The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (22 page)

AFTER NIGHTFALL
Saturday, at the end of the Sabbath, the older fellow travelers left Hebron’s Park Hotel. The group that remained was young, most in their twenties—several families and more singles, many of them yeshivah students, excited about getting away with their gambit, starting the de rigueur endless late night discussions of what to do next.
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Without knowing it, they had stumbled into a moment of weak authority: Colonel Gazit’s father had died that Saturday morning, and the Jewish mourning customs observed even by secular Israelis pulled the officer in charge of occupied land away from his office for days to come.
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Dayan, by his own testimony, returned to his office only that Sunday, still battered, drugged against pain.
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The first weekend passed with the viceroy absent and the sultan dazed.

Expelling Jews from Hebron, Gazit later argued, was too loaded a decision for local commanders. It required cabinet-level action, quickly, before support built. Dayan played for time: When he got word of the group’s presence, he ordered the army to guarantee its safety but not to assume formal responsibility for it.
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More young Orthodox Jews began arriving, such as Benny Katzover, a Hebrew University freshman and ex-Merkaz Harav student who came to help with guard duty and stayed on. The mood, he would recall, was euphoric and tense; no one knew what the government would do.
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Sunday afternoon, a telegram was sent to Yigal Allon:

Allon’s office got the message Monday morning.
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He responded immediately, heading south from Jerusalem along with the poet and activist Nathan Alterman and the head of the government’s employment service.

A report the next day, in the newspaper of Allon’s Ahdut Ha’avodah faction, begins as if Allon were fulfilling his normal duties: “Labor Minister Yigal Allon yesterday paid a holiday visit to the first settlers in Hebron. The settlers…raised the problems of employment and professional training in the place.” The settlers’ presence is taken as established fact. “The labor minister announced that…his ministry will supply work-projects employment to all settlers seeking work,” the paper said. The sole hint that the settlers lacked government permission is Allon’s concluding comment that “it is inconceivable that Jews would be barred from settling once more in this holy city.”
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On his way back to Jerusalem, Allon stopped at Kfar Etzion to talk to Hanan Porat. “They’re in danger,” he said of the Hebron settlers. “You have to give them guns.”

“That’s not so simple,” Porat replied. The kibbutz had guns from the army for guard duty, he acknowledged, “but we’ve signed for them personally.”

Allon stared at what was clearly a well-behaved young man from Bnei Akiva. “In the time of the Palmah”—Allon held his arm down and jabbed the palm of his hand forward, as if pushing it under something, “we knew to do things like
this.
” Porat, the eager student, sent the guns.
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MOSHE LEVINGER’S FIRST
meeting with Hebron mayor Muhammad Ali al-Jabari went pleasantly, historian Shabtai Teveth writes, because there was no communication. Levinger and two companions, one of whom could stutter a bit in Arabic, were received by the mayor during their first week in town. Jabari spoke no Hebrew and thought he was hospitably greeting tourists. Levinger told journalists now flocking to cover the story that the sixty-seven-year-old mayor had welcomed Jewish settlement in the town.
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Sheikh Jabari, mayor since the last days of British rule, knew how to sail with the wind. After Transjordan conquered the West Bank, he headed a staged congress of prominent citizens that called for continued rule by Amman, paving the way for annexation to the renamed kingdom of Jordan. Three times Jabari served as a Jordanian cabinet minister. A secret Israeli report on the West Bank elite written a week after the cease-fire in June 1967 described him as “a cleric. Holds reactionary views. Avaricious and easily bribed. Hated in the West Bank for his corruption”—which does not contradict other portrayals of Jabari as a uniquely powerful mayor, his influence extending throughout the Hebron region. Jabari built ties with Dayan, and publicly criticized Palestinian attacks on Israelis.
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Still, he did not like reports of welcoming settlers. His letter of protest to Eshkol and Dayan was pitched precisely to Israeli fears. In principle, remnants of the old Jewish community, who knew Arabic and the Arab way of life, might return to Hebron, he wrote—as long as Arab refugees could also return to Jaffa. In practice, settlers would be targets for attacks by the Palestinian “self-sacrificers,” and coexistence between the two peoples would be destroyed.

Jabari’s comments, leaked to the Israeli press, brought Levinger back to the mayor’s office, accompanied by fellow Merkaz Harav graduate Rabbi Eliezer Waldman and another settler. This time communication was more successful. Jabari phoned the military governor to say that the men were in his room, threatening him. The officer arrived in time to hear shouting. Levinger insisted that Hebron had always been Jewish and—as Jabari quoted him in a telegram that day to Eshkol—“we will settle the city whether you want friendly relations or not.” When the governor tried to calm matters, Jabari demanded an apology from Levinger, whom he accused of “Hitler-like comments.” The settlers stormed out.
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The schematic of the scene was simple: Levinger claimed ultimate authority in Hebron, Jabari rejected the claim, and the military governor—ostensibly the agent of the ruling power—stood ineffectually between them.

By now it was May 7; Levinger’s group had made itself at home for nearly a month in the Park Hotel, and in the news pages. Jabari’s messages underlined the lack of an official response. Two cabinet ministers—Menachem Begin and the National Religious Party’s Warhaftig—had followed Allon to Hebron to show support. The United Kibbutz’s central committee passed a resolution sending “congratulations to the first settlers in the city of the patriarchs.”
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Allon received a proposal from a Jerusalem architect—prepared “at the request of Rabbi Levinger of Hebron,” the architect said—for building a Jewish “Upper Hebron.”
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In a discussion of the problem on April 20 in Labor’s most important smoke-filled back room, the party’s political committee, Eshkol complained about ministers acting on their own, about “our dear Allon showing up” in Hebron, and about Warhaftig “running [after him] like a dog two days later and giving his blessing. We’re making a joke of ourselves.” Allon’s party colleague, Yisrael Galili, was also caustic.
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Though he was a maximalist, a United Kibbutz man, Galili’s most unambiguous commitments were to secrecy and top-down control—what a Leninist would call “democratic centralism”—and he found the spectacle in Hebron painful.

