I read this article by Jeffrey Goldberg, about the most extreme, fanatical wing of the Israeli settler population. Though published in 2004, I have no doubt many of these people are still alive today and have not moderated their views in the slightest. As I read it, I found myself disturbed, quite a bit more so than I expected, and I tried to put my finger on why that was.
Obviously, a big part (and the part that was quite “expected”) was the simple fact that these people are, in the name of Judaism, advocating policies that are sick, brutal, inhumane, and — flatly — evil. Let’s be blunt: by the time you get to this end of the settler movement, these people are just as bad as Hamas. I don’t make that statement glibly. Why is Hamas bad? Because they see it as their religious obligation to murder all the Jews, whom they see as sub-human scum. And the settlers? They say the same thing about the Arabs — calling them “Amalekites”. That’s a statement fraught with implication: Biblically, Jews are commanded to exterminate the Amalekites, wiping them clean from the face of the earth. The near-universal rabbinical rule for centuries has been that there are no more Amalekites, and thus the commandment is moot. But several settler leaders have tried to argue that the Palestinian people are Amalekites, and are explicitly urging Israel to commit genocide (the only thing they’re pulling back from is outright extermination, but genocide, definitionally, includes efforts to eliminate a group “in part”).
Beyond that particular statement, there is plenty else to detest about the settler movement: the harassment of Arab children, the violence and property damage put out against Palestinian homes and farms (in direct violation of Jewish law), the anti-democratic desire to impose a Biblical theocracy, the honoring and praising of Jewish terrorists like Baruch Goldstein, the cavalier way they are willing to martyr their children in pursuit of their agenda — it’d be easy to go on. The point being this: Read the words of these settlers, and there is nothing distinguishing them from a group like Hamas. They are equally theocratic, equally colonial, and equally genocidal. As Jews, we need to be willing to say that forthrightly, or else we have no moral credibility to criticize Hamas or anyone else.
Now obviously, that should be distressing for anyone to read. But to note the existence of these people isn’t to say they’re mainstream. Goldberg’s article focuses on the most radical fringe, but he also points out that just how much of a minority they are. 75% of Jewish settlers, Goldberg claims, have primarily economic motivations: they liked the open space and the tax breaks they got from the Israeli government (arguably the #1 all-time bone-headed Israeli government decision). Though generally solid conservative voters, they are not fanatics and their attachment to the West Bank and Gaza (this was prior to the pullout from the latter) is not ideological. By contrast, 25% of the settlers (about 50,000 people) are where they are for religious reasons. And of these, only a medium amount are “fanatics” in the sense that they subscribe to the above views. Given that the Israeli settler population is itself only a small fraction of Israel’s Jewish population, which in turn is only a portion of the overall global Jewish population, and you get some perspective back. These groups do have out-sized influence in Israeli politics, true, but that’s more a function of them being very well organized and mobilized, and the coalition nature of Israel’s parliamentary system which benefits small, cohesive interest groups.
So, if these folks are really just a tiny minority, what accounts for that extra dose of distress I felt upon reading the article?