Is This Your First War? (20 page)

Kfar Etzion was overrun in May. Its surviving residents, soldiers, and civilians, including Zisman's husband, Akiba Galandaver, were massacred, with the exception of three men and one woman. Zisman had left before the assault with her young son, Shilo, and survived. “For a year and a half we couldn't get the bodies, the bones still there,” Zisman said when I interviewed her at her kitchen table. She offered cookies and spoke in the French of her Belgian childhood. “We were asking for the bones all this time. But they wouldn't give them to us. They were cruel, very cruel. When we did get the bones, they were all jumbled together. We couldn't separate them person by person, so we buried everybody together.”

Israel recaptured Gush Etzion in the 1967 war and resettled the area. “My father gave his life for this place,” Shilo said. “My brother and I were the first to come back.” Zisman waited until 2003 to return, moving into a village she had last lived in more than fifty years earlier. “It had strong emotions for me,” she said. For Zisman, victory in the Six-Day War and the settlement of captured territories was not the disaster described by Rubinger. It was justice. She wasn't worried about an eventual Jewish minority governing a land increasingly inhabited by Arabs should Israel retain control of the West Bank. “To keep a democracy, sometimes you need to do non-democratic things,” she said. “If Israel wants to commit suicide, then it can make democracy sacred.”

“We believe that this land was promised to our forefathers during biblical times,” Shilo added. “It is impossible to explain the history from a rational point of view. There is a hand directing both the Shoah (Holocaust) and the creation of Israel.”

Zisman is one of some 280,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Another 200,000 or so live in the eastern suburbs of Jerusalem. Some live there for economic reasons. Others, more vocal and politically influential, believe the West Bank — or Judeau and Samaria, as they prefer to call it — is an unassailable part of Israel, which they, as Jews, have a duty to settle.

Nadia Matar is one of the latter, a very public face of the right-wing settler movement and co-chair of the pro-settlement group, Women for Israel's Tomorrow. Animated and energetic, Matar was born in Belgium, but her accent, when she speaks English, reflects the American origins of her husband. “I understood that if I wanted to be part of Jewish history and make Jewish history, I had to come and live here in Israel,” she told me.

Matar lived in Efrat, a West Bank settlement located, as she put it, between the holy cities of Jerusalem and Hebron. She described herself as “modern Orthodox” and wore jeans and a baseball cap. When I visited her house, orange ribbons adorned the front lawn, showing her solidarity with Jewish settlers who had been forcibly evacuated from Gaza a few years before. A large wall hanging dominated one of the walls in her living room. “For Jerusalem's sake, we will not be silent,” it read, paraphrasing a verse from the Book of Isaiah.

Matar explained her activism by saying that she wanted to show that it was not only Israeli extremists who were opposed to giving away Jewish land. She had a presentation prepared for me and delivered it rapid-fire, complete with brightly-coloured laminated maps. One compared the size of Israel to Lake Winnipeg. Another showed that historic Israel included the West Bank and Gaza, and also Jordan. She paused briefly. “But Jordan is another country, so what can we do?”

At one point, I mentioned the obvious — that none of the maps she revealed depicted any sort of Palestinian territory.

“There is no Palestinian state,” she said. “There are twenty-two Arab states here, and they have the gall to demand that I give away half my country that is the size of Lake Winnipeg. It would be like Bush, after September 11, saying that we need to compromise for peace and give up Manhattan.”

Her presentation had the feel of a pitch designed for young teenagers, and indeed Matar said she often speaks at local schools. It ended with a photograph of her extended family, all of whom were all murdered at Auschwitz. That, she concluded, is why Israel cannot give up land in Judea and Samaria.

“The new Nazism today is Islam. And they want to do it to me first, and you next,” she said. “This isn't a war about borders. This is a war against the Judeo-Christian world. Muslims see us as a cancer on the body of the Middle East. Israel is only the
hors d'oeuvre
. First Israel, then Europe, where they have hundreds of thousands of Muslims just waiting to start the intifada, then North America, Canada. We have to do to them what the Americans did to the Nazis. Kill all their leaders. Kill all the collaborators. Then we'll find those willing to make peace.”

