Elyakim Haetzni: To me, Rabbi Levinger was like a prophet of old

In a special lecture that he gave at Oz veGaon, which is located near the Gush Etzion junction, former MK attorney Elyakim Haetzni, one of the founders of Kiryat Arba Hevron, , related Rabbi Levinger’s essential and critical contribution to the renewal of the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria, from a comprehensive historical-social point of view, over the past decades.
Attorney Haetzni’s lecture was held in memory of Rabbi Levinger, ZT”L, within the framework of the ongoing activities organized by Women in Green at Oz veGaon, the Nature Preserve that was restored and prepared as a camping site in memory of the three youths who were abducted and murdered by a gang of Arab terrorists within close proximity to the site of the preserve. The anniversary of their abduction and murder is commemorated these days.
To view the lecture with simultaneous translation to English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJw49ojUaBg
To view the original lecture in Hebrew: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EA3GMGc4lac

Summary:
Attorney Haetzni opened his words with an expression of amazement at the reality that now, about fifty years after the beginning of the renewed Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli media continue to see Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria as a phenomenon that should be halted. In his opinion, when facing this sort of reality in public relations and media, it necessitated a person like Rabbi Levinger specifically, both despite and because of his unpolished and unconventional way of acting and thinking, to generate the dramatic change in the map of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria.
Haetzni starts with giving the background. He describes the situation in which the internal Israeli heresy of the Palmach generation began towards the need for settlement, to the point of placing quotation marks around the word settlement, a situation in which the world no longer accepts new borders to be drawn on the map, after having been drawn by Europe and the United States, a situation in which the idea of nationalism is fading in the world in general. In this reality where nationalism in the world is blurred, the People of Israel appeared with the firm statement that it will maintain its uniqueness unobscured and unclouded. This different kind of statement, Haetzni says, brings the Jewish People into conflict with the world and with those agents within that wish to be a people like all other peoples. The tension between these two approaches came to a climax after the Six Day War.
“What do you do when this is the reality in the world, or when divine providence, or fate, sends us a gift that we desired for so many years? All of the places where the Biblical saga took place?” asks Haetzni and then begins to speak of the days of his meeting with Rabbi Levinger and about the reason that it is specifically he, Rabbi Levinger, who has the merit of being called “the father of the settlement enterprise”:

