The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (13 page)

An opinion poll in July showed that 91 percent of Israelis favored permanently keeping East Jerusalem, 85 percent were for keeping the Syrian heights, and 71 percent wanted to keep the West Bank. Just over half thought Israel should keep the Sinai.
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Security concerns influenced those figures. Though one could have concluded from the victory that Israel’s prewar sense of vulnerability was exaggerated, the opposite conclusion was more common: Keeping land was the key to safety. Tzvi Shiloah, a minor Mapai politician, became a prominent advocate of keeping everything. To eliminate the need to choose between land and peace, he argued that holding the land would convince Arabs they had no war option. “Our being on the Canal will end any thought of an Egyptian military contest with Israel. That will force Egypt to seek peace arrangements with us,” he wrote in the Mapai-linked newspaper
Davar
.
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Were it up to the poets, policy would have been clear. Nathan Alterman, a legendary figure, declared that Israel must give up nothing, particularly not “the cradle of this nation,” as he described the West Bank. Alterman’s political column-in-verse had appeared for years in
Davar
. He was known as utterly loyal to David Ben-Gurion and to his stress on the state over movements, proletarian interests, or particular borders. He was a Tel Aviv poet, in love with his bright, modern, historyless Mediterranean city. In 1955, Haim Gouri had walked with Alterman down Jerusalem’s main street to the midtown barbed-wire border, where they could look upon the Old City. Alterman told him, “From here to Shanghai is Asia, and from here to the beach in Tel Aviv is Israel.”
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Now, in prose, Alterman changed his view, criticizing Ben-Gurion’s declared willingness to give up the West Bank. “The meaning of this victory is that it erased the difference between the state of Israel and the Land of Israel…” he wrote. “The state and the land are henceforth one essence.” The remainder of the Jewish people was therefore obligated to immigrate, creating a “threefold thread that shall not be broken.”
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Yet Alterman was also following Ben-Gurion’s lead: The founding father was known for asserting that the Bible was the Jewish deed to the Land of Israel. Alterman now told Gouri, “I know you know every path in the land, that you love the villages and their orchards, even the stink of the smoke from wood ovens…. I am a Tel Aviv man. But anyone who returns these pieces of land will first have to write a different Bible.”
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Alterman’s twist was that the Bible not only gave the Jews a right to the land; it also imposed an obligation on them to keep it.

A more radical transformation came over Moshe Shamir, a prominent novelist. For his colleagues in the far-left Mapam party, it seemed he had lost his mind.
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In an essay ringing with poetic rhetoric, he compared the conquest of the Temple Mount to God’s revelation at Mount Sinai; he described it as completing Zionism—and completing the efforts of Shabtai Tzvi, a seventeenth-century false messiah, transformed by Shamir into a proto-Zionist hero. Rhapsodically, he described the conquest as introducing the end of days, when “nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” To reach redemption required only explaining to the world that Jerusalem was “the capital of peace—the temple of brotherhood, justice, morality.”
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All that he had formerly expected from Marx and Stalin was on the cusp of fulfillment.

Alterman, Shamir, and Shiloah joined forces and began signing up other intellectuals and public figures in support of permanent Israeli rule over the Whole Land of Israel, whose borders, for them, coincided with the new cease-fire lines. At an initial meeting in Tel Aviv, Alterman declared that the war was the “zenith of Jewish history,” overshadowing not only the establishment of the state but the founding religious events recorded in the Bible.
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The group enlisted prominent members of the United Kibbutz and the Orthodox novelist S. Y. Agnon, the winner of the previous year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, along with far-right poet Uri Zvi Greenberg and Yisrael Eldad, the ideologue of the pre-state, fascist-leaning Lehi (Stern Gang) underground. Greenberg and Eldad needed no conversion; both had long dreamed of a wide new kingdom of Israel. But their support meant that lifetime enemies, radical rightists and radical leftists, now found themselves together, a sign that the new issue of the territories would cast the old ideological definitions on history’s ash heap.

