Feiglin in the News


Haaretz: 29 Kislev 5769 (Dec. 26, '08)

The Feiglin Revolution

By Ron Pressler

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received - hatred. The great creators... stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won" (Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead," 1943)

"The Jew is constantly searching. He is imprinted with a soul that comes from an ideal world and this leaves a deep, usually unconscious, impression of another reality. This soul continually pushes him to go further and never be satisfied with any contemporary human reality" - Moti Karpel, "The Belief-Based Revolution," 2003

Moshe Feiglin got out of the car with his small entourage. It included Gabi Hayehudi, a young American with long red earlocks and a large blue skullcap, who served as driver and, sometimes, when required, as uniformed bodyguard; and Tehila Bramson, a young woman from Jerusalem, who recorded his every step on video.

Feiglin was ready for the long day that surely awaited him. He'd hoped to be able to pray that morning on the Temple Mount, but the entrance was closed to Jews because of a Muslim holiday, and so he had to recite the morning prayers at his home in Karnei Shomron. He stretched a bit after the drive and then began walking toward a path that was plastered with election signs for the various Likud candidates, and crowded with their activists - mostly teenage boys and girls working for pay. Bramson attached a wireless microphone to Feiglin's shirt, stood beside him and aimed her camera at him. He'd gone no more than five paces before he was swarmed by photographers. He'd become highly sought-after media merchandise in the previous weeks, after party chair Benjamin Netanyahu made him his chief rival in the Likud.

Though accustomed to cameras, Feiglin was still a bit disconcerted by all the attention. He's a shy person by nature, and when facing the media he wore a forced smile and jammed his hands in his pockets. He needs the media, for his struggle is more about affecting public consciousness than it is political in nature. But he didn't appear to enjoy the spotlight. It was almost amusing. He stopped, rocked uneasily on his heels and stood up even straighter than he normally does, with his perfectly erect posture, until it looked like he might topple over backward. He spoke with self-assurance, but not of the sort that emanates from someone with a true sense of inner self-confidence, rather of someone who is compelled despite himself to muster this feeling because he knows that he is right.

Bramson stayed close to him, pointing her camera and heroically holding her ground in the face of the aggressive cameramen. For someone who had survived the forced, messy eviction at Amona, this was a piece of cake. Shmuel Sackett, father of Gabi Hayehudi, was standing nearby. When he noticed that Feiglin was completely surrounded by cameras, he rushed to his aid. When Feiglin saw Sackett, his good friend and partner in the founding of the Zo Artzeinu (This is Our Land?) movement 15 years ago, he strode toward him, with a genuine smile on his face now. The two embraced, and Sackett placed his massive arm on his friend's scrawny shoulders. His large physique, long earlocks and warm smile are the antithesis to Feiglin's lean, athletic build and cautious, introverted demeanor. The two continued arm in arm to their stall. As they approached, they could hear the words of the song playing on the loudspeakers, to the tune of the Likud jingle: "Because Feiglin has a way that hasn't been tried yet, and a Jewish heart, too. The tenacious enemy will dissipate like smoke only when there's a Jewish heart in the Likud."

Before an impromptu press conference began at the campaign table, an elegant middle-aged woman, accompanied by a woman friend, came over to Sackett and spoke to him in English: "My friend was looking at our list of recommended candidates and she's worried. She saw the name of Kati Sheetrit there, and she's heard that she's a leftist."

"Nooo - that's loshon hara [malicious gossip]," answered Sackett, who immigrated from New York in 1990.

"Ah, so it's just loshon hara?" said the Israeli friend, sounding reassured.

The American woman was Ruby Ray Karzen, an interior decorator and contractor, who immigrated to Israel over 20 years ago and lives in Jerusalem. About five years ago, she served as president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI), and recently she has been working as coordinator of the English-speaking branch of Feiglin's Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) faction of the Likud. This is an important job, since about 20 percent of Manhigut Yehudit's local supporters are immigrants from English-speaking countries. She first became aware of Feiglin when her daughter persuaded her to come to a Manhigut Yehudit event on Hanukkah two years ago. It was an eye-opening moment for her. She felt that Feiglin really touched on the heart of the things that need fixing in this country. And she also felt that he truly stood for something that she thought had gotten lost in recent years: Jewish pride.

