arab Nationalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1983).
32. Porath, Palestine Arab National Movement; A. Yasin, The Struggle of the Pale tinian People Prior to the Year 1948 (Beirut: PLO Research Center, 1975 [in Arabic])
33. T. Bowden, The Breakdown of Public Security: the Case of Ireland 1916-1921 and Palestine 1936-1939 (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1977)
34. M. Budeiri, The Palestine Communist Party 1919-1948: Arab and Jew in the Struggle for Internationalism (London: Ithaca Press, 1979)
35. A. Kayyali, Palestine: A Modern History (London: Croom Helm, 1978).
36. C. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-VGlesley, 1978)
37. G. Rudé, The Crowd and the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
38. This is not to deny that the peasant masses who sustained the revolt with their manpower and moral support were devoid of revolutionary elements as some commen tators intimate (B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 [Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1987]). On the contrary, the “semi- proletarianization” of the fellahin that ensued in the wake of Zionist colonization of the plains and British demands for cheap urban labor meant that they could no longer occupy a “traditional” peasant role in the political economy of the country (T. Swedennberg, “The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936-1939),” in Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, eds. E. Burke and I. Lapidus [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988]). They joined trade unions and organized sociopolitical self-aid groups that were nationally connected. These tended to sidestep local factions that were often polarized around village hamulas (loosely structured patrilineages) and haras (residential quarters).
39. Hamas graffiti Gaza, 1989. Graffiti constitutes the most popular, evident, and sustained expression of ongoing debate about the Intifada. Ever since October 1989, the Israeli army has had standing orders that allow masked youths caught in the acting of spreading graffiti to be shot on sight.
40. George Habash of the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), like the DFLP's Nayef Hawatma, is a Christian Arab. Although there is a legacy of PFLP support in Gaza owing to Nasser's patronage of its parent organization of the 1950s and 1960s, the Arab Nationalists' Movement (ANC), Islamic fundamentalism today is clearly in the ascendancy in the Gaza camps. One factor perhaps in the persistence of PFLP and DFLP support in West Bank camps such as Dahaisheh near Bethlehem is a greater presence and tolerance of Christians as equals, another is a greater commitment to “armed struggle” (as one Dahasheh poet put it: “you are born Fath, but grow up PFLP”). Ever since the 1988 Palestinian National Congress in Algiers, these PLO-affiliated groups have adhered to the principle of democratic pluralism—in particular, to the PLO decision to work for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. But local elements of these groups within the Occupied Territories occasionally advertise the provisional nature of their adherence to the principle. For example, the PFLP leaflet of December 1988, which marked that organization's twenty-first anniversary, called for the rejection(narfud) of UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the intensification of armed struggle. The non-PLO Hamas, while tactically allied with the PLO when it comes to supporting one another's strike calls, allows no compromise on the principle of an Islamic republic for the whole of historic Palestine. This implies that Palestinian Christians and Jews will be treated as “protected minorities” (dhimmi) and tolerated guests of Islam. Willing adherents to schismatic offshots of Islam such as the Bahai and perhaps the Druze may be condemned to death for their apostasy.
41. Y. Sayigh, “Struggle Within, Struggle Without: the Transformation of PLO Politics since 1982,” International Affairs 65 (1989): 256.
42. Compare H. Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and D. Horowitz and M. Lissak, Origins of the Israeli
43. Polity: Palestine Under the Mandate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Also of interest is the fact that Palestinians seeking to cut economic ties to Israel and set up a self-sufficient economy, which initially concentrates on local food production and small- scale manufacture, frequently point to the Israeli kibbutz movement as a model.
44. M. Cohen, Zion and State (Oxford, Eng.: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
45. Monde, 13 June 1990).
46. E. Sanbar, “L'intifada en Palestine: quelques propositions de lecture du soulèvement populaire palestinien,” Palestine: mémoires et territoires. Cahiers d'études stratégiques, no. 14 (Paris: EHESS, 1989).
