The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (20 page)

This was a calmer Oz than the one who described himself stalking East Jerusalem the day after the war as the shade from his own nightmares. Now he sought to unravel the nightmare, drawing conclusions that were as radical for the time as Copernicus’s were for his. It was an accepted truth in Israel in 1967 that the “Arabs of the Land of Israel” were not a distinct community with the right to a distinct national future, subdivided from that of other Arabs. It was even more heretical among Palestinians to suggest that the Jews were a legitimate nationality with a claim to Palestine.

It is difficult to know how many Israelis, or how few, agreed with Oz. It was unusual for a person his age to have access to the pages of the ruling party’s paper, but he was not the only person who believed Israel would have to give up most or all of the June conquests.

Minimalists, though, faced an essential asymmetry: They could not create facts. They could not carry out a wildcat withdrawal, or undo a settlement. The number of Israelis ready to settle in occupied territory in 1967 was also small, but they had power not matched by words in a newspaper. If any of the ministers who read Oz even half agreed with him, they would have needed a government decision to stop colonialism. Moshe Dayan needed only the inclination not to decide.

THOUGH LEVI ESHKOL
wanted part of the dowry, he knew he had to find a way to avoid keeping the bride. As usual, he was not sure what it was. Eshkol, to be fair, was uncertain because he listened to competing voices, and because he saw the flaws in what they suggested. In a given day’s conversation he was likely to state, as his own position, what he had heard in the previous day’s meeting, and to tear it apart. He was a walking parliament. Even if he acted, he might only be testing an option.

In November 1967, Eshkol appointed Moshe Sasson, a Foreign Ministry Arabist, to conduct “contacts on matters of state” with leaders of “the Arabs of the administered territories.” Explaining the appointment to Dayan, Eshkol said there was a need “to examine the possibilities of establishing a movement for an independent state in the territories.” The phrasing suggested that Israel would support the Arabs creating such a movement and that their “independence” would be from Jordan, not Israel.
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The same month Eshkol’s emissary Yaacov Herzog, director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office, held two secret meetings with King Hussein to explore the possibility of a peace deal restoring part of the West Bank to Jordan. Hussein’s proposal for getting around the Khartoum resolution was that a different Palestinian movement should “spontaneously” arise, asking him to negotiate on its behalf.

Exploring both paths, Eshkol’s motive was to redraw the border and to make sure that no Arab army again entered the West Bank, without Israel having to annex the population. The talks on both fronts dragged on fitfully. When the cabinet discussed the contacts with Hussein, it could not agree on what to offer him.
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Eshkol was certain the Gaza Strip had to remain in Israel’s hands; restoring it to Egypt was too much of a military risk. He had appointed a group of experts to suggest ways of solving the Palestinian refugee problem. But the committee’s real job, as he discussed in December with the two professors who headed it, was to find ways to resettle the refugees packed into the Gaza Strip somewhere else. The professors proposed settling them in the West Bank, an idea Eshkol did not like. Unlike them, he was not sure Israel would be able to give up that land. At Khartoum, he said, “Nasser stuck a knife” in Hussein’s back, so talks with the king would probably lead nowhere. Yigal Allon was still pushing the idea of an Arab “entity” with its defense and foreign affairs controlled by Israel, but Eshkol was skeptical. “Where do you have something like that in our day?” he demanded. He preferred to encourage the Arab refugees to emigrate. What would be immoral, he asked, if a hundred thousand went to Iraq? The question underlined his definition of them as generic Arabs, not as Palestinians.

In his ramble with the professors, Eshkol touched on another problem: whether to keep the Hebron area, with its Arab population. Besides the biblical allure of the city, the familiar factor of return to lost homes was at work: In pre-state days, several hundred Orthodox Jews had lived in Hebron. Many had come to the Holy Land to spend their lives in religious study. Others were Middle Eastern Jews who had lived in the area for generations. In 1929, when Arab opposition to Zionism exploded for the first time in countrywide violence, Arab rioters massacred sixty-seven Jews in Hebron. Most of the surviving Jews left; the Hebron Yeshivah moved to Jerusalem. The remaining Jews fled in 1936, with the start of the Arab revolt.
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Now Eshkol said he had received a letter from a rightist Knesset member on behalf of the Hebron Yeshivah, whose dean wanted to reestablish a branch in its home city. Eshkol told the professors he had met the rabbi, “and I asked him, ‘Would you like a building or two?’” The rabbi wanted a whole street, Eshkol said, hinting the conversation had led nowhere. It was one more idea he was playing with, like a cat batting around a scrap of cloth.
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THE IDEA OF HEBRON
had absolutely seized another mind, one less fertile with doubts. Rabbi Moshe Levinger heard about the Hebron Yeshivah dean’s interest in returning to the city from Elyakim Ha’etzni, a firebrand ultranationalist Tel Aviv lawyer he had met during his abortive bid to lead the reestablishment of Kfar Etzion. Once again Levinger saw the sentiment of return as an opportunity. In his own accounts of the coming months, though, he makes no mention of contacting the Hebron Yeshivah. Instead, the curt young rabbi took the mythic role for himself: He would be the one to restore the Jews to Hebron.
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The National Religious Party’s rebellious Young Guard began running newspaper ads: Anyone interested in “going up” to Hebron should contact Rabbi Moshe Levinger via a Tel Aviv post office box. Levinger also spread the word among former classmates from the Merkaz Harav yeshivah. At the end of 1967 a couple dozen people gathered at National Religious Party headquarters to lay plans. Beforehand, in Levinger’s telling, his wife, Miriam, told him: “The government won’t send you there. Go settle, and things will work out.” At the meeting, he was alone in supporting his absent wife’s approach. Everyone else wanted government approval. He embarked on a round of lobbying.

