Violence is indispensable for changing Israel’s course and establishing the State of Judea. Many Jews who want a decent state would shrink from violence, especially the mob’s. The only way to incorporate them into the struggle against our treacherous government is to offer a decidedly non-violent alternative: a peaceful resistance movement, preferably based on the existing religious establishment, with a large following and financial backing. That movement would attract much more financing than militants could hope for. The peaceful movement would be seen as a feasible alternative to insurgency. The division between militants and non-cooperators should be much stricter than practiced by the WZO and Irgun before Israel was established. Non-cooperators must be white knights in white gloves, without blemish, reminiscent of Mahatma’s followers. They should preach violence neither toward Israeli traitors nor even toward the Arabs. The agenda of an Arab-free Israel should be domain of militants; the issue cannot be resolved peacefully. The non-cooperators will make a single demand: an autonomous or independent Judea in the areas not significantly populated by secular Jews or Arabs. Meeting the demand requires no violence, allows for a truly Jewish state-like entity, and provides a safety valve for religious feelings. The message is, we want to go, we don’t infringe on anyone’s rights, and you, Israel, want to get rid of us.

To ease the split, Judea could accept a loose federal union with Israel. Confederation provides for religious diversity: Judea could be Orthodox, Samaria could be Conservative right, and some areas could be settled by secular Jewish nationalists. Even the Reformists could get a place near the Jordanian border. Religious and nationalist enclaves could relinquish foreign policy and monetary functions to Israel proper as long as she recognizes their rights to a religious environment free of Arabs.

Judea’s sovereignty offers Israel advantages over autonomy, foremost of which are the limits of liability. Many Israeli Jews detest giving our lands away to Arabs, but don’t want to suffer the consequences of keeping them. Now the religious Jews of Judea would shoulder the burden of foreign condemnation for taking over the core Jewish lands and cleansing them of Arabs. The condemnation will be irrelevant because religious Jews separate themselves from Gentiles, and insignificant because those Jews don’t significantly engage in foreign trade.

Judea will not be established easily. Israeli rulers want a monopoly on representing the Jews, and would oppose the second Jewish state, which would be more Jewish than their secular leftist entity. Splitting Israel into two Jewish states would be very hard; scores of countries have fought civil wars to preserve their integrity. Judea, however, lays no claim to Israeli land, but only to the territories earmarked for Palestinians. The Judean movement breaks no significant Israeli law, with the dubious exception of incitement to violence. Even then, Judeans could proclaim peaceful colonization by purchasing the land from Arabs. The Judean movement could structure its platform to conform to the legal niceties of Israel.

The Arab state could not reasonably refuse the Jews the right to settle in Palestine. Jewish settlers should strip themselves of Israeli citizenship. Israel has no right under international law to remove settlers who are not her citizens. The settlements will have to protect themselves, and will become the beachheads of Judea.

It is impossible to set up ironclad guidelines for founding Judea. The situation evolves, and the founders would have to be very flexible. The key is persistence, exploiting every loophole of opportunity, and never backing down.

Judea will need a charismatic religious leader, devoted but not foaming-at-the-mouth. The Rebbe could have done that, but since an authoritative high-ranking leader is now lacking, bringing up an inconspicuous but morally strong rabbi with charismatic potential might do. In the Western outlook, sort of like a Mahatma. The Indians succeeded because the British wanted to abandon the colonies. Judeans could succeed because the Jewish government and leftists want to rid Israel of irritating religious Jews and troublesome right-wingers. Judea would take the nominal religious pressure off secular Israelis: divorce and perform abortions at will, enjoy prostitution and gambling, buy pork at every corner, ride the buses with Palestinian suicide bombers on Shabbat—enjoy! Many left-wing Jews detest Arabs, and would be tacitly happy to set them to fight with religious Jews. For the plan of Judea to succeed, right-wing Jews must prove ourselves exceedingly troublesome, not worth the trouble of living with, too many to be jailed, and too notorious to be run over with tanks. A few thousand radicals for the violence, but dozens of thousands for civil disobedience. Unbending masses closing the streets in peaceful protests. We would not rely on individual leaders who are easily shut down, like Feiglin, but on people ready to lose their income, survive on peanuts, and block the streets for prolonged periods. Government, the pharaoh, has to receive its ten plagues before it lets the Jews go—to Judea. Stick and carrot. Pressure and escape. Violence and peaceful exodus to Judea.

