The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (2 page)

“We are divided,” Haim Gouri’s mother had taught him, “between those with meager spirits and those with torn souls.” That night, more than ever, Gouri counted himself as one of the raggedly ripped souls, and he envied the other sort.
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A solitary Israeli army jeep growled north from Jerusalem on the road winding through the dark hills of the West Bank. A soldier drove, another carried a gun to protect Gouri and his wife, Aliza, who had insisted on coming along though she could not understand how he had thrust himself into this madness.

The moon, only a narrow crescent, an accidental pencil stroke of light on the December sky, had already set when the jeep pulled out of its Jerusalem base near midnight. They rode though Ramallah and past the shadowed Arab villages strung out along the mountain ridge, and on through Nablus, where by daylight Palestinian demonstrators had littered the road with burning tires, and headed on. Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, had insisted that Gouri—a poet and journalist turned negotiator on a moment’s whim—could not go this way at night in his own car to carry a message from the government.
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Fifty-two years old, Gouri had a face made of sharp angles: sharp chin and nose, sharp brows above deep-set eyes. Eight and a half years before, on the third day of the Six-Day War of 1967, he had worn a uniform himself as he drove north in a convoy from Jerusalem toward newly conquered Ramallah, a platoon commander in the reserves called up for duty in a sudden conflict. That time, a June sun had drenched the hills. The land he passed through had been part of the British-ruled Palestine of his youth, but had lain, unreachable, beyond the frontier since Israel’s establishment in 1948. “It seemed to me I’d died and was waking up, resurrected,” he had written in June 1967. “All that I loved was cast at my feet, stunningly ownerless, landscapes revealed as in a dream. The old Land of Israel, the homeland of my youth, the other half of my cleft country. And their land, the land of the unseen ones, hiding behind their walls.”
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The memory still shone, incandescent, whenever he came this way, though he had since concluded that the war had “liberated the land but torn the nation”—deeply dividing Israelis about whether the land taken in the battles against Jordan, Egypt, and Syria was liberated or occupied, about whether Israel must hold some or all or none of it, about how to see the “unseen ones”—the Arabs who lived there. On this cold night, Gouri feared the nation was on verge of brother fighting brother.
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North of Nablus, next to the village of Sebastia, the jeep turned onto a dirt road lined with pines and cypresses. A two-story stone building, an abandoned train station at which passengers had last alighted when the British ruled Palestine, overlooked a narrow valley splotched with the glow of campfires.

“The scene was surrealistic,” Gouri would recall. Thousands of people waited in freezing cold. Most were Orthodox Jews, young men and women and teenagers, the armies of the night, camped out here in defiance of Rabin’s government, aflame themselves with the passion of demonstrators anywhere who are many and certain. They were there demanding that Rabin allow Jews to settle on the outskirts of Nablus, to stake a claim that would keep Israel from giving up part of the ancient homeland in return for peace. They sought to shatter a policy that said the hill country should be set aside, to be conceded when the time came, in order to avoid permanent Israeli rule over its Arab population. For a week, the crowd in the valley had grown and shrunk and grown, tense with the possibility of confrontation and the improbable hope of victory. Around them waited soldiers, ready for orders to pull them, struggling, onto buses and—as Gouri noticed with sardonic fury—meanwhile protecting the law-defying settlement supporters from the Palestinians demonstrating against their presence.
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Gouri had come earlier that day as a journalist, to look and write. The would-be settlers conjured up passions he remembered from his own days in a socialist youth movement intoxicated with the land; and they conjured up fear of anarchy, the collapse of the state.

“Happy are the whole, and woe to the torn…” he wrote that week, describing his visit. “In my life, too, there have been times when I’ve been at one with a deed. Today, too, I’m utterly at one with a few principles. But this time I wander torn among people swept up in messianic fervor.”
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He wanted this confrontation to end peacefully, within the rules; he feared the shock waves in a fractured nation if one pregnant woman were to miscarry as she was pulled to the buses. So he had stepped out of the role of journalistic witness and into the role of actor, proposing a compromise—to his old comrades-in-arms who now ruled the country, and now, with their approval, the handwritten terms scrawled by a senior cabinet minister, to the organizers at Sebastia. Inside the train station, the leaders of the Gush Emunim, Israel’s most successful protest movement, argued through the night about whether Gouri’s compromise meant victory, as Gouri and his wife shivered outside.

IN THE UNCERTAIN
memory of many Israelis and Israel-watchers, the issue of settlement in occupied land began in the struggle between Yitzhak Rabin’s first government in the mid-1970s and the young radicals of Gush Emunim. The story therefore becomes a simple one: On one side are the secular pragmatists of the left; on the other, the religious fanatics of the right. Or—in another telling that changes the labels without drastically changing the script—on one side are uninspired defeatists; on the other, the truest patriots.

