The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (35 page)

“I grant all due respect to Moshav Sadot,” Holzman responded, “but I will argue that establishing the moshav is not an ‘imperative military reason’”—the only justification the Fourth Geneva Convention provides for the forcible transfer of an occupied population.

Besides citing international law, Holzman sought to pull apart the threads of Tal’s argument for a buffer zone. Tal claimed that terror attacks increased toward the end of 1971. A map he submitted showing each attack proved the opposite: Attacks were already falling off before the expulsion—and most incidents had taken place outside the seized area. There was no escape, Holzman wrote, from concluding that the Bedouin were expelled “for reasons the respondents have concealed from this honorable court.” Holzman’s final arguments—the restrained lawyerly tone now giving way to sarcasm and passion—were presented by his law partner to the three justices who heard the case. Holzman had written them and died of a heart attack.
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In the meantime, Dayan’s plans for a port on the northeastern Sinai coast leaked to the press. A booklet prepared in the Defense Ministry described a metropolis to be called Yamit, “Of the Sea.” The booklet said it would become one of Israel’s largest cities, home to a quarter-million people by the year 2000. With Finance Minister Sapir blasting the plan as an epic boondoggle that would come at the cost of Israel’s poor, the cabinet officially shelved the idea.
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As a side benefit, that absolved the government of the need to explain in court why a port city was needed in a military buffer zone.

“
A FEW WEEKS AGO
I visited friends of mine…Holocaust survivors,” said Arie Eliav, addressing Labor’s secretariat. “A spectacularly beautiful farm in the south of the country. One son is a pilot in the air force, the other supposedly works on the farm, but he doesn’t actually work there. The tractor by now is for driving to the beach, because at the edge of the moshav are a few ‘Ahmeds.’ That’s a collective name. Not Palestinian Arabs, not Arabs of the Land of Israel. Now there’s a concept of ‘Ahmeds.’…My friends’ son says, ‘Something really funny happened a few days ago with one of those Ahmeds. They live over with the horses and donkeys…. Since the horses have ticks, one of the Ahmeds got ticks, and he just swelled up.’” The friend’s son thought that was a laugh. “I’m not coming to say that fellow is to blame,” Eliav said, implying that the blame lay with others, some of them in his audience.

Eliav was speaking in September 1972, before over 170 people including Prime Minister Golda Meir, at the first session of a party debate on what government policy should be in occupied territory—now the pressing question in party branches, kibbutzim, and the press. The party secretary-general, Aharon Yadlin, asked speakers not to deal with conditions for peace, Israel’s future borders, or settlements meant to set those borders; the issue was the indefinite interim, “how to live together until a peace agreement.” That really meant the economics of occupation, such as whether to let fewer or more West Bank and Gaza Arabs work inside Israel. The active labor force in those territories, Yadlin noted, was 160,000 people. As many as 50,000 were already working inside Israel, he said, though his comments indicate that more might be working for cash, off the books.
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Yadlin’s framing of the question showed that the spark lighting the fire was Dayan’s demand for economic “integration,” and also that Yadlin did not want to cross Meir, who emphatically wanted no debate of borders. After another session, she reportedly tried to stop the debate.
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For once given the floor, politicians would not stay off forbidden subjects.

As with Eliav. In principle, he said, it made sense that a developed country would draw outside workers—though the flood of cheap labor was actually
undeveloping
Israel, encouraging farmers and contractors to revert to hands in place of machines. But if Palestinians found jobs in Israel, he wanted them to come as citizens of their own state, with a consulate to defend them. The relation between the farmer’s son and his “Ahmeds” was the predictable relation of employers with people who lacked rights, a consequence of occupation.

The debate demonstrated that four years after its founding, Israel’s ruling party lacked a hint of a shared answer to Lyndon Johnson’s question, “What kind of Israel do you want?” The clearest camps were Moshe Dayan’s supporters and his opponents, a division putting Yigal Allon on the same side as Arie Eliav.

