A few impressions of being in the company of the settler movement last night in New York:
The meeting's in the basement of a rich stone synagogue. The crowd aren't rich people, they're cause people, rough around the edges, a little like myself. A woman in front of me has an old backpack and a small Dean and Deluca bag, explains that it was her big indulgence, buying a little goat cheese for herself for dinner. A guy next to me has a motheaten IDF Soldier baseball hat. The people are sort of old, 50s, 60s. A grayhaired woman bent by age passes around a cheap legal pad for us to write our names on. An older guy cries out about the radio show he lost because of his weekly appeals for the JDL.
Like other cause people, they all know one another. There are about 80 people in the room, and the woman next to me, a little glamorous, a little the worse for wear, wearing a lot of rings, gives me a suspicious look. "I haven't ever seen you at one of these." One of these means meetings of Americans for a Safe Israel, obviously a fringe group, but like the Israeli settlers themselves, gaining support from the body of Jewry. The copy of Outpost magazine the grayhaired woman hands me, with a smile, evangelizing, has a piece by former Pentagon under secretary Douglas Feith. He always hid his fervent Zionism in public, as other neocons did; but it's all through that piece.
A few people speak in a revivalish way, and the crowd is responsive. Whenever they mention Gaza, people cry out "Terrorists." The star is Nadia Matar of Women in Green. She's skinny and dressed in military outfit, dark green jacket, olive green pants, with a scarf around her neck. She wears a tight brown Buster Brown hat, with a big brown button on the front of it and her hair tucked under. She looks like she could be in the Stern Gang. Androgynous, but a mom, she begins by invoking the Jewish patriots who died in '47 and a settler killed more recently. "May God avenge his blood."
She has an excited breathless manner but some charm too. She shows a movie of the settler movement colonizing a crucial hill east of Bethlehem in Palestine, and in the movie she's hooking a strap up to a concrete barrier so that she can drag it away with her car's trailer hitch.
"If you don't have a man, be the man!" she cries. Great expression.
Almost everything she says is longwinded and racist. She runs down Islam and Arabs endlessly. The Palestinians should have been cleansed long ago, because "It's our land, God gave it to us." That's her mantra. She also says "Boruch Hashem," a lot, which means, Praise God, but her talk isn't religious. She doesn't seem to be that religious, more nationalistic. Her most compelling story is about shoveling the earth of the land where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked and holding it up to her face. She says the Arab desire for Eretz Israel is as fiendish as someone who
owns a football field trying to take away a box of matches at one end.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is Matar's story about fatherland. The feeling of everything she says is that we're in the Warsaw ghetto. She refers often to Hitler and the Nazis. She imitates Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French fascist, issuing fascist decrees, and seems to approve his prerogative to move Jews out of Paris–because France belongs to the French and we're not French. It's that old intimacy of Zionism and antisemitism, the dependence. Her politics exude persecution. The media are against her, the politicians are against her, most of Israel is against her, and American Jewry too.
All the adversity excites her. She likes that spot. She shows a hill in Palestine that they turned into a thriving colonial village. "Dagan Hill." Again and again they were thrown off the land by the army but they kept going back, and they won. That kind of battle thrills her, would seem to satisfy Holocaust-shaded feelings of redemption through force. Again it shows that the most important trope about Israel is Avrum Burg's statement that the Jews pardoned the Germans too fast, and put all that rage onto Arabs.
I wonder what most societies do with narrowminded radicals like her, how it can sequester their matchbox energies. The problem with Israel is that it calls to these types. She was born in Belgium in 1966, moved to Israel in '87. And every racist thing she's done has been tacitly licensed by the government, because it must hallow the raging spirit of Jabotinsky.
The meeting goes on too long. I'm glad to get out of there. The spirit of it is anachronistic, reeking of pre-WW2 European nationalism, but preserved, canned, lovingly coddled, so it's our bad dream.
