Guest Post: A Dispatch from Judea and Samaria

We Are Not Your Enemy

This week, Bones of Joseph debuts a new feature: I’ve invited my friend and WhatsApp correspondent Sarah L., a young mother and religious settler, to share how things look from her Israel — an Israel quite remote from mine. As you will see, Sarah is no “fanatic, racist or lunatic” but a thoughtful, sensitive and incisive analyst of our predicament. As I have become more and more convinced that the settler bloc, if not every last settler, represents an existential danger to the future of Israel, I am especially eager to engage with Sarah’s perspective

I hope Sarah will become a regular member of a rotating, diverse cast of correspondents who will add their voices to this Substack.

Dear Joe,

About three years ago, I lived in a caravan in a 45-family outpost where the Jordan Valley meets the Dead Sea, in the sweltering heat of Israel’s most forlorn and desolate region. Nursing my second baby, thirsty for something beyond diapers and sleepless nights, I briefly turned to Twitter. There, I shared my musings on Torah, Shakespeare, A. D. Gordon, hermeneutics, feminism, wild plants, and anything else that came to mind. While I rarely touched on politics, I tended to write a lot about Israel, the Jewish people, and the God that oversees them both. You stumbled on my account, and thus began a correspondence that has migrated from Twitter to WhatsApp and now, finally, to Substack. Though we’ve never met, we’re old friends by now.

Today, I live in a rickety little house in a pine forest in a settlement with a reputation for radicalism. In the desert I grew sunflowers; these days, I grow lettuces in the rocky soil of the mountains. For my thirtieth birthday, we built a chicken coop. I wear floor-length Indian-print dresses and a vast headscarf that aspires heavenward. My husband wears a knitted kippah, a scraggly beard, and a gun. We start our days with prayer and end them with yoga; we learn midrash and read Uri Zvi Greenberg, do our work and raise our children.

On October 7, my husband was called up to serve for almost half a year with his tank unit, first in the still-besieged kibbutzim of the Gaza Envelope and then within Gaza itself. 

I had given birth a week before. Suddenly, I found myself alone with three children under the age of five, including a newborn, for months. Every day we anticipate the next call-up and the attendant chaos in our home. 

And we are among the lucky ones. Everyone here knows at least one soldier who has fallen in this war. We lost a friend from yeshiva, another friend’s brother, yet another friend’s brother-in-law, an acquaintance’s husband, and a neighbor’s beloved cousin. Just a few days ago, my husband was en route to a daylong writing competition when it was suddenly canceled: The moderator of the competition had been killed in action the day before.

It was against this backdrop that I encountered a comment to your previous post, in which you wrote that we settlers represent an “existential threat” to Israel. “Sooner or later,” you insisted, “we will need to actually fight back against the settlers.”

I didn’t take what you wrote personally. I harbor no illusions about what the world thinks of me and my community. I am all too familiar with the tendency to cast the Israeli settler right as a motley jumble of fanatics, racists, and lunatics. We do have our fanatics, racists, and lunatics; I disagree with some of their premises and many of their methods. Too often, however, they are held up as reason to dismiss out of hand views that I find cogent and persuasive. 

I admit it stung, however, when you claimed that we serve in elite units in the IDF in order to “win good will” from the rest of Israeli society. On this conspiratorial view, my friends gave their lives, and the fragile fabric of my family was sundered, for the sake of some nefarious ulterior motive: to legitimize the settlement enterprise, or perhaps to enable the ultimate religious takeover of the state. No, I want to scream to anyone who will listen, we do it for our country just like everyone else. We do it because we are patriotic Israelis, and we believe in the continued safety and security of the Jewish people — including those who live in North Tel Aviv. 

So, in the interest of truth, of salvaging my reputation in your eyes, and of preventing us from finding ourselves on two different sides of a civil war, I feel a need to clear the air. In what follows, I will:

1. explain why I am convinced of Israel’s need for settlement;

2. share my views on the war in Gaza; and, finally, 

3. argue that we are far from the existential threat that you take us to be.

1. Settlement

You might assume that I believe in settlement primarily for religious reasons. It is true that I live in a land teeming with divine presence and Jewish collective memory, where our ancestors lived and wandered and are buried. Before it became politically inconvenient to say so, Jew and non-Jew alike acknowledged this place as the seat of Jewish history, suffused with thousands of years of Jewish life and longing. I work the soil and walk the trails with the certainty that I am engaging with something sacred, and count myself blessed to be here on this land, at the epicenter of the Jewish people, part of this unfurling story. 