I’m more concerned with another type of leftist—the cold cynics, equally unconcerned with social justice and religion. Even they long to fill their empty spiritual lives, and I know of many cases when rational minds, cold atheists, suddenly turned to religion upon encountering a very peculiar human being, the rarest of Jews: a truly believing rabbi. I’m blessed with knowing a handful of such wonderful people, and have witnessed instant conversions when rational people with excellent secular education were infected with Judaism after a thirty minute talk.

Mass education doesn’t convince anyone. People are turned to particular ideas in two ways. One, massive propaganda by demagogues. Their rhetoric is always cheap, aimed at the mob’s lowest common denominator. They turn the masses into zealots, but their zeal doesn’t last long. In Russia and Iran, disillusionment came in just decades.

The second way is by intimate communication in which an honestly, totally, unquestionably believing rabbi inspires a few other Jews. Such efforts cannot be duplicated on mass scale, and cannot be carried out on DVD or TV broadcasts. They require a spark of the personal touch.

But where do we find such rabbis? They mostly belong to the bygone generation whose faces, not of this world, shine at us from old photographs. Our generation is much colder, though a few such wondrous rabbis are there. This type of rabbi doesn’t appear in large cities or in the global village permeated by mass media. They are a unique product of small homogeneous Jewish communities, ultra-comfortable in the moral sense, where people share values and loyalties, and big-city neuroses are unknown.

The next generation of real rabbis can only come from the settlements.

Western European socialist countries live off centuries of accumulated welfare. Their income distribution is close to the socialist model, but the rest of their economy is fairly free. They are spared the burden of military expenses. They don’t have an economically lackluster quarter of their population. Israel is different in every one of those aspects.

Like the communists, Israel initially embraced socialist economic regulation because it furthers political totalitarianism. The leftist state, bent on eradicating Judaism, could not accept economically independent citizens who would eventually sponsor Jewish—that is, anti-government—purposes. Israel still retains a truly communist level of business regulation which stifles private initiative and puts businessmen at the government’s mercy—while they are loyal.

Elites are necessarily cosmopolitan. Every person comfortably cooperates with his equals. Most Israeli professionals can find friends of similar social standing in Israel. But the Israeli “elite” is too small to find fellows in the country. Big businessmen and politicians seek friends and contacts abroad. The owner of an Israeli international corporation or Israel’s foreign minister cannot really wear Jewish religious garb in London, nor can they make an argument about Jewish chosen-ness for the Promised Land to justify holding on to Jerusalem.

Through the ages, the Jewish “elite” has been the most anti-Jewish force, closely cooperating with our enemies in Judenrat fashion. Israel cannot survive as a Jewish state while the “elite” have political power. And in a democratic state, it always has such power. Worse, power is also allocated to “artistic” opinion-makers: news anchors, brainless political commentators, actors, and singers. In their search for artistic freedom they reject any bounds, including the bounds of Judaism and Jewish interests.

Davidic monarchy would be nice, but Israel’s only practical choice is administrative autonomy on the settlements’ level. Every community should have the right to determine and enforce its own rules: of schooling, public appearance, religiosity, etc. Such ghettoization can shield Jews from the assimilated “elite.” Think of Judea.

