Controversy Over Land for Palestinians Becomes Religion Issue : Israel: Rabbis enter the fray, sometimes using the same biblical passage to support opposing views.

Behold, the Lord your God has set the land before you: Go up and possess it.

--Deuteronomy 1:21

Rabbis are speaking out more and more on the vexing issue of whether Israel can and should give up land that is in dispute with Palestinians, and the rabbis engaged in the debate offer studious assurances that God backs their views.

It is a discussion in which Talmudic scholars from ages past are recruited as allies by all sides. Biblical passages are cited as supporting evidence; sometimes opposing arguments are backed by the same passages. No matter. The discussion has shaken up established views of Israeli politics and set Israelis to pondering unresolved issues of the nature of the state.

In Jewish tradition, God gave the land--most often now defined as the territory that makes up modern Israel proper as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip--to the Jewish people. The focus of the current argument lies in whether the value of conserving human life supersedes the value of keeping all the land. In the name of peace, can a biblical inheritance be deferred to some distant future when the Messiah comes and settles all these earthly affairs?

And what of the Arab inhabitants who live here? Are their vines and orchards, not to mention their mosques and churches, standing in the way of the fulfillment of God’s will?

The rabbinical thrust into the most sensitive issue facing Israeli society has brought out latent displeasure that holy men of any sort should be influencing affairs of state.

“The implied presumption that rabbis--or for that matter, priests, ayatollahs and other clerics believed to represent divine authority--should ‘rule’ on the crucial matters of state is known as theocracy,” advised Yirmayahu Yovel, a philosophy professor at Hebrew University. “Theocracy opposes not only the idea of the modern liberal state in general but specifically the idea on which Israel as the modern Jewish state was built.”

The independent newspaper Maariv, bemoaning the involvement of the rabbis in political life, stated flatly: “The rulings on Jewish law, made by doves or hawks, should not determine Israel’s political direction.”

Critics notwithstanding, Israel is a country where religion and politics are closely entwined. Caucuses of black-clad bearded Hasidic politicians are common fare in Israel’s Parliament.

Religious parties representing various shades of Jewish Orthodoxy hold the balance of power between the two main secular blocs, the Likud and Labor parties, in the nation’s Parliament. Likud, the party of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, favors keeping all the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel has occupied militarily for 22 years. Labor, the junior partner in the fragile ruling coalition, appears willing to give some of the land in return for peace with the Arabs.

Any shift by major religious leaders could have important political implications. If either of the two main parties splits from the government and tries to form a new ruling alliance, religious parties will hold the key. If new elections take place, religious parties will surely have a role in subsequent coalition-building.

Labor politicians have already been canvassing religious groups to see if they could build a working parliamentary coalition. For Labor, with its secular traditions, that in itself is a small revolution.

It had been commonly assumed that religious parties lean toward keeping the occupied lands at all costs. Settlers in the West Bank and Gaza often raise the banner of religious determinism to justify their campaigns to settle the territory.

But that assumption was upset by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, a party representing Orthodox Jews of North African and Near Eastern origin. Yosef is widely viewed as the country’s most popular and charismatic rabbi; portraits of him wearing gold embroidered robes and dark glasses adorn not a few Sephardic homes. Shas holds six seats in the 120-member Israeli Parliament, more than any other religious party.

Yosef told a conference on Jewish law in Jerusalem that saving lives supersedes the need to keep all the land, provided that generals and politicians agree that giving up the West Bank and Gaza is not a security threat to the nation as a whole.

“If territories are handed over, (if) the danger of a war will recede and a chance of durable peace will arise, then it appears that by any reasoning it is permitted to hand over territory of the land of Israel for the sake of attaining this goal (of saving lives),” he said.

Yosef said the Arab inhabitants should not be driven out both for religious and humanitarian reasons. On the one hand, the Muslims are not pagans because they worship one god. And even if they were “idol worshipers,” they should not be driven away “out of a descent respect for the opinions of the nations.”

