ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Civil War Imminent in Israel?

IDF Plans to Collect Settlers’ Weapons Prior to Disengagement

By Jim Betker
April 14, 2005

Zionist extremist elements of the settlement movement within Israel seem to be mobilizing for resistance to the planned disengagement, set to begin in mid-July, of 17 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.

As a prelude to the withdrawal the Israeli Defense Minister, Shaul Mofaz, has directed the Israeli Defense Forces to collect the weapons of settlers two weeks prior to the pullout.

Already there have been, for a number of months, violent demonstrations and threats against Israeli government officials in an attempt to derail the Roadmap to Peace. Many of these groups were once considered to be moderate, but have now come out in open opposition to the disengagement plan.

In one such demonstration in Jerusalem recently, an injured female police officer complained that “what hurt the most” was when the demonstrators “called us (the police) Nazis.”

Proponents of the disengagement have argued that the recent Revava movement where Jewish pilgrims to the Temple Mount, who go there to pray in accordance with halacha, or Jewish law, intend to do so as a mass protest against the planned disengagement. According to Zionist hardliners, this “invasion” would be welcomed as a way to provoke the Arab world still further to broaden the campaign to eliminate the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to the point of complete expulsion in the continuation of the original Zionist scheme of Eretz Israel to expand the Zionist state to the Biblical borders of ancient Israel.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office is planning a “controlled openness” policy during the evacuation that will severely limit independent coverage of the events. The military affairs commentator for Israel’s Channel 10 television says the plans he has seen are based on "the belief that they can control us and direct us and determine where we will be. This doesn't appear reasonable... I want free mobility in the field. They can keep tabs on who goes in, but they can't dictate to us where we go."

This brings to mind the controlled press atmosphere of “embedded reporters” that operates in Iraq under the U.S. occupation where everything must clear the censors.

In other protests, the foes of disengagement have likened the current Israeli regime to an “oligarchy” and called for a vote of “no confidence” of the Sharon government. Sharon has also been accused of conducting an “intimidation-defamation campaign” using “baseless inventions” in a desperate effort by the “spin meisters” of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security force, to discredit the settlement movement and the entire religious nationalist camp.

CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL ZIONISM

Yoram Peri wrote of patriotism in a recent Haaretz article, “The very concept of patriotism as a value raises many problems, such as the tension between loving one's homeland and loving one's nation, or between love of the state and love of society.” Peri complains further and questions why “the mere mention of patriotism today, by a member of Knesset or a Jewish settler, is immediately suspect, reeking of deceit, if not messianic fanaticism?”

Perhaps the self-styled nationalist religious patriots of Zionism feel the sting of the controlled media as they are increasingly portrayed in a light similar to American and European nationalists and patriots. This is the conflict between the aspects of religious Zionism and that of secular political Zionism.

The article by Peri goes on to state that patriotism has positive influences but “it also functions as a strikingly negative force” when it “allows those who control the state's mechanisms to distinguish between 'good citizens' and 'bad citizens,' to monopolize patriotism itself and to exclude the groups they do not wish to promote.”

It seems again that Israelis are slowly awakening to the New World Order blues that true American patriots and nationalists have been aware of for so long now.

The type of patriotism now in vogue among the Jewish settlers looks less and less like traditional native or revolutionary patriotism. Yoram Peri writes that, “One of the most fascinating dialectics within the current debate over the future of the territories is that the most vocal proponents of patriotism - Jewish settlers, especially those with religious-nationalist views - are willing, in the name of a zealous love for Eretz Israel, to accept a rupture in Israeli society, to hurt the State of Israel and even to shake off its authority altogether.” As a fundamentalist patriotism took hold, patriotism then became conditional in the secular state and a new kind of messianic patriotism has come to the fore among religious Zionists.

This would seem to explain the existence of a current antipathy toward traditional patriotism which clashes with an ethnic nationalism that excludes all non-Jews. It is apparent that Zionism has prevented the emergence of any civic patriotism among the Arabs living within Israel.

Peri insists that the old patriotic ideal of “blood and land” is “archaic” and suggests a new patriotism which will foster republicanism and “solidarity with community and society.”

The gulf between the Israeli Zionist right and left continues to widen and the encounters between these factions will become shriller as the disengagement plan comes closer to implementation.

The Leninist, Bolshevik dogma that there exists only power and that everything is subordinated to attaining and maintaining that power is the main goal of the Zionist secular state. The religious Zionists, though many are loyal to the teachings of the Torah, have forsaken this secularism in favor of their Talmudic heritage.

This is where the possibility for further conflict arises that could lead to extreme violence and even to civil war.