A Victory for Settler Machismo

By Niko Block - March 19 2008

There was no shortage of anger and violence three nights ago at the settler rally in Armon Hanatziv, as a crowd of over 500 ultra-Zionists flocked together with the intention of bringing the house of the yeshiva gunman to the ground. Parallels of religious and racist fanaticism were manifested once again as the crowd chanted “Death to the Arabs” in unison and a number of teenagers broke into the adjacent Arab neighborhood of Jabil Mukhaber to throw stones at the vacated house and smash up whatever cars were in the vicinity.

I went to the rally with little intention but to witness first-hand the kernel of racialized nationalism that so dominates the Knesset’s agenda – that has brought discussion of ethnic cleansing and bald-faced apartheid into the arena of acceptable political discourse of this country.

“If [Palestinians] want a state with no Jews in it, then we can’t have a state with them in it,” said a middle-aged woman named Vered who had come with a sign reading “Expel the Arab Enemy.” She admitted she had no compunctions about such an act of ethnic cleansing.

“If it brings peace,” she said. “I would give anything for peace.”

This is the vocal minority – to an unfamiliar observer it would appear a dispossessed fringe group – willing to speak out for the 55 per cent of Jewish Israelis who believe the state should actively support Arab emigration, and the 67 per cent that support a large-scale military operation in Gaza.

“You can’t negotiate with someone that wants to kill you,” said Vered. “They don’t know the word negotiate.”

As the mob clustered along the police fence, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. The group breached the barrier by force, but the police buffered the crowd until someone threw a cherry bomb at them. The police refused to respond, but the protesters had had their fix, and the demonstration gradually dissolved.

All present seemed completely unaware – or perhaps took for granted – that the week had marked a momentous victory for them, and it had come in the apologetic form of housing tenders.

The relationship between Ehud Olmert and Mercaz Harav, where the killing took place, has cooled significantly since his days as mayor when he was regularly invited to the yeshiva as a guest of honor. His proud declaration that he would “cooperate” with Bush’s Road Map, and be willing to negotiate a two-state solution with the PA has won him few friends in the ultra-Zionist community.

Two days after the shooting, minister of education Yuli Tamir visited the yeshiva to pay her condolences – a move far bolder than Olmert could have ventured, especially after the school's head rabbi, Ya’akov Shapira, had denounced the Prime Minister as weak and a heretic. Tamir was forced to leave by an angry mob of students who had gathered to scream profanities at her, calling her a murderer.

The following day it was announced that the Prime Minister had approved the construction of 750 new housing units in the settlement of Givat Ze’ev. Palms ruefully smacked foreheads everywhere from Washington to Damascus upon the announcement, but this didn’t quite satisfy the demands of the Women in Green – who spearheaded Sunday’s rally – that "the Jewish Zionist revenge must be an immediate revenge by establishing eight new communities throughout Judea and Samaria in memory of those murdered.”

Olmert’s decision came largely at the behest of the Shas, which has extremely strong ties to the settler right, and has wielded an inordinate amount of power over the PMO ever since Yisrael Beitenu pulled out of the government in January. But the response was far more civil than I had feared. When the yeshiva shooting took place I was in my office on Zion Square, about a fifteen minute walk from the scene. Sirens faded in and out of earshot, and the normal clamor of Ben Yehuda on a Thursday night was noticeably muted. I called a friend in Montreal, and expressed my fear that “if one to one-hundred is the working ratio,” referring to the previous week’s events in Gaza, “then the West Bank is on the verge of a massacre.”

The family of the gunman was arrested of course, and the security in the East Jerusalem community of Jabil Mukhaber was increased, but the explosion of military reprisals that I expected never came.

During the Gaza offensive, with clashes between demonstrators and the IDF or PA all over the West Bank, protests going on throughout Israel, and Hamas calling on Mahmoud Abbas to form a Palestinian unity government, the ever-anxious-looking Olmert had good reason to worry that a third intifada was in the making. So rather than undertaking a new military escapade after the yeshiva shooting, Olmert opened talks with Hamas for the first time in his tenure. The talks focused on the prospect of allowing PA guards to operate five of the crossings into Gaza, including Rafah, and a limited lifting of the blockade. Reaching a settlement on a cease-fire seems unlikely, though, as Hamas insists that the cease-fire would be all-encompassing, and Israel refuses to end arrests of suspected militants in the West Bank.

As surprising and significant as the choice to open negotiations was, it came with no explanatory announcement, no momentous speech that Israel had suddenly decided to alter the policy of provocation it has pursued with Hamas for the past two decades.

Indeed, such a speech would have been unwarranted, as the day after it was reported that talks had opened in Cairo, Ehud Barak ordered the assassinations of five militants in the West Bank. The move appeared a deliberate attempt on the part of the defense establishment to forestall any cease-fire deal that would curtail its right to rain missiles on Gaza at its whim. But the talks appear to have resurged, with Amos Gilad, the head of the defense ministry's political-security bureau, meeting Hamas officials in Cairo yesterday.

For all the talk of negotiations versus war with Gaza, the main test for the Olmert administration, now that it has finally shown some interest in peace around the Strip, (albeit to avoid another widespread Palestinian uprising,) will be if he can reign in the fanatics in the Shas and the settler right, and persuade Barak to let his finger off the trigger for more than a week.