The lunatic fringe wins control over Israel: "In Sharon defeat, birth of new settler revolution?"
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent
The State of Israel is a society created in the image of a dozen or more concurrent revolutions which, to this day, jockey for hearts, minds and power in the modern version of the biblical 12 tribes.
Among the revolutions were efforts to turn pale ultra-Orthodox Jewish scholar boys from Poland into brawny farmers in pre-state Palestine, or, more recently, turning drug-addled, Sabbath-flaunting Israeli juvenile delinquents into ultra-Orthodox Sephardi scholars.
Now, it appears that two movements - both fathered by a revolutionary named Ariel Sharon, the Likud and the settlement enterprise - may come together in a new synthesis, in effect a new revolution, spurred by a joint offensive that may ultimately spell the end of Sharon's career.
This week, the revolutions he spawned appear to have risen up against him at a key juncture. A coalition of settlers and Likud hawks spearheaded a month-long campaign to sink a Sharon-sponsored referendum over the Gaza disengagement proposal. The vote, held Sunday, was devastating for the prime minister: 59.5 percent of the voters rejected his plan.
It had been suggested, even before the votes were cast, that a trouncing in the referendum could spell the beginning of the end of Sharon's public life.
The irony was not lost on a brace of Israeli politicians and commentators, who invoked the image of the Golem, the medieval Jewish helper-monster who rose up to attack his rabbi-creator.
It was unclear, some suggested, whether the figure of the Golem in this case was the settlement movement or the Likud. Veteran leftist politician and Sharon observer Yossi Sarid said the referendum had turned Sharon himself into the Golem.
Beyond the irony, however, was the recognition of what appeared to be a new reality - perhaps a new revolution - in Israeli politics: the sudden potency of the settlers in effecting change within a major political party.
Buoyed by the landslide opposition vote to the Gaza withdrawal, Moshe Feiglin, leader of the far-right Jewish Leadership faction of the Likud, said Monday: "We are coming with an idea. We're saying that we want to lead this party. It may take a year, or 20 years, it makes no difference. Certainly, we are aiming to lead."
Asked if Sharon and pro-withdrawal ministers Ehud Olmert and Shaul Mofaz still had a place in the party, Feiglin replied, "Of course, but not in its leadership."
A new stab at revolution
The mother-model of Zionist revolutions, David Ben-Gurion's Labor movement, has spawned no end of rivals and parallel revolutions, none more energetic and influential than the settlement movement in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
The movement combined religious-Messianic zeal with two principles of early Labor ideologues: territorial maximalism and land conquest through the creation of new settlements by small collective groups.
Just as Ben-Gurion acted as the hands-on, wholehearted patron of the Labor revolution, Ben-Gurion's Labor-bred protege Ariel Sharon fathered two revolutions of his own. First to emerge from Sharon's political drawing board was the rightist, anti-socialist Likud, a magnet for Israel's disadvantaged non-European Jewish minorities.
As a direct outgrowth of the ultimate success of the Likud came Sharon's vision of a vast landscape of settlement, an approach that channeled and harnessed the revolutionary fire of the [non-Haredi] modern Orthodox national religious sector, in a joint endeavor that was to become Sharon's life work.
Over the past month, settlers and the prime minister - for decades inseparable allies in the settlement effort - parted ways over Sharon's latest, if possibly doomed, stab at revolution in Israeli society: an initiative to unilaterally end the Jewish presence in the whole of the Gaza Strip, in order to redraw the map of Israel to embrace settlements in the West Bank.
Takeover of the Likud from within
Launched on the strength of early polls forecasting a crushing victory, Sharon's bid to win a referendum over the Gaza withdrawal seemed at first a sure thing, a convenient if unprecedented springboard to eventual ratification by the cabinet and the Knesset.
But the success of the organizing onslaught by anti-disengagement forces, which included home visits by settlers and their children to virtually every eligible Likud voter, was astonishing. In a matter of weeks, a pro-withdrawal ratio of up to 59 percent versus 39 percent in early polls was erased, then entirely reversed.
On election day, settlers - many of them members of the rival National Religious Party and National Union - ferried voters door to door, from home to ballot box and back, deploying youths, infants and adults to sway emotions and votes at the entrances to all Likud polling stations.
