From Revolutionary Leftist to Feiglinite

This piece was originally published in the Hebrew Maariv newspaper, Shabbat appendix, October 16, 2009. The author can be reached at Shalom@maariv.co.il.

Moshe Feiglin finished saying his words. The 200 guests in Rabbi Uri Sharki’s sukkah in Givat Shaul, all activists in the Jewish Leadership faction of the Likud (Manhigut Yehudit), grinned and applauded. David Ish Shalom sat very close to Feiglin at the head table. One time he would have flipped the table on him. At one time the activists would have thrown him out of the sukkah. He is generally known as a prominent leftist who never missed a “Gush Shalom” or “Yesh Gvul” demonstration, a stubborn fighter against the settlers and a supporter of the Palestinians, who also sat in jail after he got friendly with Yasser Arafat and broke the law forbidding meeting with the PLO.

Even Ish Shalom’s personal profile seemed out of place in Feiglin’s sukkah. He’s not religious, he’s not bearded, he lives in Ein Kerem and not in Yitzhar or Itamar, and he’s even an expert on Hindu philosophy—quite far from the world of the Bible. And in spite of all this, Feiglin invited him to speak immediately after him as befits the guest of honor, and he was not disappointed. Ish Shalom lambasted the Left in a tone that not even Feiglin and his friends have dared adopt. “The Left is a deadly virus,” he said, “just as Bogie Ya’alon explained. The Left is a danger to our existence, a Judenrein that supports ethnic cleansing. It controls the elite, the media, a treasonous bastard that strategically endangers the very physical existence of Israel.”

“You’re like all the rest of the converts,” I told him this week. “You have to prove that you’re more extreme than they are so they’ll accept you.”

“No, it’s the truth,” he answered. “The left reminds me of King Montezuma of Mexico, who, with money and jewels, happily greeted the Spanish conquistadors who came to destroy him. So the Left rejects transfer for the Arabs and accepts their claims, and in the same breath they suggest transfer for the Jews.”

The Jews live in occupied territory.

“That’s your own twisted imagination. What’s the difference between Sheikh Baadar in West Jerusalem and Sheikh Jarah in the east of the city? The entire thing is occupied territory. The Arabs want all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea.”

Netanyahu specifically offered the Palestinians a state.

“It’s all tactical. He also wants to protect the Land of Israel. He knows that the Palestinians don’t want a state on half of the territory and won’t give up the right of return. He’s just rolling the ball back to them.”

Will you support Feiglin for Prime Minister?

“I hope and pray that Netanyahu will succeed at the job. If he fails, God forbid, Feiglin will be there to lead the faith-based ideology.”

He’s good for the job?

“Absolutely.”

BECAUSE OF THAT WAR

Ish Shalom, 60, has been on a long, stormy path until now. He was born in Tel Aviv to the affluent De Boton family, studied at the Herzeliya Gymnasium, but spent most of his time on the beach by his home in the Mahlul neighborhood, becoming known throughout the city as an outstanding swimmer and surfer who would swim for kilometers at a time and climb on top of boats in the middle of the sea. In the army he served as a medic, and studied psychology and sociology at the Hebrew University, but the trauma that transformed him into a militant and uncompromising peace activist came during nine months of reserve duty he spent in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War.

“My unit evacuated tens of dead and wounded in the Sinai operation,” he recalled. “There, I was exposed to the horrors of war and the horrible failure of the politicians. I came back from the war with a sort of new consciousness, and I immediately joined the organizations of the protest movements. At that time I had arrived at the home of Professor Isaiah Leibowitz in Jerusalem. I sat with him for hours. He talked about the occupation, claimed it was a disaster for the Jewish people who should have returned the territories on day 7, including the Temple Mount. Uri Avinery was also my Shulchan Aruch of politics."

In the late 70’s, Ish Shalom wrote his only book, “The Fear and the Hope,” an impressive and articulate book, according to which, without a peace arrangement, the entire region will become nuclearized when atomic weapons will be transferred to terror organizations. 34 years before Netanyahu dared utter the term “demilitarized Palestinian state,” Ish Shalom proffered an independent , demilitarized Palestinian entity in his book, and wanted to leave the larger settlement blocs be, under Israeli sovereignty. In the book, Ish Shalom advocated an historic reconciliation with the national Palestinian movement led by the PLO, an idea that was considered revolutionary in the eyes of the Left, and absolutely unthinkable on the Right.

The political arrangements being discussed today are all along these lines, but Ish Shalom has chosen to confront what he wrote in the past. “The Arab world’s raison d’être, from the Persian gulf to the ocean, is the destruction of Israel. We are the pioneering soldier of the West in the midst of the Islamic world. Believe me I want peace. I’ve proven in my resume that there’s no bigger fighter for peace than me. I was ready to die for it. In the 80’s I was a Palestinian. During the first Intifada I participated in demonstrations right next to Faisal Husseini. I attacked border patrol buses that came to arrest Arabs during the first Intifada."

Today you would definitely call that treason.

"Absolutely. I acted out of blindness. From a naïve belief that the Arabs are like us, they also want to live in peace in a state of their own. I thought that if both sides understood that peace was the aim of everyone why should there be a problem?"