Sense of justice
The Feiglin family originally came to this country during the First Aliyah (wave of immigration), in the late 19th century. They were Lubavitch Hasidim, and among the founders of communities in the northern part of the country. During World War I, part of the family emigrated to Australia. With the Second Aliyah in the early 20th century, the Palestine-based part of the family abandoned religious practice.

Feiglin's father, Yaakov, who belonged to the secular branch, attended the Gymnasia Herzliya; in 1947, at age 18, he traveled to his relatives in far-off Australia to study engineering. There, he met a distant cousin, also a Feiglin but from the Lubavitch Australian side of the family, and married her. They came to live in Israel in 1961.

Moshe Feiglin was born in 1962 in Haifa, and grew up in Rehovot. He attended a state-religious school, while his father remained secular and his mother retained her Lubavitch affiliation. His parents divorced when he was 7. He remembers being an average student. Not outstanding, but not the weakest, either. The one subject he did excel in was composition, perhaps because he was an obsessive reader. He loved to read almost anything and this passion hasn't diminished; his favorites were S.Y. Agnon and books about history. He says he couldn't stand Amos Oz.

As a child, he thought a lot about the Holocaust and even dreamed about it at night. He tried to fast on Holocaust Remembrance Day until his parents noticed and dissuaded him. When he was 12, he went on a class trip to Yad Vashem. As he passed by the pictures of the horror, he lingered by one showing a Nazi soldier cutting off a Jew's beard. At that moment, he recalls, he made up his mind that when he grew up, he would grow a beard in place of that of the Jew in the picture.

For high school, he went to the Rabbi Haim Druckman's Or Etzion yeshiva, but when he finished he didn't want to continue on to a hesder yeshiva (combining religious study and army service), but rather opted to do regular army service. Because of poor eyesight, he wasn't accepted into the Paratroops. He asked what the next possibility was involving the most combat and was told it was combat engineering, so he volunteered for that. While in the army, he married Tzipi Spring, whom he had met in the Bnei Akiva youth movement when he was 12.

He related all this as Sackett sat by his side, in the lobby of the Daniel Hotel in Herzliya, after the furor had subsided a bit following his demotion to the 36th spot on the Likud list. He did not go to university, for the same reason that he chose not to pursue an advanced yeshiva education. "I just wanted to find my own way. I didn't want to come out of the same mold, and I'm very glad I got away from it, otherwise I would have ended up just like everyone else."

This sense of uniqueness is something he's felt since he was quite young. "I always felt different," he said. "I was more mature. As a kid, I always had thoughts that kids don't usually have. It was most evident in the way I was able to understand people. For example, we had a kid in class who used to get bullied. And I could feel that he was under terrible emotional pressure. So one day I went to him and said, 'Hit me.' And he was scared. He said, 'And you won't hit me back?' I said, 'No.' And then he hit me; he really let his fists fly. Afterward, he was frightened by what he'd done." Then Feiglin turned to Sackett. "Interesting. I've never told that story to anyone before."

Instead of university, Feiglin found himself dangling on ropes from great heights, working for a window-washing company that he founded. He even invented a cleaning method for buildings whose higher floors jut out further than the lower floors, and registered a patent on it. (He also invented a revolving pull-out shelf for efficient refrigerator storage.) He says he loved to sit there all alone, suspended between heaven and earth, lost in thought.

In 1989, the young Feiglin family moved to Karnei Shomron in Samaria, for reasons of convenience, not ideology, he says, though he wasn't deterred from living there by the intifada that had erupted a year earlier. In his book "Bamakom she'ein anashim" (Where There Are No Men: Zo Artzeinu's Struggle Against the Post-Zionism Collapse), which he wrote about the founding and activity of the movement, Feiglin describes how amazed he was to discover that local families had attached metal screens to their car windows as protection from stones that were thrown at them when they drove to Tel Aviv via Qalqilyah. The problem was not the Arabs' behavior, he thought, but the Israelis' behavior.

To the roof of his car, he attached a large Israeli flag. He would drive through Qalqilyah, his elbow resting on the open window. Not a single rock was thrown at him. He also describes in the book how, during the intifada, as an officer in the reserves, he led a platoon through the city of Tubas in the northern West Bank. The city was under curfew at the time, and two young Arab girls who were sent to fetch something by their parents were startled by the sight of the group of soldiers that he commanded, and burst into tears. Feiglin was upset by the sight of the two girls, who were the age of his two daughters. As long as we act like colonialist occupiers here, he thought, the Arabs are right. We have no right to be here. We need to act like the true owners.