Minimalists in the cabinet—including Foreign Minister Abba Eban and the dovish Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir—opposed settlement in Hebron on principle.
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Apparently for the first time, settlement sparked public objections, including an open letter from prominent academics and authors to the cabinet. The signatories objected to letting a small group set national policy, and to that policy being annexation.
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Eshkol was caught not only between opposing political pressures but between his own opposing inclinations. An orphaned scrap of minutes in his files, from an unidentified meeting of the time, has him asserting that in “the strip of Judea and Samaria”—apparently referring to the mountain ridge—“there’s nothing for us” and that “I don’t know what there is in Hebron besides the sentimental matter—the Tomb of the Patriarchs.” Which was fine, but sentiment moved him.

Finally, on May 12, a ministerial committee approved a proposal to “authorize the defense minister to make the necessary arrangements to ensure the personal safety of the volunteers in Hebron, including moving them from the Park Hotel to other lodgings.”
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The wording evaded the issues of principle—should Israel keep Hebron, should Israelis settle in an Arab city—and even avoided recognizing that the “volunteers” were settlers.

When the news leaked out, settler Rabbi Waldman told the press that “God has shown us the way to redeem the Jewish nation,” and noted that according to the Bible, King David ruled from Hebron before conquering Jerusalem.
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The practical implication was that direct, defiant action was an effective means of holding the Whole Land, central to Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s vision. The theological implication was that settling in Hebron had cosmic significance, even beyond settling elsewhere: David’s kingdom was a model for the messianic kingdom, David began in Hebron, so settling in Hebron would lead to final redemption.
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In Hebron, the military governor came to read the government’s decision to the group. The settlers were told they would be allowed to establish a yeshivah, but that the government decision did not imply approval for a Jewish city next to Hebron or for Jewish businesses in the town. Only those connected to the yeshivah could stay—though in practice that meant the full group got the permits now needed to dwell in occupied territory. Any contacts with local Arab authorities would have to be through the military government. Dayan’s solution to the security problem was that they would move from the hotel to the military government headquarters, a former British fortress at the edge of town. Dayan, settler Benny Katzover would recall, seemed antagonistic, since the group had come to Hebron without his knowledge; Gazit was downright hostile. The settlers debated all night whether to agree to the move and the conditions, and at last decided to accept it as government approval. On May 19, a group now numbering one hundred settlers crowded into the west wing of the fortress.
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In ministerial-level meetings, meanwhile, the possibility of building a Jewish neighborhood regularly popped up, without any decision taken.
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In Levinger’s view, the confrontation with Jabari brought the government concession.
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By showing just who was in charge, he had won. That bends facts to fit his character. Yet Teveth’s account lends some oblique confirmation: Dayan, he says, sought to “remove them…from the life of the city and distance them from the residents.” Politically unable to evict the settlers, he minimized their contact with the mayor, and restricted them to a compound under his control.
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Dayan thought he had made them invisible in his kingdom, yet confirmed to Levinger that abrasive visibility got him what he wanted.

“
EVERY WEEK A THOUSAND
to twelve hundred were leaving the Gaza Strip. In the last few weeks the numbers have shrunk,” Eshkol complained to the director of his emigration effort for refugees, Ada Sereni, in mid-May. Sereni admitted she was getting nowhere with sending refugees to Brazil or Australia. Both countries wanted immigrants, she said, “but when they hear they’re Arabs, they’re not interested.” The Australians could not even be bribed. “We’re trying to bribe a Saudi to give them visas,” she said.

The real problem lay in Jordan, Colonel Gazit explained. The authorities were confiscating cars used to drive refugees from the bridges. Just the day before, Gazit had heard of a new Jordanian law that forbid transporting refugees. Armed Fatah men roamed the streets in Jordan, which was no attraction for immigrants.
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The meeting is the last in Eshkol’s files on the subject. The project unraveled. The idea that Gaza’s refugees could be enticed en masse to go elsewhere died, Gazit later explained, because they had no elsewhere.
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The policy of keeping the Gaza Strip remained.

Jordan, meanwhile, posed another problem for Eshkol: Hussein wanted to negotiate peace. In early May, Eban met the king secretly in London.
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Lyndon Johnson was leaning on Israel to move forward.
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For Eshkol, negotiating meant his party and government had to decide on a vision of the West Bank’s future to offer the king.

Allon’s answer was an updated version of his plan. He had realized, he later explained, that Palestinian autonomy under Israeli sovereignty “would be identified as…some kind of South African Bantustan.”
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Instead, he suggested offering the West Bank’s populated areas to Hussein, and providing a narrow corridor from Ramallah to Jericho to link the enclave with the East Bank. Israel would still keep, and settle, the strip along the Jordan and the Dead Sea. Allon began promoting the plan publicly—beginning with the peculiar venue of a meeting with the professors who had protested against settlement in Hebron. His logic and his smile, he seemed to believe, could persuade anyone. A U.S. diplomatic cable, summing up press reports, said Allon told them to “bear in mind that in matters of security, he has never been wrong.” They answered that his Zionism was out of date, that a sovereign country did not need to stake claims to land with armed settlements as Jews had done in Mandate days. But they faced the same limit as the dovish novelist Amos Oz—they could not undo settlement by wildcat action.
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