Efrat Patrol
Norden, Edward
Edward Norden Efrat Patrol The West Bank in the wake of the Israel-PLO agreement— and the looming culture war over what these lands represent. I B y the dimensions of their skullcaps ye shall...
...For the moment, he just attended...
...All the early glitches in the Israeli-PLO deal, which Rabin, Peres, and Arafat are fairly sure to overcome, are nothing compared with the mess to be expected when the Israel Defense Forces try to hand over Gaza and Jericho this spring and Palestinian elections are held there and elsewhere in the occupied territories this summer...
...But who knows...
...An hour later, morning prayers at Efrat's numerous synagogues...
...Rabbi Golan's skullcap is toward the large end of the spectrum...
...They have the precedent of Begin's treaty with Sadat, in its time lambasted by the, same fraction of their countrymen who now vilify Rabin, but which so far has abided—cross your fingers the Islamicists don't junk it if and when they oust Mubarak...
...The camp sits along the main road just south of Bethlehem...
...It's not right for the government to do this when it has to rely on Arab parties for its Knesset majority...
...After which many people signed up with Rabbi Golan before walking or driving home in the dark...
...The point is that for most Israelis the religious-nationalistic duty to hold on to as much of the Land of Israel as is in hand is not overriding or even very important...
...But problems over checkpoints and the boundaries of Jericho and the wellbeing of settlers in and around both places had cropped up and there had been one postponement after another...
...Nor is he tremendously popular in the West Bank...
...If you wanted to eat bacon or purchase a Madonna video, you'd have to do it abroad...
...It's only forbidden to give it up to idolators, and the Moslems are not idolators...
...There is no guarantee that taboo will hold...
...The settlers' pubescent daughters are off to their own high school in their uniform of ankle-length denim skirts but with hair uncovered, since marriage for them is still to come...
...The king of Jordan has recently expressed his impatience with Arafat and his eagerness to sign on the dotted line with the Israelis...
...If all the men wore average-size knit skullcaps even when they weren't in this or any other of Efrat's numerous synagogues, all their womenfolk kept their knees and elbows covered and their dresses buttoned up to the neck winter and summer...
...Or they patronize the falafel and shishlik place, equally kosher...
...Moti is an immigrant to the nerve-racking Jewish state from New York...
...Nothing about these unpleasantnesses in the shiny prospectus...
...A young Arab buys a lottery ticket in the variety store...
...Granted, Efrat is in the so-called Etzion Bloc...
...You can almost make out the building where Moti and Debra rent, and this reminds you that analogies are only helpful up to a point...
...42 The American Spectator March 1994 pizza, meaning only vegetables and no pepperoni on the cheese...
...For peace, compromise is acceptable...
...Long-term it's to lay a new highway from the Etzion Bloc to Jerusalem that skirts Bethlehem and the camp...
...His wife Vicky, in her oversized beret, sat next to him, while his deputy, the luxuriantly bearded Israeli-born Rabbi Shimon Golan, communicated a plan of action Speakers updated the crowd on what the Israeli government was planning for them and for the other 130,000 or so Jews who in the last generation have moved to what the Bible calls Judea, Samaria, and Gaza and what mankind, with the exception of some Baptists, agrees is occupied territory...
...Withdrawing the IDF and explicitly or implicitly ditching Shiloh and Efrat puts Arafat in sight, and from Bethlehem in mortar range, of Jerusalem...
...If no more than a few hundred far rightists now go the same route for opposite reasons, and provided the taboo against Jews firing on other Jews holds even when settlements may have to be emptied, the rather flexible IDF and therefore Israel should come through in one piece...
...The speakers tonight urged everyone not to be fazed by the government's stupidity and wickedness, or by the intifada whose favorite victims they were and which Rabin's pact with the ineffable Arafat had only intensified...
...Rabbi Golan holds the fort' the many occasions when Riskin travels back to the Old Country to raise funds...
...A bargain, and a gamble...
...You have among them your Sephardi taxi-driver and his upwardly mobile kids, and your bareheaded Tel Aviv suburbanite Likud middle-aged Ashkenazi businessman who's sick of doing reserve duty in fetid Gaza and intrigued by the economic consequences of peace with the so-called Arab World...
...This included Begin and Ariel Sharon, needless to say, but also Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres during their earlier stints in the 1970s as Laborite prime minister and defense minister respectively...
...Vicky said while the rabbi was on the phone: "Of course Efrat is in Israel...
...The shrewder of the rabbis and laypersons directing the PR campaign for the Council of Jewish Settlements also know their Israelis...
...Vicky broke in...
...You do see a few pistols tucked into civilian belts in Efrat, but no Uzis...
...Yes, the rabbi said after hanging up...