THE PEACE THAT NEVER WAS

In November of 1977, the day that President Sadat landed in Israel, Ish Shalom changed his name. David De Boton—a man of a respected family from Thessaloniki, a name widely known thanks to the work “Lechem Mishneh,” a commentary on Maimonides by Rabbi De Boton—became David Ish Shalom. “I decided to dedicate my life for the sake of peace,” he explained. “It was my work, my full time job for years. In my defense I can say that today I have fully repented, and the Left stayed in the era of sin."

During the first Lebanon War, peace activists got a ringing slap in the face. The Begin government, which got a lot of credit from the Left from the peace with Egypt, the evacuation of the Sinai and the destruction of the settlements there, turned into a bitter enemy of the left. “That was a jump up in my political activism. I refused to enlist for the war, and I got a suspended prison sentence.”

In 1984, Ish Shalom came to Jerusalem and continued his peace activism. He went around the city with a cart, distributed flyers, and argued with passersby. Every new settlement found him standing on the its main road with a group of demonstrators. He wandered around the West Bank and traveled to meetings with Fatah leaders, among them Faisal Husseini, Salah Zuhaikeh, Sari Nusseibeh, Ziad abu Ziad, Raymondah Tawil, and Pa’iz abu Rahma, one of the prominent leaders in Gaza. “They agreed that a new state needs to build infrastructure, an economy and education, and not deal with weapons,” he recounted. “I thought that the dream was meeting up with reality.”

In the beginning of 1987, Ish Shalom left with delegations of the Left to Europe in order to meet with the PLO, who came back then from Tunisia to Romania, Bulgaria, Switzerland, and France. These meetings brought politicians on the Right to pass laws against meetings with the PLO. Precisely at this time is when Ish Shalom decided to force his way through the ranks of the Likud and met with Moshe Amirav, a well-known party activist and close associate of Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir, who was appointed head of the government press office. The two, together with Nusseibeh, wrote a draft of mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO. “Amirav was working with Shamir’s knowledge, and Nusseibeh with Arafat’s and Fiasal Husseini’s,” he recalls. “Arafat already came to Geneva to sit at a historic meeting with Amirav. But Amirav never came. I know today that Shamir himself torpedoed the process.“

Ish Shalom didn’t slow his activities because of the initiative’s failure. Quite the contrary. He traveled around the country and around the world and caught the attention of the authorities. In 1989 he went with senior PLO officials and Israeli peace activists to Cypress in order to get on the return ship, which was supposed to embark from Larnaka to Israel, and strengthen the Intifada that broke out in the territories from the outside. The ship sank before his eyes, but Ish Shalom picked up his head. After he returned from Larnaka, he was stopped for investigation for the first time, together with associates from the Left. They all denied that they met with the PLO, but he confessed proudly, and even published an article entitled “To Oppose an Unjust Law.” “I thought that it was an anti democratic law that infringed on the right to freedom of assembly,” he says, “and it was all for the sake of peace.” In June 1990, an indictment was served against Ish Shalom. He was convicted and sentenced to seven months in prison.

THE DREAM AND ITS SHATTERING

In November 1993, Yitzchak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Arafat signed the Oslo Accords. All of the Palestinian leaders in the territories together with leftist activists came to the party at Orient House. Ish Shalom felt like a bridegroom at his wedding. A few months passed, and doubts began to gnaw at him. “I was amazed to see that they were giving them guns,” he said. “I spoke about a demilitarized state, not an armed one. I took one of the “Don’t Give Them Guns” flyers of the Right that I found on the street and waved it in the middle of a Gush Shalom demonstration. I remember Uri Avinery and some other activists attacking me angrily, tearing up the flyer and throwing me out of the demonstration.”

At the start of 1995, the serious terrorist attacks began. Ish Shalom stopped his political activities and sat on the fence. Then Barak came to power, and after a year went to Camp David. “The moment of crisis was when Arafat refused to sign the agreement that Barak offered him,” he recalls, “and then the Al Aqsa Intifada was just breaking out , which was more murderous than anything before it.” Ish Shalom decided to leave the country, and in 2002 went to India, broken and full of disappointment. He buried himself in the study of Hindu philosophy and future technologies, and three and a half years ago he came back.

The total dedication he committed to the Left, he decided to commit to the Right. He sought out a new leader. Benjamin Netanyahu was the first. He read all his writings, sent him memos, picketed by his house with signs of support, but didn’t get to the point of a relationship with him. From there he went to Lieberman, tried to join up with Yisrael Beiteinu, and even went to the Foreign Minister’s house in Nokdim, but he was pushed away there, too. Today he is a fervent Feiglinite who doesn’t miss a Manhigut Yehudit event, enlists tens of people to its ranks, and spreads Feiglin’s philosophy throughout the country.

“Moshe Feiglin is not your routine politician,” Ish Shalom says in praise. “Straight, a man with a compass and conscience that analyzes the Israeli reality with a razor-sharp edge and leads you to clear answers on every subject.”

They’re not suspicious of you in Manhigut Yehudit?

“They have every reason to be suspicious of me. My biography is appalling. Nevertheless, they are doing me a kindness and allowing me to bask in their shade.”

Moti Karpel, the ideologue of Manhigut Yehudit, writes that we need to erase peace from our political lexicon.

“Definitely. This peace is leading us to self-annihilation. What do you need more than the 16 years we went through in order to understand that? Only Feiglin can bring peace. Why? Because when the People of Israel will know that the land is hers and there is no negotiating over it, then you can start speaking seriously.”