Allon had begun looking more moderate partly by staying put as others, particularly Dayan, staked out steadily more intransigent positions. But by now, Allon also embraced the heresy that there was such a thing as the Palestinian people. “What’s certain is that a Palestinian population exists, whether or not one defines it as a nation; that a Palestinian public with its own unique lines exists, whether or not one recognizes it as such,” Allon said in a November session. Besides sparking his found-a-new-toy enthusiasm for a new concept, the idea provided another argument for his plan: If the Palestinians were a nation, then Israel should give up the part of the West Bank where they lived—while retaining the land Allon saw as essential to security. The deal should be made with Jordan, since the East Bank was part of the Palestinian homeland, he argued, though he did not oppose negotiating with West Bank Palestinians as well. What he did oppose was Dayan’s idea that only “under the aegis of Israel and the IDF,” meaning permanent Israeli rule, could Jews and Arabs live together.
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The strongest barrage against Dayan came from Pinhas Sapir. The dovish finance minister lectured his party’s leaders in the tone of a high school teacher harassing students flunking both math and social studies. The flood of Arab labor, he warned, was a “social, political and moral danger,” creating “a class that does the clean work and those who do the dirty work”—akin “to Negroes in the United States.” Whether Israel officially annexed the occupied territories or just drifted toward that de facto result, a million Arabs would be added to its population. Anyone who expected a rising standard of living to erase their national aspirations, he said, “hasn’t learned the lesson of history.” Denying them equal rights would put Israel in a class with “countries whose names I don’t even want to say in the same breath.”

Then he gave his math lesson, using birthrates and migration figures to predict how many Jews and Arabs would live in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip when Israel celebrated its golden jubilee in 1998. Calculating population increases, he said, just meant figuring compound interest, and “there are teachers sitting here, they can tell us what grade in elementary school you learn compound interest.” If Jewish immigration remained steady and Israel kept the occupied territories, Sapir said, in 1998 the Arabs would be 48.5 percent of the population. If immigration more than doubled, Arabs would still be over 40 percent. “Is this the Jewish state we aspired to?” he berated his students. (Sapir’s predictions, checked against later reality, also taught that statistics can indeed be truthful. At the end of 1997, after unexpectedly high immigration, Arabs constituted approximately 44 percent of the population in Israel and the occupied territories.)
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Shimon Peres, speaking for the Dayan camp, accused Sapir of ideological weakness. Just as Zionists had had faith in pre-state days that immigration would create a Jewish majority, they should have confidence now that Jews would come from the Soviet Union, Europe, the United States. The Arabs of the occupied territories could then live as a minority with equal rights in an expanded Israel. Meanwhile, Peres said, the current situation was fine. Without need for treaties, there was de facto peace with Jordan, and “terror has almost stopped.” In the West Bank, incomes were rising. “I’m proud that tens of thousands of laborers are working in Israel, in the professions they are capable of,” Peres said. “…And all of this is when Jerusalem is united, a Jewish neighborhood has been established in Hebron, and settlements have been established in the Rift and the Rafiah Plain.”
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ONE MORNING
in early winter, Benny Katzover sat in his friend Menachem Felix’s home in Kiryat Arba outside Hebron, parsing a page of Talmud with him. Katzover was frustrated. The night before, he had attended yet another gathering of rabbis and Orthodox activists on settling in Samaria, the northern West Bank. Government policy kept the area from Jerusalem north off-limits to Jewish settlement. The ideas raised at the meeting for action—lobbying the National Religious Party, demonstrating, holding a hunger strike—did not impress Katzover.

Felix, twenty-seven years old, had come to Hebron directly from Merkaz Harav, where he had spent several years absorbing Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s messianic nationalist teachings. As he and Katzover studied, the conversation shifted to the previous night’s meeting. Their books closed. If no one else would act, they decided, they would. Settling in Hebron had taught them how to do it.

First, they needed a group ready to settle—fifteen or twenty families, “strong enough,” in Katzover’s words, “that if you threw them on a mountain, without water or electricity or phones or kindergartens, they would hold on with their teeth and create a settlement.” That day, in Katzover’s account, they signed up two or three families from Kiryat Arba. Then they began contacting friends, asking for names of potential recruits, traveling the country, meeting people. Katzover and Felix were done with the quiet of living in an established settlement; they were back in action.

On Friday, February 2, 1973, fifteen young couples and several singles met in a Kiryat Arba apartment. They set their goal as settling near Nablus, the biblical city of Shekhem, just as Kiryat Arba neighbored Hebron.

Nablus was the major Arab city of the region, the “strongest city” in Katzover’s description, and settling there would be “an answer to Arab power,” breaking open the gates to the area. Shekhem was also where God had promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land, as told in Genesis. Katzover and his friends were Orthodox Jews, but his explanation for the choice of where to settle tapped two impulses of militant modern nationalism: the desire for power, as a value, especially power in the face of another, threatening group; and the desire to fulfill promises of the mythic past, to live the myth.

