Let My People Leave

The reserve infantry unit I served in for 18 years is currently performing several weeks of active duty in the West Bank. When the call-up orders went out some months ago, the timing left no question about the nature of the soldiers' mission. At that time, early July was the time Israel planned to withdraw its army, and its civilian settlements, from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the northern West Bank-a move that has since been postponed until August.

For many years, I was the company clerk--the soldier who processes requests to be released from service and who makes up the daily duty roster. My successor in that job-I'll call him Avraham-told me that, when the orders went out, he had expected that a number of the Orthodox religious soldiers in the unit would ask to be excused from this round of duty because they believed that Jewish religious law grants Jews an inalienable right to live everywhere in the biblical land of Israel. Removing Jews from their homes in Gaza and the West Bank would thus be a violation of their religious principles.

Avraham and I are both Orthodox Jews. He thinks that soldiers who feel they cannot participate in the evacuation of Israeli settlements should follow the dictates of their conscience. I believe that the military duty to follow orders should in this instance take precedence over their opposition to the withdrawal policy-just as I followed orders for many years to protect Israeli settlements in the West Bank, although I thought that it was wrong for Israel to have built them.

How can this be, if we both follow the same creed and we both live in accordance with its precepts? After all, Orthodox Jews believe that God made a gift of the Holy Land to the Jewish people. Therefore, Orthodox Jews must oppose handing over any part of that land to foreigners not as a practical matter of policy but as a matter of religious principle. And they must oppose removing Jews from their homes in these God-given territories. That is, indeed, the logic of a large majority of Orthodox Jews today. So on what basis can I argue that Avraham, and most of my fellow believers, are wrong?

To understand why the settlers and their religious supporters see disengagement as a violation of God's precepts, one must understand their theology. Any modern Jewish theology must address the significance of the Jewish state in Zion. The Jews have returned to their land-and have established their rule over it-after two millennia of exile. To many believing Jews, it seems obvious that this fulfillment of prophecy and of age-long yearning must have religious meaning.

The lion's share of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip identify themselves as part of a larger group of observant Jews who call themselves "religious Zionists" and "modern Orthodox." Religious Zionism embraces a spectrum of religious approaches and philosophies. But in the 1960s and 1970s a large portion of the community's younger generation was attracted to a particular religious Zionist philosophy associated with the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook. These two men developed a comprehensive theology that viewed the Jewish return to Israel as part of a divine process that would lead inevitably to the arrival of the Messiah.

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