Fields of Blood (67 page)

Hizbollah, therefore, renounced terrorism and became a political party answerable to the electorate, focusing on social activism and a grassroots transformation.

It had already begun to disentangle itself from the melee of Shii militias by developing an underground cell structure and devised a spiritual process designed to replace what
Khomeini had called the “colonized brain” with one that could think outside the parameters imposed by the West. All Hizbollah leaders still attend philosophy classes to develop their capacity to think critically and independently. As the American civil rights activists did, they work with small groups in the villages to discover how each individual can best contribute to the community: they may set someone up in business or train him for an
elite militia. Their goal, reminiscent of the Confucian ideal, is to develop a Shii community in which everybody receives and gives a measure of respect and feels valued and needed. Since the 2006 war with
Israel, Hizbollah has concentrated especially on anger management: “We want to turn this anger from a destructive course into something politically useful—building resistance, perhaps—or into some socially constructive activity.”
⁴⁹

During that war, Hizbollah modeled an alternative solution to the problem of asymmetrical warfare.
⁵⁰
In preparation for such a contingency, it had constructed deep underground tunnels and bunkers, some forty feet below the surface, where its militias could sit out
Israeli air strikes, before emerging to mount a prolonged rocket and missile attack.
Hizbollah knew that these could not seriously damage the powerful Israeli war machine, but the long duration and unremitting nature of these missile barrages did affect Israeli morale. Hizbollah’s goal was to force Israel to launch a ground invasion, whereupon the well-trained Hizbollah guerrilla forces, with intimate knowledge of the terrain, could effectively assault Israel’s armored tanks with their shoulder-launched missiles. They had also achieved such a mastery of intelligence and public relations that many Israeli journalists frankly admitted that they preferred Hizbollah’s dispatches to the IDF’s. Their victory in compelling the Israelis to withdraw demonstrated that
terrorism need not be the only way to repel a militarily superior enemy.

As an inspiration for terrorism, however,
nationalism has been far more productive than religion. Terrorism experts agree that the denial of a people’s right to national self-determination and the occupation of its homeland by foreign forces has historically been the most powerful recruiting agent of terrorist organizations, whether their ideology is religious (the Lebanese Shii) or secular (the
PLO).
⁵¹
In Israel, however, we have seen a different dynamic of secular nationalism pushing a religious tradition into a more militant direction: its tendency to make the nation-state a supreme value so that its preservation and integrity permit any form of action, however extreme. In May 1980, after the murder of six yeshiva students in
Hebron, Gush settlers
Menachem Livni and
Yehuda Etzion planted bombs in the cars of five Arab mayors, intending not to kill but to mutilate them so that they became living reminders of the consequences of any opposition to Israel.
⁵²
But this operation was only a sideline. In April 1984 the Israeli government revealed the existence of a Jewish underground movement that had plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to bring the
Camp David talks to an end.

In order to curb Jewish aggression that could endanger the nation’s survival, the
Talmudic rabbis had insisted that the Temple could be rebuilt only by the Messiah, and over the centuries this had acquired the force of a taboo. But Jewish extremists were intensely disturbed by the Dome of the Rock, the third-holiest place in the
Muslim world, which was said to stand on the site of Solomon’s temple. This magnificent shrine, which dominates the skyline of East Jerusalem and is so perfectly attuned to the natural environment, was a permanent reminder of
the centuries of Islamic domination of the Holy Land. For the Gush, this symbol of the Muslim minority had become demonic. Livni and Etzion described it as an “abomination” and the “root cause of all the spiritual errors of our generation.” For
Yeshua ben Shoshan, the underground’s spiritual adviser, the Dome was the haunt of the evil forces that inspired the Camp David negotiations.
⁵³
All three were convinced that, according to Kabbalistic
perennial philosophy, their actions here on earth would activate events in heaven, forcing God, as it were, to effect the Messianic redemption.
⁵⁴
As an explosives expert in the IDF, Livni manufactured twenty-eight precision bombs that would have destroyed the Dome but not its surroundings.
⁵⁵
Their only reason for not going ahead was that they could not find a rabbi to bless their operation. The plot was another demonstration of the modern death wish. The destruction of the iconic Dome would almost certainly have caused a war in which, for the first time, the entire Muslim world would have united to fight Israel. Strategists in Washington believed that during the
Cold War, when the
Soviets supported the Arabs and the
United States Israel, this might even have sparked a Third World War.
⁵⁶
So crucial was the survival and territorial integrity of the State of Israel to the militants that it justified risking the destruction of the human race.