What are the alternatives, anyway? I cannot stand the silliness of the “historical right.” Look into an encyclopedia. Jews were sovereign on this land, in traditional chronology, from David’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1034 to 719 BCE when the Assyrians sacked Israel, a total of 315 years. That can be extended here and there: take the fall of Jerusalem rather than Israel, add a few years of Hasmonean independence, calculate from the time of Saul’s raid on Amalek, and so on. But the essence is clear: by whatever measure, Jewish sovereignty was very short. Jewish dominance lasted much longer, from the era of judges (the real ones, not the Supreme Court’s) in the fifteenth century BCE until the second century CE, but that still hardly breaks us even with the centuries of Arab dominance in this land. Ask yourselves: if the direct, proven descendants of the Canaanites were to pop up now, say in Africa, and demand the right of return to their historical land, would you consider their demands relevant?

That Jewish presence in the Land of Israel never ceased and the Jews are its oldest residents is irrelevant: native populations throughout the world are annihilated and subdued rather than allowed to prosper and win sovereignty; look at the Native Indians in America.

Besides, Jews are not settling our historical lands now. The historical lands are exactly the “occupied territories.” The Jewish state was there while the sea coast was dominated first by Philistines, then by Greeks and Romans. Jews held it only for short time, and it was largely a pagan area. Our historical connection to Tel Aviv is just a bit stronger than to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Or take the related argument for Jewish “historical connection” to this land. Arabs, too, have a historical connection to it. Not all of them; some are relatively recent migrants—though even a century-long stay in Palestine makes them more native then the Russian Jews who came in the 1990s. But what is the historical connection of the perfectly proper Jews of Khazar descent to Palestine? Their ancestors never lived here. What is the historical connection of Ethiopian converts to Judaism to Palestine? What warped atheistic reasoning allocates them more rights to the land than the local Arabs? Jews demonstrably have a stronger historical connection to Europe than to Palestine: we spent 1,900 years of our history in Europe, much longer than in the Middle East.

The argument that Jews need a state is also dumb. Chechens need a state. Basques need a state. Some Eskimos, perhaps, think they need a state. There are more than 2,000 written languages in the world; behind each one there is at least one national group. Not even 10 percent of them have their own states. The number of Jews willing to man our own state is minuscule: states are not normally made up for just six million people. Much larger ethnic groups strive for independence with no international support.

Why should atheist Jews have a state in the current location? Palestinians justly rejoin that Europeans made them pay for Christian crimes against Jews in the Holocaust. Theodore Herzl was cynical about Jewish religious rights, left Jerusalem to Christians, and so retained a single stupid justification for founding the Jewish state in the Land of Israel: it was ostensibly a “land without people.” Of course, the land was settled from time immemorial, and even the deserts and swamps were a part of the Muslim world. Would anyone presume to take the vast uninhabited tracts of Siberia away from Russia? If Muslims had no rights to uninhabited desert, what rights does Israel have over the largely uninhabited Negev desert?

The utilitarian argument that no place other than Palestine was available for Jews is wrong and irrelevant. Wrong, because Jews were offered Uganda. That, by the way, was a bad choice: decades later, the Entebbe affair made Uganda’s capital a household name among Jews. Wrong, because Jews could as well take uninhabited land elsewhere: purchase a group of islands, plead for autonomy in the Australian savannah, build a gated community in Arizona, or occupy land elsewhere. If anyone should be compassionate to the perils of landless Jews, it is the European Christians who persecuted us. The Europeans have plenty of near-empty lands, especially in mountainous terrain, suitable for a tiny Jewish state.

The argument about safety is laughable. Nowhere in the world are Jews less secure than on a tiny strip of land perched between a sea of water and a sea of Muslims, besieged by Arabs from within and Arabs from without, where a single nuclear bomb can kill a tenth of the population.

Israel is a bad place to escape from anti-Semitism. If anything, Israel offered anti-Semites a politically correct way to express their hatred of Jews: now they hate Israel; hating a state is okay. The unavoidable Israeli repressions against Arabs provoke a wave of anti-Semitism among the leftists who were otherwise neutral-to-positive to secular Jews.

There is no cultural reason for Israel because there is no Israeli culture. It is American pop in Hebrew, with no connection to Jewishness whatsoever. Israel formally renounced the core Jewish traditions of Shabbat, kashrut, public rules of Pesach, and even Yom Kippur. Forget Israeli culture, there is not even Jewish culture. There is no common history: Sephardi Jews were largely spared the hallmark feature of the Ashkenazi Exile: continuous persecution. Nothing besides religion unites the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, or the Polish and German Jews.

