The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (24 page)

Allon kept his promise to help the settlers set up businesses inside Hebron. It was with his help, according to Katzover, that they were eventually able to lease a building owned by the Jordanian government, which under occupation rules was now controlled by an Israeli agency.
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Levinger and his followers won the skirmish and the battle—or so it appeared. In fact, Eshkol, Dayan, and other policymakers were drifting toward accepting Allon’s proposal for planting an Israeli quarter on the edge of Hebron even before the strange street theater of the kiosk affair. For Levinger, though, the affair could only prove that confrontation and defiance worked wonders. For the Israeli public, it was evidence that the government was unwilling to enforce the law against those who broke it in the name of nationalism.

Eshkol’s behavior, given his strong words in the Knesset and his warnings that Israel could not annex the West Bank’s Arabs, seems particularly contradictory. An explanation can be found in his office file of outgoing mail, amid countless pro forma telegrams to couples who had invited the prime minister and his wife to their weddings. The telegram sent the day before the kiosk affair to “Katzover, Hebron settlers, Hebron,” is unusual; it is written in lyric language borrowed from Jewish liturgy:

The concluding blessing recited in a Jewish wedding, looking forward to final redemption, asks God to let “the voice of joy and happiness, of bridegroom and bride be heard speedily…in the hills of Judea.” The fact that Eshkol wrote, or signed, that telegram does not mean he had signed on to Levinger’s messianic theology. Nor does it mean he was insincere when he told the Knesset that the government must assert its authority. It does suggest that the people defying him conjured up wild feelings of history and glory, that human beings are consistently inconsistent, and that Eshkol wore his oversized inconsistencies as a badge of honor.

In allowing settlement at Hebron, Israel’s leaders were swayed by ancient and recent history—by the biblical power of the city’s name and by their consistent impulse to return to places from which Jews had been pushed out in their own memory. More than deciding on settlement, the government drifted into permitting it. Doing so contradicted the efforts of the same months to negotiate with Jordan or to create limited self-rule in the West Bank. It defied the fears of territorial minimalists in the cabinet, and of Eshkol himself, about the dangers of annexation. It blatantly violated Dayan’s declared intent of low-profile occupation. It resulted not from strategy, but from a lack of it.

More than anyone in the cabinet, Allon claimed to have a strategic concept, cleanly built out of analysis, goals, and means. In the weeks ahead, the ministerial panel decided to place the Jewish neighborhood on the east side of Hebron. Allon claimed this fit his plan: Israel would keep the strip of land from the Dead Sea all the way up to the edge of Hebron, but not the Arab city itself. But placing the settlement up against Hebron, and allowing settlers to open businesses in the city, would create an umbilical tie between the Jewish quarter and the Arab town. Though Allon tried to convince himself otherwise, within his own strategic calculus his actions in Hebron made no more sense than dividing by zero.
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Along with helping Levinger, Allon continued acting as patron to Hanan Porat and Moshe Moskovic, the leading advocates of settlement in the Etzion Bloc. Allon told Moskovic he was helping him in order to make up for the “failure of 1948”—the fall of the Etzion Bloc and Allon’s inability to retake it, the youthful experience of falling short that haunted him in middle age. As soon as the kiosk affair was over, Allon sponsored cabinet approval for building a new settlement in the Etzion area. The center of the community would be a yeshivah. Until the new settlement was built, the yeshivah would be located at Kfar Etzion, creating what was then an unusual partnership of religious kibbutz and seminary.

