by Hagit Rosenbaum, Besheva, translated by Hillel Fendel
It was 40 years ago; the Israeli city of Yamit and neighboring communities in the northwestern Sinai Desert were in the final stages of being destroyed so that they could be handed over to Egypt in honor of the Camp David peace agreements. This was the first time that Israel had destroyed Jewish towns for such a purpose.
When the following incident occurred, Yamit was already totally razed, except for the home in which Rabbi Yisrael Ariel and his family lived. The IDF Commander of the destroy-and-evacuate operation, Gen. Chaim Erez, entered the house and asked where the family's belongings should be taken. After a short, tense discussion, the Rabbi's wife picked up her little daughter, turned to the General, and said sadly but defiantly, "When this little girl is grown, she will be able to say, 'Chaim Erez expelled me from Yamit!" Gen. Erez, the hard-hat commander under whose hands an entire large town was taken down, began crying like a child.
"Those tears were very precious to me," Rabbi Ariel says today. "He said to us that he himself is a Holocaust survivor. So I asked him, 'And yet you still fulfill orders without thinking?!' He answered apologetically, 'During the day, it's true, we carry out orders – but at night we plan out how to conquer the place anew.' That is, even the army knows the truth: we're at war, and one day they'll have to take over these areas once again."
It turns out that then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin paved the way for the various destructions of Jewish towns that his successors carried out. These were terribly difficult times for the residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but seemed to get easier for decision-makers as the years passed. The settlement enterprise in general has only thrived and grown in the decades that have passed, but it seems to have become intolerably easy for government-ordered bulldozers to knock down citizens' house in these areas. And where is the settlement leadership in this story? It appears that they have simply not found the miraculous solution to this problem.
Two leaders of the Stop the Withdrawal From Sinai movement in 1981-1982 – Rabbi Ariel and Benny Katzover – spoke with us of the insights they gleaned at the time and since then.
Katzover, serving at the time as head of the Shomron Regional Council, was drafted to lead the campaign against the withdrawal in Yamit – and only after a while did his job description begin to take form: to coordinate the 15 different groups of people who wished to help out, and to set a strategy and plan of action with which to face the army forces that would soon arrive in the area.
Q. Why do you think the struggle in Yamit failed?
A. I wouldn't say that the word "failure" is relevant here. Given the complicated circumstances in which we waged this battle, our Task Force had some good achievements, though we did not, of course, attain our ultimate goal. The IDF officers told us, 'If you would have had 10,000 people here, instead of 3,000, the story would have ended differently.' But the fact is that even the 3,000 we brought was a pretty impressive number, given a few reasons – not least because the right-wing political leadership, including the national-religious sector, fully backed the withdrawal. The decision to quit Sinai was made and promoted by the head of the nationalist camp, Menachem Begin, and a large portion of the members of the National Religious Party (Mafdal) supported it. Even the most 'militant' members of the Mafdal merely abstained on the issue when it was brought to a Knesset vote. This made it very difficult to bring masses of people to the Sinai to fight the withdrawal."
Katzover recounts that when he organized home meetings around the country to persuade people to join the struggle, "the amount of people who took part was about half of those who came to similar meetings for the purpose of attracting people to move to the Shomron. People even said to us, 'You think you know better than Begin? You think you're more nationalist than the Mafdal?' We saw that the public was either mixed-up, or ready to accept the decree, or, in the worst case, even in agreement with it." On the backdrop of the blatant absence of an ideological backbone among the right-wing and religious political leadership, Katzover explains, it was hard to bring the thousands that were vital for the success of the Stop the Sinai Withdrawal movement.
Q. In Gush Katif [in 2005], this was not the case, and there were other favorable factors as well. How do you explain that that campaign also didn't succeed?
A. "I'm not sure, but it seems to me that we simply didn't fight hard enough. If we would have fought in Gush Katif the way we did in Yamit, it could have been different. In Yamit we fought, as the late Chanan Porat said we should, as if we were fighting for our own homes – thought not all of us… We fought, literally, on the roofs of the homes, [Ed. note: see pictures above article] and that was very significant. The proof is that for years afterwards, when I was invited to give talks to IDF soldiers, they would always show clips of our rooftops struggle at Yamit. They would ask themselves what would be if a struggle of that type would occur in places closer to the population and in areas more in the national historic consensus… That is to say, the efforts in Yamit against the withdrawal are engraved in the consciousness of the decision-makers."
