Last week, tempers flared over the issue of the Evyatar settlement outpost. Was the settlement legal or not? Was it right to involve the military in a civilian matter? Will the state uphold the agreement or will the outpost ultimately be evacuated by force? And yet, despite the importance of these matters, it seems the issue has turned more into a ploy to divert national attention.
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Thus, for example, as the public gaze was fixed on the fate of Evyatar, no one in the government uttered a word about any of the illegal Bedouin communities and structures being built in the Negev. Meanwhile, it seems the protestations by some coalition parties pertaining to the Citizenship bill – with Meretz and even some members of the Labor party now echoing the anti-Zionist Ra'am party – have fallen on deaf ears. Additionally, the earnest debate over Evyatar appears to have drowned out the background noise of the prime minister in practice, Yair Lapid, who has already agreed with the Biden administration (which has conceded the nuclear deal with Iran) to a policy of "no surprises," and who together with outgoing President Reuven Rivlin has signaled the need to renew dialogue with the Palestinians.
At the same time, in terms of actual governance, the composition of the Ministerial Committee on Basic Laws established by Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar was met with a modicum of indifference. Not only are its members not expected to reign in the High Court's unreasonable power against the legislative branch, but some of them also support changing and perhaps even annulling the nation-state law, about which committee member Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer wrote: "The nation-state law should be taught in classrooms as a contemptible distortion. Democracy must raise its voice against racism."
The collective preoccupation with Evyatar, therefore, is without question media spin aimed at distracting the public from other issues of national importance. However, something else happened, quite unintentionally. It re-crystallized the country's national ideological discourse and reorganized the scale of national needs.
On the national scale, Evyatar is important, but the Jordan Valley and Israel's entire eastern border, where Israel must impose its sovereignty, is no less important. On the national scale, Evyatar is important, but the national right of the Jewish people in their homeland, revoking the Nakba narrative and changing the "peace" paradigm that is based on a historical distortion – is even more important. On the national scale, Evyatar is important, but preserving the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and preventing it from becoming a country of all its citizens – is important sevenfold.
Hence, when many in the right-wing camp opposed the Evyatar agreement and any cooperation with the government, they didn't do so because they support the settlement enterprise any less. Just the opposite, they did so because they fear the entire Jewish-national foundation on the scale is being undermined by the current government. It was, in essence, a wake-up call for a different, even more, fundamental type of fight. A fight for the Jewish state itself. A fight for the very character of the Jewish national state. To paraphrase the distinction proposed by Ahad Ha'am between "the Jews' problem" and the "Jewish problem," it is not the settlers' problem or the problem of the settlement enterprise, rather it is a question of Jewish nationalism. The fight for it has already begun. And the solution doesn't lie in the fine print of the Evyatar agreement or reciprocally evacuating Khan al-Ahmar, rather first and foremost in toppling the government.
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