The triumph lent dramatic momentum to two allied, if at times mutually wary, groups on the pro-settlement right: the settlers' umbrella Yesha Council, long the General Motors of operational settlement activity, and the heretofore marginal far-right Likud Jewish Leadership faction, headed by the soft-spoken, ultra-hardline Feiglin.
"The Jewish Leadership faction within the Likud has a declared objective: a takeover of the Likud from within, carrying out a 'revolution of beliefs' within the party," political analyst Shalom Yerushalmi said Sunday.
Stated differently, the "revolution of beliefs" is a revolution of the religious right within the Likud, Yerushalmi said, with its objectives including the election of Feiglin as head of the Likud and, eventually, as prime minister.
Through intensive recruitment, Jewish Leadership activists have signed up large numbers of Israelis- some of them recent immigrants with modest political experience - to join the Likud.
As a result, the composition of Likud bodies has shown significant changes. Jewish Leadership members now control some 130 seats in the Likud's 3,000-strong Central Committee, affording them a strong presence in a rough-and-tumble forum where physical strength and husky vocal chords serve as vital tools.
No betrayal goes forgotten
In contrast to the far-right cadres of the Jewish Leadership group, the much larger settlement movement is far less ideological, its resources directed toward building and fostering settlements that in decades of existence have taken on more and more of the aspect of suburban bedroom communities.
The movement's stunning success in the referendum was built largely on pleas to allow children to remain in the homes in which they were born, and on IDF intelligence assessments that Palestinians would view a unilateral withdrawal as a prize and a victory for terrorism.
The referendum triumph has been seen by many settlers as an event of greater significance than simply blunting for the moment the withdrawal plan, noted Haaretz correspondent Nadav Shragai.
"This was an opportunity for settlers to directly connect with the general public in Israel," he said. "One of the lessons they've drawn from this is the potential importance of going door-to-door, leapfrogging politicians and the media, and sowing seeds for the future."
Some settlers also have come to view the Likud in a new light, Shragai said, adding that they see a greater possibility of exerting influence by working within a major party than within the smaller parties they are accustomed to calling home.
At the same time, the settlers' sense of victory this week was mitigated by a number of factors, with the thrill of impending success shattered by a Gaza terror attack that killed a young woman and her four children Sunday.
There was also the issue of their former father figure Sharon, a man justly famed for never forgetting a perceived betrayal.
According to Shragai, "A wounded Sharon, fear the disengagement opponents, is a dangerous Sharon. Behind the scenes, they are asking questions they dare not speak in public: Will Sharon now evacuate dozens of outposts? Will he choke the settlements and shut out their budgets? Will he honor the decision of the Likud members, or will he strive to implement his plan in other ways?"
'Fatal error' for the Likud
Cabinet minister Tzipi Livni, daughter of two fighters of the pre-state Irgun Zvai Leumi underground militia - a forerunner of the Likud's central pillar, the Herut party - said Monday that it would be a "fatal error" for the Likud to depart from its traditional ways and adopt the ideology of the Jewish Leadership group.
Unlike the wider Likud, which has accepted certain aspects of ceding West Bank and Gaza land in the past, the Jewish Leadership group rejects all territorial compromise. Its platform includes such proposals as construction of a synagogue and a study hall for the Sanhedrin on Jerusalem's Temple Mount.
Feiglin first rose to prominence as leader of Zu Artzeinu (this is our land), a group that organized fierce protests against the then-Labor government's peace moves prior to the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
More recently, promoting an "alternative peace plan" he called the Jewish Road Map, Feiglin wrote that although law-abiding Palestinians would be tolerated in a future Jewish state, "Transfer [expulsion] is a just solution, and it is likely that sometime in the future it will be foisted upon us, whether we like it or not."
Feiglin rejected assertions Sunday that his faction was leading a centrist party toward the extreme right.
"The Likud is, in fact, a centrist party, and we are people of the center," he told Israel Radio. "But the leadership of the Likud, and of the nation as a whole, and of its elites, has taken the country and run to the farthest left of extremes."
Feiglin, saying his group opposed the concept of religious parties, said his faction was closer to the Likud constitution than the current party leadership. He cited a clause mandating the government to confer Israeli sovereignty on all the Land of Israel that the country held.
"I would advise people to glance at what's written in the Likud constitution," he said, "before accusing us of bringing in 'foreign' ideas."
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