There were voices, though fewer, opposing euphoria and the conclusions it produced. In
Davar,
the twenty-seven-year-old novelist Amos Oz warned, “Even occupiers who went much further in oppression, far beyond where Moshe Dayan is willing to go, sat in most places on thorns and scorpions until they were uprooted. Not to mention the total moral destruction that long occupation causes the occupier. Even unavoidable occupation corrupts.”
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Soon after, Oz would describe arriving in Jerusalem, city of his birth, the day after the war, in uniform, straight from the Sinai Desert, and discovering that “Jerusalem is mine, yet a stranger to me,” and that “the city is inhabited. People live there, strangers: I do not understand their language, they are living where they have always lived and I am the stranger…. Their eyes hate me. They wish me dead. Accursed stranger.” As a child in Jerusalem, Oz had feared looming enemies beyond the border, ready to kill him; now he found himself “stalking its streets clutching a submachine gun, like a figure from one of my childhood nightmares: an alien man in an alien city.”
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Oz’s relative youth was paradigmatic; he had grown up after statehood. The youngest of Alterman’s circle were a generation older, the messianic Shamir and the perpetually conflicted Gouri. For Oz, the newly conquered land was foreign territory—occupied, not liberated. He could empathize with the people there, know they were oppressed. Yet, mark this, too: They were different and terrifying, and he wanted to be able to turn his back on them, knowing that a fence safely kept them distant.

Oz was a member of Kibbutz Huldah, which belonged to Mapai’s kibbutz movement. He and a dozen other members of various kibbutzim spent that summer holding long discussions at communes around the country, from his own movement and others, with men home from the war—people who had seen battle, had seen many friends and more enemy soldiers killed. Out of the transcripts, the organizers created a book called
Soldiers’ Talk
.
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Published independently by young people, made up of conversations in which the speakers were identified only by first names, it belonged to the genre of Israeli youth movement newsletters and pamphlets. It was the child of the ecstatic
In Your Covenant
of 1937, but the genre had turned dark.

Because
Soldiers’ Talk
contains multiple voices and the speakers are struggling with conflicting thoughts, the book has been used to prove many points: that Israeli soldiers were morally sensitive or militaristic, eager for peace or despairing of it. The overwhelming tone, though, is of melancholy and shock, of mourning for comrades and for innocence. “We didn’t return drunk with victory,” says a brief preface. “Between the lines grows dissent from a society that tends to see a military achievement as compelling proof of the justice of its values.”
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The word that seems to repeat most often in the book is
mu’akah
, which translates as “depression” or “angst.” Another leitmotif is “filthy,” as when a young officer named Dan, at Kibbutz Gvat, says, “The feeling of [being in] an occupying army is an extraordinarily filthy feeling.” His unit conquered the city of Gaza. He describes rounding up men who would be expelled to Egypt, for reasons he does not give. A woman pulling small children came to the bus bearing the men and begged Dan to release her husband, lest her children starve, and Dan felt helpless, until a higher officer agreed to free the man. Then, Dan says, he begged his commander, “Get us out of here. This is a shitty job…. I’m akibbutz member. We weren’t brought up for this.” Amnon, also of Kibbutz Gvat, says that when his unit rode into Gaza, he “recalled all the pictures of conquering armies, and the feeling was amazingly shitty.”
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The memory of the Holocaust is woven through the conversations. At Na’an, Yisrael Galili’s kibbutz, tank commander Kobi Rabinovich says, “In my behavior…I was constantly facing the Holocaust. They killed us, obliterated us. Because of that, it was all more intense…. There were sights that reminded me of things I’d seen in pictures…. You see a pile of corpses and a hand sticking out of it.” In the space of a thought, the broad-shouldered young reservist bounces between Jewish victimhood and the implication that he is the victimizer. If the other side had won, he says, they would have behaved like animals, and then he adds, “All in all, war is a filthy thing.”
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Elsewhere, Oz talks with members of Kibbutz Geva in the Jezreel Valley about territory. A man named Gili describes conquering Nablus, and says he would be willing to give it up for peace, but adds that the borders must be changed for security, that the Jordan River and the Syrian heights must remain in Israeli hands. He adds, “And the only reason for depression is that in a few years we’ll have to fight again.” Oz asserts that for peace, he would be willing “to visit the Western Wall as a tourist” in a foreign country. A friend of his died in the battle for the police academy in Jerusalem, he says, and “if blowing up the Western Wall with dynamite would raise him up from the dead, I’d say: Blow it up!”
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Let the camera roll back to compare Alterman’s comrades and Oz’s. One will look in vain in
Soldiers’ Talk
, even in the conversations at United Kibbutz communes that it records, for Yitzhak Tabenkin’s awakening, for novelist Moshe Shamir’s epiphany, or for Yigal Allon’s enthusiasm to annex and settle. Indeed, one will look in vain for enthusiasm for any action. Young veterans like Amnon and Dan do not speak of organizing to end the occupation. The gulf between the older generation and the younger is not political. It is between ecstasy and shell-shock.

