The Road from Gush Etzion

Preface The Road from Gush Etzion on sePtember 27, 2017, the Israeli government celebrated a half century of territorial expansion in the West Bank. The occasion was marked with an official state commemoration in a field outside the Gush Etzion settlement of Alon Shvut. Thousands of guests gath- ered for “50 Years of Settlement in Judea and Samaria,” referring to the biblical term the government had adopted for the territory in 1967. Featuring music, dancers, and fireworks, the ceremony echoed across the hilltops between Jerusalem and Hebron. “Settle- ment is important to you my friends,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the assembled crowd. “It is no less important to me and therefore, I tell you clearly and before anything: There will be no further uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel!”1 The location of the ceremony was historically significant. Gush Etzion, or the Etzion Bloc, is a cluster of settlements that consists of many heavily populated towns and includes Kfar Etzion, the first religious kibbutz established in the West Bank after the 1967 War. Before the emergence of Israel in 1948, the area was the site of pre- state Jewish agricultural communities founded between the 1920s and 1940s. After the November 1947 UN vote to partition Pales- tine, the area was designated as part of a Palestinian state. During the 1948 War, Gush Etzion’s children were evacuated from the area, but women and men remained behind to defend the settlement. [ ix ] [ x ] Preface On May 13, armed villagers and the Arab Legion broke into Kfar Etzion, killing over a hundred Jewish residents. The neighboring kibbutzim surrendered the following day to the Arab Legion, as the State of Israel was declared in Tel Aviv.2 Gush Etzion then came under Jordanian control for the next nineteen years, until Israel’s conquest of the West Bank in the June 1967 War. That war, referred to as the “Six Day War” in Israel, and the Naksa, or “setback” in the Arab world, led to a lightning- fast Israeli victory over combined Arab forces yielding the capture of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and East Jerusa- lem and the West Bank from Jordan. Having kept the memory of the kibbutz alive while growing up in Israel, the children of Kfar Etzion’s former residents immediately sought to return. The Israeli cabinet granted them permission to do so in September 1967, despite advice by the legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry at the time, Theodor Meron. A civilian settlement would contravene the Fourth Geneva Conventions, Meron argued, as the territory was deemed “occupied” by Israel after the war. To circumvent these legal strictures, Kfar Etzion was established as a military outpost, even though it was in effect a civilian settlement.3 The reestablishment of Kfar Etzion, which followed similar initiatives in the Golan Heights, was the basis for a much broader effort by successive Labor and Likud governments to settle Jews beyond the 1949 Armistice line (known as the “Green Line”) in the newly occupied territories. Five decades later, their number reached over six hundred thousand people, including residents of East Jerusalem.4 For Israeli government officials in 2017, Gush Etzion was therefore a fitting place to mark the anniversary of the war and the birth of the settlement project. In their planning announcement of the ceremony, Naftali Bennett, Israel’s education minister, and Miri Regev, Israel’s culture minister, remarked that “Israel’s glorious victory in the Six Day War and the liberation of Judea and Samaria, the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley” should be celebrated with “the respect it deserves.”5 Government opposition members decried the choice of location, which flaunted the ongoing occupation of Palestinians living in the same territories. “Israel has controlled millions of people for 50 years, treads on them every day anew and denies them rights Preface [ xi ] and sovereignty,” the left-wing Meretz party chairwoman Zehava Galon told the Haaretz newspaper. “Bennett and Regev want us to continue living with this reality alongside us without considering the heavy price it extracts from us,” she concluded.6 The ceremony and the surrounding debate embodied the dissonant feelings that 1967 still arouses in Israel, of conquest and military victory alongside unanswered questions about the war’s consequences and Is- raeli state control over local Palestinian life and territory ever since. I know Gush Etzion well. In August 2001, when I was eighteen years old, I arrived in the settlement of Alon Shvut for a year of intensive study at Yeshivat Har Etzion, a preparatory academy of religious learning focused on immersion in the Torah, Talmud, and Jewish thought. The yeshiva, commonly known as the “Gush,” was originally established in Kfar Etzion in 1968, before it expanded