More Heat Than Light

...Certainly, there is much to bemoan in Israel's policy over that time, and Friedman's moral outrage at the settlers' aggressive tactics and ambitious agenda is shared by many people of goodwill...

...No doubt Likud will one day return to power, but it will be a different entity, facing circumstances that are not of its own making...

...and second, to vent his own shock and rage at their excesses...

...American Jews must perpetually tack between the winds blowing out of Washington and Jerusalem, while every Israeli government, Left or Right, expects them to do its bidding...

...Friedman delights in focusing on the settlers' personal odysseys and physical characteristics??one woman, we are told in a fairly typical passage, "was plump, but not as overweight as some of the other women I saw...

...I had hoped to encounter somebody like myself or one of my friends in the pages of this book, but he was nowhere to be found...

...If only it were that simple...

...As time went on, I noticed that some of my friends had similar questions and, though we entertained few illusions about Arab intentions toward Israel, one by one we eventually broke with Gush Emunim, more in sorrow than in anger...

...they emerge, instead, as exotic human fauna...

...A hefty chunk of Zealots for Zion is devoted to the network of American supporters of the settlers and of Israel generally...

...and Israel...

...Rather, they are supporting players in the U.S.-Israel pas de deux...

...Israel's political culture is the product of a heady, uneven mix of national sentiment, Socialist universalism and Jewish moral-ism, formed in the confusing, sometimes hopeful, often murderous whirl of the past century...

...Chief among these is Rabbi Yehudah Amital, one of Gush Emunim's early mentors who subsequently went on to initiate a religious peace movement and run for the Knesset as a candidate in favor of territorial compromise...

...His purpose appears to be twofold: first, to study the West Bank settlers??those determined activists who have managed to push events in unexpected directions and may pose a threat to the current peace process...

...No mention is made, for example, of the key role resettling the land has played in Zionism...

...Kook was by no means the only Orthodox thinker to reckon with modern intellectual currents...

...In a kind of semiotic collision, I was listening to Mozart and had been reading an essay by Isaiah Berlin on Johann Herder, the father of modern nationalism...

...Its roots lie in the ideas of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of modern Palestine, who laid the intellectual foundations of religious Zionism...

...Kook died in 1935, well before the establishment of the State of Israel and 32 years before the 1967 Six Day War placed the Biblical heartlands of Judea and Samaria (aka the West Bank aka the occupied territories) into Israeli hands...

...Both Gush Emunim and Peace Now are the heirs of that Zionist tradition, making their polemics all the more pained and bitter...

...The PLO only enters the narrative when it accepts a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict in late 1988 (nearly a quarter century after its inception), and other Palestinians are barely taken up...

...Although Friedman approvingly cites a monograph by Israel's foremost defense analyst, Ze'ev Schiff, advocating Israeli disengagement from the Palestinians, he scants the related concerns addressed in Schiff's lengthy work, specifically the necessary linking of territorial compromise to effective security arrangements...

...Reality is far more complicated...

...What distinguished him was his openness not just to modern thought but to the experience of modernity...

...The take-no-prisoners style of some American partisans of Israel may indeed be uncalled for...

...While to most of Kook's rabbinic peers the avowedly secular Zionist project was at best a helpful expedient and at worst an outright heresy, he saw Zionism as the initial step toward the redemption of the Jewish people and, through their creation of a model society in Palestine, of the world...

...And how is it that American Jews, so liberal in their own political views, supported a Right-wing Israeli government...

...What Begin did at Camp David, Friedman says, was "bribe the Egyptians by giving them a separate peace...

...In addition, two important questions linger: How did Orthodox Jews, historically quiescent, become so militant in the furtherance of Likud's territorial ambitions...

...The time is ripe, in other words, for an initial assessment of Likud's tenure, and in particular of the impact its settlement policies have had on the prospects for peace in the Middle East...

...Friedman has spent many hours in their company, which he recounts vividly and at times insightfully...

...Despite my enthusiasm then for Rabbi Kook's dazzling theology, I could not help thinking that something was wrong here...

...But one can hardly condemn American Jews for not asking their government to bear down on the Jewish State, especially since there seemed until recently to be little willingness among the Arabs (apart from Egypt) to openly accept that state's existence??with or without the occupied territories...

...Sadly, Robert Friedman does little to answer these questions...

