A panel discussion on “The Disengagement: Community in Conflict,” held on Tisha b’Av at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El here, certainly lived up to its billing.

Though the participants held a civil discourse before a large and attentive audience, their deep differences in viewpoints underscored the painful post-Gaza phase to come.

The Orthodox speaker, who made aliyah 10 years ago, said he worried that most Israelis don’t appreciate the pain Religious Zionists have gone through in the disengagement from Gaza, which not only pries settlers away from their homes but challenges an ideology that sought to blend love of the state and love of the land.

“Those on the right have been marginalized as extremists,” said Michael Freund, a former policy planner under then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Further territorial concessions would be the height of folly, he indicated.

The former Israel Defense Forces officer said that in the context of the peace process, giving up Gaza, with about 9,000 Jews living among 1.3 million Palestinians, was a no-brainer.

“It’s a minor step on the road to peace,” said Guy Grossman, a doctoral candidate in political science at Columbia University. The next big issue, he said, was the West Bank.

The executive director of the New Israel Fund, which co-sponsored the program, said once the disengagement is complete, Israel “should seek peace more aggressively,” presumably in dismantling West Bank settlements. Larry Garber also said Israel now should turn its attention toward domestic priorities that have been ignored like “helping the poor and the weak.”

For Tirza Leibowitz, a soft-spoken Israeli attorney, the primary issue is not disengagement. It’s the occupation, she said, and the moral blight it represents on Israeli society.

Not so, said Ken Jacobson, senior associate national director of the Anti-Defamation League, noting that Israel has sought to rid itself of the role of occupier for years. The main problem, he said, is that Israel has had no partner on the Palestinian side.

Jacobson went on to note, correctly, the fundamental challenge the disengagement represents to Religious Zionists, who make up about 15 percent of the Israeli population and whose positive idealism has been widely applauded at a time when many Israeli youth are prone to apathy. The movement’s hesder yeshivot have produced some of the IDF’s top officers, disproportionate to their numbers.

But now, after long advocating the synergy of a love of the land and a commitment to the democratic process, some of the movement’s followers are feeling disillusioned by the loss of land through that process. What’s more, several leading rabbis are saying the land takes precedence over the state. That is a dangerous position, undermining the authenticity of the government. It raises the fear that a significant segment of the Religious Zionist movement, traumatized by their unanswered prayers and protests, could follow in the path of the haredim in becoming disenfranchised from the modern state.

After listening to the Skirball panel, it’s not difficult to see why many on the Israeli right will feel, post-Gaza, that the country has made a supreme territorial sacrifice and should cede no more land unless and until there is a full peace agreement with the Palestinians. By contrast, there are those on the left energized by the Gaza move and impatient for the next stage: dismantling the West Bank settlements. (Can we imagine the depth of the societal rift if Israel announced plans to evacuate about one-third of the 240,000 Jews living in communities there, as envisioned by Camp David discussions?)

The Palestinian leadership is rallying around Abu Mazen’s call of “Gaza today, the West Bank and Jerusalem tomorrow,” and the European nations, the United Nations and perhaps Washington may soon follow with their own more delicately expressed versions of that position.

In the meantime, after a year and a half of intense and almost exclusive focus on the disengagement, many Israelis will be looking to the government to turn its attention to domestic needs as poverty levels rise, unemployment exceeds 10 percent, and too many social and educational priorities have gone unaddressed.

The saving grace amid these mutually exclusive demands is that throughout Israel’s history, veering from crisis to crisis, the center has held. And Israel’s center now sees the disengagement as a necessary evil, an amputation of a limb to save the body. So there is no rejoicing, and little optimism about the immediate future. But after the stages of disbelief, denial and anger, there may come a time for hope and acceptance, a recognition that the demographic necessity of disengagement helped sustain the Jewish and democratic qualities that are Israel’s soul. n

E-mail: Gary@jewishweek.org