The fallout from Israel's invasion of Gaza this winter reveals an intensifying struggle between the secularist liberals and religious nationalists over the very identity of Israel. The invasion of Gaza has been followed by testimonies of many soldiers who witnessed brutal murders of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military. According to these reports, which have set off an army investigation in Israel, Israeli military was purposefully lax in its rules of engagement with civilians. There are disturbing reports of Israeli troops shooting Palestinian women and children, including the killing of an old lady by sniper. The whole-scale demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza was not only tolerated by top Israeli military commanders, but encouraged. The Human Rights Watch has said that there is enough evidence in Gaza to warrant a war crimes investigation of Israeli troops.
But what the testimonies of many Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza reveal is that many of the crimes were committed, or encouraged, by the religious nationalists who have become extremely powerful within the ranks of the Israeli military. The chief rabbi of the military has recently been reprimanded for distributing a booklet warning the troops not to show mercy to the enemy. There have been reports of religious nationalist soldiers anointing themselves with oil before the battle and calling for all Arabs to be kicked out of the Holy Land because they were impeding Israel's God-given mission to resettle the land. The fact that most of these religious nationalists, including the army's chief rabbi, are West Bank settlers shows the depth of the Israeli division.
The society seems to be divided between the secular liberals who desperately want a peace with the Palestinians, even though this will have to include a complete abandonment of West Bank settlements and the return to the pre-1967 borders; and the far right religious fanatics, many of whom are West Bank settlers, and who believe they are on God's mission therefore the Palestinians are the intruders in the Holy Land. The fact that the recently formed government includes a man who openly called for Arabs to be expelled from Israel does not bide well for the secularists.
The fight between the secularists and the religious fanatics is a struggle to define the future of Zionism. Would Zionism succumb to the religious intolerance which would seriously endanger the future of the Israeli state? Or would Zionism take a more secular and pragmatic route, acknowledging that a two-state solution is the only way that Israel can remain true to its founding mission to be the state of all Jews.
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That bit about the religious intolerance is not exactly what I'd call accurate - see, e.g., http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/world/middleeast/28israel.html?scp=9&sq=israel%20religious&st=cse
"Stuart Cohen, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University who is religiously observant, says that the army has indeed grown more violent toward civilians in the past 25 years, partly because the Palestinians have. But he says it has nothing to do with the increase of religious soldiers.
For 12 years he has been studying the correspondence between religious soldiers and rabbis on combat morality, and overwhelmingly the rabbis have urged restraint. While he cannot measure how that advice has been put into practice, he suspects it has had a real effect. And other religious soldiers said their behavior in Gaza was especially respectful.
“When we entered houses, we actually cleaned up the place,” said Yishai Goldflam, 32, a religiously observant film student in Jerusalem whose open letter to the Palestinian owners of the house he occupied for some days was published in the newspaper Maariv. “There are always idiots who do immoral things. But they don’t represent the majority."
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