The students would alternate between study and army service—just as Nahal soldiers alternated between farmwork and active duty. One such seminary had existed in Israel before 1967. After the war another was established in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City—Yeshivat Hakotel, the yeshivah of the Western Wall. Along with the institution in the Etzion Bloc, it created an unlikely synthesis: Yeshivot, dedicated to the ideal of the religious scholar, the quintessential “old Jew,” would be used for creating settlements in places seen as the new frontier. For graduates of yeshivah high schools, caught between their rabbis’ ideal of study and their youth movement’s demand for pioneering, that synthesis was peculiarly attractive. “Why should you care whether they harvest tomatoes or study Torah?” Moskovic asked Allon, explaining this new version of Nahal. The theology of redemption through militant nationalism that would be taught in the new study halls was entirely outside Allon’s concerns.
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“
I WORSHIP MOSHE DAYAN
…. I don’t miss a public statement of his, a newspaper interview. I believe he’s the man who can bring some sort of solution that will lead us to peace.” So writes Yaakov Perry in his memoirs, putting the past in present tense as he describes his feelings in 1968. Emulating Dayan, Perry has made himself part of the social life of Nablus’s upper crust, sometimes visiting nationalist poet Fadwa Tuqan, listening to her poems. His hosts all know he is a Shin Bet man. Dayan, he writes, stops to see Tuqan nearly every time he passes through town.

In September, Perry gets to meet his idol. His commander calls him, telling him to come alone at 7:30 the next Saturday morning to a junction at the edge of the West Bank. “You’ll meet Moshe Dayan there and go with him wherever he wants,” the voice on the phone says.

Dayan arrives at the set time, and knocks on the window of Perry’s car. “Come meet my girlfriend,” the defense minister says. They step over to Dayan’s car, in which “sits a pretty blonde, who introduces herself as Rachel.” The defense minister tells Perry to get in, and says, “I want to go to Iskaka.” Perry blanches. Iskaka is a village of a few hundred people on the mountain ridge road between Nablus and Ramallah, in an area teeming with armed Palestinians. “Any trip to Iskaka without heavy military guard seems irresponsible,” Perry writes, adding that Dayan is unarmed and that he himself has only his pistol. “What are we doing in Iskaka?” Perry asks.

“Excavations,” Dayan answers.

Since it is Saturday, the day off from work in Israel, nearly everyone is home in Iskaka. Dayan tells Perry to get directions to the center of the village. Later Perry will learn that Dayan “has scouts searching the West Bank for archaeological sites, and they sent him to Iskaka.” At the center of the village is a pit, an abandoned excavation. Dayan gets out, takes digging tools from the trunk, tells Perry, “Keep an eye on Rachel,” and disappears into the pit. Villagers shout, “It’s the
wazir,
” the minister, and crowd around. Imagining how this can end, Perry takes Rachel’s hand and leads her through the crowd into the dig. “I want to assume that they won’t hurt a woman, or all of us together.”

He finds Dayan digging slowly, carefully, as if the entire village were not watching. “Look at this!” Dayan says happily as he pulls pottery from the dust.

Perry watches, as if seeing himself in a surrealistic film, as villagers bring a stool for Rachel to sit on, then serve juice, coffee, and fruit. Without asking Dayan, Perry returns to the car and radios the Border Police. Minutes later Border Policeman pour into Iskaka. Perry urges them to stand back, stay polite, keep a watch.

In the pit, with his mistress watching, the minister of invisible occupation plunders antiquities.
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Stop in London on your way home, said the message for Yigal Allon. “I love stopping in London,” Allon would later describe his reaction, as if the point were to go to the theater or watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. In this case, though, his perpetual tone of excitement made sense: He would meet a king. And get to tell him about his plan, and perhaps prove that it could be the basis for peace.