...This is why, in coordination with the disorganized Likud, they have been focussing on the Golan Heights...
...Even the ex-Soviet immigrants who fetch up here don skullcaps to blend in...
...Even nearer, you have the other settlements of the Etzion Bloc, quite important in the history of Zionism, some wiped out in 1948 and rebuilt after the Six-Day War in 1967, some founded from scratch in the last decade or two, Only among themselves do these Arabs refer to one of the larger places they have built for the Jews as "Abu Amar's House," Abu Amar being Yasir Arafat's nickname...
...It is tuned to the news and music of Radio Jordan...
...The well-equipped vehicles will patrol all night on the Jerusalem-Bethlehem-Hebron-Beersheba highway below and in problematic villages roundabout like Kefar Aroub...
...A time comes when the mother country gets tired of the wretched business...
...Furthermore, while about half of the Jews in Israel are Sephardim, meaning very roughly that their grandparents come from Asia or Africa, the sharp-eyed visitor gets the impression that althoughthere is a synagogue where the Sephardi rite is observed, at least nine out of ten of the people in town have Ashkenazi grandparents, meaning very roughly that they came to the Land of Israel either directly from Europe or via the U.S...
...40 The American Spectator March 1994 like Efrat...
...Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was set on overcoming all glitches in order to hand every last inch over to Arafat...
...But is it really forbidden by religious law, he was asked, to give up any part of the Land of Israel for any reason whatsoever to non-Jews, as that same ex-head chaplain of the army had ruled...
...Conversely, the smaller the head-covering the more likely the wearer is to be a dove, for instance one of those American immigrants in a skullcap so tiny you notice it only from behind...
...It was Israel Radio, setting up a live interview for the breakfast show in another seven hours...
...The male adolescents in sweatshirts, jeans, and running shoes honing their brains on Talmudic puzzles in the yeshiva/high school are definitely human compared with their bare-headed age-mates in Tel Aviv, no better than Hebrew-speaking Beavises and Buttheads...
...The prospectus also woos newcomers by touting Efrat's "atmosphere of friendship and serenity...
...They rip into the pizza, these corporals and second lieutenants, draftees from Israel proper doing a job no Beavis or Butthead would get caught doing, their weapons stashed under the table, a field radio crackling, the jeeps outside loaded with gear—jerry-cans of steaming tea, flares, steel helmets, tear-gas canisters, a searchlight, a megaphone, plastic handcuffs, a gizmo out front to neutralize any piano wire strung across a back road...
...Simply by remaining, they could block the advent of a Palestinian state...
...On the one hand, American immigrants living in Efrat were quick to praise its schools and the atmosphere of community...
...Well, yes, even in these unusually stressful times, and especially compared with Israel proper, Efrat on the surface is peaceful, mellow, civilized...
...Moti has convinced himself that Rabin wouldn't be building the new highway around Bethlehem and Dehaishe if he didn't mean to annex the Etzion Bloc...
...From this angle, a miraculous Israeli-PLO success in the months and years to come is nearly as undesirable as withdrawal followed by Arab double-crossing and war...
...I B y the dimensions of their skullcaps ye shall generally know them...
...Efrat, an incorporated town but fundamentally a bedroom suburb of Jerusalem, is open to anyone...
...They had a wonderful time giving everything away...
...The other mistake was complacency...
...Whatever happens in the Diaspora is a footnote to Jewish history," he declared cheerfully as Vicky listened...
...What he now added was that what the intifada couldn't do, the Israeli government had done...
...A strange thing to be conveyed, perhaps, by a CNN producer and a husband and father in a rented apartment in Jerusalem who was agonizing recently over whether to buy a house in Edward Norden is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and Commentary...
...VI C hances are good that in the relatively near future, Vicky will be proved right...
...Weekends in Damascus...
...This would not, however, only be the end of the settlements...
...This is also what Jewish tradition wants of us...
...It wasn't too late...
...They were by definition Zionists—they had switched their lives from the Diaspora to Zion...
...Only among themselves do these Arabs refer to one of the larger places they have built for the Jews as "Abu Amar's House," Abu Amar being the half-shaven Arafat's nickname...
...Now that Rabin has promised a referendum before finalizing any Golan deal, the way is clear for insisting on a referendum sooner or later on the final status of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza too...
...Open to all, Efrat is populated solely by Jews who cover their heads...
...Rabin was mistaken but not a traitor...
...Those who considered the entire deal abominable hoped these problems would be fatal...
...Stirrings in the audience...
...Someday they would be, and Efrat would officially become a town in Israel...
