On a particularly sad Thursday afternoon in August 2005, as I was looked through the window of the bus carrying away the evicted residents of the destroyed Gush Katif settlement of Kfar Darom, I saw one woman who was desperately banging on the glass. A short while later, the driver pulled over and one of the soldiers on the bus went outside and grabbed a patch of dirt in his hand, and returned to the bus, giving the hysterical woman the soil in order to console her. It was only at that moment that the evicted settlers grew quiet. The dozens of men, women and children who were forced from their homes in the Gaza settlements were on their way to Kfar Maimon, the first stop in a long, tortuous road to rehabilitation. A month earlier, I visited Kfar Maimon. At the time, Kfar Maimon embodied the last bit of hope, the final saving grace -- which later turned out to be unrealistic -- that the eviction could be averted at the last minute. Approximately 40,000 protesters turned out for the "March of Engagement," seeking to reach Gush Katif. Ultimately, they were blocked by police and military cordon. The march and demonstration took up just about every patch of dirt and grass that was available there. The protesters believed that Kfar Maimon was just a temporary way station before they reached their ultimate destination. They were hopeful that the government would capitulate to the tens of thousands who had amassed there, and that Gush Katif would not be evacuated. Instead, they were hit with a cold dose of reality. At dawn on the morning of Tuesday, July 19, 2005, this group of tens of thousands of working men and women who left their homes, their jobs, and their children found themselves surrounded by 20,000 police officers and soldiers, deployed in seven circles around this small community. Hovering in the air above them were two police Bell 206 helicopters, one light surveillance aircraft, and a blimp that was also launched to monitor traffic throughout the area. These were 48 dramatic hours, during which a civil war was averted. All the non-parliamentary right-wing leadership was there -- the heads of the Yesha Council of settlements in Judea and Samaria, the rabbis, the Gush Katif municipal council heads, and Anat Roth, a young girl from Jerusalem who once worked as a field observer for Peace Now. Roth was raised on the ideology of the Labor Party. In the past she had worked for prominent Labor figures like Ehud Barak, Amram Mitzna and Matan Vilnai. During the protest, she was "captive" to the constant stream of media reports on the latest developments. At the time, she equated the situation to a standoff between two armies, just waiting for the opening salvo that would start the battle. "The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife," she said. "I was certain that the clash would erupt at any moment, but to my immense astonishment, I saw the battered, humiliated demonstrators hugging soldiers, displaying superhuman restraint and obeying their leadership, albeit in shock and pain. Two days later, everything dissipated. People went back home." "During those 48 hours in Kfar Maimon, it hit me like a bolt of lightning," Roth says. "I promised myself that I would solve the riddle." "A fissure, not a victory" Nine years after the traumatic eviction from Gush Katif, Roth has compiled her findings into a 631-page tome entitled "Lo b'khol m'khir" ("Not at Any Price"). Roth, who went on to earn a doctorate, stayed abreast of the disengagement process step by step by dint of her position as a researcher with the Israel Democracy Institute. She took part in meetings and discussions with disengagement opponents. She had a first-hand, front-row seat to all of the tempestuous arguments and raging debates, bouts of screaming, and tears. She says that she has "cracked the genetic code of adherence to statesmanlike behavior as espoused by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and the moral compass that prevented a civil war from breaking out in Kfar Maimon." "It came very close [to civil war]," Roth said this week. "There was a very high potential for bloodshed. A tiny spark could have ignited everything and all hell could have broken loose." To understand how the pieces of the puzzle came together, one needed to refer back to the dozens of meetings and discussions that preceded the events, most of which were held behind closed doors. Some of these meetings were held in the offices of the Yesha Council, some took place in the home of Rabbi Avraham Shapira in Jerusalem. Anyone who compares Roth's conclusions as spelled out in her book with the prophecies of doom and rage that were propagated by journalists in the run-up to, and during, the final eviction will feel a sense of embarrassment. That's because the gaps between them are enormous. We know now that the settler leadership knew it had no way of defeating the State of Israel. Some settler leaders even believed at the time that they shouldn't even try to achieve such a victory. "We could apply tremendous pressure on the state," one of the main settler leaders in the Yesha Council, Ze'ev (Zambish) Hever, told his colleagues. "But at the end of the day, we will not break it. We are not going for broke. It is impossible to redeem the land of Israel at the price of defeating the people of Israel and cutting them up into pieces. There's no such victory. That's not victory. That's something totally