The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (18 page)

Weitz’s typed words beg to be read aloud in the cold, high, angrily sober voice of an old man. He did not want to go back to the past; he had already been there. He did not share the euphoria of biblical verses. The old struggle for land and a state had been won; the new struggle for peace was to be fought by diplomats, not by young men with long locks swept across their foreheads in the old Palmah style, and most young men and women were no longer interested anyway. His friends read his letter and filed it.

Policy, it turned out, could be conducted according to sentiment. Eshkol knew he could not annex the West Bank. But the United States was not pushing him to withdraw before peace, and at Khartoum the Arabs had proclaimed “no peace.” The Allon Plan fit Eshkol’s own sense that the Jordan River must be Israel’s line of defense.
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But his divided government was incapable of choosing that or any other policy.

The Allon Plan’s strategic logic dictated that Israel should give up the Hebron hills and their Arab population. But Allon himself felt tied to Hebron and even more so to the Etzion Bloc, which he had been unable to save in 1948. They represented another of the goals he had fallen short of reaching. Nostalgia for the lost kibbutzim moved Eshkol as well. His solution was to fall back on the method that Labor Zionism and his own past provided: to redraw the map one settlement at a time.

The myth of a reluctant Eshkol pushed by Orthodox settlers into reestablishing Kfar Etzion would later serve the purposes both of the Israeli left and of the young Orthodox rebels. But the evidence is stronger that after a characteristic argument with himself, Eshkol made a choice, knowingly evaded legal constraints, imposed his decision on the cabinet, and misrepresented his intentions abroad. From that point, he personally directed settlement in occupied territory.
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“
NEW YORK TIMES
has item on Eshkol declaration on need to settle territories in our hands…. Please cable urgently whether this actually said…. If it was not—we would like to publish immediate denial. We await your immediate reply,” said the cable from an Israeli diplomat at U.N. headquarters.
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“There is no declaration,” said the return cable, from Eshkol’s aide Adi Yafeh, “rather, cabinet agreed on and publicized establishment of military settlement outposts repeat outposts in Etzion Bloc, and plans for establishing additional points. At Banias heights a first point in Golan was established yesterday.”
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The exchange indicates how Israeli emissaries abroad—including Foreign Minister Abba Eban, who was then at the United Nations—heard of Eshkol’s decision. A few nights before, over dinner with Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Eban had elegantly explained why Israel would not annex the West Bank, but would return it to Jordan on condition of demilitarization and free access for Israelis.
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For him, the headline of his morning
Times
was a mess that he and his staff again had to clean up.
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“When we set up Kfar Etzion,” Eshkol admitted two months later, “Eban was really boiling, angry, upset.”
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The press was also the State Department’s intelligence source for what looked like a major shift in Israeli policy. But State did receive some analysis: The embassy in Tel Aviv noted that according to a “usually well-informed” reporter, government policy “in settlement of occupied territories is to be based on establishing facts quietly rather than making noisy statements.” Among the Mideast hands at State, the words
establishing facts
had no cultural resonance; they did not conjure up old ballads and legendary photos as they did for Israel’s leaders, and the point was not seen as worth including in a message to Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow, then traveling in Brazil.
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At his noon briefing the next day, the State Department spokesman said, “If accurately reported, the plans for establishment of permanent settlements would be inconsistent with the Israeli position as we understand it—that they regard occupied territories…to be matters for negotiation. We have not been officially informed of any change in that policy.”
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In diplomats’ language, that was meant to be a biting rebuke.
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At the U.N. General Assembly, British foreign secretary George Brown attacked the Israeli decision.
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Back at the Etzion Bloc, Porat and his friends wrote in their founding-day flier, with the joy of college students holding a successful demonstration, “It turns out that the ascent to Kfar Etzion has made lots of noise in the world. Those settling today have joked that each one has shocked five countries.”
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The job of explaining Israeli policy fell to Foreign Ministry official Shlomo Argov, who told an American diplomat that since peace was not imminent, the army needed to establish “military positions in control of occupied territory…for [the] necessary length of time.” The Nahal unit at Kfar Etzion would hold the southern approaches to Jerusalem only until Israel gave up the land. Argov did not have an easy time. “He could not deny attachment of Israelis to that particular piece of ground,” the U.S. diplomat recorded. “Similarly, while claiming elements of coincidence was [
sic
] present in fact Nahal unit included sons of original…settlers, Argov admitted that governments [
sic
] had responded to pressure in permitting these individuals to take part in establishing position.”
⁶⁸

