The defeatist talk that has been disseminated in the media for the past two weeks – perhaps from "military sources" and perhaps from the "wanted assumption" of the distributors – is detached from the vital interests of the State of Israel.
As long as the war in the Gaza Strip lasts, Israel cannot exist without the government's instructions to the army being fulfilled by the end. Their fulfillment is a necessity of life. The communities of the northwestern Negev will stand deserted and abandoned, God forbid, if Islamist Nazism is not uprooted and destroyed militarily, organizationally and politically (not necessarily "ideologically") from the entire Gaza Strip, including Rafah and the Philadelphi Route.
And it will not end with displacement from the Negev and the Upper Galilee. A defeatist acceptance of a genocidal gang in Rafah and Khan Yunis, physically linked to Sinai, will cast a dark shadow and a heavy question mark over our entire being. If there are those at a loss in our political or military leadership who do not understand the full significance of this, reality will impose itself on them. It is better for them to stick to the goals of the war to the fullest, than to be forced into even more difficult conditions than those we now stupidly find ourselves in. But the full realization of the goals of the campaign in Gaza, and perhaps also of a campaign in the north whose goals have not yet been defined, will not exempt us from the question of settlement. It must be elevated and quickly elevated to a high place in our order of priorities, after too long years of neglect and alienation.
The war exposed a basic fact that we tended to ignore: The State of Israel must be a settling state. This is her truth and it is the necessity of her life. The severe neglect of the alert squads throughout the country, including in the "territories", the prohibition of environmental "madaurieta" to settle the land (unless the settlers are not Jews), the foolish idea that spatial protection and border protection are only a military matter and not a settlement matter, the wild and manipulative incitement propaganda against the settlers in Samaria and Judea – these are prominent examples of false anti-settlement concepts that took over wide circles in the military, planning, economic, media and political establishments after 1967, And the baseless arrogance that gripped the military establishment at the time, the idea that the army was the main tool in our struggle with the Arabs for the land gradually took root.
In the Alon Moreh High Court of Justice, former Palmachniks Haim Bar-Lev and Mati Peled (before he became anti-Zionist) testified against the idea of security settlement. This was one of the manifestations of the idea that the army is enough and there is no need for settlement. The erosion of the Zionist concept of "one hand in the craft and the other in the shalach" did not occur immediately, as evidenced by the settlement efforts in the 60s and 70s in the Golan, the Jordan Valley, Sinai, the Gaza Strip and even the central mountain boulevard (Ariel, Ma'ale Adumim and Kiryat Arba). But the idea that we were clinging to the land through intertwined settlement and defense was increasingly portrayed as outdated.
It wasn't just an ideological process – Israeli society had lost its communal capacity. The "settler movements" of the labor movement stopped settling moshavim and kibbutzim. Already in the 60s, their loss of community capacity was evident. The wave of settlement after 1967 did not herald a recovery, in the end.
The foolish idea that spatial defense and border protection are only a military matter and not a settlement matter, the wild and manipulative incitement propaganda against the settlers in Samaria and Judea – these are prominent examples of false anti-settlement concepts that took over wide circles in the military, planning, economic, media and political establishments after 1967
The hostility towards the religious settlers and their Amana movement stems, by the way, in no small part from frustration at the loss of settlement capacity in the labor movement. We must not continue the neglect of settlement. Our lives themselves require it to be renewed. New settlement movements need to be established; And the kibbutzim and moshavim movements cannot afford not to resurrect Bari (named after the well-remembered Berl Katzenelson) and the other settlements. In Sderot, Ofakim and Netivot, Sha'ar Hanegev and Eshkol, as well as in the Upper Galilee, the Gush Etzion deed that was destroyed in 1948 and rebuilt after 1967 must be repeated. The massacre must be translated into settling cities and villages along all borders – in the Galilee, Golan, Jordan Valley, Arava, Egyptian border, northwestern and eastern Negev – as well as in the center of the country, on the backs of the mountains of Samaria and Judea. This is the Zionists' response to the fierce horror.
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