...Gaza may well blow up in a Palestinian civil war, as Vicky predicts without sorrow—the clownish Abu Amar, plucked from history's trashcan by the Israelis in hopes The American Spectator March 1994 43 that he will squelch the intifada and facilitate peace treaties with Jordan and Syria, is no great hero in what is basically one enormous refugee camp...
...The ordinary Israeli, even in Tel Aviv, wasn't unreachable...
...VII M oti and Debra Krauthammer have made their choice, sort of...
...A true Jewish state for them would vest less authority in the Knesset, more in the rabbis—and not such genial Upper West Side rabbis as Shlomo Riskin, either...
...And yet, unlike the Riskins, a palpable majority of Israelis do not think what their government is up to is utterly stupid or hopeless, and do not pray for its collapse—not yet, anyway...
...How close to Sweden or the U.S., how close to the ayatollahs...
...So where does Moti Krauthammer's skullcap fit in...
...II ump now to Efrat...
...The country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River is so small and crowded, and is liable to remain so contested, that a more precise analogy may be to Lebanon or Bosnia...
...Rabbi Riskin has arranged for Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, ex-Knicks star and NBA Hall of Famer, to teach in Efrat's strictly kosher combined basketball, karate, and Talmud summer camp...
...A bulletin board at the entrance to the municipality offices...
...Anger and fear ought not to lead anyone into free-lance action, especially not into violence...
...The clean-shaven Rabbi Riskin was sitting front and center in the audience...
...Moreover, Labor kibbutzim will have to be sacrificed if the Golan, also captured in 1967, is exchanged for peace with Syria—the Knesset annexed the Golan in 1981, yet what the Knesset has done it can undo...
...If after three months they change their minds, they can have all the money back...
...As they do all his countrymen who are not the silliest of doves, which is to say that not only the settlers but the majority of Israelis today look to the future with more than their usual nervousness...
...The Labor government today sees no need for one concerning the West Bank and Gaza, nor for a general election, the Likud being weak but the national mood jittery and changeable...
...Vicky took the wheel of the Riskin Volvo with its chicken wire over the windshield...
...But what standing would Arafat have then, and how will he be able, as the Israeli government and public hope against hope that he will, to prevent chaos and keep the rejectionists with their AK-47s from continuing to go after Israeli troops and the settlers during the so-called "interim" period of autonomy...
...Is Sinai or any corner of it part of the Land of Israel...
...On the other, they had let Moti and Debra know that it would be crazy for them to sink money just now in a place which, if 38 The Americap Spectator March 1994 the Israeli-PLO deal pans out, might be located inside a Palestinian state, together with Shiloh...
...What is or should be the meaning, texture, function of a Jewish state...
...Yet no one in the know would take it for a badge of xenophobia...
...It would mean the beginning of the end of the modern state of Israel, God forbid...
...Your Israeli man in the street is more worried by Hafez Assad' s tanks and Scuds than by Arafat...
...If a Palestinian civil war in the areas to be vacated by the IDF is a distinct possibility, a Jewish civil war, on the face of it about withdrawal but really about the Jewishness of the Jewish state as well, is not inconceivable...
...The Biblically resonant outpost of Shiloh, for example...
...If Judea and Samaria hadn't been annexed yet, I believed it was only because the world didn't allow it...
...Which did not prevent De Gaulle from selling out the colons and is not preventing John Major from heaving Ulster overboard...
...The cash register of every place on the mall is flanked by charity boxes...
...As soon as the army leaves Gaza it's going to explode...
...Each neighborhood is called after one of the Biblical species of fruit "with which," as a glossy bilingual prospectus for couples like Moti and Debra says, "the Land of Israel is blessed"—fig, date, olive, pomegranate, and so on—and has not only its own kindergarten but at least one synagogue, so that residents may go on foot with their youngest children to worship on the Sabbath...
...That might qualify as false advertising if the selling points under "Educational and Cultural Institutions" didn't let the cat out of the bag...
...V T he Israeli army is indeed in Efrat...
...This is the big crisis which he's seen coming for years...
...On this as on many other things you can find rabbis with contrary opinions...
...As Efrat's founder and guide, Vicky's husband would have something to say this evening...
...And we pay our taxes...
...No," Shlomo Riskin answered to his wife's dissatisfaction...
...On the other hand, Debra casually fed the younger of the couple's two kids at the breast in the presence of a visitor, as the clean-shaven Moti and she discussed the pros and cons of moving to Efrat...
...the Council of Jewish Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and in particular by the local council here in the Etzion Bloc...
...They suspect those who use the Land of Israel as a rallying cry of nursing other agendas...
...He professes not to be worried, not in the least...
...And, he said, he expects the deal will fail thanks to its contradictions...
...That's what we would be here...
