Hanan Porat

Few figures embody with such intensity the tensions and passions of contemporary religious Zionism as Ḥanan Porat (1943-2011). A rabbi, educator, settlement pioneer, and politician, he was at once a survivor of one of the founding tragedies of Israel's War of Independence and one of the principal architects of the movement that, after 1967, would transform the face of Judea, Samaria, and the Golan. His biography traces the great ruptures of Israel's history: the fall of Gush Etzion in 1948, the messianic reversal brought about by the Six-Day War, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, and the wounds caused by the withdrawal from Gaza.

According to authoritative biographical entries, Hanan Porat was an Israeli rabbi, educator, and politician who served in the Knesset for Tehiya, the National Religious Party, Tkuma, and the National Union between 1981 and 1984 and then between 1988 and 1999. Porat was born in Kfar Pines in 1943, during the Mandate period. [Wikipedia; World Biographical Encyclopedia]. This Great Book sets out to retrace his itinerary by confronting the militant memory he himself shaped with the facts established by the archive and by research, without concealing the controversies that his trajectory continues to provoke.

Ḥanan Porat's identity was forged in the very event that preceded him and marked him for life. In 1944 his family moved to Kfar Etzion in the Judean hills, then returned to Kfar Pines after the massacre of the village's Jews on May 13, 1948, the eve of Israel's declaration of independence. [CIE — Center for Israel Education]. Young Ḥanan, not yet five years old, was among the children evacuated before the fall. In early 1948, during the unrest, Kfar Etzion was besieged and the children evacuated to Jerusalem. Porat's father went there as well to organize the convoys. After the Kfar Etzion massacre, his family settled in Kfar Pines. [Alchetron; Encyclopaedia Judaica].

The memory of this destruction became the emotional and ideological bedrock of his entire life. According to the testimony he often recounted, for nineteen years the young Porat was among the survivors of Gush Etzion who kept alive the memory of the tragic rupture and the destruction they had endured: "We felt that we had been torn away," he recalled. [The Jewish Press]. This memory was ritualized each year: every year, on Israel's Memorial Day, they would gather at Ramat Rachel, at the southern edge of Jerusalem, to gaze into the distance at the "Lone Tree" that marked the site of their destroyed community. [The Jewish Press]. The heroic defense of the village, ending in bloodshed, gave Kfar Etzion a symbolic dimension that far exceeded its demographic importance: defended to a tragic end, with more than one hundred and fifty fighters killed in battle and massacred after their surrender, Kfar Etzion became a lasting symbol of heroic Zionist resistance. [The Jewish Press]. It was in this crucible that the intimate promise of return was born, which would become the program of a lifetime.

Porat's intellectual trajectory belongs to the elite of religious Zionism. Porat studied at the Bnei Akiva yeshiva high school, at Yeshivat Kerem B'Yavneh, and at the Mercaz HaRav talmudic college, and was ordained a rabbi. He worked as a religious teacher in several yeshivot. [Alchetron; Wikipedia]. His time at Yeshiva Mercaz HaRav, founded by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and led by his son Tzvi Yehuda Kook, is decisive: it is there that the messianic theology of Zionism is transmitted, which sees in the return to the Land of Israel the beginning of Redemption. This doctrinal matrix would later provide the ideological framework of the settlement movement.

Like most religious Zionist youth committed to the ideal of uniting Torah with service to the State, he served in the paratroopers brigade of the Israel Defense Forces. [Alchetron]. His military commitment was not symbolic: he took part in the hardest battles of his generation and bore their wounds in his flesh, which only reinforced, in the eyes of his supporters, the coherence between the man of prayer and the man of action. This dual identity — talmudic erudition and military bravery — constitutes the signature of the figure and explains the moral authority he would enjoy within his camp.

The Six-Day War of June 1967, by placing the West Bank under Israeli control, opened the concrete possibility of fulfilling a childhood promise. Porat became the soul of the enterprise. Porat led the re-establishment of Kfar Etzion as a religious settlement after Israel's capture of the West Bank in the June 1967 war. [CIE]. The operation was not a mere private initiative: it required arbitration at the highest level of the State. He convinced Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to grant authorization to settle in Gush Etzion. [World Biographical Encyclopedia].

