Who are the settlers and what do they want?

On Wednesday, December 16th Professor Steven L. Spiegel moderated a discussion with Dr. Shlomo Fischer, the founding director of Yesodot- The Center for Torah and Democracy and a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The following is a summary of his remarks. A full recording of the conversation can be found here. 

How did we get into the crisis with the settlements that we find today?

The Israeli government counts 300,000 settlers.  The American government counts settlers who moved over the 1967 cease-fire line in Jerusalem as well, bringing the count up to something like 450,000.

The settlements, as a whole, have been sponsored and constructed by various Israeli governments.  Almost all of the settlements have an extensive infrastructure of roads and electricity that can only have been accomplished by numerous Israeli governments.  That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, there has definitely been an ideological spearhead, which is composed of what I call radical religious Zionists, who make up about 60 percent of the settler population.  Nevertheless, today they provide a coherent lobby and pressure group for the entire enterprise. 

Settlement activity began in the occupied territories almost immediately after they were captured in the 1967 war. In the early spring of 1968 the first settlement of Gush Etzion was established.

What you have in the settlements is the combination of modern nationalism and religion.  There's a very deep identity issue here. For most people, for many years, nationalist identity and religious identity were considered heterogeneous. The deepest impulse of religious Zionism is to give religious meaning and religious regulation to modern Jewish Israeli nationalism.  They do that by advocating a particular political program of settlement (which is considered a religious commandment) and annexation of what they call the Greater Land of Israel.

What effect has the handling of the evacuations from Gaza in 2005 had on the way settlers are responding to the possibility of evacuating settlements in the West Bank?

The lesson of the evacuation from Gush Katif is that there is no good evacuation. The very shabby treatment that these people received showed West Bank settlers that it's not in their interest to be evacuated, and that even if the government gives them some sort of compensation, it will in no way make up for their loss of home and loss of lifestyle.

With the Gaza withdrawal, the government treated the settlers like atomistic individuals, telling them to take their check and leave.  What the people had in mind was to maintain their communities.  It's only now, five years after the event, that people are finally getting resettled.  In the meantime, their children have dropped out of school, families have been destroyed.  There have been lots of human tragedies which were tied to the actuality of the evacuation itself. If one were to assess them now, looking at what has happened, one would say, “This is going to destroy my life.” Many of the settlers today probably feel they have nothing to lose by engaging in active resistance.

The entire Gaza episode radicalized the religious community.  They didn’t disobey orders, yet they were shafted.  The fact is that the withdrawal was smooth and the government had no resistance.  And then the settlers were treated like garbage. There's a feeling that they sold themselves too cheap. 

It’s often said that Americans make up a large percentage of the settlers. How would you classify the majority of settlers?

It's very significant that the majority of the visible settler leaders are people that were born in Israel. The settlers are the first generation of religious Zionists who were born and socialized at the time of the creation of the State.  These are people who have no inferiority complex as far as their Israeliness is concerned.  They believe that they can make an ideological proposal for leading all of Israeli society.

Almost all of the settlers were born religious.  They started on the one hand with this confidence and, on the other hand, with this famous chip on their shoulder that somehow the State belongs to the Labor Party, it belongs to the secular Zionists. And they said, “We're as good as you are, we're Israeli as much as you are.  We served in the paratroopers just like you did.  We speak the same Hebrew as you do.  We read the same poetry. There's no reason why we cannot have a say in how to run this country.”  That’s a very big motif among the settler leadership.

How have religious settlers managed to play such a prominent role in the IDF?

The IDF has undergone significant changes in the last 20 years.  The IDF is much less composed of charisma and of prestige than it used to be.

If you take the most advantaged groups in society, they go into the IDF because they're citizens, but they go into the famous units, of high-tech, of communications equipment, of computers.  They come out of that and they go on to work in high-tech.  This is the dream of those elite.

Now, you have four groups of people who will go on to be generals in the IDF.

The first component of the IDF is Kibbutznikim. They no longer have the image of admiration and prestige in Israel, and they want to get back into it.

Secondly, you have the group that historically was excluded from the IDF - Jews of North African and Middle Eastern background, who are increasingly becoming an important factor in the officer corps and in the combat units of the IDF. 

Thirdly, 20 percent of the population is immigrants from the former Soviet Union who've come over since 1990.  These are people want to become the establishment of Israeli society.  They want to get into the mainstream.  The way to do that is through the IDF and its fighting units.

The fourth group is the religious. If you look at who got killed in the last Lebanese war you'd see these groups, all of which were formerly excluded and now have a chance to get in. For the religious, it means a way to lead Israeli society. We have a group here that has a vision of how Israeli society, as an integral religious national division, should be run.  That's why they invented the Machina programs.  For a long time people thought that the Hesder programs were the spearheads.

What has the role of the Hesder movement been historically in Israel?

The Hesder movement got its cache in the 1973 war and the 1982 war in Lebanon.  In my Hesder Yeshiva in 1973, we had 250 students.  In the Yom Kippur War we had 11 dead and 50 wounded.  It's a pretty high casualty rate for one institution. The other Hesder Yeshivas looked the same.  And in '82 it repeated itself.  I had four sons who served in Hesder and they all served in combat units. That's very much in the ethos.

When the settlers are confronting the army, are they actually just confronting each other?

The children of the leaders of the Council of Judea and Samaria (the settlers' public council in the West Bank) were the intermediaries.  They were the lieutenants and captains and special forces who were taking messages back and forth from the settler leaders to the army. So the religious ideological leaders are confronting the army and the intermediaries are their own children.

Do all Hesders promote the right wing agenda?

Yes, but they're not necessarily promoting disobedience of orders.  That's the subject of a huge dispute within the Hesder community itself.  There are rabbis who, in 2005 said if you disobey orders, then don't come back.  If you go to Gaza, if you're ordered to remove the settlers and you refuse that, then don't come back.  You have no place in the Yeshiva.

The majority, the way it worked out, is those telling them not to disobey. After all the fuss, there were 67 incidences of kids disobeying orders. So, it's very, very minimal.

Netanyahu is having a difficult time implementing a freeze on settlement construction. Will the settlers eventually listen to Netanyahu? How does this get resolved?

The question is, will the army act with enough will. The settler experience is that the army is ambivalent toward them because the settlers help them control the Palestinian population, which is the major mission, as they perceive it.

The army has never demonstrated enough will to do this.  Sharon made it extremely clear that he wanted it to be done and he took a number of steps to get it done, a major one being that he employed Dan Halutz as the Chief of Staff. This is significant because Halutz comes from the Air Force, which means that he has no personal or professional connections to the settlers.  Anybody who served on the ground will have such connections. Now they have Ashkenazi. I believe Ashkenazi is professional enough to carry out this mission if it's made absolutely clear to him that this is the mission.

At this point Barak and everybody -- Ashkenazi, too -- would prefer that the police do it.  That's bearing the brunt of things. If necessary, the police will do it, but at the price of freeing up manpower from other needed missions. It always comes down to a question of will.  Sharon had fantastic political will.  And he made it happen. Nobody knows about Netanyahu yet.

Compiled by Rachel Cooper