In either telling, the confrontation at the Sebastia train station in the first week of December 1975 marks the point of departure for a long and contentious journey. Gush Emunim and its successors have gone on to build communities throughout the territories Israel overran in June 1967. Settlers have benefited from government support, especially after Israel’s Labor Party lost power to the right-wing Likud bloc in 1977—and yet, again and again, some have also clashed with the state, at times violently. The question of whether the settlement imperative or democracy takes precedence has threatened to rip Israel apart.

In accounts of Mideast diplomacy as well, the settlements first appear in the mid-1970s, as if from nowhere, with no explanation of how they appeared on the landscape.
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Since then, Israel’s settlements have seized an ever more prominent place on the international agenda. The most accepted approach to ending the entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians requires dividing the land that both consider their home. And the very purpose of settlements is to stand in the way of Israel forfeiting the land it took in 1967, or at the very least, to ensure that it will retain as much of that land as possible.

In his eighties, one of the most renowned poets in a country where poets achieve popular stardom, Haim Gouri says today that getting involved at Sebastia was “the greatest foolishness of my life.” His hope that a compromise would restore “the rules of the game” of civil discourse and law has proven vain. Long after Sebastia, he has watched Israeli soldiers struggle with defiant settlers. He has been accused, he says with pain, of being “the father of the settlements,” as if he will be remembered for that and his poems will be forgotten.
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The charge is unjust, and not only because he was badly used at the time, his compromise quickly twisted by politicians—particularly by Rabin’s defense minister and chief rival, who was then known for his pro-settlement views, Shimon Peres.

In fact, Sebastia was not the beginning of settlement, but the
end
of the beginning. It was the culmination of a story that began even before the guns of the Six-Day War cooled. Religious radicals, convinced they were fulfilling God’s plan for history, indeed played a central role—but alongside of, or even as understudies to, secularists identified with Israel’s political left. Some had torn souls. Some were certain of what they were doing, were “made of exclamation points,” in Gouri’s phrase. Without intending to do so, they helped beget the religious settler movement, and then were stunned by it.

There are ironies inside ironies. Those who began the process of settlement beyond Israel’s prewar borders believed passionately in the Jewish state. The older ones had helped create it. Yet they were inspired by the glory of their youth, the fervor of times before the state existed, when they were rebels, not officials. Now, impossibly, they tried to play both roles. The victory of 1967 represented a triumph of the state they had built. Yet it also yielded unplanned conquests, an accidental empire.

The process of settlement, of taking ownership of that empire, led to the state’s gradual unraveling, blurring its borders, undercutting its authority. It pulled Jews and Arabs back into an older kind of conflict—instead of a battle between states, a struggle between two ethnic groups struggling for control of the same undivided land—the conflict that existed before the partition of Palestine and Israel’s establishment. Victory faded into a tragedy of unending struggles, internal and external.

Sebastia was a crossroads, but the journey had begun years earlier, before anyone could drive north on the road from Jerusalem.

One day in early May 1967, General Uzi Narkiss stood in the shade of pine trees on the breeze-stroked hilltop of Kibbutz Ramat Rachel, at the edge of Israeli West Jerusalem, and looked out past the armistice line at Bethlehem and the Judean Desert in the Jordanian-held West Bank. With him stood journalist Haim Gouri and a young intelligence officer. It was a clear day in the brief Israeli spring, after the rains have stopped, before the dry heat scorches the last pale green from the hillsides and leaves them yellow-brown. Still, when Gouri wrote of his day with the general for his newspaper, his tone would be overcast, melancholy with nostalgia. He and Narkiss were looking at the territory of memory—as unreachable as one’s youth.
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Narkiss, forty-two years old and the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Central Command, turned his binoculars to a flat-topped mountain to the southeast, site of a ruined fortress built by King Herod of Judea two millennia ago. Narkiss had hidden there for a day, he told the intelligence officer, back in 1946: His unit of the underground Haganah had attacked the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River, as part of an operation aimed at driving the British from Palestine. Afterward they escaped by boat across the Dead Sea and climbed the desert cliffs to the ancient fortress, took cover there through daylight, then hiked through the hills to Ramat Rachel.

The young officer looked at Narkiss and mapped the line between Israeli generations: “You’ve passed through those places,” he said. “Our experiences are different.” He added, in the vague wish of someone with many years ahead of him, “Still, we’d like to go one day—let’s hope in a time of peace.”