...A less abnormal and safer life, finally—in acountry whose banner features the Star of David, to which any Jew may immigrate, and whose capital is Jerusalem—is what they desire...
...Americans should not be thunderstruck if Rabin and Arafat jointly announce that, in the interests of peace, they have decided to put the elections off sine die...
...Nor would any such effective majority be possible if it didn't include a lot of certified right-wingers...
...The mowing down of settlers in a drive-by near Hebron, the stabbings of Jews by Arabs in Israel proper, and the string of delays in the Oslo schedule notwithstanding, they are letting Rabin go ahead...
...Must we have sovereignty come what may over every hill where prophets, judges, and kings spoke and wrote in Hebrew...
...Ditto for the neighborhoods under construction by the Arabs and those projected in the master plan envisioning a population of 4,500 families, the family and not the individual being the smallest unit Jews who cover their heads plan for...
...Nothing concerning Wadi Nis either, and the demographics of Riskin-ville are finessed...
...Lincoln Square Synagogue in the cultural heart of Manhattan, a sd-called "modern Orthodox" congregation, had been Shlomo Riskin's last posting before he and Vicky immigrated—or as they say in Hebrew, "ascended"—to this spot in the red-hot heart of Zion...
...The Palestinian hard-hats show up at the same time the adult male Efratites and not a few of their wives head out for Jerusalem and their day's work as doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, computer programmers, insurance salespersons...
...Since the age of prophecy is over, it takes a fool to say what baby is emerging from the womb...
...Cynical as most Israelis have become, most do not yet believe that peace is worse than a chimera or that the slogan of land for peace is necessarily an empty one...
...His parents, who eventually followed him to Efrat, did put him through The American Spectator March 1994 41 a bar mitzvah, for which his paternal grandfather gave him a copy of Das Kapital...
...Why put the Declaration of Principles at more risk...
...Furthermore...
...But it was going to be a long haul...
...I'm trying to say something...
...No violence ever against other Jews, and no violence against Palestinians either...
...Vicky bustled, listened, bit her tongue...
...The bare-headed young rather loudly joking soldiers wipe their mouths and leave to guard the Riskins and their flock as they sleep...
...But since the terrain is difficult, the Dehaishe gauntlet will have to be run for some time to come...
...The Rabin government, while tightening the budgetary screws on all the settlements, is carrying on the work begun under Yitzhak Shamir, and from Efrat you can see the monster earth-movers trailing plumes of blood-colored dust...
...The good Jews whom not only CNN but also the not-so-good Jews of Tel Aviv put down as settlers, as the main impediments to peace in the Middle East, were going to be left to twist in the wind...
...Who needs it...
...n The American Spectator March 1994 45...
...How much democracy, how much theocracy...
...Many skullcapped Israelis do cherish a very different idea from most of their bareheaded countrymen about what the half-formed Jewish state ought to be...
...The old man was "an idealist, and I loved him very much," said the rabbi...
...The bloodier the confusion and the longer this birth takes, the more likely it is that secular Israelis will be persuaded that the deal is not only a sin but a terrible mistake...
...Since then, although new families continue arriving, growth has slowed to a crawl...
...But the government doesn't care...
...Peace might only encourage them to slack off...
...Of course, a few Jewish men are to be found in the municipality offices, minding the video and pizza and variety and grocery stores on the mall, and in front of blackboards teaching the boys in the high school...
...eration have moved to what the Bible calls Judea, Samaria, and Gaza and what mankind, with the exception of some Baptists, agrees is occupied territory...
...The native-born customer picking up something in the photo-cum-video store is unarmed...
...And like the Israeli settlers, the Unionists in Belfast are patriots, loving their queen better than Londoners do...
...This was to be the first step in a pullback from most or all of the land taken in the Six-Day War, and of a process ending no one knows where...
...Nor should autonomy, the interim period, and other such language of the declaration fool anyone...
...If, unlike in other settlements and hanging from some balconies in Israel proper, you see no "RABIN TRAITOR" signs here, it's because even those Efratites who believe that the prime minister should be put on trial wouldn't dream of challenging the founder's approach...
...Like the Jews in this portion of the Land of Israel, the French colons in Algeria felt at home and were repeatedly assured by successive governments in Paris that nothing bad would be allowed to happen' to them...
...It seems that Shlomo Riskin doesn't come of especially Orthodox or Zionist stock...
...Reasonably good business at the supermarket, where a goodlooking young Arab unloads produce and the housewives pushing baby carriages select winter fruit grown around Jericho...
...The Israeli negotiators in Oslo had paid less attention to the infernal details than the rabbi would if he were buying a house...
...Historians say that the local Palestinian villagers during the 1948 fighting did away with as many of the Bloc's defenders as they could and hawked photos of the bodies with sexual parts cut off in Jerusalem...
