The Question of Israeli Settlements: Calamity or Fulfillment? - by Jerold Auerbach

...Kerstein’s “messianic fanatics” turned out to be passionate Israelis who — like secular Zionists — were determined to return to the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people. They neither rejected Israeli democracy, as he writes, nor did they advocate “a theocratic state.” Their “apocalyptic messianism,” in translation, was devotion to the restoration of Jewish national sovereignty — also known as Zionism.

Jerold Auerbach..
Algemeiner..
30 August '20..

Benjamin Kerstein has been commended as “one of the finest American-Israeli authors of his generation.” But his recent Algemeiner critique — “Zionism, Messianism and the Question of the Settlements” — is unpersuasive.

Kerstein understands that Israeli settlers are not monolithic: they “represent a diverse and complex society-within-a-society.” They range from ordinary Israelis who, like generations of Zionists before them, have built communities in the Biblical Land of Israel, to “true believers” who are “often terrifyingly sure of themselves.” Their “remarkable success story” might best be understood as the fulfillment of the Zionist dream. Yet he identifies with those “who view the movement with skepticism at best and open hostility at worst.”

Kerstein knows that Judea and Samaria (Jordan’s “West Bank” until the Six-Day War) comprised “the heartland of the ancient Jewish kingdoms; it is integral to the Jewish people’s biblical inheritance … and our presence there is as indigenous as one could possibly imagine.” He recognizes settlers as “people of considerable integrity” who “are willing to put their lives in danger for what they believe in.” That seems like a compelling argument for an embrace of the historic Land of Israel and its bold and courageous Jewish residents.

Yet for Kerstein there are “very legitimate reasons to be skeptical of and even hostile toward the settlement movement.” Least persuasive is his discomfort that “essentially the entire world considers the settlements illegal.” (Who cares?) But “the most troubling aspect of the settlement movement” is its “ferociously messianic passion” of the kind that has sprinkled Jewish history with “horrifically destructive” consequences. Among the “terrible horrors,” he rightly identifies “Baruch Goldstein’s slaughter of 29 innocent Muslims” in the Machpelah shrine (1994), reinforced by “the Kahanist ideologues of Hebron” who “reject Israeli democracy.”

But Kerstein ignores the reality that the overwhelming majority of the nearly 450,000 settlers are normal Israelis who, as Zionists have always done, built communities in the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people. The settlement blocs with the largest number of Israeli residents feature universities, yeshivas, scientific laboratories, high-rise apartments and shopping centers. It is inconceivable that they would be ever be abandoned by their residents or evicted by the Israeli government.

That leaves Kerstein’s primary targets: the “messianic fanatics” of Hebron and neighboring Kiryat Arba (Biblical Hebron) who reject democracy and advocate “a theocratic state.” But Baruch Goldstein’s horrific massacre of Muslims at prayer in Me’arat ha’Machpelah — the ancient burial site of Jewish patriarchs and matriarchs — remains the tragic exception. Hebron Jews, numbering fewer than 1,000, have far more often been the targets of Palestinian terrorism than perpetrators of violence.

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Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Hebron Jews: Memory and Conflict in the Land of Israel (2009).