Sharon May Have Helped Create a Monster -- Israel's Settler Movement
Like the Golem of Jewish legend, a peril has emerged that confronts its maker. Now the nation itself is endangered.

By Uri Avnery, Uri Avnery is a founding member of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group founded in 1993.

In Jewish legend, the Golem was a man-made creature endowed with enormous strength. Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, also know as the Maharal, created him of clay and gave him life by putting a piece of paper with the secret name of God under his tongue.

The Golem helped the Jews defend themselves against anti-Semitic rioters, but one day he turned against his creator. He sowed ruin and destruction, until, at the last moment, the rabbi succeeded in extracting the paper from his mouth. The Golem turned back into a heap of clay.

Ariel Sharon is not a rabbi, and the Kabbalah is a closed book to him. But he has created a Golem: the settlement movement in the occupied territories.

He was sure that the Golem would serve him. After all, the settlers owe him everything. It was Sharon who nursed them for decades, diverted funding to them on a massive scale, put at their service all the political positions he occupied one after the other: the leadership of the ministries of agriculture, defense, foreign affairs, housing, industry and trade, infrastructure and, finally, the prime minister's office.

Ever since he was the commanding general of the Southern Sector in the early 1970s, he preached to everybody he met, Israelis and foreigners alike, the gospel of the settlements. According to Sharon, it was vitally important to set up settlements in order to turn all of Eretz Israel — from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, at least — into a Jewish state, to tear the Palestinian territories into ribbons and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Like a bulldozer without brakes, Sharon leveled all opposition. He saw to it that tens of billions of dollars were turned over to the settlements, bent the laws to their benefit and enlisted the officers of the army in their service. In this way, a closely woven network of settlements and special roads came into being. When he coined the slogan "unilateral disengagement," when he proposed pulling up stakes in Gaza and bringing the settlers home, it never occurred to him that they might oppose him. Don't they owe him? Are they not his children? Sharon offered them a deal that seemed to him eminently reasonable: Give up the isolated settlements, with a few thousand settlers, in order to secure the future of the big settlement blocks, with 80% of the settlers, to be incorporated into Israel.

Sacrifice some fingers in order to save the whole body. This way not only do we save the settlement enterprise but we also gain a good part of the West Bank.

But the Golem, once the piece of paper is under his tongue, demonstrates a logic of his own. He does not intend to give up the dozens of small settlements, especially as that is where the hard core of Messianic fanatics lives. The Golem also understood that the evacuation of the first settlement would create a precedent that would endanger all the others. Like the Maharal, Sharon underrated his Golem. He treated him as a servant. How could he respect a creature that he had created with his own hands? Now he is learning that it is much easier to create a Golem than to reverse the process.

In the surfeit of interviews that Sharon gave last weekend, he declared that the settlers were only a small minority of the people. And indeed, even according to the settlers themselves, they constitute less than 4% of the citizens of Israel. But the numbers do not reflect their actual power. In a democratic society, a small, fanatical and highly motivated minority can influence matters more than a big but apathetic and flabby majority.

In the course of the decades, the settlers have set up an extensive apparatus of control and propaganda. Patiently, they have infiltrated the army, where they now occupy the key positions once held by kibbutzniks. They possess huge amounts of funds, not only the money that flows to them through hundreds of channels from the state coffers, and not only the lavish donations from American Jewish multimillionaires, but also from the plentiful resources of the American Christian evangelists hoping for the rebirth of biblical Israel.

One may well ask: What foolishness possessed Sharon when he proposed that the members of Likud — his own party — of all people, should decide on his plan? Did he not realize that this is the only arena where the settlers can command superior forces?

Why? As usual with victory-drunk generals: out of sheer arrogance and contempt for the opponent. At the pinnacle of political power, he disparaged the settlers. He underrated their emotional appeal and their well-oiled logistics machine, created with the money of the state.

Most of the settlers constitute a disciplined body. They unquestioningly obey their commanders, the "Yesha rabbis" (Yesha is the Hebrew acronym for Judea, Samaria and Gaza). This is a totalitarian structure, in the true sense of the term: total faith, total organization, total discipline.

"My head supports the Sharon plan, but my heart supports the settlers," a Likud member confessed. That is quite natural: When a settler family with attached baby knocks at the door and asks: "Do you want to evict us from our home?" — how can he resist? After all, from the day he was born he has heard that the national aim is to possess the whole of Eretz Israel, that the settlers are the salt of the Earth.

One good thing has come from this referendum: Suddenly the public has awaked and seen the Golem that has come to life in their midst. The writing is on the wall: The settler movement is sucking the marrow from the state; it is an obstacle to peace; it is a danger to Israeli democracy and to the future of the state itself. Now the general public, too, sees the danger represented by this rampaging Golem.

It is not too late to remove the piece of paper from beneath the Golem's tongue.