That fit the goals of yeshivah student Yehudah Etzion, who heard of the plan through friends. He dropped his own project of settling elsewhere in the West Bank, and joined the new group.

The activists began meeting politicians. If they could not get government approval, they hoped to gain influential support, so that “the government and the army couldn’t run us over,” in Katzover’s words, if they tried settling anyway. The strategy, that is, was a repeat of Hebron in 1968, when a wildcat settlement gained the backing of Yigal Allon and other cabinet members. This time, though, Allon told them clearly that he was opposed. Samaria was outside his map. In the Labor Party, in Katzover’s account, only two prominent figures expressed support—“Moshe Dayan, and especially Shimon Peres.”
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AT LAST
, Henry Kissinger was done with distractions. A peace agreement for Vietnam was signed; Nixon had won his landslide reelection. In February 1973, Anwar al-Sadat’s national security adviser Hafiz Ismail came to Washington. Kissinger and Ismail retired to a private estate for two days of talks on how to get Mideast diplomacy moving.

Kissinger had ideas, but a central one was to wait. Nothing much could get done, he reasoned, until after the Israeli elections scheduled for the end of October. Less than a week after Ismail had left, Golda Meir came calling in Washington, and the U.S. press reported that Nixon promised her more warplanes. The impatient man in Cairo did not feel encouraged.
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OFFICIALLY
, the cabinet made no decision at its meeting on April 8. Unofficially, that meant Golda Meir had come down against Dayan’s latest proposal: allowing Israeli individuals and companies to buy land from Arabs in the West Bank.

For two months, the idea had roiled domestic politics and set off a gale of diplomatic cables to Washington from U.S. envoys in the Mideast. It underlined another return to the thinking of pre-state days, when land-buying was a key tactic in the Jewish-Arab ethnic struggle for Palestine. The move seemed certain to create a new class of Israelis opposing withdrawal and would privatize settlement policy. Private developers would not keep to the Allon Plan’s lines. The change also violated a fundamental Labor position: Land should not be private property; it should be owned by the Jewish National Fund in the name of the Jewish people, or by the state. Sapir, as usual using economic arguments for his dovish positions, said the Dayan proposal would set off a wave of land speculation—a term of moral contempt in the Labor lexicon.

From the U.S. embassy in Amman came reports of near-panic in Hussein’s court in response to Dayan’s proposal. West Bank Arabs would sell, attracted by easy money, pushed by fear that land might be expropriated anyway. A new wave of Palestinian emigrants would flood the East Bank, the king’s constant nightmare, and any hope of getting Israel out of the West Bank would evaporate.

This time, advance publicity in Israel and distress warnings from Jordan led to U.S. pressure. On the eve of the crucial cabinet meeting, Under Secretary of State Sisco phoned the new Israeli ambassador in Washington, Simcha Dinitz, a Meir confidant. Meir, previously wavering, decided that Dayan’s proposal would be “divisive.” The defense minister, seemingly defeated, did not ask for a vote.
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Meir also found her party’s debate on the occupied territories divisive, and put her foot down: one more session.
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Dayan, finally, stood to present his positions. To speak early was to be lost in the crowd. To speak last was power. If the Arabs “have not dared, so far, to renew the shooting,” Dayan said, a major reason was the land Israel held. That included the mountains of Samaria and of the Sinai, because radar stations there provided the air force with early warning of any Arab attack. Allon’s idea of giving up the mountains, he implied, showed poor understanding of modern war.
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But Dayan’s military reasons were only his preamble. Explicitly, he rejected the view that Israel should settle and keep only land that it needed for security. “When we stop studying the Bible,” he declared, “Jews will no longer feel that they are at home in Judea and Samaria.”
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That feeling, he argued, should drive a policy of maximum settlement, by all means possible. The Arabs were not offering peace, and it might take a generation before they did. If by then “the area that is up for discussion has been reduced and cut” by settlement, “I don’t see that as such a grim possibility.”
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In the long term, Israel was seeking to turn “an Arab entity and essence” into a Jewish one, just as Jews had done in the Jezreel Valley of his youth before 1948. Inevitably, that required negating the “national and political rights” of the Arabs. Arabs would have to move to make way for Jews, Dayan said. Their compensation would be economic improvement.
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It was a vision that mixed paternalism and dispossession, one that cited hard military calculations but ultimately rested on his passion for the romanticized past, the Bible as epic.