different ... a fissure." "Our struggle is limited by the fact that we took upon ourselves the responsibility of not exacerbating the tensions and setting off a civil war," Rabbi Zalman Melamed, a cleric considered by some to be an extremist, said at the time. "We are also responsible for the people of Israel," said Pinhas Wallerstein, who at the time served as the head of the Binyamin Regional Council. "Even if we feel betrayed, we mustn't go for broke." "If you go for broke and break the people of Israel, you have no chance of ever reaching the land of Israel," said Bentzi Lieberman, who at the time served as head of the Yesha Council. Preparations for the March of Engagement began many months before the disengagement. Its goal was to bring tens of thousands of people to Gush Katif in efforts to severely hinder, perhaps even to entirely sabotage, the eviction process, though there would be no violence. Most of the disengagement opponents were comfortable with going through with the protest, but the more moderate wing of the settler leadership had its doubts. "We are not going up against a Roman caesar," said Rabbi Yigal Ariel. "It would be a great disaster if the state was unable do what it set out to do." "The public in Israel will not forgive us for getting in the way of the IDF and for canceling decisions passed by the government and the Knesset," said Shaul Goldstein, the Gush Katif Regional Council chief. "They will hate us for the fact that the settlers, a small minority, is changing history. Then the master destruction plan will be enacted and we will lose all of Judea and Samaria." "No pushing soldiers" The moderates who favored a more conciliatory approach were faced with their own internal opposition. Michael Puah, the director general of the Jewish Leadership faction, castigated the Yesha leadership. According to Puah, the moderates' insistence on looking at the State of Israel as the be-all and end-all was no less an act of "idolatry." Rabbi Dudi Dudkevitch, the chief rabbi of Yitzhar, drew his own borders, which were completely unacceptable to the mainstream settler community. "Wherever there is friction between the Torah and the state, we must perform the biggest mitzvah for the sake of the state and subjugate it before the Torah," he said. "It is not to go against the state, but to do something for the sake of the state." "The IDF behaved like a Jewish army with a gentile head," Dudkevitch would later tell Roth. "Since the hands were attached to the body that is Israel, we couldn't fight it like we would fight a foreign army. On the other hand, I would've been ready to accept harming my own body, for me to be harmed, if it would advance the struggle." Dudkevitch accurately and succinctly phrased the question that needed to be answered. "Do I want to defeat the state? Do I want to bring it to submission? Do I want to bring the state to a point where it will be incapable of doing what it wants to do? In my view, this is the biggest mitzvah, but some of the heads of Yesha view this as the worst violation of their inner soul. In their minds, it is forbidden to defeat the state, because the state is the biggest expression of God in this generation, and it mustn't be defeated." At the end of March 2005, all attempts to thwart the disengagement through political means failed. Now the struggle was going to be waged on the ground. The limits and boundaries of that struggle were drawn up by the settler leadership, though not without bitter argument. Now these boundaries were about to be tested. The major sticking point revolved around the nature and character of the march. The Yesha Council believed that the main purpose of the march was to score points in public opinion, with the end-goal being to throw the ball back in the Knesset's court in hopes that the law would be struck down. Among the more militant factions in the settler leadership, however, the herding of masses of people into Gush Katif was entirely operational. For three months, the debate went back and forth. Then, finally, on June 21, Zviki Bar-Hai, the head of the Hebron Hills Regional Council who also served as the director of the Yesha Council's operational staff, said that he had cobbled together a coalition of settlers that ranged from (militant) Yitzhar to (super-diplomatic) Atzmona. Nine days later, then GOC Southern Command Dan Harel declared that the Gaza Strip would be "a closed military zone." In response, the Yesha Council announced that zero hour had come, and it was time to embark on the March of Engagement. On July 3, the plan was presented to the former chief rabbi of Israel and the head rabbi of the Mercaz Harav yeshiva, Avraham Shapira, down to the tiniest detail. His modest apartment in the heart of the Kiryat Moshe quarter of Jerusalem was too small to host the dozens of settler leaders involved in the discussions. "The moderates" who were fearful of "defeating the state by force" expressed their view that once the security forces denied the marchers permission to move forward, the protesters were to make do and sit on the ground while refusing to move. On the other hand, the more militant stream lobbied the rabbi to endorse their strategy of continuing to move forward even if the security forces order them to halt. They were convinced that the elderly rabbi, who in the past supported the refusal of military orders to evacuate settlements, would support their