"VISIONARIES have seen their vision torn asunder before their eyes." In these words, a prominent ideologue summed up the mood on Israel's religious right in the months after Yitzhak Rabin's handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn.
The comment was made by Dan Be'eri, writing in the West Bank settler journal Nekudah. It describes a movement's goals in words connoting prophecy and religious truth. And it depicts the peace process not as a political defeat, but as an act of violation - akin, in the Hebrew, to a predator consuming its prey.
In both respects, Be'eri's words are a telling portrayal of the passions sparked on the religious right by Rabin's diplomatic steps - passions that fuelled mass protests and that drove Yigal Amir and his alleged accomplices to plot the prime minister's death.
Rabin's peace policies were opposed by the entire Israeli right, and polls consistently showed that much of the public rejected them too. Secular politicians, including Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, and others further to the right, stridently declared that the agreement with the PLO was dangerous to Israel's security.
But the activists who planned demonstrations against the government, who blocked roads and fought with the police, and who called on soldiers to refuse any future orders to evacuate settlements, came almost exclusively from the ranks of Orthodox Zionists - religious settlers in the occupied territories, and their supporters within sovereign Israel.
The prime minister, for his part, devoted some of his choice invective to the settlers.
Israel's Orthodox right is as much a religious movement - a particular, peculiar development in Judaism - as it is a political camp comprising Orthodox settler groups and most of the National Religious Party. Its beliefs posit that the End of Days is at hand, and that Jewish control of the land of Israel is an essential step toward the final Redemption. Israel's agreement to give up parts of the Jewish homeland to Arabs threatened principles of faith and not only the country's security.
The ideology of most of the religious right is rooted in the dense writings of Avraham Yitzhak Kook, a Lithuanian born rabbi who became a Zionist before the turn of the century and moved to the Holy Land in 1904. In the fevered politics of Eastern European Jewry in those years, Zionism was one of several secular movements like socialism that rejected traditional religion as perpetuating Jewish suffering, and sought to replace it with a political programme.
Most Orthodox rabbis, in turn, despised Zionists as pork eating heretics who defied God by trying to end the Jews' exile from their land before the arrival of the messiah promised by the prophets.
To justify his Zionism, Kook fused kabhalah (Jewish mysticism) and European style nationalism into mystical messianism. For Kook, the fact that Jews were organising the return to their homeland was proof that the Divine redemption had already begun. Secular Zionists, the pioneers who had begun immigrating from Europe to the biblical homeland, farming the land and building new towns, were carrying out God's will unknowingly, despite themselves and would eventually return to religion.
Kook provided a basis for Orthodox Jews to join the national movement, co operate with anti religious pioneers, and regard both physical labour and modern education as religious obligations.
His ideas draw on classic Jewish mysticism - yet they also affirm a 19th century faith in human progress, and reflect the confident reading of "inevitable processes of history" popular among leftwing radicals of the time. To this day, Kook's writings are read by some religious Jews as a mandate for liberal openness to the modern world.
In 1921, Kook was appointed first Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazi (Eastern European) community in British Mandatory Palestine; several years later he established his own yeshivah (rabbinic academy), Merkaz Harav, in Jerusalem. After his death in 1935, his place at the head of the yeshivah was taken by his only son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, who lived until 1982.
The younger Kook emphasised the national rather than the universal side of his father's philosophy. He, and others influenced by his father, continued reading history as fulfilling a Divine script. After Israel's independence in 1948, the chief rabbis of the new state adopted a "Prayer for the State" that defined Israel as "the first flowering of our Redemption".
MEANWHILE, religious Zionism developed into a significant minority within the Zionist movement. Orthodox Zionists, following the example of their secular compatriots, established a handful of Orthodox kibbutzim, a labour union and their own school system and youth movement, Bnei Akiva. In the Zionist leadership and then the new state, their political representatives (who eventually joined forces and formed the National Religious Party) were perennial junior partners of the dominant Labour movement.
But religious Zionists suffered a double inferiority complex; on the one hand, ultra Orthodox Jews, still opposed to Zionism, regarded them as second rate in religious study and commitment. Yet as state builders, they'd clearly played no more than a minor role. The young generation of "crocheted yarmulkes" - the distinctive skull cap of religious Zionists - was regarded as well behaved and rather harmless.
The Kooks' philosophy was not the only one within Orthodox Zionism, but as time passed, graduates of Merkaz Harav gained increasing influence in the religious schools and Bnei Akiva. The turning point came with Israel's sudden, startling Rabin engineered victory in the Six Day War.
The triumph inspired euphoria among many Israelis, but for religious Zionists, and especially disciples of Tzvi Yehudah Kook, the joy was deeper: an obvious Divine miracle had occurred. The heart of the sacred land that God had promised Abraham - Hebroin, the hills of Samaria, the Old City of Jerusalem - had been restored to Jewish rule. Indeed, Kook's students believed he had virtually prophesied the miracle; three weeks before the war, at an Israeli Independence Day celebration at his yeshivah, the rabbi had burst out: "Where's our Hebron? Have we forgotten her? Where's our Shechem (the biblical name of Nablus), our Jericho?"
There could be no sign more clear than the victory that the messianic process was moving forward. Summing up the mood, Kook would later tell his students that they were not in the beginning but the middle of the Redemption. "We're in the living room and not in the entry hall." Another prominent rabbi wrote that the land of Israel had been liberated from the sitra ahra - the kabbalistic name for the primordial evil - an argument that identified flesh and blood enemies with satanic forces.
