Summary
Rabbi Haim Druckman, a Gahelet and Young Guard leader credited with coining the name Gush Emunim in February 1974, who carried the movement’s case on Elon Moreh to the Begin government and later left the National Religious Party to found Matzad (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2278-3624).
Details
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Druckman was among the Gahelet graduates around Tzvi Yehuda Kook who became future leaders of Gush Emunim, and is credited with having coined the name Gush Emunim at a meeting of its early leadership in his home in February 1974 (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 2, lines 1765-1790; Chapter 3, lines 3060-3200).
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A fervent, very observant and mystically inclined Young Guard leader, he was number two on the National Religious Party’s list for the 1981 Knesset elections, opposed his party’s support of the Camp David Accords, and played an active role in the Movement to Halt the Retreat in Sinai (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3060-3200).
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In the Elon Moreh crisis of 1979 he advanced Gush Emunim’s proposed legal solutions to Prime Minister Begin, as acting foreign minister, through the attorney general, and received Begin’s promise to speed the land survey designed to identify state land for settlement (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 2560-2750).
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In March 1983 he left the National Religious Party to establish Matzad (the Religious Zionism Camp), appealing to the yeshiva wing and the Yeshivot Hesder participants; in 1984 Matzad joined Poalei Agudat Yisrael in the Morasha alliance, which won two Knesset seats before redividing in July 1986 (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 3, lines 3060-3200).
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He is named in Chapter 4 among the tightly knit circle of Tzvi Yehuda’s disciples who formed the ideological and political core of Gush Emunim’s leadership (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3625-3750).
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Druckman’s Knesset speech condemning the Yamit withdrawal, quoted in Chapter 4, casts the uprooting of settlements as amputation: “the uprooting of settlements in the Land of Israel is the severing of a limb from a living body” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 4119-4400).
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Chapter 5 records that Druckman greeted the crippling of two Arab mayors on the West Bank by quoting the Book of Deborah: “Thus may all Israel’s enemies perish!” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 6119-6177).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, National Religious Party, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Elon Moreh