A few years ago, a friend at work was looking for an apartment in the young town of Modi’in for his future bride and himself. “Are the religious neighborhoods there nice?” I asked him, assuming that he would prefer such a neighborhood. He earned my lasting admiration when he told me that he wasn’t looking for a home in a religious neighborhood. He wanted his children to live in mixed society, secular and religious together, so that they would know the society they lived in. This was extremely important for him.

Bambi Sheleg always strikes me as a wise person. An important article by her appeared in this weekend’s Maariv (Hebrew link). I hope that as many as possible from her own camp, the National Religious camp, will be able to read it and understand it, for it is painfully true.

If they read it, really read it, with open minds, they will perhaps be able to begin to understand why the majority of ordinary Israelis, while feeling empathy for the pain of people being torn from their homes, find it so very difficult to relate to the religious settlers and their current campaign; why the truth is that deep down inside many don’t really give a damn about them.

For some reason I can’t find it in Maariv’s NRG online version (Hebrew link). I have translated a few excerpts (Hebrew link). It’s not a very good translation but I feel that the message is so very important it must be said. I hope Ms. Sheleg can forgive me.

Ms. Sheleg describes the changes in the National Religious camp in the years that followed the Yom Kippur War. She says they began to truly believe that they were carrying the banner of the Jewish People. This was because they hadn’t forgotten the Torah and its values; because they were more modest, filled with faith. The traumatic effect of the Yom Kippur War on the leading stratum of Israeli society until then did not touch the National Religious. On the contrary, Ms. Sheleg claims, the war strengthened them.

“Thus began, in fact, the great inner disengagement of the Religious Zionism. This disengagement had many facets: On the one hand it strengthened our sector in Israeli public life in a really amazing way. We built splendid communities, large families, our people became involved in all the life systems in Israel: In the academia, in the media, in the army, in politics, everywhere. Our various education systems … became much stronger, because they received far more funding than the regular state education system and because so many of us regarded and continue to regard the issue of education as of premier importance …

[…]

But this isolating of ourselves, along with a deep inner feeling of justness that neither requests nor needs outside confirmation, blinded many of us. We feel that the Israeli world outside of our communities is gradually losing its humanity…”

Ms. Sheleg cites government corruption, commercialization, the state of the education system, the Media, and asks:

“Have we not contributed, with the very fact of our separating ourselves, to some of these difficult processes? Have we no hand in the fact that for the last thirty years the Israeli agenda has been focused solely around the issue of Eretz Yisrael and the settlements we built? And how are we to understand the demand by religious residents of Gush Katif to be separated from the residents of the secular settlements in the town built for the evacuees, Nitzan?

[…]

Dear friends, it is so difficult for me to write this, we were wrong and we led our society astray. On our path to free the Land of our Fathers, we forgot our People. We cared very well for our own children, and we forgot so many of the other children…

[…]

While we were busy settling Eretz Yisrael and taking care of our seemingly more value-filled identity, which was different from that of everyone else, terrible things were occurring here: There are a million and a half poor people in Israeli society, most of whom do not belong to our rank and file. We looked after our own, didn’t we? The beautiful settlements we built; the gigantic, ostentatious houses in so many of them, all these seem to us like something we deserve. While our education system flourished, and we made sure our children got more and more study hours, there was no one to look after the other children. We strengthened (our education systems) and neglected all the other education systems, even when we controlled the Ministry of Education. We behaved like an interested sector, and not like a worthy leadership for a society. …”

Ms. Sheleg says that the behavior of so many of her camp in recent months indicates panic, a deep feeling of insult, as if society betrayed them, the best of its sons. “Well,” She sums up, “many of us are its best sons, but we betrayed our society first. In all innocence. Out of true idealism. But also out of conceit. We disengaged first.”

************************

John Williams pointed me to another interesting article, this time in the UK Guardian - withdrawal from Gaza as “a microcosm of the key issues of the first decade of the 21st century”.

Much later: If anything, Bambi Sheleg’s article has made me feel more compassion for the National Religious/settlers.

Last week, I was flummoxed by the slogan of the anti-diengagement people in their demonstration in Kikar Rabin. “Gush Katif - Anee Nishba” (Gush Katif - I swear). I didn’t get it. I still don’t. What on earth does that mean?

And I thought religious people weren’t supposed to swear. When we were sworn in at the end of basic training in the army, the religous ‘declared’ instead of swearing, because they couldn’t swear.

My point is they seem to have no idea how unfathomable they are to so many Israelis. For a long time, I don’t think they really cared. It’s backfiring on them now. That slogan is alienating.