In Saudi Arabia, a representative of King Faisal showed up at the U.S. ambassador’s residence to say that Israel’s settlement decision was undermining the “spirit of moderation which came out of Khartoum talks.” An Amman paper’s editorial blasted the Israeli use of “pioneer” for settlers, as if they were “explorers of African jungles paving the way for white settlers.” Another Jordanian daily, though, “cast doubt Israel will seriously try to establish permanent settlements in occupied areas.” Rather, it explained, Israel was trying to pressure the Arabs into direct negotiations and signing peace treaties. The article underlined what was to be feared most: negotiating openly with Israel.
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The diplomatic squall quickly blew over. The Johnson administration was “exhausted” with the Mideast crisis and “had another problem on the other side of the globe,” as National Security Council staffer Harold Saunders would say many years later, referring to Vietnam.
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Despite the awkward conversation with Argov, U.S. officials continued to refer to Kfar Etzion as a Nahal outpost. The next spring, commenting on the fact that the Israeli Tourism Ministry was providing assistance to build a restaurant there, an official at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem reported, “the Government of Israel apparently has long-range plans for Kfar Etzion.”
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THE ONLY ACTUAL
connection to the military, according to Porat, was that “they sent us a wooden sign, saying ‘Kfar Etzion Nahal Outpost.’” The fact that “this isn’t an outpost, this is a civilian settlement” was obvious. So “we took the sign, put iron strips on it, and put it at the dining hall door, and everyone who came in cleaned their feet on it.”
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The cabinet, meanwhile, tried to restore order after Eshkol’s decision on Kfar Etzion. The ministers voted that future settlements would belong to Nahal, as would “outposts” already approved, including the one at Aalleiqa in the Golan Heights.
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With that, the original status of short-term “work camp” was forgotten.

In mid-October, with the help of the army’s Northern Command, the Golan kibbutz-in-the-making moved to a compound in the ghost town of Quneitrah, at the edge of Israeli-held land. The three-room houses, built for Syrian officers’ families—or by other accounts, for Soviet advisers—were better suited than the ruins at Aalleiqa for winter in the heights. They came equipped with the beds and tables and chairs of those who had fled, even if they lacked electricity. The inside walls of a larger house were knocked down to create a communal dining hall for a group now numbering over eighty people.
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Soon after, the commander of Nahal appeared, accompanied by aides and secretaries. “I’ve received orders that you are to be a Nahal outpost,” the officer told kibbutz secretary Yehudah Harel. “Tomorrow send people to headquarters in Jaffa to get uniforms, a flag and a sign.”

“On Friday, I’ll discuss it with the kibbutz secretariat,” replied Harel, enjoying an anarchist moment.

“This is an order,” said the stunned commander.

“We’re civilians,” answered Harel. “We don’t take orders.”

Still, Harel sought advice from Yigal Allon, who told him to agree. The idea was to make life easier for Eban, Allon said. “Once we built an army camouflaged as settlements,” he said, referring to the Palmah in pre-state days. “Now we’ll build settlements camouflaged as an army.” Harel disliked that advice, but bent because the same order came from the always helpful Northern Command. He agreed to a sign saying “Quneitrah Nahal Outpost” and a flag from the unit, but no uniforms.

