The Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR)
presents in this policy paper a combination of two unique essays on the Israeli
Government’s Disengagement Plan. The first essay is the work of Professor Louis
René Beres, a political scientist who is also an expert in international law.
The second essay is based on the extraordinary erudition of one of the
twentieth-century’s greatest Talmudic scholars and Torah philosophers, the late
Rabbi Dr. Chaim Zimmerman. This second essay has been condensed and annotated by
Professor Paul Eidelberg, a political scientist who studied with Rav Chaim for
many years. The combination of these two essays provides the most comprehensive and deeply informed critique of the
Disengagement Plan, a critique comprehensible and meaningful to all Jews
(secular or religious) as well as to all others who recognize God’s eternal and
immutable promise of Israel to the Jewish people.
The Disengagement Plan entails the
uprooting of some 10,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza and Northern Samaria, and
the turning over of this Jewish land to Israel’s enemies. “Disengagement” was
the central issue of Israel’s January 2003 national election. In that election,
the Labor Party, the author of disengagement, was overwhelmingly defeated by the
Plan’s opponents, the Likud. Nevertheless, less than a year later, Likud Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon made disengagement the centerpiece of his national policy
and forced it though the Knesset despite its
having been clearly rejected not only by the electorate but also by a referendum
he initiated in his own party.
The Disengagement Plan has divided the
nation to the extent of arousing fear of a civil war. Religious as well as
non-religious Jews oppose this plan. Israeli professors of law and attorneys
have shown that the plan violates domestic and international law. Professor
Beres will comment instructively on the legal
aspects of the issue and will also show, in a scintillating display of
scholarship, how disengagement violates the Higher Law doctrine of Western
civilization, which originates in the Bible of Israel. However, to fully
appreciate how and why the Disengagement Plan violates Jewish law, (Halacha),
the masterful erudition of the late Rabbi Dr. Chaim Zimmerman is necessary. The
ACPR trusts that secular and religious readers will be enlightened by both of
the essays in this policy paper, and that this
essential fusion of perspectives will remind Israelis of their true obligations,
as Jews and as citizens of the most persistently endangered state on planet
Earth.
Arieh Stav
Director, ACPR