...To Kook's keenly dialectical mind, the quasi-religious impulses motivating the young, idealistic Socialists who emigrated to Palestine (such as David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir) represented not a negation of Judaism but rather a broadening of Judaism's religious message to encompass modern politics, society and culture...

...Reviewed by Yehudah Mirsky Publications Director, Washington Institute for Near East Policy...

...In Friedman's view, American Jewry has been hijacked by a quasifascistic leadership...

...Zealots for Zion largely consists of a series of portraits of members of Gush Emunim (The Bloc of the Faithful), a group of Orthodox activists who arose after the 1973 Yom Kippur War to claim the pioneering mantle from their dispirited Socialist elders...

...Kook, a rare combination of jurist, poet, activist, and mystic, was steeped in the Lurianic school of Jewish mysticism (named after its founder, a 16th-century divine named Isaac Luria), which interpreted the exile of the Jewish people as a metaphor for God's exile from the world...

...He has done a fine job of documenting the personal and institutional links among various groups in the U.S...

...Yet here, too, his critique is less than helpful...

...Missing above all from this book is the most interesting side of Gush Emunim, its intellectual underpinnings...

...In his depiction, the Israelis of Gush Emunim on the one hand and Peace Now on the other inhabit separate mental universes ??the one suffused with fire-breathing nationalism, the other all sweetness and light...

...During last year's loan guarantee imbroglio, they could not convince then Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir to ease up on settlement expansion, nor could they face down a determined President George Bush...

...Their room to maneuver has been set by the Israeli political landscape of the past 15 years...

...Readers in search of that information should consult Ehud Sprinzak's The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right...

...The great irony of Gush Emunim and of Orthodox Jewish activism on its behalf is that its very openness to current notions of politics and the nation-state has paradoxically fostered a distinct kind of illiberalism...

...Yet he does not use his portraiture to capture these people as the stubborn and maddeningly effective political actors they have been...

...But the latter ultimately drowns out the former, with the result that he generates more rhetorical heat than analytic light...

...But that is not the whole story...

...But he cannot see past his anger and disgust to offer useful criticism...

...Incredibly, there is not a single reference to Hanan Porat, one of Gush Emunim's preeminent leaders, while other key figures, like Benny Katzover, Daniella Weiss and Yoel Bin-Nun, are mentioned merely in passing...

...As he has it, the ADL is the JDL is AIPAC is UJA is anybody who ever had a kind word for Menachem Begin...

...Israel's American supporters are not Jerusalem's puppets...

...As I looked into the eyes of the Palestinian men, some of them old enough to be my grandfather, I saw anger, intimidation and sheer boredom...

...The settler movement gained further impetus from a mounting sense among Israelis that the idealism of early Labor Zionism was a spent force, a perception that helped deliver the Prime Minister's office to Menachem Begin in 1977...

...Some of Kook's latter-day disciples interpret his affirmation of modern politics precisely as a disavowal of pseudo-Messianism, be it nationalist, militarist or pacifist...

...The forthcomingness to him of individuals he strongly dislikes is impressive testimony to his skills as an interviewer and reporter...

...His son and successor, Zvi Yehudah, became Gush Emunim's chief authority and eminence grise, urging his disciples to settle the territories...

...Missing, also, is a historical or diplomatic context (as well as source notes...

...He says remarkably little about their methods of organization, lobbying and settlement techniques, relationship to their political leadership, or ideology...

...contributor, "Economist," "Jerusalem Report," "Washington Monthly" The owl of Minerva has spread her wings over Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir's Likud Party...

...On a drizzly afternoon in the winter of 1979, I stood and checked the identity cards of Palestinian day laborers at the entrance to Alon Shvut, a settlement on the West Bank...

...Between these two competing interpretations of Kook's legacy lie many variations, which Friedman does not explore, along with sincere questioning and self-doubt...

...Its electoral loss to Shimon Peres and Yitzchak Rabin's Labor Party last June, andthestriking policy changes Labor has since initiated, mark the end of a strange and difficult chapter not only in the history of Israel and Zionism, but in the evolution of Jewish thought and praxis...

...And aside from a few paragraphs about the yuppie mayor of one town, there is hardly any discussion of the vast number of settlers who are not part of the Gush movement, who are apolitical or even Leftists drawn to the area by conventional suburban aspirations...