Heads to the right

Gideon Levy

It is still unclear whether the terrorist who entered the
Mercaz Harav yeshiva on Thursday night and killed
eight of its students knew exactly what place he was
entering. But the thousands of people who walked
behind the coffins on Friday knew very well.
"The flagship of religious Zionism" was the common
expression used, the "holy of holies"; there was
even a hyperbolic comparison to the Al-Aqsa Mosque
in terms of sanctity. Some of the praise of the yeshiva
is certainly well deserved, and nothing, of course,
can justify the horrible killing of young boys in a
library. Still, it would be appropriate to recall,
even at this difficult hour, what this yeshiva has
brought forth.

Mercaz Harav is the flagship of the last group in
Israeli society still operating in the realm of ideas.
Religious Zionists are the only group, aside from
the ultra-Orthodox population, whose members
are willing to lay down their lives for the collective
and its worldview. It is a group that responds
faithfully to its leaders - a group that even has
leaders - and idolizes them. It is also a fairly homogenous
group in terms of its thinking:
Some 80 percent of its members define themselves
as right-wingers. None of this is true of Israel's
complacent, individualist secular public. And so
we end up with a minority, 12 to 15 percent of the
population, whose influence in certain areas is crucial
and far exceeds its own relative size.

No one can explain in depth the magical powers of
extortion this group has obtained. Nor can anyone
ignore the damage it has caused the country.
Without the settlement enterprise, peace might
have reigned here already; without the Gush Emunim
movement, supported by successive Israeli governments,
there would be no settlements; and without the
Mercaz Harav yeshiva, there would be no Gush Emunim.
This institution, then, was the cradle of the settlement
enterprise and its driving force. Most of the students killed
in the terrorist attack were second-generation settlers.
It should be said again, clearly and unequivocally:
Their killing was a criminal act.
(An unusual personal comment: On Friday I said in a radio
interview, among other things, that the Mercaz Harav
yeshiva was a fascist institution; right-wing circles spread
a rumor on the Internet that I had said the slain students
were fascists. This is not true. In any case, if my comment
about the yeshiva offended people in their grief, I wish to
express my sincere sorrow and apology).

From Mercaz Harav emerged the rabbis that led the vilest
move in Zionist history. Most of the delusional right-wing
perpetrators and the mongers of hate for Arabs came
from this flagship. Religious leaders such as Rabbis
Moshe Levinger, Haim Druckman, Avraham Shapira,
Yaakov Ariel, Zefania Drori, Shlomo Aviner and Dov Lior,
all idolized by their students, raised generations of
nationalist youths within those walls.


Rabbi Lior, for example, head of the Council of Rabbis
of Judea and Samaria, ruled in 2004 that the Israel
Defense Forces was allowed to kill innocent people.
How do these words sound now, after the attack in
Jerusalem? Is the permission ours alone? Back then,
Lior ruled that, "There should be no feeling of guilt at
the morality of foreigners." He decreed that the Knesset
could not decide to evacuate settlements, and that
soldiers were allowed to refuse the order to evacuate
settlers. Rabbi Druckman made a similar ruling.

In 2002, Rabbi Aviner, another graduate of the yeshiva,
called for the execution of Israelis who refused to serve in
the military. Back then the refusal came from left-wingers,
of course. Aviner also ruled that war casualties are no
cause for national grief, and he called for the abolition of
Yom Hazikaron, the annual day of remembrance for fallen
Israeli soldiers. He compared the road map peace plan to
the appeasement of Hitler and considers the evacuation
of settlements an "illegal crime."

The same yeshiva graduated Hanan Porat, one of the
founders of Gush Emunim and one of those who returned
to Gush Etzion. Another alumnus, Rabbi Levinger, beat
him to it with the Jewish settlement at the Park Hotel in
the heart of Hebron. These are the prominent figures that
have emerged from this radical seminary and that is their
legacy. From here they preached the application of different
laws of morality and justice than the universal ones; yes,
where the chosen people is concerned, there is such a thing.

With all the changes religious Zionism has undergone
- from the time the Mizrahi movement joined the Zionist
Congress, through its existence as a moderate stream that
deftly managed to combine religion and modernity, to its
transformation into the source of Israeli nationalism -
the movement has managed to retain an exalted,
inexplicable standing in Israel's largely secular society.
There are still very many secular Israelis who view the
religious Zionists, the students of the Mercaz Harav
yeshiva and the West Bank's so-called "hilltop youths"
as a group of pioneers committed to noble values, as the
pillar of fire advancing before the camp. Even those who
deeply detest the Haredi public reserve a warm spot in
their hearts for religious Zionism, the very group that
has inflicted more calamity on us than all the Haredim
put together.

The killing at the yeshiva is heartrending. No one
deserved it. The innocents in Gaza and the victims at
Mercaz Harav in Jerusalem were all an unnecessary
sacrifice. They have already paid the highest possible
price. Their families and those around them will
probably adopt even more radical positions now,
and so we will be led into another round of endless bloodshed.