The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (10 page)

On the afternoon of June 27, all three unification laws were submitted to the Knesset, sent to committee, returned to the plenum and passed, in defiance of normal procedure. Only the two small communist parties (pro-Moscow and anti-) objected.
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The next day, responding to the Knesset vote, the State Department cabled U.S. ambassador Barbour, instructing him to warn Israel against presenting the world with a fait accompli.
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The seven-hour time difference with Israel rendered the warning irrelevant. By then, Interior Minister Haim Moshe Shapira and the cabinet secretary had issued decrees applying Israeli jurisdiction to an area specified by two and a half typed pages of map coordinates and adding it to the City of Jerusalem. Military orders were delivered by courier to commanders in Jerusalem: As of 1300 hours, June 29, Jerusalem City Hall would take over from the army, permits would no longer be needed to cross between the two sides of Jerusalem, blocked roads must be opened, minefields must be removed.
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On the day of unification, army Central Command chief Uzi Narkiss suddenly recalled that he had neglected to dissolve the Jordanian city government, which meant East Jerusalem had two mayors and two city councils. The general phoned Lieutenant Colonel Ya’akov Salman, the deputy military governor, and ordered him: Dissolve it, fast.

“But how?” said Salman, according to Israeli journalist Uzi Benziman’s account.

“That’s your business. Confirm orders carried out today.”

“It has to involve some legal procedure. We need to cite some regulation.”

“You figure the method,” Narkiss told him. “You think I know how to do it?”

Salman sent military police to locate the Arab council members and bring them to the East Jerusalem City Hall. At 5:00 that afternoon, he found the mayor, Ruhi al-Khatib, with four of the other eleven councilors outside the building’s locked doors. The group proceeded to the hotel next door, where Salman quickly drafted a four-sentence decree and read it out: “In the name of the Israel Defense Forces, I respectfully inform Mr. Ruhi al-Khatib and the members of the Jerusalem City Council that the Council is hereby dissolved.” A liaison officer translated the statement into Arabic. When the deposed mayor asked for something in writing, the liaison officer found that the only paper in the meeting room was a napkin, on which he wrote out his translation. Uzi Benziman, describing the incident, notes that the decree had no basis in law. But Salman, who later wrote that the decision to annex was “made emotionally, without serious deliberation,” had fulfilled his orders.
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That first day, a two-way pilgrimage flooded the city. At Mandelbaum Gate, the main crossing point between east and west, Haim Gouri found crowds streaming in both directions, and felt “a hundred megatons of expectation, a hundred megatons of curiosity, exploding before our eyes.” On streets leading to the Old City, he wandered through an impromptu fair, painting with words a scene that should have called Brueghel back from the dead to grab his brushes:

Inside the walls, in the old covered markets, he passed through crazed commerce and heard one well-dressed young souvenir merchant shouting in English, “I will never take Israeli money!” Later, Gouri wrote, would come the time to understand the problems. For a moment, “Jerusalem of the Mandate,” of his youth, had returned; Gouri imagined not a reunited city, but the city of innocence and nostalgia, never divided.
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Meanwhile, in the streets of Qatamon and Baqa—West Jerusalem neighborhoods whose mansions had been abandoned by wealthy Arabs in 1948 and subdivided among Jewish immigrants—packed cars with Jordanian plates rolled slowly by, as families from East Jerusalem and beyond looked at houses left behind nineteen years before.
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One of the cars, that day or soon after, belonged to Ramallah teenager Raja Shehadeh’s family. Earlier, Raja had bicycled from Ramallah to Jerusalem, noticing as he came over the last hill that this time, past the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, he could see the low houses of the west city, as if they had not been there all along but had suddenly appeared, as if some divider of fog had been pulled down. Now the family crossed into the Jewish city, where Raja’s mother had gone to school. His mother, excited, pointed out places she knew; for her, he later wrote, “this was a true return to the past.” For him, the second side of the city was stunningly foreign. “This Jerusalem had a majesty and anonymity that did not exist in the eastern side,” he found, in a subtle variation on his melody of humiliation.
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“Topsy-turvy world department: All week we have been meeting Arab visitors at our New City premises and Jewish visitors at the Old City,” read a cable from bemused American consul-general Evan Wilson in early July. “Arab owner of grand piano, which has been in living room of our New City residence for 19 years since he entrusted it for safekeeping to my predecessor…in 1948 when leaving in a hurry, has come to claim it back.” Unification was “proceeding smoothly,” he said, except for the traffic and pedestrians choking the streets and the army engineers’ continued demolition of buildings just outside the Old City to reopen thoroughfares.
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Ambassador Barbour, offering advice on whether America should recognize Israel’s “territorial acquisition,” asked whether “we have any real alternatives to making the best of a potentially good situation.” Israel’s willingness to sacrifice troops to avoid damaging religious sites during the conquest, he cabled home, proved it could be trusted to protect the holy places. Ending the city’s division was positive, and Israel had acquired the Old City “in a purely defensive action,” which should mitigate American commitment to territorial integrity. Walt Rostow passed the cable to Johnson with a note that it expressed a “Tel Aviv perspective,” a hint that the ambassador identified a bit much with the locals.
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The U.S. administration quickly adopted the position that while it rejected Israel’s “administrative actions” in Jerusalem, no territorial acquisition had occurred or even could occur. At the State Department, Rostow’s brother Eugene, the under secretary for political affairs, met with Israeli ambassador Avraham Harman, and took note of his insistence that Israel’s “steps do not constitute annexation but only municipal fusion.” In a memo afterward, Eugene Rostow asserted that creating “a unified municipal administration” did not mean annexation, since no country actually had the power to change Jerusalem’s status as an international city. Israel, he noted, had affirmed that it had not annexed anything. Based on that view, the United States abstained twice in July on General Assembly resolutions demanding that Israel rescind any change in Jerusalem’s status. The U.S. position was that Israel need not reverse what it had never done.
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By early July, Eshkol phoned Yehudah Tamir, a businessman and former director general of the Housing Ministry, and gave him the job of building Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem as quickly as possible. Tamir would report directly to the prime minister. Eshkol’s logic was simple, explains Benziman: Israeli control in Jerusalem depended on Jewish settlement. Eshkol’s own files show that in the weeks and months to come, he personally oversaw the construction efforts, and urged others involved to avoid publicity.
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On paper, annexing land while claiming not to was absurd: The denials muted Israel’s own insistence that it would not withdraw. Yet the move satisfied Israeli public opinion and its leaders’ desires, while evading a clash with the United States, Israel’s patron and diplomatic ally. Unification also prepared the ground for the moves that mattered: large-scale construction for Jews beyond the Green Line in expanded Jerusalem.