47. D. Snyder and C. Tilly, “Hardship and Collective Violence in France, 1830 to 1960,” Social Research 56 (1989): 263-293. Cf. T. Nardin, Violence and State: A Critique of Empirical Political Theory (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1971).
48. J. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27 (1962): 5-19.
49. R. Shehadeh, “Occupier's Law and the Uprising,” Journal of Palestine Studies 17: 24-37.
50. Dan Shomron, Israeli Chief of Staff, Moged, Israel Television, 25 January 1989.
51. Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz, 21 May 1990.
52. Davar, 22 May 1990. Shortly before the massacre, fundamentalist Rav Moshe Tsvi Neriah urged on his countrymen that: “This not the time to think, but the time to shoot left and right” (cited by Amos Oz at Peace Now rally, Tel Aviv, 26 May 1990). Conversely, the march organized by Hezbollah, the militant Sh'ite Party of God, called for “Muslim fury over the shedding of Palestinian blood by Zionists,” which religiously requires “escalating the struggle to obliterate the Jewish state” (International Herald Tribune, 22 May 1990). Such a scenario hardly leaves room for ordinary life—only “Jewish blood” or “Arab blood.”
53. Ze'ev Schiff in Ha'aretz, 9 October 1990
54. Wall Street Journal, 11 October 1990.
55. Jerusalem Post, 9 August 1989; cf.Al-Fajr 27 September 1985; also polls reported in Al-Fajr, 4 April 1984, 13 July 1984
56. Meron Benvenisti in Al-Fajr, 1 November 1985; polls conducted among 15-18-year-old Israelis in successive years by the Jerusalem Van Leer Foundation since 1984.
57. Palestinians argue that intolerance of collaboration is taking on a higher profile because Israel relies on informers to step up its war against the Intifada (cf. Jonathan Kuttab, “A Palestinian View on ‘Collaborators ’,” Jerusalem Post, 10 September 1989). That many of the leaders of the Unified Command initially had no police record and were unknown to Israeli security forces, magnified the danger of local informers. Moreover, according to Palestinian sources, Israel trains and arms thousands of collaborators, some of whom work in self-organized groups, checking names against “blacklists”, beating demonstrators and so forth (New York Times, 23 September 1989). Israeli policy of holding Palestinians collectively responsible for individual actions, including actions against collaborators, also amplifies the objective threat of collaborators to Palestinian society and their worth to Israeli security forces (for example, 4 buildings housing 55 persons were demolished on 15 June 1990 after their proprietors were accused of attacking collaborators).
58. Leila Hudson considers the fact that far more Palestinians than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians as support for “the idea that the most potent and crucial of [the Intifada's] aspects is not direct confrontation with the Israeli state—a hopeless mismatch of resources and technology—but a unifying of the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories into an organized political force to confront the Israelis with a token physical and economic force of a nature that could be amplified by the media into a confrontation of national claims and wills” (“The Palestinian Intifada: The Culture of History and the Practice of Ideology,” unpublished manuscript, University of Michigan, Department of Anthropology, October 1990).
59. In fall 1989 a special leaflet announcing the escalation of nonviolent civil disobedience was distributed. Because most taxes collected in the West Bank and Gaza go to paying the costs of occupation with little reinvested in social services to the Occupied Territories, Palestinians began refusing to pay the costs of their own repression. The hallowed principle of “no taxation without representation,” would carry a special appeal for western democracies. So fearful was the Israeli administration of the economic and symbolic value of nonpayment of taxes that it went to extraordinary measures in an effort to crush the “tax rebellion” that originated in the village of Beit Sahur near Bethlehem. The village was put under curfew for weeks in autumn 1989 as troops cut telephone lines, rounded up scores of people, ransacked village homes and stores, seized and proceeded to auction off personal goods worth many times the value of the taxes ostensibly owed. Foreign diplomats who attempted to enter Beit Sahur at the invitation of the villagers were told the area was closed for reasons of “military security.” When local Palestinian leaders called a press conference in the National-Palace Hotel in East Jerusalem to explain the program of nonviolent civil disobedience, the army sealed off the hotel and surrounding streets as a “military zone,” the first such zone declared in East Jerusalem since its “unification” with the Israeli state (Jerusalem Post, 4 October 1989