Israel at first succeeded in developing respect for Jews worldwide. That’s not a proper objective, as Jews never cared about foreign opinion; indeed, we acted contrary to prevailing Christian thought. The Israel that engages in the peace process’ concessions, fails to suppress Arab terrorism, and generally acts weakly, provokes anti-Semitism.

Jewishness without religion is racist. What would Jews say of WASP Americans launching a campaign against intermarriage? Or of white citizens of South Africa urging their kin against marrying the blacks? What would we think of American black nationalists calling upon their tribe to avoid marrying whites? Everyone, however, is completely fine with religious distinctions. It’s okay for a Muslim to refuse to marry a non-Muslim, and so it is for Catholics. It is politically acceptable for Saudi Arabia to forbid non-Islamic worship in Mecca, and for the Vatican to refuse citizenship to non-Catholics. Imagine the US proclaiming a policy of preserving itself as a white, non-Hispanic state, or of the Belgians suppressing the birth rate among their Muslim citizens. However reasonable, such efforts would be detested. A Jewish religious state can restrict intermarriage, banish the Arabs, and do away with foreign worship (and conveniently, also foreign presence) in the Land of Israel.

Jewishness is indefensible on atheist grounds. Anti-Semites all over the world protest the Jewish concept of chosen-ness as racist, and decry anti-gentile pronouncements in Jewish religious books. American liberals already censored the school edition of Huckleberry Finn to remove racist remarks, and it will not be long before they will get to the Talmud and Shulhan Aruch. Liberal “rabbis” have already disavowed “barbaric” and “racist” statements in the Bible. Jews will be unable to defend our religion against liberal onslaught unless we fall back onto the statement of honest belief that Judaism is divinely revealed in its entirety.

There is a single atheist argument for Jews ruling over the Land of Israel: raw power. We are powerful and willing enough to take over this land. As good an argument as this is, it is not without the divine miracle that the handful of us Jews can stand against the Muslim hordes.

Religion provides Jews the only politically correct justification for the necessary actions. Everyone claims that the days are gone when European colonists annihilated the Native Americans to clear a country for themselves and Israel cannot act likewise now. Everyone says that Jews cannot repeat the sixty-year old example of Czechs and Poles who evicted millions of their Germans after the WWII. Cleansing the land of sworn enemies is confused with cleansing it of an undesirable ethnic group, and condemned. The world media screamed when Israel displaced 400,000 Palestinians in 1948. It is unlikely that media would abandon this topic after some months if Israel repeated the trick. But claiming a religious commandment to cleanse the land of natives, however nice and loyal, and to annex all the Promised Land that we hold, is a somewhat more acceptable way of dealing with foreign sensibilities. Few Western and Russian politicians are prepared for a head-on assault on the Bible. Machiavelli was surprised about Ferdinand’s decision to evict Jews from Spain, surmising that his religious justification was a clever ruse, and that the real purpose was to take over Jewish property. Religious justification is still workable, whether you’re a believer or not.

Though one can easily criticize the Bible, there is no point in doing so, as that undermines secular Jewish values as well. People don’t question many concepts with direct bearing on their lives: monetary policy, military intelligence, or state’s investment of their retirement funds. People take on faith incomprehensible scientific doctrines, such as the theory of evolution, parallel lines not crossing in infinity, and the Big Bang. So include the commandments among those unquestioned things.

It doesn’t pay to question whether God gave us the commandments on Mount Sinai or Moses knew the laws earlier and recorded them on Jethro’s suggestion. Just accept as a matter of belief that God revealed himself to the hundreds of thousands of Jews at Sinai, promised us this land in perpetual possession, and commanded us to drive the aborigines out. That position is so much simpler than labored nonsense about historical rights. Is it true? Who cares? What political theories are true? Lenin lied. Marx was wrong. Jefferson’s principles were idealistic, and were never implemented. Plato was a leftist monster who envisaged an Orwellian society. How often people choose to believe evident falsehoods which are expedient and comfortable, such as government’s wisdom, politicians’ relative honesty, or the peace process?
The biblical notions are plausible, sensible, and—as humans proved for millennia—utterly believable.