Ramifications for Gush Katif
Katzover continues: "This is why [then-Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon, when he led the Disengagement-expulsion from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005, made sure not to allow that type of struggle to develop. He in fact succeeded in crumbling our leadership. It is reasonable to think that if everyone had fought in Gush Katif as people fight for their own homes, the outcome would have been different. Instead, there was a spirit of 'With love we will win' (except for in Kfar Darom) – which means, in other words, 'we won't fight.' This was the message broadcast by the leadership of the Gush and of the Yesha Council – and that's exactly what Sharon needed."
When we review the main "expulsion" stations that followed Gush Katif, Katzover notes the first Amona destruction, in early 2006, as a positive turning point: "[Then-Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert planned to evacuate all the civilian outposts in Yesha. He gave instructions to use strong violence against the protestors. But the results were not what he expected." The police violence looked very bad for the government, and was not that effective, "and the entire subject of evacuating outposts was removed from the agenda. This proves that when you struggle, it ends differently. When I say struggle, I don't mean with active violence, but with dedication; we're good in this. We need hundreds and thousands that will come to resist evacuations with determination and dedication."
The next important spot that needs to be defended will apparently be Yeshivat Chomesh, Katzover says: "There's a group there that has already proven itself as being of a totally different strain. If a worthy leadership develops there with an appropriate level of determination, the results will be in kind." This does not mean the struggle will necessarily succeed, but that it will stop further thoughts of withdrawals for years to come.
Refusal of Orders
Another tool in the campaign to prevent destruction in Yesha is that of refusal to carry out the relevant IDF orders. Rabbi Ariel notes that he was the first to even mention this possibility – and that he paid high prices for this, in the form of trials and even jail time. Rav Ariel was among the founders of the city of Yamit, including the Yeshiva there, and afterwards was very instrumental in founding communities nearby such as Atzmona, Hatzar Adar, and more. During the months preceding the destruction of Yamit, he headed a Yeshivat Yamit-based group called Maoz (Fortress), which led the anti-withdrawal efforts in the city.
Returning to the old argument as to whether the Sinai Peninsula is Halakhically part of the Land of Israel, Rabbi Ariel is very clear: "By every Halakhic standard, Sinai is Eretz Yisrael, and is located within the Land's Biblical boundaries." To underscore this, he made sure to give the new communities there Biblical names [see Numbers 34,5].
And this is why he felt so betrayed by Begin and the Mafdal, whose support for the withdrawal he viewed not only as an ideological reversal, but also as a "betrayal in the foundations of Torah. The Land of Israel doesn't belong to the Prime Minister, but rather to the nation, and it is forbidden to give away even a millimeter of it."
Of course there are those who point to the diplomatic and security benefits that have resulted from the peace agreement with Egypt, but Rav Ariel has a ready answer: "This is not real peace, but only imaginary peace. The area of the Sinai was three times larger than the State of Israel today, and we gave it to them on a silver platter – for let me be quite clear: With the Arabs, there is no such thing as peace. For them, it's all part of the war; this 'peace' is a time to gather strength and prepare for the next war. And that's what will be here too."
As evidence, Rav Ariel says that the Egyptians "have violated all the agreements. They were allowed to bring their forces in the Sinai only up to a certain point, but now the peninsula has turned into one of the largest military bases in the world, with airports, huge weapons stockpiles, ports, bridges over the Suez Canal… Their army can reach Be'er Sheva and Tel Aviv with ease. The agreement is not worth the paper it was printed on. If a war starts tomorrow, they'll have a tremendous advantage. This was a very stupid move on Begin's part – and unfortunately, it is continuing with the other agreements that followed, such as the Oslo Accords."
Rav Ariel sees no point in asking why the struggle against the withdrawal did not succeed: "They came with the whole army and police, with bulldozers and more – so of course citizens cannot overcome them. But the main problem is that there seems to be a loss of ideals. When Yamit was being built, there was a great pioneering spirit, with construction going on all around, and agriculture in the nearby communities, government funding all over… But then, ideals began to be replaced by considerations of money, and destruction in Yesha followed soon after, on hilltop after hilltop in Yesha…"
Q. And still, what can be the light at the end of the tunnel of challenges for the settlement enterprise?
A. Our demographic growth, among the faith-based public, including the hareidim, and the traditionalists, and the nationalists. We see many more observant Jews in the Knesset than before, and within 20 years there might be a majority – and then they'll be able to pass laws very different than some of those being passed now. My beard is already quite white, and I've seen some great moments, such as the Six Day War liberation of the Temple Mount – in which I took part – after 2,000 years of Exile. We will yet return to every place, but the public has to be ready – and we are making progress. Our public, which used to be tiny, is becoming a significant force. We are in the midst of a process, one that passes through some difficult and painful experiences – but in the end, we will see that it will result in the truth and in a true redemption for our people."