On maps, the armistice line between Israel and Jordan was drawn in green. The line wrapped around West Jerusalem as if it were a peninsula of Israel surrounded by a sea of Jordanian territory. Ramat Rachel was a tinier peninsula, a promontory pointed southward toward Bethlehem and, beyond that, Hebron. After curling around the kibbutz, the Green Line sliced through Jerusalem, cleaving neighborhoods. Splotches of land were designated as demilitarized zones by the armistice agreement signed in April 1949, at the end of Israel’s war of independence. The agreement looked forward to a permanent peace settlement, but that never came, so the Green Line remained the border, temporary in perpetuity.
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Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, stood just over a mile from the frontier; the prime minister’s house, two-thirds of a mile. On the Jordanian side, the walled Old City nuzzled up against the border.

Gouri was accompanying Narkiss for a tour of the urban frontier. The two were friends, members of an aristocracy of old fighters. They had met in pre-state days as young recruits to the Palmah, the elite force of the Haganah. The Palmah had been closely tied to a pro-Soviet movement of farm communes, kibbutzim, known as Hakibbutz Hame’uhad, the United Kibbutz, whose original goal had been turning all of Jewish Palestine into a single collective. Some people had called the Palmah “the Red Army of the United Kibbutz.”
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Now Gouri wrote for the daily newspaper of the party tied to that movement.

“It’s so quiet here,” Narkiss said, looking at the hills. “It seems like you’re allowed to just get up and walk over there.”

How long, Gouri asked, could the strange situation continue in Jerusalem? “We should be prepared to live like this for years and years,” Narkiss answered. “It might last forever, and it could change any day. We know this is the border, and that’s that.”

READING NARKISS’S
words from the standpoint of history, looking back through the smoke of burning Egyptian tanks in the Sinai sands, one might suspect he was being disingenuous, that behind blank words he hid plans of war and conquest. But history can mislead us: It tells how things turned out. That is precisely what people living not-yet-history, looking forward into uncertainty, cannot know. What appears inevitable, even intentional, in retrospect, is often a series of accidents in real life.

Narkiss was being forthright: The top brass of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) did not expect war. Earlier in 1967, Colonel Shlomo Gazit, the head of Military Intelligence’s research department, had presented Armored Corps commander General Yisrael Tal with a report on the atrocious level of training of Egyptian tank crews. “If you are right,” Tal replied, “they have no possibility of contending with us militarily.” Tal’s response only reinforced Military Intelligence’s repeated evaluations that, even though the Arab countries aspired to destroy Israel, war was unlikely.
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In March 1967, at a briefing for top commanders, General Aharon Yariv, the head of Military Intelligence, declared there was no chance of war in the Middle East in the next eight years. Egypt, the most powerful Arab country, was tied down in a civil war in Yemen; other Arab countries would not fight Israel on their own.
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That hardly meant that Israel was ready to convert tanks into tractors. Indeed, one reason for confidence was Israel’s deterrent power. Through the mid-1960s, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and military Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin had worked to acquire new arms, especially for the air force and armored corps, to convince Arab leaders they should not attack.

Still, tensions had been growing since 1964 on the eastern border. To cripple the Jewish state, Syria had tried to divert the headwaters of its main water supply, the Jordan River; Israel foiled that plan by bombing the earthworks.
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Syria sponsored Palestinian groups, particularly the Fatah movement, that aimed at reclaiming Palestine from the “Zionist entity” via “armed struggle” and that launched terror attacks from both Syrian and Jordanian territory. The Israeli army responded with cross-border retaliation raids. A de facto peace between Israel and Jordan—including secret meetings between top Israeli officials and the young King Hussein—evaporated.
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Along the 1949 armistice line with Syria—on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee and along the deep, humid valley of the Jordan River—were demilitarized zones that Israel regarded as its territory, a claim Syria rejected. On the ground, each side held part of these zones. Each time Israel sent tractors to farm disputed land, Syria answered with gunfire, sometimes shelling kibbutzim in the valley from the Syrian heights that rose steeply to the east. Recent Israeli histories argue that the Israeli generals deliberately initiated some such incidents: Syrian fire provided a pretext for a stronger Israeli response, really intended as retaliation for Palestinian attacks.
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The clashes grew worse. On April 7, 1967, Syria answered a foray by two Israeli tractors with mortar and cannon fire, to which Israeli warplanes retorted by strafing and bombing Syrian positions. Israeli jets downed Syrian planes in dogfights over Damascus; Syrian shells leveled Kibbutz Gadot, inside a demilitarized zone on the Jordan River bank, north of the Sea of Galilee.
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Yet as Gazit has admitted, “Israeli intelligence erred in not drawing conclusions from the escalation, and did not warn that it could lead to a major conflagration.”
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Rather than being a deliberate prelude to war, the sparring testified to Israel’s confidence that it could punish Syria without risking all-out conflict.

