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Letter from Sa-Nur

From Graham Usher in Sa-Nur

September 1st, 2005 -- Miriam Adler, 28, was the spokesman for Sa-Nur, one of the four northern West Bank settlements slated for evacuation under the disengagement plan. She came to Israel in 1989 from Moscow, “after ten years of struggle” in the former Soviet Union. She spent most of her life in Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, before arriving here in 2003 with her husband and six children. How would she define her family? “We are Zionists, pioneers, idealists,” she says.

But she is not particularly typical of “traditional” religious Zionism. She wears a short-sleeved orange shirt and thick black mascara around her pale blue eyes. She is not an old-style territorial nationalist, like the Likud youth activists who founded Sa-Nur as a “civilian” settlement in 1978. In deference to faith, she has an orange skullcap over her hair. She is rather a modern, perhaps post-modern, alloy of the two.

Some Israelis would call her a “repentant” Jew due to the primacy she accords the “land of Israel” over the institutions of the state. Veteran peace activist Uri Avnery describes her and her kind as “a sect which bears little resemblance to traditional Judaism. Rather they are a mutation of Judaism made in Israel.” Whatever you call her, she and her fellow “Zionists, pioneers, idealists” have emerged as the radical edge of Israel’s settler movement.

A month before the evacuation, we sat in Sa-Nur’s administrative headquarters, once an Ottoman fort, now an art gallery. Miriam’s office has the buzz of a war room. Detailed maps of the West Bank hang from the walls. Armed with a baton, she points out the strategic location of Sa-Nur, on the main road between Nablus and Jenin.

“We are Israel’s flak-jacket,” she says. “Without Sa-Nur northern Samaria will become a contiguous territory for terror. This is why we must remain here, in the enemy’s midst. Unfortunately,” she sneers, “the government believes its foreign image is more important than Jewish blood.”

She believes it to be only a temporary aberration. Sa-Nur, she says, is primed for confrontation, that “surreal, catastrophic situation” when Jew will expel Jew from their Biblical birthright. Miriam takes us on a tour of the settlement.

An old mosque has become a yeshiva. A new synagogue is being built. Around the settlement’s perimeter are a dozen black tents, hosting 150 “defenders”, mostly Jews from the isolated “ideological” settlements around Nablus.

“We are ready to absorb 10,000 from all places, a group so big it will be impossible for the army to uproot us,” says Miriam. “They will evict 1,000. So what? Nine thousand will stay. We will block the roads, scatter into the [Palestinian] villages. Our aim is to drive the army crazy, to make it inoperable. We are prepared for a long siege, to wait until the army gives up. That is the Zionist way.”

Has Zionism lost its way? Yes, she says. For Miriam the fundamental rift thrown up by the disengagement is not between Israel and Palestine (“a place, not a people”) or even between the “state of Israel” and the “land of Israel”. No, “it is between people who are connected to the ideals of Zionism and Judaism, to settling the land, to national pride. And those who have no ideological ties, who think only of today.”

We end our trip in the art gallery. Miriam exudes an almost maternal pride as she shows us the artefacts, all made by Israeli artists from the Soviet Union. It is easy to understand why. They chart her itinerary from émigré to born-again Jew.

There are bronze sculptures of peasants tilling the land of the Russian pale. The walls are lined with photographs of Israeli soldiers, Bible in one hand, Uzi in the other. And in the centre is a vast Menorah, hoisting not candles but melted-down machine guns. For Miriam it is the very emblem of her faith, where the hand of God is steeled by military might. “Had Israel lived by that code — by religious values and force — we wouldn’t be where we are today,” she says.

Sa-Nur was evacuated and Miriam arrested in a single day on 23 August. It was the last of the 25 settlements in Gaza and the West Bank to be removed.


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