The symbolism of the act is clear: it was the surviving children, now grown to adulthood, who returned to refound the village of their fathers. Rabbi Porat was one of the leaders of the surviving children of Kfar Etzion, bringing them back nineteen years later, in 1967, to re-establish the Jewish presence in Gush Etzion after Israel's reconquest of the area. [Jewish Action]. This return made Kfar Etzion the first Jewish settlement established beyond the Green Line after 1967, and conferred upon Porat the stature of a founding pioneer whose prestige would shine over his entire public career. The act established a logic: what was lost can be reconquered, and the reconquest is read as the fulfillment of a historical design.

The trauma of the 1973 Yom Kippur War paradoxically constitutes the second driving force behind Porat's activism. He was severely wounded during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, on the bank of the Suez Canal. He recovered and was among the founders of the Gush Emunim movement, which established more than a hundred Israeli settlements. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. Within a shaken Israeli society, Porat proposed a project of spiritual recovery through settlement. According to the testimonies gathered, he also helped found Gush Emunim, the movement to resettle Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, in 1974, when Israeli society felt dejected in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Paradoxically, despite the stunning victory, a national malaise pervaded the country after the war and the revelation of Israel's vulnerability. Rabbi Porat's goal was to "raise the national spirit." [Jewish Action].

The movement quickly moved to action on the most disputed ground. In 1975, he led the founding of Elon Moreh, the first Israeli settlement in the West Bank, at Sebastia. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. The Sebastia episode, marked by repeated clashes with the army and by negotiations with the Labor government, became the founding act of a method: settlement through the fait accompli, sustained by militant mobilization. Under the impetus of Porat and his companions, Gush Emunim transformed an ideological claim into a lasting territorial policy, whose effects still shape the geography and diplomacy of the region today.

Porat's engagement crossed the parliamentary threshold from the early 1980s onward. He sat in the Knesset for Tehiya, the National Religious Party, Tkuma, and the National Union between 1981 and 1984, then between 1988 and 1999. [Wikipédia]. His political career mirrors the reconfigurations of the Israeli nationalist and religious right. Re-elected on several occasions, he was re-elected in 1992 and 1996. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. Within the National Religious Party, he rose to leadership responsibilities: in 1996, he was appointed chairman of the NRP's parliamentary group, but on 4 March 1999, he and Zvi Hendel left the party to establish a new faction, first named Emunim, later renamed Tkuma. [World Biographical Encyclopedia].

This split illustrates his loyalty to an uncompromising ideological line, which he felt was diluted by the compromises of the large religious party. Before the 1999 elections, Tkuma formed an alliance with other small right-wing parties named the National Union. Porat was placed third on the Union's list and was once again re-elected. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. His departure from parliamentary life was nonetheless swift: he resigned from the Knesset on 20 October of that year, and was replaced by Hendel. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. To the very end, Porat remained a man of conviction rather than a man of the apparatus, more at ease in ideological mobilization than in managing partisan balances.

Porat's final public years are dominated by his opposition to the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, decided by Ariel Sharon in 2005. For the founder of the return to Kfar Etzion, the evacuation of the settlements contradicted his life's work. According to his biographical notice, before Israel's disengagement from Gaza, he urged the young people of Neve Dekalim, in Gush Katif, to disrupt the evacuation forces. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. This directive, which fits within the logic of unarmed but determined resistance he had embodied since Sebastia, attests to the continuity of a struggle waged over four decades.

The end of his life was marked by illness. Porat died on October 4, 2011, at the age of 67, of cancer. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. The memory he left within his camp is that of a spiritual as much as a political guide; the image of the shofar, instrument of awakening and of the call, was taken up to evoke his passing in religious Zionist circles. His reading of history remained fundamentally messianic: he later declared that the Israeli victory should have become a national holiday. [World Biographical Encyclopedia]. At the crossroads of militant memory and the historian's judgment, the figure of Porat remains inseparably venerated by some and contested by others, depending on whether or not one subscribes to the project he championed.

The life of Ḥanan Porat traces a remarkable coherence, from the child torn from Kfar Etzion in 1948 to the rabbi-parliamentarian who fought the Gaza disengagement in 2005. A survivor of a foundational catastrophe, he made it the driving force of an enterprise of territorial and spiritual reconquest that lastingly marked Israel. Founder of the return to Gush Etzion, co-founder of Gush Emunim, initiator of Elon Moreh, parliamentarian for several religious and nationalist parties, he was one of the principal architects of the settlement movement. His trajectory, established by the archive as much as by testimony, remains inseparable from the controversies it arouses: for his supporters, the fulfillment of a fidelity; for his adversaries, the onset of an unresolved territorial conflict. The historian will retain above all the power of a memory transformed into action, and the way in which an individual biography embraced, to the point of embodying them, the rifts of contemporary Zionism.