60. Al-Fajr, 16 October 1989).
61. Although there are deep-seated political and socioeconomic divisions among Palestinians with feuding families often joining rival factions, as yet there is little of the widespread intemecine violence that characterized the later stages of the Thawra. Never theless following installation of a narrow Israeli right-wing government and the suspension of U.S.-PLO talks in summer 1990, there was a sense of despair in the villages. Hamas denounced the PLO and Unified Command for advocating compromise with Israel as “the peace of the weak.” While defending its policy, the Unified Command questioned in its own July leaflet “the benefit of raising the banner of peace” but warned against “fascist methods of sowing internal strife and discord” among Palestinians as the spectacle of internal violence seemed on the verge of an open fray. The spectre of the Thawra loomed large, as Faisal Husseini warned: “If we don't control ourselves and unify our ranks, and allow tribal and factional differences to act up, then we will fail.returning to square one” (Al-Fajr, 9 July 1990).
62. Traditionally, the idea has been that those who commit violence essentially do so for practical ends, be they psychological or political (cf. H. Arendt, “On Violence,” in Crisis of the Republic [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970]). Primarily through the inspiration of Foucault, this thesis has come under critical scrutiny from several quarters. For Machiavellian notions of pragmatically rational, instrumental violence imply that ends are clearly perceived, that the moral limits on means are set as a function of those ends, and that the intrusion of existential contingencies will prove to be largely irrelevant. Yet revolution, for example, is by its very nature an open-ended quest for a new society, its “meaning” is notoriously an open-textured exercise in interpretation and its modalities of behavior are as unstable as the spread of rumor on the wings of unforeseen actions and events (cf. B. Singer, “Violence in the French Revolution: Forms of Ingestion/Forms of Expulsion,” Social Research 61 (1989): 263-293.
63. Yehuda Elkana in Ha'aretz, 2 March 1988.
64. “No-Nonsense Commander,” Jerusalem Post, 5 June 1988.
65. Louis René Beres, “The Real Threat of Genocide,” Jerusalem Post, 5 June 1988.
66. Consider the attack by young religious settlers on the Arab village of Kifl Harith: According to one Israeli military official, these self-proclaimed “hikers” apparently “opened fire like madmen” (Ma'ariv, 31 May 1989) in what another officer declared to be “a clear provocation by the settlers” (Ha'aretz, 31 May 1989). Nevertheless, “[s]oldiers at Kifl Harith, and in recent incidents of settler retaliation, had noted the license numbers of vehicles involved, but made no effort to arrest rioters” (Jerusalem Post, 31 May 1989). By implicitly accepting the settlers' claims that attacks against Arabs constitute “retaliation,” the Israeli press and public harbor an asymmetric concept of “justice” that, for example, sentences Arabs who throw Molotov cocktails for “attempted murder” of Jews but gives suspended sentences to Jews who throw Molotov cocktails “in retaliation” against Arab motorists going to work:
67. Why, when Jewish Cossacks capped mayhem with murder in Kifl Harith, did soldiers write down license numbers but not bother to chase or arrest them?.The government is unlikely to bring other [Jewish] pogromists to trial. That would mean putting on trial the government's own methods. (Gershom Gorenberg in Jerusalem Post, 4 June 1989)
68. The spectre of Jews having to fight Jews is no longer a remote nightmare and Jewish racism is rearing its ugly head. Perhaps the most perilous message, so far, that should have caused alarm bells to ring throughout the land, was sounded.by Rabbi Yitzhak Ginzburg, the head of Joseph Tomb's yeshiva in Nablus, who said clearly and loudly that the blood of Jews and Gentiles is not the same. He was speaking after a court hearing in which eight of his students are suspected of having committed murder, arson and attempted murder during a raid on the Arab village of Kifl Harith. (Editorial in Jerusalem Post, 4 June 1989)