In America, on his lecture tour that September of 1968, Allon had described the plan to McGeorge Bundy and to Henry Kissinger, Allon’s old professor at Harvard, and both—according to Allon—praised it to the skies. He even presented it to President Johnson, who listened with absolute attention and did not reject it. Allon reminded Johnson about the Phantom warplanes that Israel needed, and that night, when Johnson spoke at a B’nai B’rith dinner, he sat Allon between himself and Lady Bird, and over the meal said, “I can tell you I’ve decided to approve the Phantom sale,” though he waited a month to announce that publicly.
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In American records, the Allon-Johnson meeting—attended also by Yitzhak Rabin, now retired from the army and serving as Israel’s ambassador in Washington—lasted sixteen minutes, was off the record, and took place on the recommendation of national security adviser Walt Rostow, in order to give “one of the most influential Israeli leaders a firsthand picture of our reservations about current Israeli policy.” The session included only a bare mention of the Allon Plan as something the visitor explained beforehand to Rostow, who urged Allon to base peace proposals on coexistence with Jordan, not on “topographical premises—a purely military boundary,” a polite way of rejecting Allon’s dearest axioms.
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The testimony gap is typical. A few weeks earlier, Assistant Secretary of State Joseph Sisco and George Ball, the U.S. representative to the U.N., toured the Middle East. A cable to Washington mentions in one sentence that Allon briefed them on his plan, and that Eban “stressed that this plan was not endorsed” by the Israeli government.
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In Allon’s telling, he was visiting Druse leaders in the Golan Heights when he received instructions via army radio link to fly by helicopter to Ginossar, his kibbutz, where he landed next to another Israeli army copter bearing Ball and Sisco, sent by Eshkol to hear about the plan. Over lunch, Sisco’s compliments on Allon’s ideas were “unrestrained,” and Ball said, “It’s an ingenious plan.” Allon also told his guests that the Druse wanted Israel to annex the Golan Heights, and Sisco said that if that was what the residents wanted, there was no reason to say no. Afterward Allon wrote a memo to Eshkol proposing annexation, noting that Ball and Sisco “explicitly said they had no reservations about our settlements in the Golan Heights,” but Eban managed to kill the idea as a diplomatic disaster.
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Then again, the American cables also say nothing of lunch being at a wooden picnic table, as Sisco would recall many years later, or that “the first thing Allon did was…put a bottle of bourbon on the table, and we each had a drink,” a detail perhaps significant to the testimony gap. Nothing was said of the Golan, Sisco would insist, but Allon “made a tremendous impression…he was a very engaging man.”
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People liked Yigal, and he was sure they liked his great idea.

Now, after all the delays, King Hussein wanted to meet secretly with senior Israelis who would present peace proposals. Labor’s inner sanctum, the political committee, accepted Eshkol’s suggestion that Eban and Allon raise Allon’s plan as Allon’s “own thoughts, his personal proposal,” not as the government position.
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The government did not actually have a position. If Hussein bought the idea, Eshkol would bring it to a cabinet vote.
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So Allon found himself on September 27, 1968, in a room in London with Eban, Yaacov Herzog, the thirty-two-year-old king of Jordan, and the king’s even younger adviser Zaid al-Rifai, the son of a former Jordanian prime minister. Allon later described Rifai’s job as being the tough guy in Hussein’s good-cop, bad-cop routine, the one who posed hard questions and gave negative answers so that the elegant Anglified king could be relaxed and courtly. Eban, as elegant, said that if Hussein rejected the principles presented to him, Israel would be forced to seek an agreement with the Palestinians—an empty threat, as Hussein had shown by sabotaging the deal with Jabari. Eban’s principles included a signed treaty, demilitarizing the West Bank, and Jerusalem remaining united under Israel, perhaps with a Jordanian-Muslim status for the Islamic holy sites. Then Allon, who by one account said this was the “happiest moment of his life,” brought out the maps he carried with him of his plan, explaining that for defensive reasons Israel would have to annex part of the West Bank. Jordan had to take into account that it had lost the war, he said.

“Because of the war,” interrupted Rifai, “we are now willing to agree to the June 4 lines, which we were unwilling to do before the war.”