Yet far from being inspired by their religious tradition, the militants’ conviction violated core teachings of Rabbinic
Judaism. The rabbis had repeatedly insisted that violence toward other human beings was tantamount to a denial of God, who had made men and women in his image; murder, therefore, was a sacrilege. God had created
adam,
a single man, to teach us that whoever destroyed a single human life would be punished as though he had destroyed the whole world.
⁵⁷

The Dome as a perceived symbol of Jewish humiliation, subjugation, and obliteration fed dangerously into the Jewish history of grievance and suffering, a phenomenon that, as we have seen, can fester dangerously and inspire a violent riposte. Jews had fought back and achieved a superpower status in the Middle East that would once have seemed inconceivable. For the Gush, the peace process seemed to threaten this hard-won status, and like the monks who obliterated the iconic pagan
temples after
Julian’s attempt to suppress
Christianity, they instinctively responded, “Never again.” Hence Jewish radicals, with or without rabbinic approval, continue to flirt with Livni’s dangerous idea, convinced that their political designs have some basis in eternal truth. The Temple
Mount Faithful have drawn up plans for the Jewish temple that will one day replace the Dome, which they display in a museum provocatively close to the
Haram al-Sharif with the ritual utensils and ceremonial robes that they have prepared for the cult. For many, Jewish Jerusalem rising phoenixlike from the ashes of
Auschwitz has acquired a symbolic value that is nonnegotiable.

The history of Jerusalem shows that a holy place always becomes more precious to a people after they have lost it or feel that their tenure is endangered. Livni’s plot therefore helped to make the Haram al-Sharif even more sacred to the
Palestinians. When Islam was a great world power, Muslims had the confidence to be inclusive in their devotion to this sacred space. Calling Jerusalem al-Quds (“the Holy”), they understood that a holy place belongs to God and can never be the exclusive preserve of a state. When Umar conquered the city, he left the Christian shrines intact and invited Jews to return to the city from which they had been excluded for centuries. But now, as they feel that they are losing their city, Palestinian Muslims have become more possessive. Hence the tension between Muslims and Jews frequently erupts into violence at this holy place: in 2000 the provocative visit of the hawkish
Israeli politician
Ariel Sharon with his right-wing entourage sparked the Palestinian uprising known as the Second
Intifada.

Rabbi
Meir Kahane also plotted to destroy what he called “the gentiles’ abomination on the Temple Mount.” Most Israelis were horrified when he was elected to a seat in the 1984 Knesset with 1.2 percent of the vote.
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For Kahane, to attack any gentile who posed the slightest threat to the Jewish nation was a sacred duty. In
New York he had founded the
Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews by black youths, but when he arrived in Israel and settled in
Kiryat Arba, he changed its name to
Kach (“Thus it is!”), its goal to force the Palestinians to leave the Land. Kahane’s ideology symbolizes the “miniaturization” of identity that is one of the catalysts of violence.
⁵⁹
His “
fundamentalism” was so extreme that it reduced
Judaism to a single precept. “There are not several messages in Judaism,” he insisted. “There is only one”: God simply wanted Jews to “come to this country to create a Jewish state.” Israel was commanded to be a “holy” nation, set apart from all others, so “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.”
⁶⁰
In the Bible the cult of holiness had prompted the priestly writers to honor the essential “otherness” of every
single human being; it had urged Jews to love the foreigner who lived in their land, using their memories of past suffering not to justify persecution but to sympathize with the distress that these uprooted people were enduring. Kahane, however, embodied an extreme version of the secular
nationalism whose inability to tolerate minorities had caused such suffering to his own people. In his view, “holiness” meant the isolation of Jews, who must be “set apart” in their own Land and the
Palestinians expelled.

Some Jews argue that the
Holocaust “summons us all to preserve democracy, to fight racism, and to defend human rights,” but many
Israelis have concluded that the world’s failure to save the Jewish people requires the existence of a militarily strong Israel, and they are, therefore, reluctant to engage in peace negotiations.
⁶¹
Kahane, however, went much further. Messianic redemption, he argued, had begun after the
Six-Day War. Had Israel annexed the territories, expelled the Arabs, and torn down the Dome, redemption would have come painlessly. But because the Israeli government wanted to appease the international community and refrained from this violence, redemption would come in a terrible anti-Semitic calamity, far worse than the Holocaust, that would force all Jews to leave the diaspora.
⁶²
The Holocaust overshadowed Kahane’s ideology. The State of Israel, he believed, was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles: “He could no longer take the desecration of his Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him.” Every attack on a Jew, therefore, amounted to blasphemy, and every act of Jewish retaliation was
Kiddush ha-Shem,
a sanctification of God’s name: “a Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums [
sic
].”
⁶³
This was the ideology that inspired
Kiryat Arba settler
Baruch Goldstein to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the
Cave of the Patriarchs in
Hebron on the festival of
Purim, February 25, 1994. The massacre was revenge for the murder of fifty-nine Jews in Hebron on August 24, 1929. Goldstein died in the attack and is revered by the Israeli far right as a
martyr. His action would inspire the first wave of Muslim suicide bombing in Israel and Palestine.