Levinger’s activism left a meager paper trail. His testimony—sometimes corroborated or contradicted by other people’s—must therefore be cited, but suspiciously. In Levinger’s account, when Eshkol and Dayan refused to meet him, it was because they were at a loss before him, because “they didn’t know how to answer us,” and not because he was an unknown thirty-two-year-old rabbi. Levinger claims to have met Dayan’s viceroy, Colonel Gazit, at the Defense Ministry. “You’ll get an answer,” Gazit told him, but no answer ever came. Gazit would recall no such meeting, nor a reason for one—dealing with Jewish settlement was not his bailiwick.
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Levinger did meet leaders of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel. He stood as he spoke in the Tel Aviv office, clenched his fist, and blasted Dayan—the wrong move in front of the movement’s poet-leader Nathan Alterman, who regarded Dayan as the avatar of Israeli courage. A young Orthodox journalist who was working with Alterman, Yisrael Harel, was both embarrassed and captivated by the rabbi’s refusal to show respect to the secular elite of Israeli culture. Orthodox Zionists did not normally act that way; they showed deference.
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Rudeness had unsettling charisma.

Despite the tense introduction, Alterman’s movement decided to lend a hand, and raised Levinger’s project with Yigal Allon. For Allon, it was a useful tool toward his own goals. In mid-January 1968, he submitted a proposal to the cabinet for building “a Jewish neighborhood in the immediate vicinity of Hebron.” To back up the idea, he cited requests by Israeli citizens to settle in the town.

Allon’s reasoning was historic, not strategic. “Jews lived in Hebron for hundreds of years under Ottoman rule and the British mandate,” he said. They should be allowed to do so again, he asserted—regardless of who ultimately ended up ruling the city.
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The last comment defies Allon’s principle that settlement would determine the state’s borders. It can be read as a ploy to lessen opposition from cabinet minimalists, or as a rationalization to himself. The claim of historic rights to Hebron, though, is consistent with his original presentation of the Allon Plan, where he raised the option of keeping the city despite its large Arab population.
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Allon was still wavering between his old romance with the Whole Land and his new compromises, and could not resist asserting the right to return to Hebron.

Two months later, in mid-March, Allon reminded Eshkol of his proposal, and noted that among those who had sought his help in settling in Hebron was Levinger’s group, comprising “23 families and several dozen young singles.” The group, Allon indicated, would reestablish Jewish religious study in the town. On Levinger’s stage, cabinet ministers were supporting actors. On Allon’s stage, the rabbi and yeshivah students were extras needed for a crowd scene, in lieu of old-fashioned pioneers plowing kibbutz fields.

Attached to the memo was a cable to Allon signed by Levinger and Harel in the name of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel: “Hebron settlers await green light.”
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No green light came. Levinger therefore assumed the right of way. He held another gathering of his recruits in Tel Aviv. This time the vote was to establish facts: to move to Hebron and hope for permission afterward.

On the last day of March, Levinger and several companions toured Hebron with an aging survivor of the pre-1929 Jewish community. On the street they talked briefly with an Israeli Druse serving in the paramilitary Border Police, which kept order in occupied towns. The search for available apartments was fruitless. Levinger and friends agreed on an alternative—to rent hotel rooms for the upcoming week-long holiday of Passover, and see “what develops.” The rabbi and a companion entered the town’s small Park Hotel. In one of Levinger’s accounts, they presented themselves to the owner as Swiss tourists, interested in renting the entire establishment for ten days, with an option to extend. The owner agreed, also giving permission to make the kitchen kosher for Passover. Levinger’s account hints they were unsure where the escapade would lead. Like his plan the previous autumn to camp out at Kfar Etzion, it may have been intended simply to seize attention for the cause.
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Looking out from the next morning’s newspaper was the face of the Border Policeman they had met the day before. Shortly after their meeting, he was shot dead in the Hebron casbah. It was the first such attack in Hebron since the war. Among Levinger’s supporters, the murder was seen as a warning, a response to rumors racing about town that Jews were about to move in.

For the moment, they were probably overrating their own role. If the victim was not chosen simply for his uniform, he may have been targeted as a Druse. Israeli members of the Arabic-speaking religious minority emphasized their loyalty to the Jewish state, arousing particular antagonism among West Bank residents.
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But the would-be settlers’ interpretation still matters. The possibility that they could ignite conflict, and endanger Israeli troops in Hebron, did not inspire hesitation.

Strictly speaking, shooting a uniformed, on-duty member of the occupying force was not terror, but it served the same purpose. Fifteen hundred Hebron men were detained and questioned, in a roundup that lasted till the next afternoon.
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The occupation was quite visible that day.

THERE WERE THINGS
Levi Eshkol had made up his mind about—such as moving many Jews to East Jerusalem, quickly. If foreign pressure ever gave cabinet members second thoughts about annexing the east city, Israeli neighborhoods beyond the Green Line would strengthen their resolve.
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When his East Jerusalem planning chief, Yehudah Tamir, found that there was not enough publicly owned land in the east city for massive new housing developments,
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the prime minister won approval for expropriating a swathe of over 800 acres that would reconnect West Jerusalem to Mount Scopus, the once and future campus of Hebrew University. The expropriation orders were issued in early January with a campaign of non-publicity planned by the secretive minister Yisrael Galili that included barring the item from state-owned radio, which had a monopoly on the airwaves, and pressuring newspaper editors to downplay the story.
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When the move nonetheless ignited international protests, Eshkol instructed Tamir to move even faster on construction. An Eshkol aide sent a secret memo to other officials, including Mayor Teddy Kollek, saying that “since our desire is to develop the east city rather than talk about it,” they should avoid publicity and keep working.
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