For one Jewish settler, the idea of leaving the West Bank is a sin

A TIME OF CHANGE
ISRAELIS, PALESTINIANS AND THE DISENGAGEMENT
For one Jewish settler, the idea of leaving the West Bank is a sin
- Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 9, 2005


Sa-Nur, West Bank -- This is one in a Chronicle series on Israel's planned evacuation this month of approximately 9,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. The stories are told through the lives and voices of individuals touched by the conflict.

Today: A West Bank settler finds biblical justification for his determination to remain in the territory.
Shaul Halfon sat on a stack of stone blocks in the heart of his unfinished synagogue, white dust coating his massive form, and explained the reason for his labors.

"God said to Moses, make for me a house, and I will be with the people of Israel," he bellowed, his voice carrying over the sounds of tile saws, drills, hammers and excited young yeshiva students buzzing around under his gaze.

He smiled, his eyes shining. "God himself was the engineer."

As is Halfon, a construction engineer who has spent a lifetime on a single project: building "Eretz Israel," the biblical land of Israel and Judah.

And just because he faces evacuation in less than two weeks from this tiny Jewish settlement in the northern West Bank, Halfon, 70, isn't about to stop now. The synagogue will rise, he insists, no matter that the buildings of Sa-Nur, finished or not, are to be demolished by bulldozers under supervision of the Israeli army. It will rise, and the settlement will stay, because that is what Hashem -- God -- wants it to do.

And to Halfon, God's word comes well before Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's.

"If we don't keep our country, we lose our country. Because what this crazy man wants to do is suicide for Israel," he said.

In briefings with reporters, Israeli generals have said they expect most of the settlements on the evacuation list in the Gaza Strip and in the northern West Bank -- called by its biblical name Samaria by settlers there -- to comply more or less quietly. Many settlers have begun to move, and most of the holdouts, say the briefers, are expected to submit in the final moments, perhaps with some spotty resistance.

There is one exception they regularly point to: Sa-Nur, where hundreds of activists from across the West Bank have taken up residence, promising to turn Sa-Nur, into a "Stalingrad in Samaria," a reference to the Russians holding off the Nazi siege of Stalingrad in 1942.

The newcomers have transformed Sa-Nur, a once-tiny artists' colony with a population of approximately 110, into a carnival-like tent city. They have held celebrations, rallies and demonstrations of defiance. Amid all this, Halfon emerges as a figure of respect, leading prayers, given awards for organizing protests and asked to light the celebratory bonfire.

Are the government officials right to consider Sa-Nur a challenge?

Halfon smiles.

"Of course," he said, as the sounds of building a temple echoed around him. "Because I am here."

Halfon is an outsize man, in many regards, with a physical strength belying his age and his diabetes. He is driven by an absolute, all-embracing belief: that there is just one god, the Jewish God, who loves his people but who demands of them service and obedience, demands that have not changed in nearly 6,000 years.

"God doesn't like his children when they believe half and half. He doesn't even like children when they believe 99 percent. He wants people to believe 100 percent," Halfon said. "I believe 120 percent. This is why I have power at my age to do what I do."

Halfon's views are not shared by the state of Israel, which he said refused to recognize him as a rabbi because he dissents on fundamental points of the test issued for rabbinical candidates. He believes, for example, that only rabbis can be judges, and he rejects the authority of the country's secular Supreme Court.

Nor are his beliefs universally shared in the anti-disengagement camp, which includes many whose opposition is grounded in issues such as security and what some regard as a lack of due process for the settlers who are to be removed.

But Halfon is no lone voice in the wilderness. The notion of a biblical right to a territory beyond the so-called Green Line, the armistice line that demarked Israel prior to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, motivated many of the religious Jewish settlers who went into the West Bank and Gaza Strip after that war.

A May 2005 survey by the National Security Studies Center at the University of Haifa found many Israelis in agreement with some of Halfon's views: 56 percent wanted more religion in secular schools and 33 percent wanted Israel to be governed under Halacha, Jewish religious law.

In the same survey, 39 percent said they favored the concept of "Greater Israel" -- which would incorporate the occupied territories and more -- even at the expense of the state's democratic system. And 40 percent rejected giving any of Israel's current territory to Palestinians, even as part of a full peace agreement.

To Halfon, disengaging from that territory is not only a bad idea, it's a sin, and a negation of the Jews' own history.

"(Israel) is the only place in the world that is holy," he said. But, he said, it is a holiness reserved for Jews.

Halfon's own roots go back 800 years, he says, when his ancestors, part of an early Jewish diaspora, returned to Israel from Spain.

In the 15th century, Halfon said, the family moved from Sefat, in northern Israel, and settled in Hebron, a city in the heart of biblical Judea and the site of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, revered by Jews and Muslims as the burial place of Abraham and his wife, Sarah.

In August 1929, a quarrel over Jewish access to what was then called the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, led to riots throughout British-controlled Palestine. Arab mobs killed 133 Jews, 67 of them in Hebron, including two of Halfon's older brothers, he says. His father moved the rest of the family to Tel Aviv where he helped build the neighborhood where Shaul Halfon was born, the 15th of 16 boys in a family that also included two girls.

"All our family was very, very, very, very religious," Halfon said. It did not make his young life easy. Most of his schoolmates, he recalls, were the children of secular German immigrants who mocked Halfon's appearance: the knotted string tzitzis that dangled from under his heavy long tunic, or salma, and especially the long, curling hair, peyot, that framed his face under his wide yarmulke.

"Children said, 'You look like a goat, you look like a goat,' " he said, imitating in a sneering sing-song voice. "And I said, 'Stop, or I'll beat you. ' And I beat them ... until they understood that we were very strong."

One of Halfon's brothers, he said, died fighting for a Jewish militia group against the British in the 1940s.

