Book Review: Letters from Tel Mond Prison Letters from Tel Mond Prison by Era Rapaport. Edited by William Helmreich. The Free Press: 1996. Reviewed by Rael Jean Isaac The publicity blurbs with which the Free Press accompanies this volume (and indeed the subtitle, "An Israeli Settler Defends His Act of Terror") treat this volume as a portrait of the "kind of people who participate in terrorist activities." In fact, it is nothing of the kind. This fine and fascinating book does not offer an apologia for terrorism but a passionate, often lyrical brief for Zionism, and a portrait of the settlement movement and the idealism of the young religious Jews determined to recreate Jewish life in the homeland of patriarchs and prophets. It does not reveal what led a religious Jewish social worker to engage in terror, but what drove him to vigilantism, namely, the failure of his government to fulfil its basic function of maintaining law and order. Rapaport, born in Brooklyn, a marcher for civil rights like most "right-thinking" Jewish boys, went to Israel in 1966 and came under the influence of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who would become a spiritual leader of the settlement movement following the Six Day War of 1967. Rapaport became one of the early settlers in Shiloh (first capital of ancient Israel and site of the Tabernacle for over 300 years) and served as its mayor. The settlers reached a modus vivendi with their Arab neighbors (although not necessarily on the basis of interactions that would be endorsed by the ACLU). Things went badly wrong after Begin signed the Camp David agreements, providing evidence that Labor politicians had a valid point when they said that Oslo had its roots in Camp David. Camp David, it will be remembered, not only turned over the Sinai peninsula to Egypt but promised "autonomy" to the Arabs of Judea and Samaria, including their own police force, with eventual final status

of the territories to be negotiated. The Arabs were now encouraged to believe their Jewish neighbors were only temporary, producing the escalating violence that would become known as the intifada. In a 1979 letter (much of the correspondence is prior--and some of it after--the attack on the Arab PLO mayor that led to his years in Tel Mond prison), Rapaport describes what the settlers found themselves up against. "Backers of the PLO, Jordan, communists, and religious Arabs--all suddenly worked together. The leaders of the struggle are a group of Arab mayors, militants and radicals, who established in late 1978 the National Guidance Committee....The NGC leaders called them [the Arabs] to riot, to throw rocks at our cars and to burn tires on the roads." Worse still, the settlers found their own government indifferent to the rising tide of Arab violence against them. Ezer Weizman (now President of Israel) was Minister of Defense then and Rapaport describes his attitude: "...Ezer is 'blind' now. Since Camp David, he is like a robot. No matter what the circumstances, he wants what he considers peace. He is like a man under the influence of a peace drug....Even though he knows what the NGC [National Guidance Committee] is about, not only doesn't he stop them -- he helps them!" To safeguard their communities when the Israeli government turned its back, Rapaport and others decided to take action against the PLO mayors and he personally took part in setting the car bomb that maimed Bassam Shakal, the PLO mayor of Ramallah. Rapaport would subsequently leave the country with his family (including his five children), but then voluntarily returned to be tried and to serve his sentence. The final letters in this volume are dated 1996. Rapaport, by now the father of seven children, is once again mayor of Shiloh. Describing the so-called peace process (which Netanyahu vows to continue) Rapaport is as cogent as ever. "In every other part of the world when you sign a peace agreement, it means you can go anywhere. When Germany and France made peace after World War II, Germans could walk around in Paris without getting killed and the French could walk through Berlin without endangering their lives. But is that true here? No way! A Palestinian can walk around in Tel Aviv or Haifa, but if a Jew is seen by an Arab in Ramallah or Jenin, he's taking his life into his hands. This is peace?....Why are all the water pipes in the Shomron being encased in cement to prevent the Arabs from poisoning the water supply? Why does a tunnel have to be built from Jerusalem to Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem so that Jews can be protected from rock throwers? And why are we building an electronic fence between Kfar Sava and Kalkilya?....If you don't have real peace, where people can go wherever they want to in safety, then the whole thing can't work." No one has summed up better or more simply why Oslo is an evil farce. Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.

Outpost               - 10 -               December 1996