For settler ideologues, PM is the impious King Saul failing to follow the Divine path

The religious settlement movement suffered a small crisis of faith Wednesday. Not in the righteousness of its path – unquestioned since it alone answered the call to ideological settlement in the post-1967 reality – but in its ability to lead and the people’s inclination to follow.

The settlement movement speaks of itself as enjoying Divine guidance that, much like the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites from Egypt, pushes it to the front of the camp. Despite the fact that the Golan is far away and the Negev is untamable; despite the West Bank realities of ambushes on the roads and infiltrations in its communities; despite international sentiment and demographic complexities; despite the concussive blows of the Yom Kippur War and the Disengagement from Gaza; its members have continued to build, to settle the land of Israel, and to see themselves as leading the bickering and questioning masses through the wilderness.

But now and again its members look over their shoulders, and the gap between those at the front and the rest, as they peered toward the Knesset on Wednesday, was worryingly wide.

The final tally on Jewish Home MK Zevulun Orlev’s bill to regularize Israeli settlement on private land, so long as it was erected in good faith and no competing claims of ownership were filed within four years, was 69 opposed and 22 in favor. The result, a product of backroom maneuvering and political horse trading, was foretold, but to many of the hundreds of protesters and dozens of hunger-strikers near the Knesset, who fear that the Ulpana neighborhood in Beit El could be the first in a series of dominos to fall, it looked like a betrayal.

“The faith that was wounded seven years ago (during the withdrawal from Gaza) has collapsed, and the people, the ones who build this country, no longer have faith in their leaders,” said Avi Roe, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council, where many of the outposts are located.

Do the settlement ideologues maintain faith in their ability to lead?

“It is sad to once again receive a slap in the face,” said Nitzanit Riklin, a hunger-striker who lives in the settlement of Michmas and was introduced to the podium as, among other things, a sister to Itay Harel, one of the founders of the largest West Bank outpost, Migron. “Itay is leading. Itay is a pioneer. But it is important to make sure that the people are behind us. The most dangerous thing is for us to grow cynical and apathetic. To say that the media are against us and the courts are against us, because if we do that we will become cynical and we will not be able to lead.”

A hunger-striker from Ashdod, a woman named Nili Pitchon who moved to Israel from Nice, France 13 years ago, said she had joined the campaign “for her family and for the people of Israel” but, looking around the tent and the sidewalk, filled with youths chanting Psalms and political slogans, she remarked that “too bad more secular people did not come. I am the only one. I am alone.”

Haggi Ben-Artzi, brother to the prime minister’s wife Sara and himself a resident of Beit El, told the crowd of middle- and high-school-aged children, young mothers, and politicians, that the prime minister’s stance on the issue had him thinking of Samuel the Prophet and the insufficiently pious King Saul. “Though thou wast little in thy own sight,” he quoted Samuel, waiting for the crowd to finish, “wast thou not made the head of the tribes of Israel?”

The meaning, he said, was that Netanyahu, and not the attorney general or the Supreme Court, was “responsible for this stupid and evil-spirited decision.”

He went on to tell the crowd that he was sure that his and Sara’s father, Bible scholar Shmuel Ben-Artzi, and Professor Benzion Netanyahu were both looking down at the prime minister “in shame.” But his real point was rooted in the Bible passage. Ben-Artzi (Disclosure: he was a teacher of this writer for a year) did not choose Chapter 15 of 1 Samuel at random. For the chapter ends with Samuel telling King Saul that God has torn the kingdom from his hands and given it “to a neighbor of thine that is better than thou.” The Lord, in the final verse, repents for ever having crowned Saul king.

Following the thread of Samuel’s castigation, Ben-Artzi told the crowd that the true leadership of Israel, in a matter of years, would come “from within this commandment-observing crowd.”