The comments created an uproar in part because of the unexpected nourishment they gave the hopes of Israeli doves. Yosef’s constituency, Sephardic Jewry, has been widely viewed as expansionist, anti-Arab and supportive of Likud policies. Suddenly, the view was at least partially turned on its head.

The pro-Labor newspaper Davar called Yosef’s lecture “the most significant event in Israeli politics in recent years. The tens of thousands who are influenced by (Yosef) could tip the scales between Likud and Labor.”

Independent observers noted an undercurrent in Yosef’s words that struck at the urgings of muscular nationalism in Israel, a pillar of Likud’s appeal.

“Yosef comes from the world of the yeshiva that is not seduced by nationalism,” remarked Rabbi David Hartman, head of the Shalom Hartman Institute for Judaic Studies. “They don’t celebrate power. For them, nationalism and power are not the organizing principle of Judaism.”

Nationalist rabbis did not accept Yosef’s analysis lying down. They struck out with their own viewpoint, also firmly rooted in Jewish law.

State-appointed chief rabbis, one from the Sephardic community, the other from the Ashkenazi or European community, ruled that it is forbidden to give up the occupied land. It is a biblical duty to defend Jewish sovereignty; the danger to individuals cannot excuse giving it up.

Argued Shlomo Goren, a former chief Ashkenazi rabbi, writing in support of the current chiefs’ ruling: “There are no grounds for discussing the retention or return of parts of Israel in terms of the question of danger.”

Goren rejected the idea that the lands should be returned for ironclad peace treaties--unless Israel were in danger of losing the territory through weakness in war.

“If we find that from a purely military aspect we are not in a position to vanquish our enemies, then even a shaky peace treaty is preferable to a defeat on the battlefield,” he wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

While not directly calling for the expulsion of Arabs, Goren noted that because the largely Muslim population does not accept certain commandments laid down to the sons of Noah, they could not be given “lodging” in Israel.

Goren defined Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as an “obligatory war” that must be pursued with “the utmost devotion.”

While the battle among the rabbis raged in newspapers and religious journals, another stir arose over utopian proposals put forth by Menahem Froman, a rabbi from the small West Bank settlement of Tekoa.

Froman’s is the man-bites-dog story of the West Bank. A founder of the militant settler movement Gush Emunim, he devised a formula to share not only the disputed territories with Arabs but Israel proper.

Under his plan, the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea would be ruled by two governments, one Israeli and one Palestinian.

The Jews would owe allegiance to the Israeli authorities, the Arabs to the Palestinian. He calls his concept the foundation of a “humane state” in which all sides would maintain cultural and political identity with their own people.

In answer to the widespread dismissal of his ideas as utopian, Froman shrugged: “This is the land of the prophets. It has always been the land of ideas.”

Froman’s ideas attracted little attention until he decided to meet with Faisal Husseini, a Palestinian activist linked with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

“Nothing I said was overly controversial,” Froman recalled. “But people were bothered that I shook his hand.”

His neighbors in Tekoa, a hilltop community south of Bethlehem set among a ring of Arab villagers, are tolerant of the rabbi’s views but less so of his meeting with Husseini.

“He’s a dreamer,” said settler Murray Alon. “But he was meeting with the enemy, and that is hard to take.”

Froman’s ideas stem from the notion that the state is not the sole, or even primary, force motivating contemporary Jewish history. He recalled that when his parents came to British-ruled Palestine, statehood was not their primary concern.

“Zionism means to bring Jews home,” Froman asserted. “The state is secondary. Or at least, a balance must be struck between the state and humankind.”

He reviles the image that many have of settlers as people who “wear religious clothes, a kippa (skullcap) and have murder in their eyes.”

“The biggest hope for peace is to spiritualize Israeli society,” he concluded.

But does he not believe that possession of the land by Jews is a step toward divine redemption?

“Yes,” he responded, stroking his prophet-sized beard. “But there are many ways to possess. If it means coming in and throwing others out and creating horrible structures of control, what is good about that? If it is the beginning of a higher spiritual process, then it means something.”