Settlements are Israel’s sole owner!

Author: Tawfiq Abu Shumer

The leftist writer and millionaire owner of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, wrote on 25/11/2011 about his expectations for Israel’s present and future.
He quoted part of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 1993 speech to the Knesset, delivered two years before Rabin’s assassination, in which Rabin said: “Do not be surprised, because in a few years Iran will possess nuclear weapons, and therefore we must strive to open a window for peace, instead of war.”
Schocken also said that Yitzhak Rabin was looking ahead when he signed the peace agreement with the Palestinians; he saw the necessity of putting an end to settlement activity and hoped to improve the conditions of Palestinians who have remained on their land since 1948 — that is, Arab citizens of Israel. But this vision collided with the fundamentalist settler bloc Gush Emunim, one of the main products of religious settler Zionism. It was adopted by the right‑wing Mizrachi movement and transformed, from a political party that once supported the left known as the Mafdal, into Gush Emunim — the leading force of the settlement movement that relies on an extremist ideology which says: “The 1967 war was an extension of the War of Independence, so Israel’s borders are no longer the 1948 borders but the borders after June 4, 1967.”
Gush Emunim is a religious settler organization rather than a political party in the academic sense. This fundamentalist settler organization pays no heed to human rights and does not recognise the existence of anyone in all of Palestine other than Jews; others are absent from the ideology of this extremist settler movement.
Gush Emunim is an electoral nursery for every Israeli leadership, and today it is the effective leader of Israeli policy. Anyone who wishes to seize the prime ministership and gain positions only needs to don the mantle of the Gush Emunim settler movement; Sharon, Olmert, Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Lieberman, Zevulun Hammer and others all wore it. Amos Schocken wrote: “The term ‘apartheid’ was used to distinguish between white and black in South Africa, but here in Israel there is apartheid between two peoples: the first people, the Israelis, possess all the rights, while the other people, the Palestinians, are deprived of them. The first people rule the second. Unfortunately, the ideology of the settlement party, Gush Emunim, has also achieved remarkable success in America; it attracted a large number of Christian Zionists who support Republican candidates, and this big bloc in America has made it difficult for any U.S. president to adopt a policy against the apartheid system in Israel.”
Gush Emunim is the party that, in the most recent elections in November 2022, produced two main leaders of Gush Emunim: Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben‑Gvir. The party’s primary plan has become evident in passing racist laws suitable for apartheid and contrary to the most basic human rights — laws against press freedom and against Palestinian citizens of Israel. When the law requiring an oath of loyalty to the State of Israel as a Jewish state was enacted for Palestinians, a campaign of incitement flourished against them and against Israeli left‑wing academics. The fundamentalist settler party, Gush Emunim, continues trying to strip the Supreme Court of its powers because the court obstructs Gush Emunim’s objectives and thwarts plans to Judaise all the land in Israel and expel Palestinians from their land!
Schocken’s remarks are important because they survey the future. He expected the failure of a peaceful solution with Iran, which would push Israel to strike Iran militarily. Schocken’s statements pointed precisely to the course of the Gush Emunim gang: the central settler train left its tactical role as a supporter of the left, which became apparent in its religious turn in 1977 when it merged into the Likud. The driver of Gush Emunim’s cart is the Yesha settler movement — the adopted offspring of Gush Emunim — and by its name it denotes settlement in the West Bank, that is, Judea and Samaria, and the Gaza Strip!
Haim Hanegbi wrote in Maariv on 1/7/2001 in an article titled “The Rescue Army: the peak of incitement among Yesha rabbis,” speaking about settlers’ repression of Palestinian residents, saying: “They carried their weapons and challenged everyone. Armed settlers patrolled the West Bank streets on guard patrols, weapons ready, flags fluttering on their vehicles; they want to extend their control over the population and remove them from their land. The flags they raise on their vehicles are the flags of the Israel Rescue Army, the flags of Beit El. The talk is no longer about a state that has settlements, but about settlements that have a state.”
The principles and origins of Gush Emunim trace back to the chief rabbi Moshe ben Nahman, who died in 1270, and — the article notes — he is also described as the teacher of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement.
Moshe ben Nahman was the first to sow the seeds of seizing all of Palestine, not only Area C, which constitutes 61% of the West Bank, since he was the first to call for the slogan adopted by Gush Emunim: “Settlement is a compulsory Jewish religious duty; Jewish religious rites may only be carried out in Palestine, and a Jew may divorce his Jewish wife if she refuses to emigrate to Palestine.”
We must not overlook the key facts: the settler teachings of Moshe ben Nahman since the 13th century are what attracted the Christian Zionist current and made it believe that Israeli settlement in Palestine will hasten the coming of the awaited Messiah. The Christian Zionist preacher Jerry Falwell said in 1980: “God blessed America because America supported Israel.”
Christian Zionists constitute 13% of the world’s Christians; in the United States alone their number exceeds forty million. They are the strongest supporters of Israel, they were among the voters who elected President Donald Trump, they were the only supporters of an embassy in Jerusalem, and they are the largest organisation supporting Israel in the world. One of the foremost principles of Christian Zionists is: “The return of Christ cannot occur without the settlement of the whole Promised Land.”