In reality, the residents of Gush Katif, Judea and Samaria are often the main representatives in our generation of the ideology that built this country out of the deserts and swamps that were branded "an inhospitable wilderness" by Mark Twain barely 140 years ago.
This year, Israel observes an extended Tisha B'Av. We spent nine days mourning for the loss of our Beit Hamikdash, and our national independence, earlier this month, and we now sit shiva for the forcible uprooting of whole Jewish communities in Israel. In the 1900 years that have intervened, the forced removal of Jewish communities was often cause for national fasting and repentance. That it is now happening in Israel should be cause for only more such introspection, mourning, and grief.
Ari Shavit, one of the more sensible journalists at the extreme left-wing Ha'aretz newspaper, wrote a column last week entitled, "We Must Sit Shiva". To be sure, the column was tainted with leftist blandishments about how the population transfer from Gush Katif is the correct move. But mixed in with this was a large portion of truth and sense.
He spoke harshly of Israel's left-wing intellectuals and legal elites who were nowhere to be found during the removal of 9000 people from their homes.
"The fact that the chief rabbis of Israeli secular morality did not see fit to make a genuine human gesture toward their fellow citizens who were forcibly uprooted from their homes is a fact laden with significance. It reorganizes Israel's normative framework. Soon they will discover that those who do not stand emotionally with their fellow citizens when their lives are being destroyed have lost the right to preach morality to them regarding the destruction of the lives of others."
What this week's events prove more plainly than anything else is that the State of Israel is home to very different populations. The differences between right and left (and often between religious and secular) are so marked that they could describe two completely different nations. And that is the tragic truth of the State of Israel's most glaring failure. The State, with all its elites and institutions, has failed to unite the Jewish nation behind its mission and mandate – or behind its history and mythology.
The first harbinger of the destruction that we mourn on Tisha B'Av was the division of the Jewish nation into two kingdoms. This is something we still must mourn today, as the expulsion from Gush Katif proves, and as Ari Shavit so rightly points out.
One nation that lives in Israel is made up of those for whom Israel is like any other country, with jobs, an economy, places to live and work and raise two kids. It can be as cosmopolitan, as suburban, and as urbane as any other country in the world. It can present opportunity and neglect its underprivileged just like anyone else.
The other nation in Israel are those for whom there is nowhere else to go. For the true Zionists living in Israel, we are here because this is where we were meant to be. The Land of Israel holds all our history, our ancient beginnings, our national mid-life crisis, and the new beginnings of our senior years. The entire magic of being Jewish, of being part of a still and once again vibrant nation after thousands of years of history, is represented in this land.
Of these two nations, the residents of Gush Katif, Judea and Samaria belong to the second. Ari Shavit continues, "The Gush Katif residents are not fanatics; they are not the fascist enemy; they are believers, unfortunate but good-hearted, who devoted themselves with all their might to their ideals. They were residents of development towns and moshavim who gave their hearts to the Zionist enterprise. Gush Katif was a world unto itself – a world of work and faith, of patriotic innocence and communal warmth; a world that touches the heart."
There are places in Israel where such idealism, such attachment to national roots, is missing. There are whole communities in Israel where patriotism and communal warmth do not exist.
What Gush Katif, and other communities in Judea and Samaria, represent is the nation that is meant to inherit the Land of Israel. The warmth, friendship, loyalty, ideals, imagination, hard work, and good-neighborliness of the "Settlers" is something that is far too often missing in many places in Israel.
So now there is a new challenge for the "Settlers". Rather than living in "a world unto itself" as Shavit put it, they need to "settle" in communities throughout Israel where their way of life can be a beacon to others about what it really means to live in Israel, to have and to hold the land of our birth. Throughout the rest of Israel, we can really use them and their qualities to help us build a better nation and State.
Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