Matar said Israel must annex the West Bank and Gaza. When asked how Israel could continue to exist as a Jewish state were Palestinians to form the majority, she seemed genuinely surprised by the question. “I'm not going to give them voting rights,” she said. “I will give them the basics of basics and do everything to make them want to leave. If there's a democracy, they'll use my democracy to succeed in what they wanted to do by terror. Democracy isn't something holy. What worries me is that you worry about their rights. What about the rights of Jews to live?”

But, Matar said, the status of Arabs in an expanded Israeli state is problem for the future. “I wish we could reach that stage where we need to decide where to put them. First we need to have a government that destroys the entire terrorist structure that Shimon Peres brought in here,” she said, referring to the Israeli president and former prime minister whose negotiations with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, for which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

“I'm in favour of having a system in which any major decision for this country is taken by a Jewish majority. If that means giving less rights to the Israel Arabs, then yes. Everyone knows that there is another war coming, and in the war we'll have to do what we have to do to make it clear to them that this is a Jewish state, whether that means expelling them or buying their land or telling them to go to Canada.”

Matar's willingness to consider expelling Israeli Arabs exists on the outskirts of Israeli society. But even its minority acceptance is worrying to the approximately twenty per cent of Israelis who are Muslim or Christian Arabs. Most are the descendants of those who fled or were driven out of Palestine during the wars of 1947 and 1948. Fathi Furani's family home was in Safed, a once predominantly Arab city in Galilee where some twenty Jews were massacred in 1929. Jewish forces drove out most Arab residents of the town in 1948. It is now almost entirely Jewish. Furani, who was six years old at the time, went to visit his family's former house about a dozen years ago.

“There were people there,” he said, making a circular motion in front of his ears to mimic the sideburn locks many Orthodox Jewish men wear.

“They saw us coming, and they were afraid. I said, ‘Don't worry. We're Israeli citizens. We're not from the West Bank. My father was born here. I just want to take a photo for my dad.'”

The Jewish inhabitants of his old house showed Furani around. He took a photograph in front of the house with his elderly father. They had a picnic nearby.

When I met Furani, he was living in Haifa, the city in northern Israel that bore the brunt of Hezbollah's rocket attacks in 2006. “This is my country. I don't want to leave it,” he said. “I want to live with the Jews based on respect. I don't hate Jews. I have Jewish friends who want peace for both of us. We want to live together. They don't want to throw us to the sea, and we don't want to throw them to the sea.”

The number of settlers in the West Bank has grown over the last two decades, despite various peace initiatives proposing a freeze. In addition to government-approved settlement blocks, there are dozens of illegal “outposts” that are typically established on hilltops deep in the West Bank by particularly devoted settlers with trailers, portable electricity generators, and water tanks. Where possible, they tap into the water and electricity supply of a nearby settlement. Soldiers are sent to protect them; more settlers arrive; and the outpost becomes a “fact on the ground.” Soon, another outpost is established, pushing Israel's reach deeper into Palestinian territory. Few have ever been dismantled.

Back in Efrat, Nadia Matar offered to take me to one such outpost, called Ma'ale Rehav'am. It is located in the Judean Mountains, on a hilltop far beyond the security barrier that Israel has been building since 2002. The road to it winds over rolling hills of reddish rock and scrub, past other settlements. There are few trees. It felt lonely. “Can you see any Arab village or city? Any nomads?” Matar asked. “Nothing. But they say these settlements are encroaching on Arab land. How is this place bothering George Bush or Condoleezza Rice? I have no answer but anti-Semitism.”

Ma'ale Rehav'am, in 2008, was a cluster of seven or eight trailers and a large water tank. An Israeli flag flew over everything. A few soldiers guarded the approach. One of the settlement's residents, Danny Halamish, thirty-seven, greeted us when we arrived. He was one of the settlement's original founders, arriving one night back in 2001 with one other person. Others came within a week and haven't left since. A black dog scampered at Halamish's feet. He had named it Jihad.

“I was living in England. That was 2001, when the war started, and I realized my place was here. In a war, this is the front line,” he said. “This is my land — not my land, our land. The Arabs want to take it, but they have no right to it, and we will not allow it.”