As Halfon tells it, his own first taste of war came when he was 13, when he used a donkey cart to carry a machine gun between Jewish positions in the hills around Tel Aviv during Israel's 1948 war for independence.

The war left Israel powerful and confident enough, Halfon believes, to take back all of the biblical Eretz Israel. It failed to do so, Halfon said, because of pressure from the United States and Prime Minister David Ben- Gurion's lack of religious faith.

"We didn't have the guts and enough patriotism to take it back," he said. "When you are not religious, you make all the mistakes in the world."

At the age of 19, Halfon joined the Israeli Defense Force.

He was first assigned, he said, to a paratrooper unit led by a young major named Ariel Sharon. At their first meeting, Sharon, dressed in snappy shorts and sandals, looked at Halfon, in his tzitsis, salma and peyot, "like I fell down from the moon."

Halfon relates tales of derring-do to anyone who will listen -- fellow settlers who have come to Sa-Nur's defense, the children they brought with them to the tent city, yeshiva students who listen to him as they work on the synagogue.

None of the stories can be independently confirmed: parachuting over the Suez in 1956 with no training; killing 80 Egyptian commandos in the Sinai Desert; falling asleep at the wheel of an army command car during the 1967 Six- Day War and running into a tank full of sleeping Egyptian soldiers, killing them with a hand grenade, then soaking his feet in the Suez.

If the tales sound improbable, Halfon says, so do Israel's victories -- unless you have faith like his -- that God has a plan for Israel, which has been revealed in its various wars.

"Why a six-day war, not a 10-day war? Because in six days God built all the world ... and he gave all the border like it was in the time of King David, " Halfon said. "Because I know, and I believe, for me it is easy."

When he wasn't fighting wars, Halfon advanced God's agenda by building homes for Jews throughout the territories conquered in the 1967 war. "Until 1980, there are not any settlements in Sinai and in Gush Katif (in the Gaza Strip) that don't have my 10 fingers," he says.

But Israel's leaders didn't seem to share his understanding of God's plan.

Halfon points to the failure after the 1967 war to bulldoze the 1,300- year-old mosque on the Temple Mount, a Jewish and Muslim holy place administered by Muslim authorities, and commence building a third Jewish Temple to replace the two that had been destroyed in ancient time.

"I believed that ... there was going to be a big revolution in Israel," he said. "We would come back to the way of the Torah."

The final straw, for Halfon, was Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, in which Israel agreed to give back the Sinai and the Jewish settlements that included two homes Halfon had built and intended for his children.

Disgusted, feeling like "all my world was gone," Halfon said he sold millions of dollars worth of construction equipment and departed for the United States.

The self-imposed exile lasted 10 years. He remarried a woman he met in North Carolina ("She's not American. She's Jewish"), and in 1990, finding America too corrupt, too anti-Semitic, too faithless, decided it was time to fight for Eretz Israel again.

Since then, Halfon has railed publicly against the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians -- which he compared to offering the man who beat your wife an opportunity to share her -- and in favor of the American intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard, convicted in the United States of giving spy satellite photos to Israel.

Halfon, whose van is decorated with giant billboards calling for Pollard's release, insists Israel was entitled to see those photos under past agreements with the United States. He says the case is another example of how the United States is not Israel's best friend, but its worst enemy, dominated by Christian presidents who used financial and military aid to pressure Israel into the current disengagement plan.

"President Bush -- he is the president of the United States ... not the president of the whole world," he said, his voice rising. "With what permission you push Israel to do something that is going to be very, very dangerous? Who are you that you can split our country?

"How did the United States come? By the ugliest way that can be. They killed the Indians like they killed sheep," he said. "You come and tell me what to do?"

His voice rises again at the question of whether the Palestinians should have their own land or at least equal voting and other rights in Israel.

"They're a group of murderers," he said. "There is no peace with the Palestinians. They are not a nation."

The violent Palestinians have forfeited their rights even to life, he said. The nonviolent have a choice: live in Israel under Torah law or leave for the land he says God set aside for the descendants of Ishmael -- Arabs - - in the "East," as some versions of the Book of Genesis state and which Halfon takes to mean Saudi Arabia.

But time -- and God's patience -- is running out, Halfon warns. The world is rife with poverty, cruelty, permissiveness and homosexuality. The end days are coming, and they won't be pleasant. He foresees a global war between the faiths -- after Christians and Muslims together have turned on the Jews -- in which two out of three people on Earth, including Jews, will be dead.

"And whoever is left ... will worship Hashem -- God -- as he is supposed to be.

"I have a feeling that I'm going to be in this war," he said quietly.

For now, Halfon is taking a stand at Sa-Nur, trying to demonstrate to God that there are still some who follow his word. A year ago, Halfon brought a new Torah to the settlement and soon began work on a proper synagogue to replace an old Jordanian mosque, its minaret still in place, that Sa-Nur residents have been using as their place of worship.

He moved to Sa-Nur a couple of months ago, from another small West Bank settlement called Nofim. He's living with his wife in the synagogue as he builds it, sleeping in a small tent with his family name on the flap.

Even to consider the synagogue might be destroyed in a matter of weeks would, for Halfon, be a failure of faith.

"I don't want to think about this. If I think about this, I'm not a religious man. I think about building, not about destroying."

There has been concern that violence may erupt when the evacuation proceeds at Sa-Nur, but Halfon, who carries a Glock semiautomatic pistol under his tunic, promises he will never harm any soldier who comes to remove him. He will not make it easy, however, and he makes no such promise for their equipment.

"I'll cut the bulldozer in pieces like this," he said, holding two thick fingers an inch apart. "I know how to cut."

E-mail Matthew B. Stannard at mstannard [at] sfchronicle.com

Page A - 1