...For the Krauthammers, the dicey move there was a matter of quality of life and affordability...
...Just wait and see...
...They decided to go ahead tentatively when the contractor said they could put a deposit on their Efrat dream house in escrow for three months, with no obligation...
...Virtually the only adult males in Efrat on weekdays are these Palestinians...
...The Egyptian peace treaty involved returning the Sinai down to the last grain of sand, and razing the settlements built there after the Six-Day War...
...The big city is ten miles distant as the bird flies, its skyline visible over the rocky hills from behind the pre-fabs where the Russians live...
...If you will, he is the Brigham Young of Efrat...
...They learn not only Talmud but chemistry, you'll never hear a curse word in Hebrew, English, or Arabic dropping from their lips, and during recess bobby pins keep their skullcaps from going flying as they play a hard game of basketball...
...The late-night visitor actually found it less difficult than pulling teeth to get the rabbi to declare on the record that if the PLO changed, if the Arabs repented as the Book of Jonah says the Assyrians did, if giving up sovereignty over these disputed territories was the cost of genuine peace, he for one would rethink his position while, of course, staying in Efrat, and it wouldn't be a catastrophe...
...It also springs from and drives a culture war among Jews in their ancient brand-new state...
...Andsure enough, if you interrupt the men at work they will echo him...
...A little girl in a denim skirt kisses her puppy, a mutt...
...If we don't have that right in Judea and Samaria we don't have it in Tel Aviv...
...The rabbi went on: "I would've done it anyway, because I believe Jews have a right to settle anywhere in the Land of Israel...
...Iv A round midnight in the Riskin kitchen...
...Laborites have also begun to split over the morality and wisdom of clearing the settlers from all evacuated territory...
...There is for most Israelis no prospect more dreadful than Jews spilling each others' blood...
...Over the years, a number of Efrat adults and children have gotten their heads broken by rocks thrown from Dehaishe...
...The day after the meeting, the usual Palestinians were continuing to build Efrat...
...Utter respectful quiet for Shlomo Riskin...
...This is a citizens' army where virtually every Israeli Jewish male except the so-called ultra-Orthodox serves three years as a draftee and then at least a month as a reservist annually until all his hair is gray...
...What destination for the peace train if men who still frankly declare that there is no room for a Jewish state in this part of the world get the democratic nod...
...The English of the streets of New York...
...He spoke in Hebrew, although the mother tongue of a good half of his listeners, including the Riskins, was English...
...The 20-something Moti, a distant relation of Charles Krauthammer who like his relative is in the news and opinion business, wears a quite large skullcap at home and at work...
...Once this government has no effective consensus in the street, anything can happen...
...We're 'settlers' for them...
...The loyal colons or Protestants or settlers become a pain in the neck and the man in the street in Paris or London or Tel Aviv has to be encouraged by his government to become even more alienated from the crybabies overseas than he already is...
...The big test will come in the IDF...
...But make no mistake, this group of Efratites was told...
...Staying put was crucial but not enough...
...III / n daylight, you find that the older sections of the elevenyear-old town of Efrat are beginning to look not so raw...
...You come across flowerbeds, lawns, trees big enough to stand on their own...
...0 slo and the Handshake may turn out to be a stroke of genius, or the worst blunder an Israeli government has ever made...
...The anxious confusion ahead is going to strain, even maybe tear apart, the Labor party too, for not all the Laborites are happy about a Palestinian state minutes from Tel Aviv or confident that Israel can abort it...
...These are questions that probably deprive Rabin of sleep...
...The population of his town had quadrupled between the start of the Palestinian uprising in 1987 and the ceremony at the White House...
...Several times daily a military chopper on patrol or ferrying brass thumps overhead...
...There would be a role for everyone...
...T he place-name Efrat pops up in the Bible, usually in connection with Bethlehem, as in the Book of Micah, Chapter 5, Verse 1. Dehaishe never pops up, the Palestinian refugees and their U.N.-administered camps being post-Biblical...
...It's clear, however, that this birth is going to be drawn out and bloody, and that there's no going back even if Netanyahu becomes premier, he wouldn't be able to repudiate Oslo, but only to try to make the best of it...
...Remember never to resist an Israeli soldier...
...A half-shaven Arab grandfather or great-grandfather, a man with a broom who perhaps did not approve of what other villagers did to the bodies of the Jews in 1948, has a transistor strapped to his trashcan-on-wheels...
...The settler activists, never exactly prizeAmericans should not be thunderstruck if Rabin and Arafat jointly announce that, in the interests of peace, they have decided to put the elections off But what standing would Arafat have then...