With the start of the Oslo process, Feiglin grew disgusted with what he saw as the groveling behavior of the Yesha Council, which represented settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, at the time, and searched for other ways to fight it. The establishment, any establishment, became disdainful in his eyes. He began pondering the idea of civil disobedience, which he'd read about in books. He and his neighbor, Shmuel Sackett, established Zo Artzeinu without the support of the rightist establishment, and in the summer of 1995 the movement succeeded in convincing thousands of people to block intersections throughout the country. Zo Artzeinu attracted not only religious settlers, but rightists from all over the country, who felt that the government was ignoring them. He felt that any lawbreaking involved was critical to galvanize a wider swath of public consciousness about the protest he was leading. Feiglin subsequently left his cleaning company to concentrate completely on the protest.
 
In September 1997, Feiglin and Sackett were convicted of sedition for their civil disobedience and sentenced to six months, which was later commuted to community service. When he finished, Feiglin wanted to clear his head and again sought work that would, again, allow him to be up high, all alone. He asked a cousin who ran a construction company to help get him a job as a crane operator.

Feiglin and 'The Fountainhead'
In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister, and not long after that he shook PLO leader Yasser Arafat's hand. Feiglin and his colleagues in Zo Artzeinu concluded that their failure to win people over derived from the fact that they had protested what was happening, but hadn't proposed an alternative. There were four of them by now: Feiglin and Sackett, plus Michael Fuah, a teacher from the Upper Galilee, who gained notoriety in 1994 when he protested in front of the Prime Minister's Office with a toy rifle attached to his shoulders in such a way that it pointed at his chest, and Moti Karpel, an intellectual and religious penitent from the Bat Ayin settlement. Out of Zo Artzeinu, Manhigut Yehudit was born.

The four tried to establish a movement that they hoped would strive for broader, national leadership and not represent only a certain sector as the rightist parties did. They wanted to found a movement that was composed of both religious and secular people, that would carry a Jewish message, but not be led by rabbis.

Karpel's 2003 Hebrew book, "The Belief-Based Revolution" (Hamahapekha ha'emunit), became the new movement's manifesto. In it, Karpel argues that Zionism has reached the end of its road, having concluded its historic role in assuring the corporeal future of the Jewish People in its land. Now is the time for it to be replaced by a new, grand, spectacular and authentic vision that will both ensure the existence of the nation and also provide meaning. By a belief-based consciousness − not religious consciousness in the sense of observance of commandments, but a faith-centered one, in the sense of faith in God and the keeping of his promise to Israel. The book called for the establishment of a leadership that would replace the old leftist Zionist elites with a proud Jewish leadership that would reject the distorted Western ethos and lead a return to authentic Jewish principles. In this way, the nation would be able to work toward fulfilling its destiny: redemption.

Karpel wrote: "The belief-based consciousness is a messianic consciousness, a consciousness of redemption... Not only does it understand that this is a time of redemption, it also assumes responsibility and takes a practical historic initiative to bring the redemption to fruition so as to complete it. In this sense, the faith-based consciousness is the consciousness of striving for redemption. It sees the process of redemption as a human response to a divine calling ... This idea is the fundamental Israeli insight that says history has a purpose, a goal, a designated mission."

The book describes the Jewish People as a romantic entity, seeking to achieve its destiny in the face of dangers and opposition all around it, and aspiring to show the world the light. The ideas expressed are reminiscent of the romantic conception of the isolated, rejected, but relentless genius in Ayn Rand's books, with the Jewish People representing the lone hero, and the principle of "they are a people that dwells alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations" taking the place of Rand's principle of the virtue of selfishness. It's not surprising, then, that philosopher Ohad Kamin, a disciple of Rand's philosophy in the 1980s, also joined Manhigut Yehudit.

Feiglin identifies very strongly with the messages embedded in Rand's book "The Fountainhead": "There are six billion people in the world, and out of them only a small fraction that doesn't put any stock in reality, who believe reality can be changed," he says. "Apparently, I belong to this group. I feel that I am the bearer of some kind of great truth. I envision the nation as if it had four wheels and was perched on a huge platform, and I'm trying to pull it to me with a rope. Pull too quickly and the rope will break. Pull too slowly and it won't move."