Surely, Hussein insisted, security depended on mutual trust, not topography, more graciously rejecting Allon’s thinking. Allon and Eban asked to meet again, to keep trying. Two days later, after a call from Rifai, Herzog sat down again with the king’s adviser. Rifai’s purpose was to eliminate doubt. He brought a text of Jordan’s own principles for peace, which stated that the king’s ability to reach an agreement depended totally on being able to explain it to the Arab world. The most Jordan could accept in Jerusalem was Israel’s right to Jewish holy places. Border changes would have to be mutual, a tit-for-tat trade of territory. The real security problem was Jordan’s, which could not possibly protect the West Bank with Israeli bases and settlements there and with Jordanian areas tied to the East Bank via a corridor that Israel could cut. Allon’s plan, the Jordanian paper said, was “wholly unacceptable.”
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The dialogue mapped the gap, fifteen months after the war, between Israel’s most forthcoming, not-even-official offer and the stance of the Arab ruler most eager for an agreement. Rifai laid out what would be the conciliatory Arab position thenceforth: The June 1967 defeat meant that Arabs would have to do what they had refused to do from 1948 to 1967—accept Israel’s existence within the original armistice lines. Allon and Eban’s subtext was that after the threat of May 1967 and the joy of June, Israel could not return to the Green Line. It would keep what it saw as most essential militarily (the Jordan Rift) and emotionally (East Jerusalem, the Etzion Bloc). Compromise meant Israel was willing to split the conquered land. Each side, seeing itself as more threatened, thought it obvious that the other would have to accept its security demands. Allon had done a wonderful job of negotiating with an imagined Arab who understood Israel’s needs. Hussein dickered as well with an imagined Jew. In London, facing real people, they failed.

Nonetheless, Allon’s passion for his plan, and for Jordan as the partner who would accept it, only increased. Faced with evidence that his idea would not work, he redoubled his effort to show that it would. Allon later testified that his commitment to the “Jordanian option” solidified “after my first conversation with the king in London…when I felt that there was an address here for negotiations.”
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After the London meeting, Allon also launched a new push for settlement in the areas his plan marked as permanently Israeli—as if Israeli settlements in the Jordan Rift would convince his friend the king that he really had no choice but agree to the Allon Plan.
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Sporadically, contacts between Jordan and Israel continued, with no progress on peace. Hussein’s demand that territorial changes be mutual did produce one innovation: the idea of giving Gaza to Jordan as payment for West Bank land. Allon would claim the proposal was his, and that it grew from recognition that the Palestinian refugees were not going to disappear from the Strip. His principle of giving up heavily populated Arab areas would have to be applied to Gaza—despite the government policy of keeping the Strip. According to Allon, he raised the proposal with Eshkol, who allowed him to float it in another meeting with Hussein—again, as his own thoughts, not as a government position.
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Or perhaps the idea was originally American: Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow suggested it to Eban over lunch in Washington in October 1968—though a moment before, Rostow said that “Israelis should know that we considered [the] Allon Plan…a non-starter.” Eban answered that if Jordan liked the idea of getting Gaza, it should suggest it to Israel.
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However the idea was born, the corollary for Allon was, once again, a need for settlements. To protect its southern flank, Allon reasoned, Israel would need a finger of territory separating Egypt and its army from Gaza. To mark out that buffer, it should start settlements at the southern end of the Gaza Strip and in the adjacent area of northeast Sinai, which Israel labeled the Rafiah Plain. Allon was enchanted by the king, but got nowhere negotiating. In the meantime, the Rafiah Plain showed up in his settlement proposals.
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THE EFFORTS
to broker an Egyptian-Israeli accord were also frenetic and futile. Egypt fought with Israel on the Suez Canal line, and simultaneously offered non-belligerence in return for a full Israeli withdrawal. That fell far short of the direct negotiations and signed treaty that Israel demanded, Eban told Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
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Lyndon Johnson sent a letter to Eshkol—a rare gesture, whose meaning is
this matters
—leaning on him to resist pressure from those in his government “who find it easier to risk Israel’s future on today’s expanded boundaries than to reach out for real peace.” To end on a softer note, Johnson added that he looked forward to Eshkol’s next visit, planned for late November.
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A follow-up message from State to Eban asked Israel to state clearly its position on withdrawal from the Sinai, and urged that the answer be willingness to pull back to the international boundary, with “special arrangements” for Gaza and Sharm al-Sheikh.
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That was a code suggesting that some non-Israeli force would hold those spots—a solution Israel regularly dismissed, based on its experience with the U.N. pullout from Sinai in May 1967.