Nor was conquest on the Israeli military agenda. The army’s five-year development plan, put together under Eshkol and Rabin, presumed that Israel could “realize fully its national goals” within the armistice lines.
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That reflected the position of Eshkol’s ruling Mapai party. Mapai—the Workers Party of the Land of Israel—was established in 1930. Its founders were Jewish immigrants from places such as Minsk, Kiev, Warsaw, and Lvov, who had abandoned traditional Judaism as outmoded. Facing two shining secular ideas of utopia, they chose both: socialism along with Zionism, the belief that Jews must return to their homeland to build their own nation. In the Jewish community of British-ruled Palestine, where everything from unions to health clinics to sports teams belonged to parties, Mapai dominated.

In 1937, when a British government panel called the Peel Commission first proposed solving the ethnic conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine by dividing the land into two states, Mapai leader David Ben-Gurion failed to win his party’s unqualified support for the plan. The Arabs rejected the Peel plan completely, and the British abandoned it. But ten years later, when the United Nations voted to split Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, Mapai endorsed partition, which promised immediate independence for a state with a Jewish majority.
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The U.N., though, did nothing to enforce its own decision. First Palestine’s Arabs took up arms against the Jews and partition. When the British pulled out and Ben-Gurion led the Jews to declare Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948, the neighboring Arab countries invaded—so that the moment of statehood marked a graduation from ethnic conflict to a war between sovereign nations.

By the war’s end, Israel’s forces had pushed back the Arab armies and won land beyond the U.N. partition lines, and as many as 750,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled from their villages and cities in the new Jewish state or had been expelled by Jewish forces, becoming refugees. Six thousand Jews were killed, out of the 650,000 Jews in Palestine when the war began. No Palestinian Arab state arose. The kingdom of Transjordan annexed the piece of Palestine its army had seized, on the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the kingdom’s name became Jordan. The Gaza Strip, a sliver of Palestine packed with refugees on the Mediterranean coast, remained under Egyptian military rule. Parts of Israel’s borders matched the old internationally recognized boundary of British Palestine, but elsewhere the country’s territory was defined only by the armistice lines, which meandered crazily through the countryside, defying topography. North of Tel Aviv, Israel narrowed to a coastal strip just nine miles wide, beneath Jordanian-ruled hill country. Though Israel had a natural port on the Red Sea at its southern tip, Eilat, Egypt imposed a blockade farther south, at the Straits of Tiran.
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If there were diplomatic openings for peace, they were missed; the armistice led not to permanent peace but to permanent conflict. After Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser came to power in Egypt in 1953, that country sponsored a campaign of attacks on Israel, from both Gaza and the West Bank, by Palestinian “self-sacrificers.” Israel answered with retaliation raids, killing civilians as well as soldiers. In one particularly gruesome raid, led by a young officer named Ariel Sharon, commandos killed over sixty civilians in the West Bank village of Qibyah.

The border battles, Nasser’s deal to buy a new army’s worth of Eastern Bloc weaponry via Czechoslovakia, his support for Algerian revolutionaries, his nationalization of the Suez Canal—all combined to make allies of Israel, Britain, and France. At the end of October 1956, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion won his cabinet’s approval for an invasion of Egypt’s Sinai Desert, in collusion with the two European powers. Ben-Gurion hoped to shatter the Egyptian army and end the Palestinian attacks—and to acquire at least a piece of the Sinai, including Sharm al-Sheikh, the cape controlling the Straits of Tiran.
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Under Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, the Israel Defense Forces seized the entire Sinai Peninsula in just three days. Politically, though, it was a meager victory. Facing immense pressure from U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower, Israel withdrew to the armistice lines, and Nasser assumed mythic stature among Arab nationalists as the man who stood up to imperialists. But the U.N. Emergency Force (UNEF) took up positions on the Egyptian border and at Sharm al-Sheikh; the straits did stay open; and for a few quiet years Palestinian raids ceased, until the Fatah campaign began.
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And in Israel, irredentism—claims to territory beyond the borders—receded from political debate. In 1963, Eshkol replaced Ben-Gurion as Mapai leader and prime minister. When President Lyndon Johnson invited Eshkol to America in 1964, the visit ended with a joint statement calling for maintaining the territorial integrity of all Mideast countries—implying that both the United States and Israel regarded the armistice lines as final borders.
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In the 1965 election campaign Mapai’s platform—in an era when Israeli parties worried out their platforms with theological seriousness—called for pursuing every opportunity for peace “based on respect for the political independence and territorial integrity of all states in the region.”
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Like middle-aged movements that had led revolutions in other countries, Mapai steadily shed its ideology. The Mapai method, as Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal puts it, was that “every big problem had a small solution.”
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The campaign of 1965 revolved mainly around a feud within the ruling camp: Ben-Gurion split with Eshkol and led a group of young acolytes, including Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, to form a new party—the Worker’s List of Israel, known by its Hebrew acronym Rafi. The rebels did poorly, winning only ten seats in the 120-member Knesset, and found themselves on the opposition benches.