The sign and flag went up early one morning in a field in front of the compound. That morning a kibbutz member hooked a disk harrow to a tractor to clear the field of brush, knocked down both sign and flag, and harrowed them. By ten o’clock, the settlement’s Nahal period was over. Afterward, the kibbutz newsletter reprinted a rather desperate letter from a major, saying, “For the
last time
we request you call the settlement ‘Quneitrah Outpost’ and not ‘Kibbutz Golan’ or any other name.”
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The kibbutz secretariat was soon corresponding with the committee in the Prime Minister’s Office that assigned names to new communities. The committee said nothing of “Quneitrah Outpost,” but politely explained that a settlement could not have the same name as a region, so “Golan” by itself was out.
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The kibbutz eventually chose the name Merom Golan, “Peak of the Golan.” A history of Nahal, co-published many years later by the Defense Ministry, describes each outpost established after June 1967. Neither Kfar Etzion nor Quneitrah—under that name or another—appears.
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At Quneitrah, the young kibbutz members rode herd on cattle, tended crops, and opened a lunch stop for tourists, using tables taken from the town’s houses. On paper, thirty members were employed each day in Labor Ministry work projects for the jobless. The commune’s bookkeeper, borrowed from an established kibbutz, had to fill out a form each day listing who had worked where, and instead quit and went home, because the jobs were “a complete fiction,” in Harel’s words, invented so Allon could provide the funding he had promised. Someone else filled out the forms, and the funds kept flowing. Allon, according to Harel, was “certainly” aware of the ruse.
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“The place is new, of top importance. But it seems that’s not enough,” reservist tank commander Kobi Rabinovich wrote to Eilat, his girlfriend, trying to make sense of why he did not enjoy his work at the kibbutz in Quneitrah. He missed the responsibility he had borne in the army. The letter flashes back to the first night of the war. He is in command of a tank, standing in the turret looking into darkness, in a long line of tanks on a road through the Sinai. The lights of the tank ahead of him vanish beyond a curtain of dust. Dust glues his eyelids shut. He finds himself falling as his knees give out, awakening, dozing, shouting the order, “Driver, stop!” a moment before crashing into the next tank. From the radio pleads the voice of a tank commander who has gone lost, who sees heavy vehicles moving in the dark and does not know if they belong to his side or the enemy. On the road Kobi sees “the smoking corpses of vehicles” and he smells burning rubber, the remains of “something that went on here between life and death.” At last he sees a pale horizon emerging from night. The letter ends.
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“
REGARDING THE GOLAN HEIGHTS
,” Levi Eshkol told the Knesset on October 30, “we will not allow a return to the status quo…which brought destruction and ruin to our settlements in the valley. The status quo ante in the Sinai…and the Suez Canal will also not return.” The Gaza Strip and West Bank, he asserted, had been under Egyptian and Jordanian occupation. So, he said, “we must now seek to set agreed national boundaries based on peace accords.” In Jerusalem, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City would be rebuilt. Besides that, a team was planning a new neighborhood to house 1,500 families on the north side of East Jerusalem. It was a major foreign policy address; for once Eshkol appeared to have a clear, decisive message.

Or did he? Outside of the specifics on Jerusalem, Eshkol’s speech was a Rorschach test. Analyzing it, White House staffer Harold Saunders said headlines such as “Israel Digging In” had “badly mauled the meaning.” Actually, he told national security adviser Walt Rostow, Israel had simply repeated its stand that it would stay put until negotiations succeeded, and that the starting point for talks was the postwar lines. The United States pointedly disagreed with that position, Saunders noted; it saw negotiations as necessarily beginning with the prewar boundaries. But in practical terms that did not matter “since we aren’t about to press the Israelis to withdraw” before an agreement.
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At the opposite extreme are recent histories asserting that Israel was repudiating its June 19 offer to pull back to the international border for peace. After Eshkol’s address, they note, the Knesset ratified a cabinet statement saying that, in light of the “three no’s of Khartoum,” Israel would “maintain the situation fixed by the cease-fire agreements and fortify its position.”
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Yet by themselves, those words imply only holding land until the Arabs were finally willing to talk. Rejecting the status quo ante, Eshkol did not say what would replace it.