Israel’s Religious Right and the Peace Process

Nicolas Pelham

October 12, 2009

(Nicolas Pelham has worked in Jerusalem for the past four years for International Crisis Group, which published the report Israel’s Religious Right and the Question of Settlements in July 2009.)

For background on the 2008 Acre incidents, see Peter Lagerquist, “Recipe for a Riot: Parsing Israel’s Yom Kippur Upheavals,” Middle East Report Online (October 2008). For background on the settlers and disengagement, see Peretz Kidron, “Orange Rampant,” Middle East Report Online, July 15, 2005.

It would be easy to describe the residents of the outpost of Amona as radicals. In February 2006 they led protests of 4,000 settler activists, some of them armed, against 3,000 Israeli police who were amassed to make sure that nine unauthorized structures in the West Bank were bulldozed as ordered. In the ensuing clashes, 80 security personnel and 120 settlers were wounded, more than the entirety of the casualties during the 2005 “disengagement” from settlements in Gaza, in a showdown that became the symbol of the West Bank settlers’ resolve to resist the state’s efforts to tear down encampments, like their own, that were erected without the state’s permission. “How do I explain to my children that the army that came to protect us behaves like our enemy?” laments Amona resident Irit Levinger.

But what is disturbing about the settlers in Amona is not how distant they are from other Israelis, whether geographically or politically, but how connected. They are national-religious; that is to say, they are devout in their Judaism, but unlike many other religious Jews they believe equally fervently in the secular Zionist project. The national-religious fly Israeli flags from their lampposts and serve in front-line units in the army. Six months after the confrontation at Amona, half of the outpost’s men joined the draft for the 2006 Lebanon war, and a resident was one of the nine Israeli soldiers killed in the Gaza offensive of 2008-2009. In addition to military officers, the inhabitants’ ranks include university lecturers, a policeman, civil servants and lawyers. Levinger herself is a Hebrew lecturer at a state university. Two of the wounded in the clash with police were members of the Knesset from a larger settlement nearby. The national-religious settlers may agitate against the state, but they are directly linked to the state’s levers of power and benefit from its protection. 

Outpost is a misleading term. It conjures images of cowboys braving the elements and fending off their enemies in Wild West locales. But most outposts in the West Bank are well-equipped caravan sites adjoining comfortable estates of red-roofed houses, built either at the state’s behest and expense, or with private money and state approval. Most are umbilically tied to these established settlements’ water, road and electricity networks and rely upon their neighbors to rise in protest if agents of the state come knocking at the caravans’ doors. They are snapshots of the way many settlements looked a decade or two ago and, in fact, how towns inside Israel looked after its 1948 conquests. They are symbols of Zionism’s onward march. 

Despite international outrage and an Israeli undertaking to remove outposts dating back to the 2003 road map, few outpost residents genuinely fear for their future. Most recently, Defense Minister Ehud Barak marked 22 outposts for dismantlement “within weeks.” That was in May. All are still standing.  continued>>