69. U. Greenberg, The Book of Denunciation and Belief (Jerusalem: Sadar, 1937 [in Hebrew]).
70. Heard on Mabat, Israeli Television, 31 October 1989.
71. See Boas Evron, “Education to Fascism and Flight,” Yedioth Ahronoth, 4 March 1988. Evron has been warning for some time that with Israeli's shift to the right “the true symbol of the state is no longer the Menorah of seven candlesticks, the true symbol is the iron fist.”” (“Strength, Strength, Strength,” Yedioth Ahronoth, 10 September 1982)
72. Jerusalem Post, 21 May 1989. According to Amnesty's 1990 report on human rights violations: “Over 260 unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children, were shot dead by Israeli forces, often in circumstances suggesting excessive use of force or deliberate killings. in many cases the victims did not appear to be involved in. violent activities” (cited in Jerusalem Post, 11 July 1990).
73. “From Abu Jihad to Demjanuk,” Yedioth Ahronoth, 4 April 1988. A graduate of the rabbinical seminary and the University of Vienna, Dr. Israel Eldad (Scheib) is perhaps the last remaining intellectual “legend” of the prestate right. His writings arguably represent the most complete historico-philosophic synthesis of the diverse trends of extreme Jewish nationalism.
74. Jerusalem Post, 2 March 1989
75. Jerusalem Post, 28 August 1989.
76. “We Sanction the Executioner,” Hadashot, 2 October 1988.
77. H. Wasserman, “The Nationalization of the Six Million,” Politika 8 (1986): 6-7.
78. D. Ben Gurion, Concepts and Values (1957), cited in C. Liebman and E. Don- Yehiya, “Le dilemme de la conciliation d'une culture traditionnelle et des nécessités politiques. La religion civile en Israel,”” Pardès 11 (1990): 80.
79. D. Ben Gurion, “The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution” (1944), in The Zionist
80. Idea, ed. A. Hertzberg (New York: Doubleday), pp. 609–610.
81. Davar, 31 January 1964.
82. Cf. E. Said, “Identity, Negation and Violence,” New Left Review 171 (1988): 46-60.
83. See N. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Pales tinians (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 104–105.
84. Cf. H. Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979). The PLO, even without communists, was simply Moscow's client.
85. Accordingly, in a quid pro quo, Israel has actively engaged in a worldwide program of counterinsurgency (especially in Latin America where Israel can maintain a lower profile than it can the United States) while the United States has generally acceded to Israeli definition and treatment of Palestinian “terrorism.” Indeed, in this time of a receding sentiment of communist threat—and as the memory of the Holocaust looms larger in the American public eye than ever— any attack on Israel, whether successful or not, is considered sheer terror. Thus when PLO Executive Committee member, Mohammed Abbas, claimed responsibility for the failed attempt to land Palestinian commandos on an Israeli beach, the United States decided to suspend all contacts with the PLO on the advice of virtually the entire political and media establishment (cf. Anthony Lewis, “For Arafat and the PLO, No More Time for Fudging,” International Herald Tribune, 6 June 1990). But the Israeli army's killing of 10s, wounding of 100s, and repression of 1000s during the preceding two weeks aroused only Washington's “concern.”
86. Speech to cabinet on eve of invasion of Lebanon, Ha'aretz 5 June 1982.
87. I. Zertal, “Du bon usage du sovenir: les israéliens et la Shoa,” Le Débat 58 (1990): 101.
88. Z. Jabotinsky, “State Zionism—The Revisionist Viewpoint,” in Parties in Zionism (New York: Zionist Organization of America, 1957), p. 13.
89. M. Capra, “Beer and Olive Oil,“Ma'ariv weekly supplement, 27 November 1987; see also Eitan's remarks in New York Times, 21 October 1982.
90. For example, “Last night soldiers shot dead a masked youth who painted slogans in Hebron. shooting him in the back of the head at close range. According to military sources.masked youths.had tried to ‘incite the population'” (“Masked Youths Shot Dead in West Bank,” Jerusalem Post 15 October 1989). The army considers youths (usually) between 15 and 19 years old who hide their faces under kuffiyahs as those who direct the stonethrowing of younger children (Kuttab, “Profile of the Stone Throwers,” p. 19) and take the lead in enforcing strikes and assaulting “collaborators” (Joel Greenberg, “Masked youths are Fair Game,” Jerusalem Post, 28 August 1989). But the army may now kill adolescents who cover their faces simply on the suspicion that they are “inciting the population.”