In any economy the biggest profits are generally made from dealing with faraway partners, because economic differences increase with distance, and informational efficiency (knowledge of the local market) decreases. Successful economies are open to foreign trade. With foreign trade, however, comes foreign influence: Persian and Hellenic influence then, American influence now. The economically-minded strata of Jews are always open to foreign influence. Such Jews prosper and become attractive targets: for invaders then, for economic (and therefore cultural) colonization now. Affluent, content people are not warlike, not zealous about their values, and quickly succumb to invasion or assimilation.

There is no rational reason for educated, productive Jews to stay in Israel while they can earn several times more in Gentile countries. A first generation or two of Israeli-born Jews would stay here out of habit, but habits erode quickly. American Jews similarly retained their Jewish identity for two generations after they lost Judaism, but universally assimilated in the third and fourth generations. Working for foreign markets, then working abroad, then emigrating permanently will be the trend of the next two decades.
Underproductive Jews will remain in Israel, leaving us the ultra-Orthodox Jews sponsored from abroad, black and many Sephardi Jews, and some others. Their state will be similar to Judea, a zealous poor state in the barren hills, lingering in existence for some time after Israel had gone. Like ancient Judea, the modern state will eventually become a protectorate or administrative autonomy under foreign rule.

Unless, of course, Jews heed the commandments and annex the Promised Land now.

But in minuscule Israel bureaucracy established itself quickly and bound citizens with legalese. The system usurped responsibility, but wasn’t responsible. The political echelon and the army bureaucratized and played according to rigid rules, and lost consistently. Now even soldiers are afraid to shoot Arabs, and there is no question of commanders performing independent operations. If the Yom Kippur war happened now, Ariel Sharon wouldn’t violate orders and break behind the Egyptian lines.

Talmudic tradition made Jews legal-minded. There is no way to limit bureaucratic expansion in the Jewish state. It must be Jewish, but not a state. The Bible teaches us that in the absence of a righteous and rightful monarch, the best system of government is Shoftim—independent townships without legislative power, only with judges. In modern political theory, that’s free market anarchy. It presumes minimal legislation, diversified among jurisdictions. Sort of like every town having its own speed limit, though in reality basic laws tend to converge among jurisdictions. Judea must adopt the biblical system of Shoftim.

Unless Jews break the state now, the state will break the Jews.

A large war between Palestine or Jordan and Judea would be unlikely for some years, and by that time Judea would have built a conventional army, possibly with a nuclear bomb. Religious Jews, ruthless toward their Arab enemies, will efficiently counter low-level guerrilla attacks. Israeli last-resort protection would only be deterrence, much like nuclear deterrence. The world believes Jews stand for each other, and the Arabs would find the Israeli protection of Judea credible.

Judea won’t have major economic trouble. Religious authority shouldn’t engage in economic regulation, though there is a danger of religious socialism. Judea can thrive as free market, zero-customs-duty economy. A religious government would likely misuse the money supply and cause inflation; Judea will be better off using foreign currency, whether Israeli, American, or Swiss. Ultra-Orthodox Jews accept extreme poverty and subsist on donations now; that state of affairs will continue in Judea. Most Orthodox Jews work productively. They can build a parasite economy in Judea thriving at the expense of overtaxed and over-regulated Israel, as Mexico does with the US. They can build a solid low-end economy with agriculture and basic factories.

Theocracies historically have survived longer than secular states because theological authority is closed to doubt and questioning by subjects. Secular Judea would eventually slither down into Israeli leftism, US populist democracy, or apartheid. In public opinion, only a religious state can exclude Arabs; secular states must be ethnic-blind. A secular government which imposes a strict moral code will be dubbed fascist, and ostracized. It is unlikely that great, honest rabbis would ascend to the helm of Judea, but even a rav like Ovadiah Yosef would rule Judea more sensibly than Olmert rules Israel.