position. Shapira, however, had a surprise in store for them. The rabbi unequivocally stated that marching toward a soldier who is standing his position, even if this is done with hands tied, is a form of violence "that is not the way of the Torah." His son, Rabbi Ya'akov Shapira, challenged him. "Maybe on the inside the soldier wants us to push him," he said, prompting immediate censure from his father. "How do you know what is inside a soldier-" the elderly cleric said. "There will be no pushing soldiers!" In hindsight, the discussion at Shapira's apartment was for all intents and purposes the moment in which the struggle at Kfar Maimon was decided. Shapira went beyond these statements. He appointed a small panel comprising three rabbis, tasked with closely monitoring the movements and actions of the settler leadership on the ground. He authorized them to be the arbiters of any moral or halachic dilemmas, should they arise. The three-man team would be headed by Rabbi Haim Drukman, who represents the moderate mainstream of the settler movement and who was also the head of the Bnei Akiva network of yeshivas. The contrarian position would be represented by Dudkevitch, the de facto leader of the hilltop youth. The third spot on the panel would be held by Rabbi Reuven Netanel, the chief rabbi of the settlement of Atzmona, which was located in Gush Katif. Atzmona was a settlement comprising moderates who had based their struggle on the catchphrase "With love, we will win." The Yesha Council, as Roth first revealed, began establishing a unit of "special agents" that would walk around amongst the demonstrators and remove anyone seen committing acts of violence. The agents would also be assigned the task of spotting any provocateurs who were planted in the crowd by the security forces in efforts to delegitimize the protest. The news media, which failed to report on the goings-on behind the scenes, anticipated something completely different. Haaretz was reporting that the IDF high command anticipated hundreds of wounded in what was sure to be a violent confrontation. Maariv columnist Ben Caspit observed that "we are in the midst of a clash of civilizations: there is the secular-democratic and statesmanlike approach which recognizes the basic rules of the game, and then there is the messianic, Torah-inspired approach that operates on the whims of rabbis at the expense of anything else.
There is a sizable constituency here of people who prefer a religious-halachic state over a state of law." Journalist Moshe Gorali posited that "these people are the direct continuation of the Jewish zealots [from the Second Temple period who incited the Jews of Judea to rebel against the Roman Empire]. These people are ready, in the name of their faith, to destroy the Jewish commonwealth and bring it down on top of all our heads." "These armed militias pose a challenge to the government's capability to exercise its authority on us," commentator Uzi Benziman wrote. Yesha leaders believed that their march would be halted near Kissufim junction, near the entrance to Gush Katif. They were wrong. Roth reveals in her book that then-police chief Moshe Karadi and then-IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz had estimated that if 10,000 demonstrators were allowed to reach Gush Katif, it would severely jeopardize the evacuation. Karadi took the appropriate action in light of these assessments. On July 17, at 11:00 p.m., he summoned the heads of the Yesha council to a meeting, during which he informed them that the police were now revoking the permit that they had previously granted to hold the march. That night, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered his underlings to enlist thousands of additional soldiers to help the police stop the marchers in their tracks. The police then made a decision that earned it censure from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, no less, blocking 320 of the 650 buses that the Yesha Council had ordered to transport demonstrators to the march. At that point, masses of people were marching toward Netivot. Thousands were making the kilometers-long journey to the town, where a rally was scheduled to be held. When the rally ended, the marchers resumed their journey, this time toward Gush Katif. Deep into the night, just two kilometers before Kfar Maimon, the police halted their movement. The next day, after waking up from a brief sleep, the tens of thousands of protesters realized that they were now surrounded by a massive presence of police and soldiers. Within half-an-hour, the procession was making its way toward Kfar Maimon. Some even began to run. In Kfar Maimon, the demonstrators were surrounded by an even larger contingent of security forces. In the afternoon hours, a few dozen demonstrators confronted police, who responded with tremendous violence. The Yesha council leaders who tried to step in between the protesters and the officers were themselves beaten by police. Zambish suffered a broken rib. Lieberman also was beaten badly. In large part, though, the settlers and their supporters maintained restraint and opted not to respond to the violence. Roth said this week that the settler leadership's efforts to maintain calm and patience among the crowd of tens of thousands of demonstrators were no small feat. She said that the leadership was a voluntary one, and they were at the helm of a constituency that comprised people