Halamish said he is not particularly religious but believes in God and cleaves to his Jewish identity. There are two kinds of Jews in Israel, he said: those who want to hold on to their identity, and those who want to shed it. “Tel Aviv represents the second group. It is built on sand with no roots. It might as well be Los Angeles.” Ma'ale Rehav'am, said Halamish, is not built on sand but on history, and they are making more of it every day they live there. He described Ma'ale Rehav'am as Israel's frontier. “In so many ways we are beyond the law and can do what we want. I don't think anywhere else in Israel has this freedom.”

Palestinians on the frontier must leave, he said. “The exact method is not important. It could be fast and violent, as in a war. It can be a very slow and gradual process that's led by mostly economic pressure and other means. The important thing is that we do it. Had the Arabs accepted our ownership of the land, they could have stayed here. But because they do not accept our ownership of the land, they are our enemies and cannot.”

Driving back to Matar's home in Efrat, we passed the wadi where, in 2001, two Israeli teenagers, Koby Mandell and Yosef Ishran, were bludgeoned to death after they skipped school to go hiking. At times it seems difficult to travel far in Israel or the West Bank without stumbling on places stained with similar history.

Advocates and opponents of an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank have something of a test case in the Gaza Strip. Israeli pulled out in 2005, abandoning settlements where some 9,000 Jews lived. The move, described as a unilateral disengagement, was controversial and was vigorously opposed in Gaza and by pro-settler organizations elsewhere. Some compared the Israel Defence Forces soldiers who evicted them to Nazis. Scenes of Israeli soldiers dragging Jews away from their homes were painful for many Israelis to watch — though one former army officer told me he wished he could have been among the soldiers who cleared the settlers out.

Palestinians in Gaza responded to the Israeli pullout with unprecedented numbers of rocket attacks against nearby Israeli towns. “We left them beautiful hothouses,” said Rubinger, the photographer. “They tore them to pieces and started throwing rockets at us. So today, when I have an argument with a right-wing Israeli, he says, ‘All right, so you want to pull out from the West Bank too. We pulled out from Gaza, and look what we get.' What do I tell him? I have no reply.”

“Welcome to our refugee camp,” Rachel Saperstein said as she opened the door to her bright and pleasantly decorated four-bedroom caravilla in the Israeli settlement of Nitzan. “This is my job — to take a slum and make it a palace.”

Saperstein and her husband were among the settlers forcibly evacuated from Gaza in 2005. “Soldiers, like robots, pulled me from my house,” she said. “Our Zionist dream came crashing down on us. We had a great deal of love for our army. Now we see it being used to beat up Jews.”

Saperstein was born in New York and immigrated to Israel in 1968 “because we're Jews, and being Jews we wanted to come to our homeland.” Her husband fought in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which he lost an arm and part of his face. They moved to Gaza in 1997. A Palestinian gunman there ambushed her husband as he drove in his car and shot off two of the fingers on his remaining hand. She rejected the idea that the land was once home to Arabs, too. She said they arrived when the Jews did because they wanted to make money. “They came from Yemen. They came from Iraq. And now all of a sudden they're Palestinians. They are simply Arabs who came from all over. There is a state for them. It's called Jordan. If they want to live with their Arab brothers, they can go there.”

Saperstein longed to return to Gaza. God blessed the Jews there, she said, and so did the very ground on which they lived. “The Earth will not produce for the Arabs,” she said. “It will produce for us.” Agriculture was only one of many miracles Saperstein witnessed in Gaza. She said it was as if God Himself swatted away the missiles Palestinian terrorists shot at them. “People laughed at us when we said it, but even the Arabs saw it. It bothers them to this day that in Sderot they try to kill so many and kill so few.”

Saperstein was referring to the Israeli city closest to the Gaza Strip that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rocket attacks. Sderot is a working-class town. The residents are primarily descendants of Moroccan, Kurdish Jewish, and Soviet immigrants. The attacks were ongoing when I visited. Whenever a rocket was spotted arching out of Gaza, a siren sounded and residents had thirty seconds to seek cover in a reinforced room of their house or in one of the many bomb shelters located every block or so in Sderot. As we approached the city, my driver turned off the radio and opened the car windows to better hear the alert. When the rocket came, the alert was too late or too quiet. We heard no warning, only the muffled crunching explosion of a missile hitting nearby. This one was harmless, landing in an empty parking lot.