Religious people cannot grow rich. Affluent, possibly, but not rich. Many rich hypocrites pose as religious, but they are assimilated, atheistic, lack the fear of God, and conduct religion as a set of rites rather than live a religious life.

A common objection to the second Jewish state of Judea is its limited economic capacity. That is far from certain. A theocracy built around the laws of the Torah would be a laissez-faire state with very low taxes and next to no regulation. Such a state can prosper in many areas, from offshore banking to jewelry to tax haven. But the big question is, would Jews accept a moderate economy in return for the religious and simply Jewish life? Judging by the millions of American Jews who prefer the assimilation and affluence of America to the limited economic opportunities and Jewishness of Israel, few Jews would move to Judea.

But they will be the best Jews.

Totalitarian states cannot be reformed. After the “democratic” 1990s in Russia, the KGB retook power. Totalitarian states have to be destroyed and then possibly rebuilt. Israel has every attribute of totalitarianism: pervasive security apparatus staffed by a single political group (the left), governmental and oligarchic control over economy, brainwashing in schools and media, and prejudiced courts. It would take a full-blown revolution, soaked with the blood of Arabs and Jewish leftists, to end the anti-Semitic state of Israel. What for? To have ultra-Orthodoxes vie with Orthodoxes over irrelevant regulations? To exchange leftism for religious hypocrisy? To have discredited rabbis run the country and ultra-Orthodoxes imagine themselves a privileged class of modern Levites? To allow rabbis the joy of being God’s partners and inventing more of their irrelevant rules? Thanks, no. Not worth the blood of good Jews.

We cannot make Israel, permeated by leftists, Jews-by-grandfather, and Arabs, into a Jewish state. The majority can accept a strong nationalist state, but not a Jewish state, simply because there are too few committed Jews around. We need a state of Judea. We cannot carve it out of totalitarian Israel, and so prefer that Israel abandon the settlements to the Palestinian state. We will carve Judea from Palestine.

We just want to be left alone. To teach our children as we think right. To observe our religion as we deem fit. To establish our own rules about welfare, gays, and Arabs. To ban Peace Now members to the fourth generation. Anything.

Jewish strata differ on basic matters. Orthodox, Conservatives, and Reformists will never come to an agreement; Reformism is Judaism to some, atheism to others. Leftism is anti-Semitism for some, a morally feasible policy for others. Some enjoy living with Arabs, others despise it. That’s about values. No consensus is possible, and none is necessary. Jews lived historically in isolated communities. Pharisees did not intermingle with Karaites, and even various Hasidic sects are contemptuous of each other. Israel, like other nation-states, wants to impose its will on all its subjects in every detail. That’s unjustifiable. Government should only take the tasks which the communities cannot pursue. Education, the admittance or exclusion of Arabs, and public violation of the commandments can be regulated on the community level rather than nationwide. Some communities might exclude Arabs and observe the Sabbath, others would welcome gays and barbeque pork on Sabbath. There is no legal reason to enforce moral uniformity.

Judea should not be an ultra-Orthodox state. Basic tenets should include severe limitation on the admittance of non-Jews and inviolability of borders. Other than that, the communities of Judea should be free to set their own rules on religious observance, which is obligatory for a community’s members. The communities could range from anarchist to ultra-Orthodox with every type of religious view in between. City boundaries protect every community from the culturally offensive behavior of outsiders.

That’s all we ask for: leave us alone. Continue with your socialist state if you like, just let us live as we wish. To work our orchards, educate our children, and enjoy our communities. We don’t even want to vote: elect Olmerts for yourself. We accept any jurisdiction: abandon our townships to the Palestinians and we will live as dhimmi under Abu Mazen. Big leftist Israel or Great Islamic Palestine, it makes no difference to us.

Leave us alone.