from across the religious Zionist spectrum. "There were those who thought that they needed to break through the blockade with force," she said. "There was also a problem in communicating with the masses of people. The whole atmosphere was very charged and tense, and it threatened to spin out of control at any minute." "It was an unbelievable sight," Drukman said. "So many people, women and children gathered together out of a sense of idealism, leaving their homes and their jobs to come there. It was something rare, something tremendous." The coterie of advisors surrounding Sharon did not share Drukman's opinion. Journalists and commentators, some of whom were prepped in advance, portrayed the settlers as a dangerous, violent, savage, law-breaking minority that was motivated by zealotry. According to this narrative, the well-being of the state mandated that this minority be brought to heel at any price. "A mob is threatening to topple the State of Israel," wrote Ha'aretz. "This march is entirely one of prayer, the prayer of tens of thousands from among this nation, asking for kindness from the heavens," said Hanan Porat. The press did not believe him. In her book, Roth highlights clippings and quotes that are particularly vicious and demonic. There are simply too many to count. All of these descriptions, however, turned out to have no basis in fact. The absolute majority of demonstrators in Kfar Maimon were IDF reservists, Roth said. Many of them had close friends and even family members -- some in the first degree -- on the other side of the fence. They viewed the soldiers as their own flesh and blood, and their love and appreciation for the IDF was evident. "Some of the youths," the journalist Avishai Ben Haim noted at the time, "were 'armed' with guitars, flutes, and love." Swan song The throng, nevertheless, was anxious to break through the barriers. It didn't occur to anyone that this would entail violence or bloodshed. Instead, it waited for the settler leadership to give the signal to move forward. The leadership, on the other hand, understood the situation. "We knew that Arik (Ariel) Sharon had ordered the security forces to shut this whole thing down at any price," Lieberman would later say. In a late-night meeting, the settler leadership began to seriously consider the option of waging a battle of attrition against the security forces. There wouldn't be an attempt to break through the barriers, but to tire out the soldiers and police. By the morning, however, this option became moot. The infrastructure at Kfar Maimon had collapsed. The local market was emptied out, and there was no option of restocking supplies. The water and sewage systems completely collapsed, and there was a very real danger of pollution and illness. The Kfar Maimon community leaders who so generously opened their homes and their hearts to the demonstrators were now asking them to leave immediately. Hundreds of people were huddled up in every private garden. Hundreds of people lined up just to use a shower or restroom. By 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday, there were two viable options left. The demonstrators could either break through the fences of the village -- which is what they expected to do -- or the protest march could be called off and everyone would be told to go home. In a secret meeting held by the leadership, most of the participants believed that any attempt by the protesters to barge through the fence would result in hundreds of deaths, the dissolution of the military, a societal chasm, and, eventually, civil war. "It would lead to bloodshed within just two minutes," MK Nissan Slomiansky said. In her book, Roth writes: "After over 18 months of conflict and struggle, during which the Yesha Council managed to walk a tightrope -- waging a determined public battle while making sure it doesn't spin out of control toward physical or verbal violence -- the moment arrived when they could no longer combine the two." The decision was made. There would be no storming of the fences. The only one who dissented from this decision was Dudkevitch, although he did accept the will of the majority. "I thought that we needed to pay any price so that this thing would not be allowed to come to pass, but with one reservation," he said. "We also could not, under any circumstances, raise our hands against another person and hit another person. That would set off a terrible civil war. On the other hand, I was willing for them to bust our heads, or to shoot at us, anything!" The other settler leaders did not agree with Dudkevitch. They thought that there was no way they should sanction "walking into an iron wall." Drukman wasn't convinced that breaking through the gates by force would stop the disengagement "These are childish imaginations," he said. "Stopping the state by force is not an option," Lieberman said. "The main reason that the decision was made not to storm the gates was due to moral and religious considerations," Roth said. "The main consideration was the sanctity of the state. Once there was a clear realization that storming the fences was liable to lead to a civil war and would inflict damage on the army while harming national unity and the state, it was clear to almost everyone that this is the red line." The major problem was justifying this decision to a constituency that had grown accustomed to hearing a different tune from its leadership. The