Today, Nadia Matar, head of the right-wing activist group Women in Green, wrote a letter decrying the recent shift among the national-religious leadership to focus on kiruv, bringing secular Israelis closer to Jewish tradition:
"I would expect the national-religious public, and the Jewish people as a whole, with its rabbis and educators, to engage in the schools, the yeshivot, the ulpanot, the youth movements, the synagogues, and the community centers, not in bringing people back to religion - which is a type of convenient escape to activity that does not bother anyone - but rather in intensifying the topic of the importance of Eretz Israel, our right to it, and our duty to defend it. I therefore call, here and now, upon our public: put aside the matter of making people religious, especially when there is a public that is already engaged in this."
You would think that the national-religious public promoting Judaism would be a no-brainer, but Ms. Matar seems to be seriously offended by the very idea. Her objections are two-fold: 1) it's not offensive enough; and 2) haredim already do it. It's a bold position: surrender kiruv to the haredim, as the national religious have already surrendered the Chief Rabbinate and the rabbinical courts, because it doesn't count unless you're blocking roads and screaming in people's faces.
After all, who can argue with failure? For the past two decades, the National Religious Party (Mafdal) has hemorrhaged members to extreme-right splinter parties, until the rump NRP was forced to join the National Union or fade away. We have stressed over and over to our youth that they are the only Zionists left and that they all need to settle in Judea and Samaria in order to build it for our posterity. We have built cloistered communities and looked down on the rest of the country. And somehow, with all of this, darn it if the rest of the nation doesn't view us as another species, those dangerous, unreasonable orange people!
But Ms. Matar has a solution: our ghetto walls aren't high enough. Seek out confrontation, and don't interact with the rest of the country in any other context. Show them what disengagement means! If only we were more consistent with our dogma and demagoguery, those pesky 110 other Knesset members would just accept that our ten are right. I mean, correct.
Of course, then we'd need to find a new adjective for us. If we're dumping "religious," we need to find something to hyphenate. We want to ignite social change, reforming Israeli society as a whole, so how about "socialist"? Yeah, national-socialist--that's got a nice ring, don't you think?
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