But my primary reason for supporting settlement is simple and pragmatic: A civilian presence ensures a military presence, and a military presence protects the state. 

We need no better proof than the case of Gaza itself. Since Gush Katif was uprooted in 2005, Gaza has been a black hole for the IDF. Without a civilian presence to protect, the IDF withdrew from within Gaza. In so doing, it lost significant capacities for intelligence and military action. It slipped into hubris, unaware (or dismissive) of the weapons-trafficking and all-too-workable schemes being hatched just over the border. 

In Yehuda v’Shomron [Judea and Samaria, the West Bank], by contrast, where the IDF can enter and act at will, there are regular anti-terror raids even in the large cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm. Just recently, a spectacular Special Forces raid in Jenin thwarted plans for a large-scale terror attack in central Israel. True, Yehuda v’Shomron suffer from spurts of low-level violence, as did Gush Katif before the disengagement. Looking at October 7 and its aftermath, however, do we really believe withdrawal would be preferable?

The cautionary tale from Gaza goes further. The Jordan Valley ensures Israel’s control of its border with Jordan – exactly the kind of control that Israel lost vis à vis the Egyptian border when it surrendered the Philadelphi Corridor. That border, riddled with tunnels, is now the primary port of entry for smuggling weapons to Hamas. The mountains of Yehuda v’Shomron could easily become launching pads for rockets into wealthy and populous Gush Dan (your Israel, Joe), just as Gaza became a launching pad for rockets into Sderot and Ashkelon. And if it does, October 7 suggests that we may be unable to handle the ensuing violence.

It is claimed that October 7 happened because IDF troops were diverted from the Gaza border to Yehuda v’Shomron. The claim is contested, and even if true, those troops would almost certainly have been unable to compensate for the massive systems failure that took place at every level on that day. But I’m tempted to accept the claim and say, aderaba [on the contrary]: Militaries prioritize the places where civilians appear to be under direct threat over those places where they do not. This is not a normative claim, merely a description of reality. The army’s attention was trained on Yehuda v’Shomron because heightened tensions made it impossible to ignore the risk to Israeli citizens (yes, we are Israeli citizens, and so it is the army’s basic responsibility to protect us, too). It was diverted from the Gaza border because of an illusion that everything there was more or less under control, at least when it came to potential danger to civilians. It had nothing to do with “favoring settlers” — a slander that portrays us both as less human and less Israeli than other Israelis, with the insinuation that we would sacrifice our fellow non-settler Jews in the Gaza Envelope to save our own skins. 

Finally, for many Israelis, these areas are simply home. My husband, for example, is the third generation of his family to live over the Green Line. His childhood home is here, his schools and youth groups were all here, the institutions that have shaped his memory and his inner life are all here. There is a homegrown culture here, a crucible of Torah study and nature and colorful textiles and spiritual search and artistic flourishing. The home whose threshold we crossed on our first day of marriage is here. When we come back from anywhere else, we spot the hills and olive trees of this place, and something in our soul rests — just as yours surely rests when you step off the train in Tel Aviv. There is a deep undercurrent of personal sentiment to the way we feel about this land. I’m not saying this is reason enough to scuttle a peace deal, any more than an Arab family with keys to their former home in Tzfat is reason enough for Israel to surrender Tzfat. But it’s an enormous and influential factor that is somehow never mentioned in the public discourse about settlement.

2. The War

Let’s be very clear: I want the hostages back.

When I wake up and hear helicopters over my head, I pray that they are rescue helicopters: plucking the hostages out of the yawning, toothless maw of Gaza, bringing them one by one to the green pastures of home. I want missions like Operations Moshe and Shlomo, like Entebbe, like the missions that have miraculously retrieved six hostages and counting. [ed. note: This was written before Operation Arnon on June 8, which rescued four hostages.]  I want the hostages that are now leaving Rafah as corpses, preserved in the cold of the tunnels, to have left three months ago with the breath of life still in them.