Soon after the war, a disciple of Kook said in a meeting with Orthodox cabinet members: "I believe with a perfect faith that if the Holy One, Blessed Be He, gave us the land through obvious miracles, He'll never take it from us, for He does not perform a miracle in vain. The integrity of the Land of Israel isn't subject to the decisions of the government." More than a political statement, denying the government's right to pull back from the newly conquered territory, this was a statement of theological certainty; a denial of the government's ability to give up land. But the political implications were clear.
Ideologically, the pieces were already on the board, even if it would take another quarter century before an Israeli government would actually decide to pull out of the West Bank and set the conflict with the messianists in motion.
THE theological response to the Six Day War quickly became a programme for action - settling the newly "liberated" territories. Three months after the war, a group of Orthodox settlers led by Hanan Porat, later to become a National Religious Party Knesset member - re established Kibbutz Kfar Etzion in the rocky Judaen hills between Bethlehem and Hebron. Porat had spent the first five years of his life on the same site, which had been overrun by Arab forces on May 13th, 1948, the day before the State of Israel was declared, after a long siege.
The founders of the old new kibbutz received approval from the then prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Not so the next settlement bid by another student of Kook, Moshe levinger, a thin often dishevelled young rabbi. In the spring of 1968, over the Passover holiday, Levinger and 60 other settlers moved into Hebron and refused to leave. The effort eventually led to the establishment of Kiryat Arba, the Jewish town on the edge of Hebron that became the hot bed of settler extremism and finally, in 1979, the springboard for several hundred Jews to settle inside Hebron.
Levinger and the other settlers saw them selves as renewing their small Jewish community that had lived in the intensely Islamic city until 1929, when Arab rioters killed 67 Jews. A series of terror attacks on the settlers confirmed their view of the Arabs as a murderous threat, and relations between the two groups were always on the brink of explosion.
Just before Rabin became prime minister in 1974, Porat, Levinger and others formed Gush Emunim, which would force Rabin into one of his most embarrassing defeats. Rabin's policy rejected settling in the Sumarian hills of the northern West Bank; he hoped to return that area, heavily populated by Arabs, to Arab rule in a peace treaty. From the summer of 1974 on, the leaders of Gush Emunim led hundreds of supporters in a series of attempts to establish a Jewish settlement near Nablus. Each time, troops removed them - until in December, 1975, unwilling to confront thousands of Gush Emunim backers gathered at an abandoned railway station. Rabin agreed to let 30 families move into an army base in Samaria. The defeat left Rabin's policy on the West Bank's future and his image as a leader in shreds.
Gush Emunim, meanwhile, became the leading force in religious Zionism. Its leaders presented themselves as the true heirs of the early Zionist pioneers, willing to defy discomfort and danger to settle the land - and at the same time insisted that their religious vision was more complete than that of the ultra Orthodox.
The National Religious Party relinquished its traditional alliance with the Labour Party and steadily swung to the right, following the lead of Gush Emunim. In religious schools where they alternated between army duty and religious study, rabbis preached the integrity of the Land of Israel as a principle of faith. The "Zionism of Redemption" - at once a political movement and religious sect - had an aura of triumphant confidence.
BY 1992, when Yitzhak Rabin returned to the prime minister's office for the second time, an estimated 105,000 Israelis lived in the occupied territories. Probably a quarter belonged to the "Gush Emunim culture". Not only had Rabin, proponent of territorial compromise, been elected prime minister; the far right Tehiyah party, supported by many settlers, failed to re enter the Knesset and the National Religious Party, virtually for the first time remained outside ruling coalition a symbol of a community suddenly marginalised.
At the end of 1993 came the earthquake: the announcement of the Oslo accords. Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were near. While the interim accord promised that settlements would remain in place, there was no guarantee that the that the final agreement would do the same. The right regarded the PLO's acceptance of peace as a tactical step alone, on the way to eliminating Israel in the future.
The Oslo accords and subsequent Palestinian terror attacks galvanised protest.
One of the strongest challenges to the government's legitimacy came from Schlomo Goren, a former chief rabbi. He issued a ruling in December 1993 saying that Jewish religious law required soldiers to disobey any future orders to dismantle settlements. The ruling caused a public storm and further undermined the Orthodox secular partnership.
Early on the morning of February 25th, 1994, extremist Baruch Goldstein rose, put on his reservist uniform, took his assault rifle, and left his house for Hebron Tomb of the Patriarchs to pray. When the Jewish service was over, he entered another hall of the tomb where Muslim services were in progress, and hid behind a column. Then he began shooting in all directions, firing over 100 bullets. Within moments, 29 kneeling Arabs had been killed and scores injured.
Goldstein, it appears, hoped to please heaven by reasserting Jewish strength and derail the peace process.
Goldstein was soon described as a martyr, "like the martyrs of the Holocaust", and in a eulogy it was said that "his desperate act of love for his people . . . will some day be recognised by all Jews as the turning point which brought redemption upon us". His supporters later published a book about him Blessed Be The Man, A copy was acquired by a Bar Ilan university law student, Yigal Amir.
Horrifying as the massacre was, it should not have been a surprise. Academics and journalists had warned of the danger of Jewish terror since the White House signing. For an extreme religious group faced with the failure of prophecy and sudden social isolation, despair and nihilistic action - was one likely response.
One possible reason that Rabin was so taken by surprise was that he was an intensely secular man. He apparently had no understanding of the religious right's beliefs, and regarded it simply as a stringent but marginal political group. After the Hebron killings, several key activists were jailed. Yet Rabin and the security forces apparently remained unprepared for the violence from others on the extreme edge of the religious right. The massacre was not only a disaster in its own right, but a tragically missed warning.
On October 5th, 1995, as the Knesset debated the Oslo II accord, right wing demonstrators again filled central Jerusalem. From Zion Square, tens of thousands marched to the Knesset. Never, it appeared, had Israeli politics come so close to an open battle.
The worst was yet to come.