Feiglin dreams of a state guided by his perception of what the Jewish spirit means: a state that would remove all the muslim shrines from the Temple Mount, a state whose non-Jewish inhabitants would be entitled to become residents and to run their own municipal affairs, but not to determine the country's fate. A state where the courts are not subject to the relativist values of the West, but to the absolute values that clearly distinguish between the good and the bad, where one is not punished for killing a terrorist who is tied up. A state that understands that we are not engaged in a "low-intensity conflict," but rather in a world war that pits Jewish civilization against Muslim civilization, a war that must be waged by any and all means to defeat the enemy and ensure the triumph of the Jewish idea.

"The radical left has created a parallel between the democratic method and its own values, and emptied the term 'democracy' of its content," Feiglin wrote in a 2004 article. "[Former Supreme Court president] Aharon Barak's test of the 'enlightened man' is a blatant example of the coercion of the concept of democracy in the hands of the ruler's individual values. The term 'democracy' may have become so distorted that it's impossible to use anymore."

Feiglin dreams of a small-scale governmental administration and a nation full of motivation. "The government has to supply two things only - security and justice. All the rest, including education and welfare, should be left to the citizens. They'll do a better job of it in any case."

"The Jew is a free man," he said.

'This is not a democracy'
Arranging for Manhigut Yehudit to join the Likud in 2000 wasn't a political ploy, in Feiglin's view. Rather, it arose from a deep belief that a movement that wishes to grab the helm of government needs to join forces with a larger party, a party with the stature to rule.
Among his movement's main figures, a clear division of labor was established: Feiglin became the leader; Fuah the political strategist, responsible for deals and moves in the Likud central committee; Sackett the fundraiser; and Karpel the philosopher.

Fuah, a quiet, intelligent man, was elected to the Likud central committee and became a member of its constitutional committee, where he influenced, among other things, the decision to vote for only 10 candidates in the primary, a relatively small number, which, according to calculations, was supposed to help the more extreme candidates. Netanyahu's people only belatedly grasped the math, and the central committee meeting that the chairman convened managed to improve his situation only slightly - increasing the number of slots from 10 to 12.

Manhigut Yehudit drew thousands of supporters. Some were people from the traditional religious right who agreed with its hard line, a minority were secular, and some were religious people who believed that the "keepers of the Jewish flame," in their own eyes, ought to be leading the nation, and be not shunted into sectarian parties with a limited appeal. Many of the latter were immigrants from the United States or the former Soviet Union. Many were newly religious, highly educated (Feiglin takes pride in the fact that his driver in the previous campaign was an atomic engineer) and hailed from the upper middle class.

On Monday two weeks ago, Belzer Hasid Aharon Elboim was sitting at Feiglin's campaign table next to the polling station at Jerusalem's International Convention Center. While Feiglin was holding his impromptu press conference, Elboim explained that there was also another group of Haredim in Likud, "but they're there for the jobs," while he and his friends were in it for the ideology.

Feiglin did not stay inside the convention center for long. He returned to the car with Gabi Hayehudi and Tehila Bramson, and set off for Be'er Sheva. Feiglin was greeted warmly at the polling station there. He was approached by a heavyset man with big sunglasses, a thick mustache and jeans, with a hamsa (good-luck charm) keychain dangling from his pocket. It was David Asidon, of the Likud central committee. "We need you sitting on top of Bibi's [Netanyahu's] head," he said to Feiglin, who smiled contentedly.

A week before, at the end of the central committee meeting convened by Netanyahu to change the party's voting system, in order to thwart Feiglin's chances to get his people on the Knesset list, a committee member had approached Feiglin and Fuah in the parking lot. "You should fight less," he told them.

"We've held back until now, but we have to show opposition," they answered. "Likudniks like force."

At that point, in Be'er Sheva, Feiglin saw that this tactic seemed to have paid off. Outside the polling station, two women sat on plastic chairs in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Both had voted for Feiglin.

"Why not?" said the older one in a heavy Moroccan accent. "He's one of us, he's good." The younger one added, "I do what my mother tells me to."

Another Likud member who was sitting at the campaign booth of attorney David Azulai said she, too, had voted for Feiglin. "I don't like what Bibi did to him. That's the main reason. But also because he's rightist. We joined up with the left and were disappointed."

Feiglin went inside to vote, and came out six minutes later. Computerized voting can be tricky. Outside, he had his picture taken and spoke with the local media. "I'm amazed by the love I get in the periphery. The closer you get to the Azrieli Towers [in Tel Aviv], the less votes I get, but in the periphery I'm doing fine."