But here is another thing I want: I want our enemies, the ones who have never hesitated, not in Hebron in 1929, not in Itamar in 2011, and not on October 7, 2023, to perform the vilest and most unthinkable acts of violence against us, to understand that the cost of hostage-taking outweighs the gains. I do not want my children, or my neighbors’ children, or my political rivals’ children, to wind up as bargaining chips in hellish captivity, and so I want Hamas and Hezbollah and all the rest to abandon the notion that truckloads of hostages will be a military or diplomatic advantage. I want us to prove that notion wrong by winning this war – and winning so decisively that the terms of negotiation will be terms of surrender for Hamas.

As you know, this line of thought isn’t just a modern innovation by Israeli right-wingers. It’s reflected in the Mishnah: “Captives should not be redeemed for more than their value, for the sake of tikkun olam [proper public policy].” The Gemara proposes two potential costs of redeeming captives at an exorbitant rate: It can place an undue burden on the community, and it can create an incentive to take more captives. When we look at the extraordinary damage caused by the Shalit deal, as well as the horrifying number of hostages Hamas took on October 7, it is plain that ransoming our captives at too high a rate in the past has done both. 

But a hostage deal wouldn’t just incentivize hostage-taking and brutal attacks against civilians in the future; it wouldn’t just keep Hamas afloat and the small towns of the Gaza Envelope endangered; and it wouldn’t just absurdly force Israel to surrender in a conflict where we are the stronger party. No, it would also broadcast to every one of our enemies, including the ones lurking on our borders and those farther afield on their way to acquiring nuclear weapons, that we are afraid of the costs of war — and that, if the costs are high enough, they can get whatever they want out of us. This is a recipe for perpetual war, with infinitely more civilian death and suffering on both sides. It is easy to imagine the many possible routes from such an outcome to a third, horrific Hurban [destruction of the state].

What I’ve just suggested — that our enemies will not make peace unless forced by defeat, that our military is incapable of dealing with the consequences of a deal down the line — is an unpleasant, even medieval way of understanding the world. Unfortunately, as you hinted in your last post, the world has not ceased to be medieval simply because the liberal West believes in progress. We must hold onto the faith that change is possible, that peace can one day come to this region and to the Jewish people, that we Jews will one day no longer measure our existence from catastrophe to catastrophe. But we cannot afford to be utopian. Pray for peace, yes — but be always prepared for war.

3. Why We Need Each Other

Joe, in your last post, you mention the weak spots in the liberalism of the secular West, which (in your view as well as mine) are gradually being filled with the most grotesque and atavistic forms of quasi-religious conviction. The dati leumi [national-religious] community contains many different articulations of Jewish life; these various articulations “battle it out” day by day as we seek to refine what the Torah means for religious people in the land of Israel. Some are indeed as grotesque and atavistic as the new worldviews you condemn in the West. But some are a kind of inoculation against the dangers you described in your last post: a strong civic religion that instills a profound and self-sacrificing love for God, family, community, country, and people; a Torah that serves not only as an open dialogue with the Ribono Shel Olam [Master of the Universe] but as a check on our worst human behaviors. Torah — not just Tanach, but Torah She’be’al Peh [the rabbinic tradition] and the accumulated lessons of 2,000 years of exile — can inform the creation of the “new Jew” that the early secular Zionists dreamt of. Torah can teach us both strength and mercy, both fervor and self-restraint. I pray that if we learn it regularly, its wisdom will mold us in ways that we do not even yet understand.

Joe, you and I both believe that the continued survival of the Jewish people is a moral imperative, a good in itself. Each of us are acting in ways that we see as necessary to that survival; each of us has our blind spots. We can learn from the moderation and humanity of your camp just as you can learn from the resolve and enthusiasm of mine, each balancing the most destructive impulses of the other. At the risk of deploying a cliché, this is why a sense of brotherhood is so important: Once we see each other as brothers-in-arms in service of a shared goal, we can begin to talk for real.

In that spirit, here are some questions for you:

• What would have to change for you to see the settler right not as a fifth column, but as a legitimate element in Israeli society? What do you expect of us, and what should we expect of you?

• What is your relationship to Yehuda v’Shomron / the West Bank? To the land of Israel more generally?

• What do you think should be the place of religion in Zionism? Is there a place for it, or do you subscribe to an old-school model that sees the contradictions as too great?

• Is brotherhood among Israel’s tribes desirable? Is it possible?

• Finally, what endgame do you see for this war? Assuming that the answer is “defeat,” as your last post seemed to lament, how can we break the downward spiral towards hurban — or can we at all?

Looking forward to your response, as always,

Sarah