assembled crowds wanted the march to continue onwards. The discussions convened by the leadership were held behind closed doors. The brave, moral decisions that were made were also kept secret. On Wednesday, the leaders took a step that sewn even more confusion among their masses. It had agreed to Porat's proposal to create a diversion. On the one hand, the leaders would announce that the march was going forward. On the other hand, it would put out fictitious announcements claiming to have organized a 1,500-person force that would individually infiltrate Gush Katif. Even the rabbinical council that took place that day in Kfar Maimon fell victim to the diversion. In the evening hours, tens of thousands of marchers were resuming -- unbeknownst to them -- their faux protest from inside the fence. They had no idea they were being used as pawn in a diversionary tactic. Netanel feared that some of the protesters would try to barge through the fence, contrary to what was decided. As a result, he ordered a group of young men to serve as a buffer between the marchers and the security forces. "The orange YASAM," Dudkevitch referred to them, a reference to the Israeli riot police unit. Two hours after it began, the procession was suddenly halted. No explanation was given to the mass of people. Toward 11:00 p.m., the confused crowd was finally told by Lieberman that "the current chapter is over." "We will, drop by drop, reach Gush Katif, and in another two weeks there will be 10,000 people there," Lieberman said in an attempt to assuage the demonstrators. The optimism and sense of potency among the protesters had now given way to deep disappointment and disgust. Some were now being to make angry statements critical of the settler leadership. "Shame," "You bamboozled us," were among the chants. Even the "infiltration force" was a total failure. Just 150 managed to make their way to Gush Katif. This was the swan song of the struggle against the mass eviction. Three weeks later, Gush Katif was evacuated. Though it was tense and highly emotional, there was almost no resistance. The residents of the "super-diplomatic" Gush Katif settlements (as Roth characterized them) adhered to their moderate ways, believing until the end that "with love, we will win." Between Rabbi Kook and Ariel Sharon Judging by the results, this was a resounding failure. At least that is what I told Roth, having witnessed the events first-hand. The moderate approach as embodied by "with love we will win" failed. Roth, however, prefers to look at it in a different way. "[Love] wasn't enough to win given the forces that were lined up against it," she said. "The conclusion is that in the future, in order for this not to happen again, there will be a need to create additional tools, and those tools have indeed been created. There is the large political force that has been created by virtue of the merging of parties [into Habayit Hayehudi], and, of course, the debunking of the negative image of the settlements and the settlers and their violent and threatening reputation." "'With love we will win' was not a tactic, but an essence, an internal philosophy that was formulated and derived from the teachings of Rabbi Kook, who believed that love and faith should be at the root of public behavior. It eschewed violence completely. Violence is illegitimate not just because it won't achieve anything, but also because of the damage it causes." "Contrary to the public image of the settlers, the land of Israel is not the only value nor is it the supreme value that they hold dear," she said. "The integrity of the land of Israel is a sanctified value, but so is the integrity of the state and the nation. This statesmanlike philosophy, which finds practical expression in the fact that, for better or worse, we are part of this country and that what needs to be fixed should be done from within, is rooted in the religious education that is taught from a young age." "So, even in places where the leadership wasn't present, violence did not break out. That is also the reason that the calls made by some people to disengage from the state after the disengagement did not really gain traction." Roth said that her most potent experience from the disengagement was realizing the tremendous gap between perception and reality. "When I started the research, I held the view, that was mainstream among the research community as well as the public at large, that the settlers were an extremist, dangerous, and violent constituency that was ready to fight at any price over keeping the Greater Land of Israel whole," she said. "To my astonishment, I discovered that there is a huge gap between perception and reality. As was proven in Kfar Maimon -- and then, later on, during the evacuation of the outpost of Amona -- this is a responsible, moderate constituency." After the disengagement, Roth's political views changed. Today, she opposes the two-state solution. Her lifestyle has also changed. Now she is religiously observant. "I grew up in a very Zionist household," she said. "It was a household that is very much connected not only to the land of Israel but also to the Jewish tradition, so the roots were always there. But the decision to adopt a religious lifestyle was made in recent years after I began to more intimately study the teachings of Rabbi Kook and after I came into closer contact with the people who live according to those teachings."