...Yet there may come a time before the next elections in 1996 at the latest when a referendum on the heart of Zion and the destiny of the settlements there will become more than politic, will be necessary to forestall schism...
...Disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane of New York and Jerusalem, for example, are identifiable by their giant, positively Islamic skullcaps...
...Except that the Jewish crybabies and the Palestinians in the West Bank are not separated from Israel proper by the Mediterranean, the Irish Sea, or any other body of water...
...The Wadi Nis men knock off an hour before sunset, the Efrat commuters anxious or complacent about the future return via Dehaishe, there will be prayers in the mosque and the synagogues, the ever-cheerful Rabbi Riskin will lead an evening Talmud class for grown-ups, the soldiers will enjoy their pizza, a mother will tell her child in English to go to bed and be answered in Hebrew, another day and another night will pass into history...
...As the latter don't believe in anything, as they have lost their nerve and moral compass, he has no doubt who will prevail but it may take more years and meanwhile he finds himself needing to buck up those around him in this community who may be better educated and less stalwart than he is...
...Rabbi Riskin will tell you that relations between Efrat and Wadi Nis are great...
...The debate over Judea and Samaria, which has been going on theoretically since the day after the Six-Day War and is now coming to a boil, has never been only about security, about high ground on this country's mountain ridge and lines of fire and sufficient time to mobilize the reserves for all-out war...
...Rabbi Golan: "Those of us who The American Spectator March 1994 39 think it can't happen to us, that we're moderates, that the Etzion Bloc is too close to Jerusalem for the government to abandon, that the ordinary Israeli loves us any more than he does the 'crazies' in Shiloh or Hebron, is wrong...
...They'd come to Lincoln Square when they were in New York and when I asked them whether I ought to build Efrat here they said yes, because there was a national consensus on keeping the Etzion Bloc...
...Such a country would go out of its way to be different, abnormal if you like, since the Jews are a people commanded to dwell apart forever in order to endure and carry on their divine work...
...Men interested in volunteering for civil disobedience should bring toothbrushes and phylacteries because they were likely to be jailed...
...The most you'll see are decals on windshields stating "THE LAND OF ISRAEL IN DANGER...
...We're not the beautiful people in Tel Aviv...
...They will be the second if at the end of the day the IDF will simply have retreated to a place where the Moslems can more easily continue their generations-long war against the nowdemoralized Jewish state in their midst...
...or "WE'RE NOT MOVING FROM THE GOLAN...
...Short-term, the answer was to put chicken wire over windshields...
...The lending library opens at four and has Kafka in Hebrew and Stephen King in English...
...44 The American Spectator March 1994 winning democrats, claimed that Rabin's one-vote majority in the Knesset gave him no right to sign a future deal with Assad without getting an okay from "the people...
...If it were, they'd be thinking of one of those communes deeper into the ridiculously small West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, where you have to apply for membership and pass ideological muster...
...This is a rather strategic and historically important cluster of Zionist settlements that goes back to before the U.N.'s partition of the country into Jewish and Palestinian states in 1947 and that the Israeli government farther down the negotiating road might balk at leaving...
...The troops wear parkas over their flak jackets...
...Vicky continued: "Non-Moslems in Arab countries are third-class citizens...
...Modern Orthodoxy implies sticking to Jewish law, customs, and Old World tradition and voting Republican, yet going to Harvard and keeping fully abreast of fiber optics, pro basketball, etc...
...Both Vicky, who was brewing decaf and serving cake, and the rabbi, who was telling a visitor something about his childhood, had had the usual full day...
...Call it a failure of nerve, call it the triumph of hope over experience, most Israeli Jews are still going along unenthusiastically with this huge wager...
...Trade with Qatar...
...Actually the high school is a yeshiva, i.e., a religious academy for boys: they and the girls of Efrat, unlike their foul-mouthed secular Israeli counterparts, are segregated at puberty, and the Arabs have broken ground for a rabbinical school...
...The crowd of residents who had answered the call for this meeting was of a type...
...and move to the West Bank settlement of Efrat...
...The Israeli army, by the terms of the Declaration of Principles with Yasir Arafat's wing of the PLO, was supposed to have begun leaving the West Bank town of Jericho and parts of Gaza in mid-December...
...If they have never agreed with Sharon that the settlements are Israel's first line of defense, some Laborites do believe that when swords are beaten into plowshares Jews ought to be able to live in a more or less sovereign Palestine as Arabs live in Israel, and, these Laborites being patriotic, pragmatic Zionists and reserve officers in the army, they fear what could happen if the IDF is ordered to bulldoze Shiloh or Efrat as it did Yamit...