to bigger quarters nearby. It has programs for both Israeli students, who integrate their religious learning with active service in the Israeli army, and overseas Jewish students from across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. My time at the Gush was in line with the expectations of the Modern Ortho- dox American Jewish community in which I grew up, where it was common practice to spend a gap year before college living in Israel. Most young men and women study at a religious seminary, an expe- rience that is meant to strengthen traditional observance and one’s connection to the land of Israel. I had been raised with a strong attachment to Zionism, traveling across Israel as part of a summer camp teen tour and participating in a wide array of activities to support the Jewish state. Although I was not particularly eager to pore over pages of Talmud, the social and familial expectations to spend a year abroad were strong, as was the encouragement of my school rabbis. The Gush seemed less restrictive than some of the other yeshiva options. It had a repu- tation for deep and critical inquiry, where students and teachers drew on ancient and modern Jewish thought to explore the texts of a religious tradition with analytical rigor and robust debate. This particular theological outlook was also coupled with openness to the wider world. With some trepidation, but also a degree of excite- ment, I found myself arriving in the West Bank for a year of study between high school and university in New York City. [ xii ] Preface My arrival at the Gush coincided with the height of the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising. It was a year of extreme violence throughout Israel and the occupied territories, with a stream of suicide bombings and military operations that unleashed havoc on civilian life. The events of that year led to a gradual and pain- ful personal and political awakening about the circumstances that had led me there. I was often close to the violence, making regu- lar trips out of the settlement for weekend breaks. The dark green Egged company buses that I rode to and from Gush Etzion were bulletproof. There were frequent shooting attacks on the cars and buses driving on the settler- only roads in the West Bank, especially near the tunnels that passed under Palestinian villages above. I had macabre thoughts on those trips, wondering where it was best to sit in the event of a suicide bombing and whether a bullet round could make it through the gaps under the double-plated windows. On the announcement board in the yeshiva’s study hall, or Beit Midrash, small notices regularly went up with the Hebrew names of the in- jured, asking students to pray for those who had been victims of a terror attack. One Saturday night, headed back to yeshiva after the Jewish Sabbath, I missed a particularly gruesome triple suicide bombing on West Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street by just a few minutes. I remember visiting a student from my high school who had been in- jured in the bombing and can still distinctly recall the ball bearings that had been removed from his body sitting in a small plastic cup nearby. It was hard to focus on tractates of Talmud in this surreal environment. I often retreated to my dorm room, where I read local newspapers and tried to make sense of events unfolding around me. In the spring of 2002, I could feel my room shake as the Israeli army launched Operation “Defensive Shield,” occupying nearby Bethlehem, as well as Jenin, Nablus, and other major Palestinian cities. The operation was launched following a string of attacks that culminated in a Passover suicide bombing by a Hamas bomber at the Park Hotel in the seaside town of Netanya. It was the largest military operation in the West Bank since the 1967 War. Amid all this upheaval, I recall very little discussion with our yeshiva’s rabbis about the drivers of Palestinian violence or the rela- tionship of the yeshiva and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc to the Preface [ xiii ] wider context of the occupation. For many Jewish religious leaders in the settlements or elsewhere this would not be surprising, given their deep- seated belief in the divine right to the land and intimate knowledge of biblical scripture invoked to support continued Jewish presence there, generally to the exclusion of others. But the founder of the institution, an inspiring educator named Rabbi Yehuda Am- ital, was a figure who possessed a unique worldview. Born in what was then Transylvania, he had survived the Nazi invasion of Hun- gary and arrived in Palestine in 1944. His entire family had perished in the Holocaust. Rabbi Amital would often tell students the fa- mous story of a rabbinic scholar studying Torah in a room next to his grandson and hearing a baby cry in a third room beyond.

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