The article in Ha'aretz Magazine that carried a magazine cover photograph of the latest entrant in the race to become prime minister of Israel and who is now a cabinet minister and member of the security cabinet, Effi Eitam ("Waiting for a sign," by Ari Shavit, March 22), focused on his political-security approach. It should have drawn the reader's attention to other aspects of Eitam's credo: Israel is the state of God; the Jews are the soul of the world; the Jewish people has a mission to reveal the image of God on earth; the leader of the Jewish people stands in the same place that Moses and King David stood; a world without Jews is a world of robots, a dead world; and the State of Israel is the Noah's Ark of the future of the world and its task is to uncover God's image.
And so on and so forth. Everyone who has become used to viewing the field of policy-making in political terms had better open his eyes and take a long, hard look at the new reality: Effi Eitam, the new leader of the National Religious Party, is above all a religious leader. He is the first religious-nationalist fundamentalist to take a position at the starting line in the race for the country's leadership. Israel faces the danger of being led by the counterpart of the ayatollahs in Iran and the Taliban of Afghanistan. It is precisely because Eitam does not wear the black robe and the round hat of the ultra-Orthodox that both the supporters of Shas (Sephardi Torah Guardians) and the new immigrants from the former Soviet Union will vote for him.
Most people who want to live a normal life have yet to comprehend the lesson of September 11: when the achievements of modern technology can be used by every religious fanatic, whose mentality and political morality are mired in ancient times, the ideology of religious fanaticism is itself the most dangerous explosive material.
The free world must be a great deal more resolute in demanding that political leaders separate their religion - any and every religion - from politics, because otherwise we are headed for a terrible calamity. If Eitam views himself as a leader based on the model of Moses and King David, he cannot be part of the democratic dialogue and the normal restraints will not work with him.
This man sees himself as a leader at the forefront of the nation in its mission to reveal the image of God on earth. His model includes also the leader of the biblical settlement period, Joshua, who in the moral and legal terms of our time engaged in multiple genocide.
True, Eitam will not make a sortie to destroy the Pentagon, the temple of the soulless robots, if that is what he thinks is necessary to save the Noah's Ark of the state of God; but he will definitely be capable of destroying the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount. There is nothing in his ideological doctrine, not even one conscious inhibition, that will prevent him from doing that if it looks like a reasonable proposition at the time.
Yehuda Etzion, one of the leaders of the 1980s Jewish terrorist underground, who was convicted, among other charges, on a count of conspiracy to blow up the Dome of the Rock, claimed in his trial that what he did was an outgrowth of what God has said to the Jewish people "since the time of the patriarch Abraham."
I do not think that the comparison with the Taliban is an exaggeration. Does anyone seriously think that Eitam's doctrine can be squared with civil equality and giving consideration to human rights and minority rights according to contemporary morality in a modern law-abiding state?
Eitam's spiritual and military simulacrum from the previous generation, Major General Shlomo Goren, the chief chaplain of the Israel Defense Forces, declared that "every law that is for the good of the Jewish people is a good law, and every law that is detrimental to the Jewish people is of no interest to me" - though neither Goren nor Etzion ever got close to a place in the security cabinet.
Ironically, Eitam also invokes David Ben-Gurion, who came to Ein Gev, a kibbutz on the north side of Lake Kinneret that was subjected to Syrian shelling from the heights above, and Effi, who grew up on the kibbutz, heard him say that a nation does not retreat from its lifework. From there we have long since dug in throughout the Land of Israel and dug in on the Golan Heights ("living space," as Eitam calls it), and by doing so we dug up our rooted values: the abandoned Zionist morality, which until then was the morality of our time and of the international community, along with democracy, reasonable preservation of human rights, the ethos of personal freedom and separation between religion and state in the critical spheres.
The despotic leaders of the onrushing future, who draw on absolutist religious fundamentalist justifications, are the punishment for the lax stand taken by the humane and democratic in Israel. They are God's messengers, and we are soulless robots in their eyes. It is impossible and there is no chance to stop them by force, but we must stand up tenaciously for our existence as a normal society, making use of every means of persuasion available in a legal struggle, as is necessary in an emergency.
Dr. Olek Netzer, a political psychologist, is the author the book "The Virus of Fanaticism.
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