Rabbi Rueven Hess, paused in mid-sentenced, cupped his hands around his mouth and breathed hard into them. He then returned to the Talmud and conducting the third straight day of classes at the Esh Harav Meir Yeshiva – a barn-shaped synagogue located in the Kfar Tapuach West outpost, that according to the Israeli Defense Ministry should have already been evacuated.
Across the table from Hess on a freezing January afternoon were five unenthusiastic students, seemingly more absorbed in fortifying themselves against the cold than in the name of god.
Rather than Talmudic haggling, most important to the students, was that the synagogue – dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Meir Kahane, a banned former parliamentarian who preached ridding Israel of all Arab inhabitants – had weathered Ariel Sharon’s vow some two weeks ago to dismantle eight West Bank outposts, this synagogue among them.
“This is a prime example of why the government can never win against the Jews of Samaria,” said Mike Ben Yaacov, the de facto leader of the outpost, and one of the founders of the “New Jewish Legion” militia.
“Suppose they come with their bulldozers,” Ben Yaacov said. I imagine there will be firm resistance in that case. But the people will return a few minutes later and pitch a tent, and put a torah scroll in it. There is no end to it. A tractor can never win against the spirit of those who adhere to an idea.”
Ben Yacov would not elaborate on what “firm resistance meant.”
Yet it was not a divine hand that stayed the synagogue’s sentence but a combination of legal wrangling, and deterrent. Like the other eight outposts slated for evacuation the synagogue has faded out of the headlines and into legal quagmire of the Israeli courts and appeals system.
“There is a certain victory here,” said the head of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza (Yesha), Adi Mintz. “The process [of the government’s attempted evacuation of the settlements] has not ended, but just faded away. It has become a major legal problem for the government.”
Last week the High Court stated a Yesha petition that the settlers be given more time – 15 days extra – to appeal what the Sharon administration’s executive order to evacuate some eight outposts. “After that appeal, we will also petition the High Court on the legality of Sharon’s executive order,” added Mintz, “it could take months, maybe more.”
But in addition to legal bulwarks some settlement groups, as have the members of Kahane Chai, wield the scepter of Jews harming Jews – a mini-civil war of sorts – as a deterrent.
The outpost upon which the Eish Harav Meir Yeshiva has been built, is one of the hubs of the “New Jewish Legion” defense militia, a group deeply influenced by the teachings of Kahane. Kahane served a term in the Knesset in the 1980s, but his party was banned at the following election as racist. Kahane was assassinated while on a speaking tour in the US by an Egyptian militant at New York's Marriot East Hotel in November 1990.
In his last speech that November day, Kahane said, “there is no Arab problem, there is a Jewish problem,” namely, in his words, weakness.
He had taught his devotees that his opponents in the Israeli government were not necessarily against him but against the laws of the Torah, Ben Yacov explained.
Continued
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