91. Cf. M. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, A Study in Terror and Healing and the Wild Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
92. Al-Fajr, 16 January 1989
93. Jerusalem Post, 19 May 1989.
94. International Herald Tribune, 27-28 May 1989.
95. Houston Chronicle, 30 May 1989.
96. Washington Post, 27 May 1989.
97. Jerusalem Post, 26 May 1989. In their otherwise sober analysis of the Intifada, Israeli journalists Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari take heart that “the struggle to maintain the IDF's moral stature was joined by the army's judicial system. The military courts simply did not allow soldiers to get away with excesses” (Z. Schiff and E. Ya'ari, Intifada: the Palestinian Uprising—Israel's Third Front [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990], p. 154). On 6 October 1989, in yet another trial of the Givati, the Jerusalem Post reported that soldiers thought they were obeying the defense minister's orders:
98. Al-Fajr, 10 May 1981, 25 February 1983, 16 September 1983, 15 February 1984.
99. M. Zuckerman, “Israel and the Holocaust,” Telos 78 (1988-1989): 43-54.
100. Still, for many Israelis, the memory of the Holocaust-whatever else it may be—is a memory of innocent human suffering and of a deeply personal collective tragedy. For this reason, the moral imperative that sustains the Israeli “structure of violence” among the dwindling majority of the Israelis has yet little of the abstract Kantian character of a categorical “moral duty” that could ultimately carry it beyond human compassion to brutal slaughter as happened when the Nazis expelled the Jew from the category “human” and dutifully steeled themselves “not to show the slightest trace of emotion” in purging and racially purifying humanity (Rudolph Hoess cited in J. Halberstam, “From Kant to Auschwitz,” Social Theory and Practice 14 (1988): 41-54).
101. As such, Jewish chauvinistic messianism “is a distinct variant of European conservative nationalism with its mystical overtones that had emerged as a reaction to the French Revolution and its aftermath” (Y. Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement 1925-1948 [London: Frank Cass, 1988], p. 141). Like America's Christian right, Zionist ultranationalism believes the state's founding fathers were betrayed by pluralistic demo cracy and godless government technocrats: “While the Israeli right wing extremists are obviously not antisemitic as most Christian radical right groups are, they display many xenophobic features and express, on occasion, clear ideas of ethnic discrimination and Social Darwinism” as well as “militarism, ethnocentrism and religiosity” (E. Sprmzak, The
102. Eldad in Ha'arez, 1 August 1988.
103. Emunim: The Politics of Zionist Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1986), p. 2.
104. Indeed, in defying and eventually overcoming successive government bans on settlement in the Occupied Territories, Gush Emunim activists avowedly take their lead from the illegal paramilitary “tower and stockade” (homah u migdal) settlements, which Labor “pioneers” (halutzim) erected during the Arab revolt in order to “create facts on the ground” that would force Britain to cede to Jewish territorial aspirations (see E. Orren, Settlement Amid Struggles: the Pre-State Strategy of Settlement [Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1978(in hebrew)]; cf. interview with Dr. Yosef Dreizin, Nekuda no. 68 [13 January 1984]). Only it is Israel's army—not a foreign power—that Gush means to finesse.
105. I. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1988), p. 77.
106. “Gush Emunim Extends Hand for Peace to Jericho,” Jerusalem Post Internation al, 9 May 1987.
