Hanging on: Economist

Hanging on: Economist

Apr 3rd 2008

The settlers are regrouping from their defeat in Gaza

Extra-hot mustard

ON ISRAELI independence day, when most of the country goes picnicking, two groups of citizens have adopted a curious ritual. They commemorate their country's birth by visiting places that no longer exist.

Growing numbers of Palestinian-Israelis have for the past decade congregated at the sites of villages in Israel destroyed in the aftermath of what they call the nakba, or catastrophe, and what Jews call the war of liberation. Last year thousands gathered at al-Lajjun, just north of the West Bank, where a thick pine forest shelters the ruins of stone houses whose owners and their descendants now live a few minutes down the highway in Umm al-Fahm.

The other group is religious Jewish settlers. Unlike the more numerous but less ideological “quality-of-life” settlers, most of whom live in large communities close to the Green Line (the pre-1967 border), they resemble the Palestinians more than they do their fellow Jews in their near-fetishistic attachment to particular bits of land. They used last year's anniversary to march to Homesh, one of four small northern West Bank settlements dismantled at the same time as those in Gaza in 2005. Permission for the march had been denied and troops closed the roads, but stood by as banner-waving teenagers and couples with prams clambered past.

It was just one small example of how the settlers have subverted government decisions and co-opted local army commanders over the past 40 years, contriving to align the state's security interests with their own plan to populate the occupied territories. Many commentators saw their failure to stop the unilateral Gaza withdrawal as a mortal blow to their power. But they have staged a comeback.

True, militant youth of the Gaza barricades were disillusioned and a few renounced their beliefs. A few others moved in the opposite direction, adopting a hardline ideology that combines religious Zionism's passion for the land with the haredi disdain for the institutions of the state; its acronym is hardal, which also means “mustard”. But some who had spent years cut off from mainland Israel took their eviction from Gaza as a divine hint and moved to Israel proper rather than to the West Bank, to try to spread their ideology there.

Also, says Rabbi Yoel Bin-Nun, one of the spiritual leaders of the early settler movement, “the second Lebanon war put all the internal conflicts into perspective.” It brought some of the settlers who had rejected the state back to reality. It also convinced more of the Israeli general public that the settlers had been right and unilateral withdrawals (Israel had pulled its army out of southern Lebanon unilaterally six years earlier) were a mistake. The rain of rockets that has emanated from Gaza since the disengagement has only heightened that feeling.

There will be strong resistance to such withdrawals in future. The founders' generation of settlers grew up in Israel proper; their children and grandchildren have grown up in the settlements, bubble-like communities of like-minded people. “A threat to their homes there is a threat to their only homes,” says Dror Etkes, a left-wing anti-settlement activist. Violent clashes between young settlers and police marred the first attempt after Gaza to evacuate an “unauthorised” West Bank outpost.

At the same time, Mr Etkes notes, the Gaza pull-out and the building of the West Bank barrier have made mainstream Israelis more aware that these territories will, ultimately, not be in Israel. The settlers who resist that notion will be an increasingly radical bunch, but also an increasingly isolated one.