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Last Updated: Nov 10th, 2005 - 19:31:01 |
Of all the places in Judea and Samaria, Ariel Sharon was magically drawn to the view and history of the Jebel Kabir region. He used to bring many visitors to the top of Mount Kabir, among them foreign diplomats and army officers, to show them how narrow Israel's waist is, how beautiful the biblical landscape and how many hilltops empty of man there were on which settlements could be established.
And of all the members of Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), he particularly liked the first residents of Elon Moreh, who settled at the foot of Mount Kabir. Because they were the most authentic, determined and dynamic of the new members of the tribe of the bold; they were the ones - and how he liked this - who put "we will do" before "we will listen." And he personally accompanied them, on his own two feet, when they ascended the rise to locate the site for their permanent settlement on the slopes of Mount Kabir.
Last Shabbat, which was the Torah portion of Lech Lecha, or "Go" ("... to Elon Moreh"), the community celebrated the 25th anniversary of its establishment, following struggles, hardships and temporary way stations, as a permanent settlement. And many who were connected to the early days of the faith-based revolution came to celebrate with them. Sharon, of course, was not there. And Menachem Felix said: What is more important than listening to history is making history. The audience responded with wild applause.
The Knesset's decision on Tuesday brings the uprooting to the threshold of Elon Moreh, which is located in northern Samaria. A single generation after its founding, and at the initiative of a man who played a key role in its establishment, the Knesset voted, with an absolute (Jewish!) majority, to uproot some of the fruits of this faith-based revolution. And this is the essence of the revolution that Sharon underwent: During the Elon Moreh days, when the public, after the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, was gripped by pessimism, Sharon joined the sector that was - and remains - optimistic and goal-oriented. Now, after 31 years in which the pessimism has merely increased - not least because of the four-year war of attrition that Sharon did not manage to end - he has chosen to stand at the head of the pessimistic camp. If in the past, he was engaged in construction and creation, now, in his distress - and apparently for personal reasons, as well - he is setting out to show that he is also strong in uprooting, destruction and ruination.
And standing at his side during the vote on uprooting, in addition to those among the Likud who lack connections and roots, were also the leaders of the camp that once contained the foremost builders: the Labor Party. And one of those who is trying to claim this camp's leadership, Matan Vilnai, even said: We support Sharon because the act of disengagement is a beacon. Today, it is uprooting rather than sinking roots that constitutes the beacon of the Labor movement, which voted unanimously for Sharon's initiative.
No event that has taken place since the founding of Elon Moreh, which swept a large movement of actualizers after it, truly proves that the faith-based camp was wrong. I am convinced that had there been such an event, this camp would have admitted its mistake and joined the majority of the nation. In practice, virtually everything this camp foresaw - and which Sharon agreed with and proclaimed - has happened. Gush Emunim claimed that the answer to the failure of the Yom Kippur War was not to wallow in melancholy, but to emerge from it via construction and creation - and it was right. The results of the years of terrorist warfare, which began after Israel was ready to concede virtually the entire heart of its homeland, prove this.
But those who wallowed in melancholy, instead of trying to pull themselves out, continued to dig themselves deeper in and dragged additional sections of society, including many of those who were born or grew up after the Yom Kippur War, into a mood that suited their own.
Oslo, the central initiative of this mood - which Yitzhak Rabin followed almost against his will - has proven to be a total and calamitous failure of pessimism. But because people do not tend to admit their mistakes, instead of trying the opposite approach, they dug themselves even deeper in the wrong direction and brought upon us the madness of flight and uprooting. The obligation to oppose this madness is not only in order to save the settlement enterprise, but primarily to open the nation's eyes so that it will abandon the well-tested path of despair and once again take the Zionist high road, the road of faith in the correctness of Zionism and in our ability to reach safe harbor at the end of the struggle.
At the gathering in Elon Moreh, Geula Cohen, a close friend for many years, mourned Sharon's about-face with a poem written by Uri Zvi Greenberg, which is chilling in its timeliness: "I dreamed a dream, and in the dream: Lions / came down from the glorious high places / hungry for sour grapes / following in the footsteps of / red foxes / and the moon looked down as they lined up / after the foxes - / and I went after them and cried aloud / in the lions' language: / Lions, lions! / But they no longer understood the lions' language / and then, I wept sorely..."
Great emotion gripped the listeners. And despite the festive atmosphere of that Shabbat, there were those who wiped away tears.
© Copyright 5764, 5765 by author and Tsel Harim
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