107. M. Dayan, A New Map: Other Relationships (Tel Aviv: Ma'ariv, 1969).
108. Cf. LIM ideologue Eleazar Livneh, Crisis of Western Civilization (Tel Aviv: Schoken, 1972, [in Hebrew]).
109. Ephraim Ben Haim, “Only Settlement Will Stop Munich,” Zot Ha'aretz, no.175, (15 October 1974).
110. Ma'ariv, 23 September 1978, 6 December 1978.
111. Although Gush activists comprise no more than 20 percent of the settler popula tion, they control nearly all aspects of security, economy, and politics in the Occupied Territories. They have appropriated for themselves nearly the same amount of scarce water, and twice the electricity, as has the Arab population, which outnumbers them 10 to 1. In 1978, Israeli Chief of Staff Raphael (Raful) Eitan, a Gush sympathizer, gave the first Gush communities responsibility for security and defense in the Occupied Territories. Through control of the Council of Settlement of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (Moetzet Yesha), these former illegal “squatters” became government functionaries with huge budgets and enor mous political and military power (M. Benvenisti, 1986 Report: Demographic, Economic
112. Legal, Social and Political Development in the WestBank [Jerusalem: Jerusalem Post, West Bank Data Project, 1986]). In addition, their control of the educational system in the Occupied Territories virtually assures continuing support for the Gush “ministate” among the settler population: The religious educational system in general and the Merkaz Harav school of Gush's spiritual guide, Rav Yehuda Tsvi Kook in particular has bred a far more ideologically committed succession than the deideologized and declining state school system.
113. Yedioth Ahronot, 30 April 1984.
114. Rabbi Israel Rosen, “Yesha Rabbis: To Encourage Arab Emigration,“Nekuda, no.115 [November 1987])
115. Rabbi Moshe Levinger, “They are Holy,” Nekuda, no. 89 [7 July 1985]).
116. Lustick, For the Land and the Lord, p. 111.
117. Y. Ne'eman, The Policy of Open Eyes [Tel Aviv-Ramat Aviv” Revivim, 1974] [in Hebrew])
118. See Joel Rebibo, “The ‘Commandment’ to Conquer the Land,” Jerusalem Post, 18 August 1989.
119. “The Holy Land and the Value of Life,” Jerusalem Post, 6 October 1989.
120. I. Eldad, The Jewish Revolution: Jewish Statehood (New York: Shengold, 1971), p. 56.
121. Tehiya activist Ephraim Ben Haim, cited in T. Raanan, Gush Emunim (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1980), pp. 216—217.
122. M. Nisan, American Middle East Foreign Policy [Montreal: Dawn, 1982], p. 70).
123. “Platform,” Tehiya-Tsomet election pamphlet, 1984, cited in Sprinzak, Emergence of the Israeli Radical Right.
124. M. Kahane, Listen World, Listen Jew [Tucson: Institute of the Jewish Idea, 1978] [in Hebrew], p. 128).
125. Rabbi Meir Kahane in Orit Shohat, “Don't Ask Me How,” Ha'aretz Magazine, 31 May 1985).
126. Kahane, Listen World, Listen Jew, p. 140).
127. Tehiya's Rabbi Eliezer Waldman in Lustick, For the Land and the Lord, p. 143).
128. (Rabbi Israel Sadan in A. Rubinstein, Le rêve et l'histoire: le Sionisme, Israel et les Juifs [Paris: Calmann-lévy, 1985], p. 41).
129. D. Yosephi, “A Humane Solution to the Demographic Problem,” in The Book of the Whole Land of Israel, ed. A. Ben Ami (Tel Aviv: Freedman, 1977), p. 349.
130. Years [Miami: Institute of the Jewish Idea, 1983] [in Hebrew], p. 66).
131. Said, “Identity and Violence,” P. 54.
132. Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (1896).
133. Middle East and the West [New York: Harper and Row, 1966], pp. 72, 75, 126).
134. Palestine, ed. N. Aruri [London: Zed Books, 1984], pp. 4–5).
135. Z. Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall—We and the Arabs,” in Writings (Jerusalem: Eri Jabotinsky, 1959 [in Hebrew]).
136. From “The Land of Israel” and “The War (1910-1930),” in Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, pp. 419–423.
137. “Lowering the Sword,” Foreign Policy 78 (1990): 97, 102.
138. Editorial in Jerusalem Post, 5 July 1990.