The bulldozers of the Mughrabi Quarter prefigured annexation: In the first case, the officers and civilians cast the government as British mandatory authorities, and created a fait accompli to set policy. In the second, the government itself took the role of the pre-independence Zionist movement, cast the United States and United Nations as British high commissioner, and sought to establish a fact that would only be fully appreciated once it was irreversible. Without noticing it, the country’s leaders had immersed themselves in a fountain of youth that took them two decades into their past.

ON JUNE
19, the day that Israel offered to give up the Syrian heights for full peace, a staff officer in the IDF division holding those heights informed battalion commanders that the next day “a settlement survey team will began working in [our] sector, led by Meir Shamir of the Settlement Department.”
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Neither the officer nor Shamir could have known of the government’s diplomatic initiative. Possibly no one in the cabinet knew of Shamir’s work plans, whose purpose was to explore conditions establishing Jewish farming communities on the newly conquered land.

The Settlement Department belonged to the Jewish Agency—which, historically speaking,
was
the pre-independence Zionist movement. Established along with the British mandate after World War I, the Agency represented Palestine’s Jews to the British authorities, served the Jews as a government-in-the-making, and funneled Jewish philanthropy from abroad to projects in Palestine. Its Siamese twin, with overlapping boards and shared officials, was the Zionist Organization, the international body created by Theodor Herzl in 1897 to promote Jewish nationalism.

In 1948, the Agency turned over most of its functions to the new state. Yet as if time were frozen, it continued to exist. That way, Diaspora Jews could keep up financial support, donating to a nongovernmental organization rather than to a foreign state. The Agency, though, was not precisely an independent philanthropy. A contract with the government laid out a division of functions. Along with the Jewish National Fund, which bought and managed land holdings in the name of the Jewish people, it was considered a “national institution.” Israeli politicians filled the top roles at the Agency. Levi Eshkol himself had headed the Settlement Department from 1948 until assuming the premiership in 1963; for most of those fifteen years he was also finance minister.
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The Settlement Department was a bureaucratic shrine to an ethos from the revolutionary period: the ideal of settling on the land. The traditional Hebrew word for Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel,
aliyah,
literally “ascent,” is better translated as “repatriation”—it connotes the return home of exiles, refugees adrift for generations. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Zionism turned repatriation from a hope into a pressing obligation, and added a second stage: A Jew should return not only to the homeland, but to land itself, to the earth. True repatriation meant becoming a farmer and a person of nature. “The return to nature,” as Israeli political philosopher Yaron Ezrahi has written, “was a commitment to the naturalization of an entire people as an act of collective emancipation from the ‘culture of exile,’ a deliberate attempt to leap over two thousand years of Jewish history and somehow retrieve the primordial universe that existed before expulsion from the land.”
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Modern Hebrew adopted the word
ascent
for this process as well: to settle on a new piece of land is “to ascend to the soil,” as if arising from the depths.

The ideal has its roots in European thinkers who romanticized both nature and the peasantry, in socialism’s beatifying the workingman—and in the inclination of a persecuted minority to accept the majority’s caricature of it. Distaste for “the prototype of the pale, scrawny Jew” runs through Zionist writing as well.
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Of course, there was also a practical side: In the struggle between the Jews and Arabs for one territory, each new piece of land acquired and settled by Jews was an additional stake in the whole of the land. Beginning in the 1880s, European Jewish immigrants established farming colonies in which they soon employed Arab fieldworkers. The next generation of immigrants, influenced by socialist ideology, insisted that Jews do the labor themselves, leading to the creation of the kibbutzim, communes on Jewish National Fund land.

Members of the first kibbutzim led an intensely ascetic life, following a philosophy known as the “religion of labor,” in which the central sacrament of traditional Judaism, religious study, was replaced by the sacrament of physical labor and settlement on the land. Labor Zionism regarded itself as the successor to Judaism. The kibbutzim formed a secular monastic order (albeit without celibacy), a minority whose members treated the group as their true family, and whose greatest pride was to own nothing, to work entirely for others, to live in the fever of an ideal that the wider society admired but could not match.

Another wave of immigrants after World War I, inspired by the Russian Revolution, brought the dream of turning Jewish Palestine into a single commune. The United Kibbutz, born of this effort, sought to create large kibbutzim, often at the edge of towns, as with Ramat Rachel next to Jerusalem. Members worked not only in fields but at city labor, to prove—in the words of one pioneer—“that a [former] yeshivah student or Jewish gymnasiast could work harder than an Arab.”
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A member’s status depended on the intensity of his toil. Children lived in separate houses, raised by the group. In some communes, their names were chosen by the membership.