Let the camera move back farther, for a much wider panorama. This was the summer of 1967. In France, America, Mexico, the fuse of student revolutions was burning toward the explosions of 1968. One of the mysteries of Israeli history is why it produced only the tiniest of New Lefts, the vaguest echo of student rebellion. Surely, one thinks, it should have been an epicenter of the upheaval. Elsewhere, as Paul Berman explains in his book
A Tale of Two Utopias,
the founders of the New Left were often children of Old Left activists. In France and America, a disproportionate number were Jews. Many French student radicals were children of partisans or Holocaust survivors. The children had grown up in comfort, knowing their parents were heroes. The heroic parents had sent them to communist youth groups or to Hashomer Hatza’ir, the left-Zionist youth movement linked to Mapam. In America, their parents had lived through the McCarthy repression. In Mexico, some were children of exiled Spanish Civil War veterans. The children longed to match the heroism of their parents; they feared becoming “veterans of the cinemathèque.” As the New Left developed in each of those countries, it formulated a goal of “participatory democracy,” socialism built from the bottom up by communes and workers’ councils instead of Stalinist bureaucracies.
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By definition, young kibbutz members were children of Old Leftists, many of them Holocaust survivors or partisans, and even more of them veterans of what for them was the revolutionary war of 1948. But by the summer of 1967 the children had their own war stories, which they told in
Soldiers’ Talk.
They had stopped an expected Holocaust, and found that war left you feeling filthy. As for participatory democracy, they had grown up in the closest thing to success at it. For them it was as prosaic as an extra weekend shift milking the cows or the Saturday night kibbutz general meeting. The revolution was a yawn, and heroism was shitty.

ONE CAN
also look in vain in
Soldiers’ Talk
for one more conversation, unlike the rest, from that summer. Somehow, among the editors, the idea arose that students from Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s Merkaz Harav yeshivah, who had also served in combat units alongside kibbutz men, would become allies against the “nationalistic intoxication that had engulfed the country.” A meeting was soon arranged between six yeshivah students and two kibbutz interviewers. The discussion lasted five tense hours.
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Asked for his feelings about the war, one student, Yohanan Fried, spoke of a clash of emotion and reason. “Someone who longs for the Whole Land of Israel has the feeling of a person who’s missing a limb…,” he said, then qualified: “That is…reason tells the emotions that, ‘You must feel that you are not complete.’” What he labeled as “reason” was the theology of his yeshivah. He was describing the process of appropriating his teachers’ belief as his own.

The war was part of a great, divinely directed process, explained Yoel Bin-Nun, another of the students, citing Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook as speaking at the beginning of World War I of “the greatness of every war, and that the greater a war is, the greater the events one should expect as a result.”

Yohanan added that the latest war followed earlier divine acts: the creation of the state, and before that the Holocaust: “Maybe this is too cruel a sentence, but the Holocaust was some sort of giant broom that sped immigration to the Land…. As if the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to us, ‘Enough children, you’ve played what you wanted…. Now I’ll move you to the Land.’” The question of where God had been in the Holocaust was thereby answered; He was arranging redemption, so that the fate of individual victims had to be put aside.
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