Thursday, May 29, 2008

The Two-Pronged Assault On Religious Zionism
By:Caroline B. Glick The Jewish Press Wednesday, May 28, 2008
www.jewishpress.com/displaycontent_new.cfm?contentid=31978&contentname=The%20Two-Pronged%20Assault%20On%20Religious%20Zionism%20§ionid=14&mode=a&recnum=0

Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was presented to the world as a
strategic bid to enhance prospects for peace between the Palestinians and
Israel. Proponents of the move argued that removing all Israeli civilians
and military personnel from Gaza would take away the source of Palestinian
grievances. Once fully appeased, the Palestinians would be forced to behave
responsibly, abjure terrorism and build their state - first in Gaza, and
then in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem as well.

This was the pretext of Israel's withdrawal. But it wasn't the
subtext. The subtext of the withdrawal - telegraphed to both Israelis and
the international community - was that the withdrawal would cause the demise
of Religious Zionism at the hands of the leftist progeny of Labor Zionists.
That is, the operation wasn't about peace with the Arabs. It was about
cultural supremacy within Israel.

In the countdown to the withdrawal, the Palestinians did everything
they could to make clear the move would not enhance the chances for peace.
They triumphantly declared that then-prime minister Ariel Sharon's decision
to expel Gaza's Jews was an admission that Israel had been defeated by the
Palestinians. Hamas was ascendant and both Hamas and Fatah declared
repeatedly that they would continue their terror war until all of Israel was
destroyed. And as the pretext crumbled, the subtext became more prominent.

Haaretz editorialized six weeks before the expulsion of Gaza's
8,000 Jews, "The disengagement of Israeli policy from its religious fuel is
the real disengagement currently on the agenda. On the day after the
disengagement, religious Zionism's status will be different. The real
question is not how many mortar shells will fall, or who will guard the
Philadelphi route [connecting Gaza with Egypt], or whether the Palestinians
will dance of the roofs of Ganei Tal. The real question is who sets the
national agenda."

Religious Zionist leaders were in a horrible bind. If they
responded to the demands of their own people and fought fire with fire, they
knew - given the Left's control of the media - they would be demonized for
years to come. And they knew that if the Left succeeded in destroying their
reputation among rank and file Israelis, they would be powerless to defend
Judea and Samaria.

So in the end, Religious Zionist leaders disappointed their
followers, making do with mass protests in the countdown to the expulsions
and then allowing the IDF to carry out the expulsions largely unchallenged.
While they failed to save Gaza's Jews from internal exile, they at least
succeeded in preventing the demise of Religious Zionism as a political and
social force in Israel.

Their success was acknowledged by . In the weeks that followed the
expulsions, Haaretz columnist Orit Shochat bemoaned the fact that the
campaign against Religious Zionism had not succeeded. As she put it,
"Soldiers who experienced the evacuation won't travel to an ashram in India
because they discovered that there is an ashram next door. The same Jewish
religion that they hadn't seen up close for a long time embraces them into
its fold with a song and a tear for a common fate. They have now sat
arm-in-arm at the synagogues in Gush Katif, they have now felt the holiness
mixed in sweat, they have now moved rhythmically and sung songs. They have
stood in line to kiss the Torah scrolls. They are now half-inside."

Zionism's revolutionary message to Jewry was that after 2,000 years
of powerlessness, Jews would again become actors on the global stage. But
Zionism has many movements and not all of them are equally revolutionary.
The two most significant Zionist movements today are Labor Zionism and
Religious Zionism.

The inherent weakness of Labor Zionism is that it was never aimed
specifically at enabling Jews to be Jews. Rather, its purpose was to enable
Jews to be socialists. Understanding that the anti-Semitic climate in Europe
in the early 20th century rendered Jewish assimilation into a larger
socialist sea impossible, Labor Zionists argued that by establishing a
Jewish state Jews would be "normalized" and accepted as regular people and
socialists by the nations of the world. That is, Labor Zionism's message was
assimilation on a national level rather than on an individual one since
conditions in Europe precluded individual assimilation.

Labor Zionists have been confounded by the endurance of
anti-Semitism and its transformation of Israel, though anti-Zionism, into
the International Jew. The world's refusal to accept Israel as an equal has
been shattering for them. It has caused Labor Zionists to abandon Zionism in
the hopes that by doing so they will finally be accepted as equals by the
nations of the world. At its core, Labor Zionism is outward seeking rather
than inward looking.

In contrast, Religious Zionism is inward looking. It seeks to turn
Jews into actors on the international stage as Jews. It also seeks to make
Judaism responsive to the imperatives of an empowered people as it was
responsive to the imperatives of Jews as a powerless people during the
generations of exile. Because of its specific message to Jews as Jews,
Religious Zionism is a pure revolutionary ideology.

Religious Zionists are a finger in the eye of the Labor Zionists
for their stubborn devotion to Judaism and their relative indifference to
whether Israel is accepted by the anti-Semites of the world. And Labor
Zionists are not alone in their angry rejection of Religious Zionism's
message. They are joined by the non-Zionist religious establishment.

The non-Zionist religious establishment feels threatened by
Religious Zionism's attempts to reinvest Judaism with its nationalist
mission for the Jewish nation. And, unfortunately, the non-Zionist religious
establishment is joining forces with the Labor Zionist establishment to
attack Religious Zionism.

In early May, a panel of three non-Zionist rabbinic judges on
Jerusalem's High Rabbinic Court published a ruling in a divorce case
declaring all the thousands of conversions carried out under the auspices of
Religious Zionist Rabbi Chaim Druckman, and the state's Conversion Authority
he headed, null and void. The court argued that Druckman did not investigate
sufficiently whether the converts were committed to observing all the
mitzvot. Piling on to the non-Zionist establishment's act, Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert last week removed Druckman from his position as head of the
Conversion Authority.

Both Rabbi Avraham Sherman, who wrote the rabbinical high court's
decision, and Druckman's fellow Religious Zionist rabbis agree that the
dispute is an attack on Religious Zionism's view of the role of religion in
Israel rather than a strictly halachic disagreement. In his ruling, Sherman
wrote of Druckman and his Religious Zionist colleagues in the Conversion
Authority, "All these rabbis have one thing in common. They all see in
conversion a sacred commandment as part of their national responsibility..
In other words, the conversion is not primarily the spiritual and religious
need of the individual convert who wishes to join the Jewish people and
accept upon himself all the commandments. Rather, conversion is a means of
improving the spiritual situation of the entire Jewish nation living in
Israel. It is a way of bringing Jews closer to their Judaism."

The Religious Zionist movement is up in arms over the ruling, which
its leaders are calling an act of aggression and halachic malfeasance. Rabbi
Yuval Cherlow, who heads the hesder yeshiva in Petach Tikvah and is
considered a leading rabbinic authority in Religious Zionist circles, called
Sherman's ruling "a desecration of God's name" and said that if it is not
overturned he would set up independent conversion courts outside the aegis
of the Chief Rabbinate.

Between the Labor Zionists' attempts to destroy Religious Zionism
politically, and the non-Zionist rabbinic leadership's attempts to demonize
it religiously, Religious Zionism has been under tremendous pressure in
recent years. One can only hope its leaders will have the wisdom to
persevere. Israel and the Jewish people need Religious Zionism more than
anyone will ever admit.