...Call them settlers, call them pioneers, call them suburbanites, call them, as Efrat's chief rabbi Shlomo Riskin is prepared to do, Israeli residents of the disputed territories, call them whatever you like, they could rescue their country...
...Later he discovered Judaism and Zionism, the first in his opinion necessitating the second...
...Few adults, even over where the far left and far right touch, crave a repetition...
...A ruling by an ex-head chaplain of the army to the effect that soldiers could refuse orders to dismantle settlements was going to be the main topic...
...It was too good a deal to refuse...
...Pistols for Sale" is another...
...Spiritually, all parts of the Land of Israel remain holy, the fittest place for a Jew to live, no matter who the temporal ruler...
...The sort of nice home they could buy in Efrat for $163,000 goes for half again as much in a decent neighborhood of Jerusalem...
...They have no tradition of democracy...
...Referendums worldwide usually are passed, the government choosing the wording and timing...
...Efrat is Shlomo Riskin's modem Orthodox baby in the Promised Land...
...Not Jericho, because Jericho is bourgeois, but Gaza is going to explode...
...It was a few hundred far leftists in the 1980s who pioneered conscientious objection in this army by going to jail rather than serving across the Green Line...
...You felt and heard everyone's anger growing as speakers updated the crowd on what the Israeli government was planning for them and for the other 130,000 or so Jews who in the last genshake on the South Lawn of the White House into a PLO state under which Efrat and all the other new settlements of the Biblical Land of Israel would be doomed...
...Or to be more precise, it's over and around it constantly, and every night before the pizza shop closes you'll see a couple of jeeps with chicken wire over their windshields pull up and the bareheaded troops pile out for a Coke and unavoidably kosher Rabbi Riskin has arranged for Earl "The Pearl" Monroe, ex—Knicks star and NBA Hall of Famer, to teach in Efrat's strictly kosher combined basketball, karate, and Talmud summer camp...
...The dogs of Efrat pay no attention, yet when a Red Crescent ambulance wails up the highway with its Arab casualty or casualties of the intifada bound for East Jerusalem, they howl...
...His government was set on translating the paper crafted in Oslo and the infamous handworked out by...
...The customer sings the praises of the rabbi who caused a small uproar in Israel proper by advising believing soldiers to disobey certain orders...
...Well, the quote-unquote settlers and the Arabs are going to make sure that this deal fails...
...But I felt better with everybody's OK...
...his wife Debra is from Seattle...
...They must not be tempted to run away by eventual offers of compensation similar to what evacuees from the ill-starred town of Yamit in the Sinai got a decade before...
...It was absolutely wrong to kill or hurt innocent Arabs or damage their property as a few settlers elsewhere had done...
...It wasn't a question of fashion...
...Day care for working mothers lasts until either one or four in the afternoon...
...Remember this place was created with the help and blessings of the Israeli government...
...Because in his opinion the deal with Arafat and especially the dismantling of settlements put Jewish lives in danger, he'd agree that soldiers who obey religious laws, like his own two sons, have the right and duty to refuse such orders if ever they are given, but only if they are prepared to go to jail and "do not lift a hand" against the Israel Defense Forces...
...The West Bank and Gaza pioneers really all live on an archipelago in a sea of ever-more-assertive Palestinians...
...Seeking Nursemaid" is one of the notices...
...The rabbi answered that he hadn't given it a thought...
...The current population [of Efrat] represents every age group, the religious and the secular...
...Furthermore," the rabbi said, "this puts the fate of the country in the balance...
...Non-violent resistance, sweet reason, and moderation are Shlomo Riskin's bywords...
...Crybabies, Rabin had called them...
...Elsewhere someone has on Channel 7, the religious channel of Israel Radio, and the Hebrew song you hear it broadcasting more than once in every 24-hour period this winter is a bouncy number entitled, "Here Comes the Messiah...
...It gets cold at night here in the Judean Hills...
...Vicky...
...His faction may be outvoted in both places by the Islamicists and the Rejection Front of George Habash and Company...
...Everyone agrees that Judea and Samaria with Jerusalem in the middle constitute the heart of old Zion...
...They will turn out to be the first if, Palestinian state or no Palestinian state, they force the other Arab states into a race to make peace with the Zionists...
...But the further step they were considering now wasn't a matter of nationalism, religious or otherwise...
...In the disorder and near-panic that Vicky Riskin foresees, it is hardly imaginable that Rabin will be able to govern with a one-vote Knesset majority...
...A healthy suspicion...
...Volunteers were needed for all kinds of things...
...A Palestinian state, with everything it entails, was in the offing...
...Vicky...
...It was an emergency action get-together, and in the Multi-Purpose Room of the main synagogue the angst of those who had come, the fury and determination not to be moved, were sliceable with a knife...