At least regarding Israel’s position toward Egypt, deciding not to decide would no longer work. The cabinet met on October 31 at Eshkol’s home. The prime minister was ailing, unable to reach his office; he had missed several previous cabinet sessions. The decision was to tell the United States that as part of a peace agreement,

The decision, as an official biography of Eshkol states, sealed “a steady process of cabinet members distancing themselves” from the original offer of a pullback to the international line in return for peace. Egypt and Syria had rejected that offer, and Israel’s leaders had discovered that the trauma of 1956 was not repeating itself. The Labor-led government believed it could safely stay put until the Arab countries realized they would have to pay a higher price.
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The same day, army and Settlement Department representatives toured the Rafiah Plain to check the feasibility of the department’s own ideas for settling northeast Sinai, an area that most certainly did not link Israel with Sharm al-Sheikh. Three spots that settlement planners had marked on their map for Israeli farm villages turned out to be “problematic, being occupied by Bedouin who claim rights” to the land.
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Eban and Ambassador Rabin delivered the cabinet’s message to Rusk on Sunday, November 3.
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Two days later, Richard Nixon defeated Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, in the presidential election, ensuring that not only Johnson but also his top officials would soon clean out their desks. Soon after, Rabin and Mordechai Hod, the commander of the Israel Air Force, met with Walt Rostow and NSC staffer Harold Saunders to wrap up the Phantom sale, in what Saunders described as “a highly spirited, heavily colloquial, amicable” conversation, apparently a diplomat’s way of saying that the boys shouted, cursed, and enjoyed each other’s company. Saunders’s report has him and Rostow telling Rabin, “We’ve told you the U.S. position
ad nauseam
—you have to give the West Bank back, you have to give Hussein a role in Jerusalem, a ‘Polish corridor’ to Sharm al-Sheikh doesn’t make sense…. If the Israel is aren’t tired of hearing this, we’d be glad to say it again.”
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The Phantom deal went through anyway, showing that the Bundy Doctrine of not using arms supplies as a means of pressure still held. Eshkol, meanwhile, informed the White House he would have to cancel his visit “on advice of his doctors.”
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The stage lights were fading, and not just on the Johnson era. The diplomacy of autumn served to show that the war’s aftermath was not a “crisis” but a stalemate. Stalemate was the soil in which settlements grew.

WHAT A PERSON
does on the Jewish New Year, says a traditional belief, is an omen for the coming year. If so, Rosh Hashanah, September 23, 1968, did not promise calm in Hebron, especially not at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, also known as the Ibrahimi Mosque.

Under an agreement between Dayan and the sheikh of the mosque, Jews were allowed to visit, except at times of Muslim prayer, including midday.
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Technically, the agreement said nothing about Jewish prayer, but in practice Jews did worship at the tomb during the allowed visiting hours. Before their first Rosh Hashanah in Hebron, the settlers asked permission from the military government to conduct the long services of that day, and the all-day worship of Yom Kippur soon after, at the tomb.
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Their attraction to the building was a mix of spiritual and proprietary, like their attraction to Hebron. “We had…become visitors in our holy site,” Chaim Simons, a British-born immigrant who had joined the settlement in the military government courtyard, later recalled. The Arabs “had unlimited access…. They had the sole manager, the solekeys.”
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It was not enough to
be
in sacred space, one had to own it—the impulse behind conflicts over holy places everywhere. To own a place where God is thought to be palpably present inspires a feeling perilously close to owning God.