The reality in which Rabbi Levinger began to act was a situation where “everything was forbidden”, not only in Hevron, but also in Kfar Etzion when the government, which included people of the National Religious Party, objected to the return to the kibbutz. It was in such a situation that civilians began to organize and to act with a sense of internal truth, with a clear conscience and willingness to pay the price for this truth. The concept and principle that led the activists is the understanding that a law that prevents the People of Israel from cleaving to Zion is an illegal law and must be fought. This is how the preparations began for the “ illegal” ascent to Kfar Etzion.
This approach, Haetzni explains, brought Rabbi Levinger to his activism, not from an anarchistic approach, but from loyalty and respect for the government and its representatives. He acted from the point of view that it is not right to compromise the holiness of the Land of Israel and Jewish self-respect, while he totally surrendered his own honor. “In cases of harm to the Land of Israel and the respect for the People of Israel Rabbi Levinger would become another person, a person who was capable of a roar that could shake the walls. This is how it was in arguments between us and it was so also in speaking with people in power. This quiet and polite person would suddenly seem to become a different person. He reminds me of a prophet of old, who, when the issue at hand was his mission, he would stand in front of the king and the establishment as steady as a rock, speaking on behalf of a greater power. And they feared him. It was not play acting, as it is today, when public relations professionals instruct the politicians. It was inside of him”.
Next, Haetzni began to speak about the first days of the settlement in Gush Etzion and Hevron, which, in his opinion, if things had depended on the government of Israel, would have remained “judenrein”, as it had been since the riots of 1929, when the Jewish community was destroyed by slaughter, theft and pillage by the city’s Arabs. “This massacre was such a trauma that no person from the grand families that were then in Hevron has returned to it. Everything had to be rebuilt from the beginning”, he says, and describes how in those days, Moshe Dayan, who was responsible for the area and was under medical care having been almost been buried in a private archaeological excavation that he had been carrying out, learned of the Jews’ entry to the settlement of Hevron during the holiday of Passover. “This act was officially “ illegal” and was led by Rabbi Levinger. The government was presented with facts on the ground”.
Haetzni emphasizes that in the presence of the international pressures that the Israeli government of those days surrendered to, nothing would have progressed within the settlement enterprise if the internal pressures under the leadership of Rabbi Levinger had not arisen. “Without the awakening from below, nothing would have happened. The historic opportunity of the return of the People of Israel to its core and its heart would have been missed, and the next opportunity might have been only in another two thousand years. It would have passed and gone away. The pressure from below found resonance within every individual, and Rabbi Levinger entered by way of this opening”.
Haetzni next described the battle to return to the ancient Jewish cemetery in the city, the cemetery in which Rabbi Levinger was later buried. Back then, the rabbi rejected the government’s intention to establish a new cemetery for the Jews inside Kiryat Arba and declared that the only cemetery to serve the Jews of the city is the cemetery that was known even to the Arabs as the Jewish cemetery in the heart of Hevron. Haetzni goes on to describe the battle to liberate the Cave of the Patriarchs and the return of the Jewish presence there, not as tourists, as Moshe Dayan intended. “Rabbi Levinger said ‘it shall not happen and shall not be’. So what do you do? You have a circumcision ceremony at the place”, says Haetzni, and describes weddings where the bride and groom sneaked into the cave and when they arrived at one of the large areas in the cave, they would remove their jackets and reveal their finery. When the military governor arrived they would not allow him to disturb the ceremony.
In this same spirit women came to recite psalms, yeshiva men would come to pray in waves, all as a sort of war of attrition against the military forces, led by Rabbi Levinger who “led this civil disobedience”, until we arrived at a status of almost equality in the Cave, a status that enables life with dignity”.
About the first baby to be circumcised at the Cave of the Patriarchs, who died a few months afterward from crib death, the son of the artist Baruch Nachshon and his wife Sarah, Haetzni tells how the rumor spread among the military administration of Rabbi Levinger’s intention to bury him in the ancient cemetery, thus determining facts on the ground. People from the military administrations came to the rabbis of Kiryat Arba and claimed that it is known that one doesn’t remove a dead person from Jerusalem to bury him in another place. This is how they hoped to prevent Rabbi Levinger’s plan, but books of Gemara were opened and studied together, in which it was written that a dead person is not removed from Jerusalem except to Hevron specifically, and indeed, it was so. The army tried to stop the vehicle with the baby from arriving by placing a truck in the way. Rabbi Levinger instructed to remove the baby’s body to the streets of Hevron, together with his father and mother, and so, after an entire day in which the road was blocked and the Arabs of Hevron could not believe how the Jews were preventing a Jewish baby to be buried in the Jewish cemetery, the government allowed the burial in the ancient cemetery of Hevron. “Today, the Jews perform burials and are present in the cemetery thanks to Rabbi Levinger’s civil disobedience of then. It is by this merit that the president and honor guard have been present in this cemetery. It comes from below, from the depths of history and the depths of the hearts of the simple people, led by the school of Rabbi Kook and continued under the leadership of Rabbi Moshe Levinger”.
This is also the way it was, continues Haetzni, with the entry to Beit Hadassah, because had it not been for the entrance there, the fate of Hevron might have been like the cities of Judea and Samaria, where Jews cannot enter today. In light of the government’s refusal to return the Jewish presence to Hevron after the Six Day war, we could have behaved “in accordance with the law” and left Hevron without Jews, or we could have acted. Under Rabbi Levinger’s leadership and the practical implementation of his wife, Rabbanit Miriam, the women of Kiryat Arba chose the second option. And thus, in 1979, the women and their children entered the building that had been abandoned decades before, and was littered and infested with rats. And for a year, they lived in it under military siege, when food was only allowed to be brought in with the claim of “if you (the Israeli army) allowed food to be brought to Egypt’s entrapped third army, how can you refuse food to be brought to the women in Beit Hadassah…?!”.
The official entry to Beit Hadassah and the reopening of Hevron to Jewish life was allowed upon Begin’s instruction after the murder of the six young men who participated in the Sabbath Eve event that was held at the entrance to the besieged building.
Haetzni continues, telling of the steps that led to the rebuilding, in an atmosphere of political and practical battles, of the Avraham Avinu Synagogue in the city. “These are things that no generation dreamed of attaining, but they would not have happened if the call had not arisen from below, and the one who led this was Rabbi Levinger, and we have still not spoken of his months’ long strike in front of the Deheishe Refugee Camp. He founded the Nahala Movement and was behind the large demonstration before the recent elections, a demonstration that helped to turn around the state of nationalist spirit and helped preven the disaster of a leftist government coming to power. And thus, even in his last days, rabbi Levinger exerted influence and leadership”.