...From Bethlehem these stonemasons and carpenters and sub-contractors with their own cement-mixers come, from Hebron and Kefar Aroub and especially from the village of Wadi Nis, whose vineyards abut Efrat's tennis courts and whose minaret tops a nearby hill...
...Around dawn, the call to prayer from Wadi Nis's minaret...
...What are we here for...
...Anyway, nearer still to Efrat you have the sprawl of Bethlehem, once Christian, now primarily Moslem...
...Watchful and jolly, a fleshy man with a very healthy color who looks unrabbinically lowbrow due to the placement of what appear to be hair transplants, he simply posed the question in Hebrew, food for thought, whether any splits had opened up yet in the Labor party, Rabin's party...
...Or rather, he knew the Etzion Bloc was in territory the world considered occupied, but everybody who counted in Israeli politics had flashed him the green light...
...The wall phone rang...
...Yet even bareheaded Likud politicians like Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, who deplore Oslo while squabbling among themselves, and eat what they please when not dining with their skullcapped allies, know their Likudniks and Israelis in general well enough to play up the military risks of the Labor deal with Arafat, not the Bible...
...Israeli males who obey religious law, that is...
...Provided they stayed put and moved heaven and earth, they could still open the eyes of their fellow Israelis, bring down the government, and save both their own homes and the whole endangered Zionist enterprise...
...Moti and Debra had called up Shlomo Riskin himself and he had advised them that no one could make up their minds for them...
...No hanging out with the yeshiva boys...
...The larger his knitted skullcap, the more apt the man or boy is to energize his religion with nationalism and vice versa, and to view the world in terms of good Jews, bad Jews, and goyim...
...Of coursehe prays for the Israeli-PLO deal to collapse, because, as he told his bare-headed visitor, to appease a violent man like Arafat is to hasten the next war...
...As easy-going as Efrat is compared with many other settlements, it's Rabbi Riskin's baby, and the sameness of its self-selected population illustrates the following truth: the God-fearing minority among the Ashkenazi Jews of Israel and the Diaspora are the ones who have staked their all on the proposition that henceforth only Jews must be sovereign in the very heart of the land promised to them in the Bible...
...I can't conceive of being Jewish in our times and not joining the adventure of Israel...
...Of the 900 families in the growing town of Efrat, only a minority were represented here tonight...
...The analogy, in other words breaks down over two facts—one historic, the other brutally geographic...
...But for the most part the men of Efrat leave for Jerusalem six mornings a week to earn a living for the family...
...Because it is made of velvet, because its colorful pattern is as bright as a Caucasian rug, and because it is shaped like a Zambian musician's pillbox, it conveys nothing so much as relaxation...
...Every child knows without having read the traitorous Flavius Josephus that the last time the Jews had a civil war, they lost this country and their political independence for nineteen centuries...
...Lots of children, lots of dogs barking exclusively at Arabs...
...A spanking new gymnasium was funded by the lottery and by Jim and Mary Pattison, goyim based in Vancouver...
...A bunch of political science professors...
...Nor about the fact that Efrat, "one of the most sought-after communities in Israel," has until now been left even by the governments of Menachem Begin and Shamir as a kind of extraterritorial island or enclave or pocket outside the Jewish state...
...Relations with the Vatican...
...Efratites suffering from false confidence had to be educated, he said, and then recruited for this planned open-ended campaign of demonstrations and propaganda offensives in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and especially Israel proper...
...The army is here...
...Much depends on how much disorder there is, what humble gifts the bareheaded politicians reveal, and who among the rabbis exerts the most authority over people whose trust is supposed to be in God...
...The soldier in the field is not our enemy," Golan concluded...
...Why had he come to this side of the Green Line when he ascended, when he fulfilled the religious obligation to settle the Land of Israel...
...Until that road is finished, though, he, Debra and the kids will be living in Jerusalem...
...The store carries Sex, Lies and Videotape, Citizen Kane, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Scent of a Woman, Ghostbusters, King Lear, but no porn...
...Our boys serve in it...
...Between 1948 and 1967 the armistice line, the so-called Green Line between the West Bank of the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan and the miraculously resurrected Jewish state, was threaded between Jesus' birthplace and Jerusalem, and maybe that is where the Israeli-Palestinian border is going to be drawn for the millennium...
...The one between the believing and the nonbelieving or secular Jews...
...But the Arabs hadn't changed .. . Vicky: "That's right...
...Rabbi Riskin covered his face with his hands...
...He warned against a couple of tendencies...
...Like a good Jewish wife, she does without makeup and, because a married woman's hair is to be seen only by her mate, covers it with a baggy sort of wool cap...
Vol. 27 • March 1994 • No. 3
