The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (38 page)

The idea immediately gained political backing. Even Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, touring the Heights that week, publicly endorsed it.
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Like most doves, he had a short list of places he thought Israel needed to keep; his comprised East Jerusalem and the Golan.
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When Kissinger met Syria’s vice minister for foreign affairs, Mohammed Zakariya Ismail, in Washington on November 2—his first meeting with a Syrian official—Ismail quoted Sapir’s words from that morning’s
Washington
Post
. “Such declarations…” the Syrian official said, “do not give us encouragement regarding talks with Israel.”

“Mr. Minister, one of our problems is that many people say many things for many reasons, particularly domestic reasons,” Kissinger answered, with urbane sarcasm. Without an agreement, he added, Israel might build such a city.
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The exchange did not merit mention in Kissinger’s detailed memoirs; settlements still do not seem to have appeared yet on his agenda as a diplomatic difficulty.
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By January, though, diplomacy was at the top of the Golan settlers’ agenda, as a threat to their future. Their hope that Israel would keep the newly conquered Syrian territory were now giving way to a fear that it would give up land occupied since 1967.

One reason was a change in tone within Labor. Because of the war, the elections scheduled for October were postponed to December 31. At a bitter, interminable central committee session in early December, the party essentially repudiated the Galili Document, the hawkish stance adopted before the war. Allon said he had only backed it originally to keep the party from adopting Dayan’s even more extreme position. The new platform said that Israel would seek a peace agreement providing “defensible borders”—Allon’s favorite phrase—“based on territorial compromise.” That meant dividing the 1967 conquests, not returning to the Green Line, but this was the first time the party explicitly endorsed conceding land. The platform also declared that Israel would seek an agreement in which “Palestinian Arabs” would express their national identity in Jordan.
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Another balancing act, this stance acknowledged that there were Palestinians and implied that Israel might give up West Bank land, while rejecting a separate Palestinian state. Again, as the party sought to project a more flexible image, it borrowed from Allon’s lexicon. Allon, the expansionist, had become the voice of moderation mainly by being more moderate than Dayan.

In the small hours, speaking last, Golda Meir defended herself against charges she had passed up chances for peace, and said those in the party “who supposedly want peace more than me” were undermining Israel’s negotiating position by proposing that it give up “everything.” She blasted those who favored a Palestinian state, or who accepted the novelist Amos Oz’s view that the conflict was tragic for both Jews and Arabs. Everyone in the hall was praying that the postwar negotiations would lead to peace, she said, but “maybe there are differences in realistic evaluation” of the chances. Her evaluation, she made clear, was not blessed with optimism.

Even if Meir had bent little, the speech suggests that her party was now home to some who believed the war was more than a failure of intelligence—one charge to which she pleaded guilty. And yes, she admitted, she might look too sad in her TV appearances, hurting morale. “At my age,” she asked, with the self-denigration she used to cut off criticism, “should I start to use makeup?”
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Given only a yes-no choice, the committee voted—by an 85 percent majority—to keep her as its candidate for prime minister. In the election, Labor remained the largest party with fifty-one Knesset seats—five seats fewer than it had held before, twelve fewer than when Meir had taken the reins nearly five years earlier. The Likud, the new right-wing alliance put together by Ariel Sharon and led by Menachem Begin, won thirty-nine seats. It was the most available choice for protest, especially for anyone who believed that Labor had left Israel weak and would now give away too much. For the first time, Israel had two major parties, rather than one.

In mid-January, Kissinger introduced the technique of shuttle diplomacy, a marathon of flying back and forth between Mideast leaders to reach an initial accord between Israel and Egypt—not peace, but a small step toward it. Under the separation-of-forces agreement signed January 18, Israel withdrew to a line running ten to fifteen miles east of the Suez Canal. Egypt retained the narrow strip it had retaken, six miles wide, on the canal’s east side. Both sides would reduce frontline forces, and between the armies would be a U.N. buffer zone. Egypt agreed to reopen the Bab al-Mandab straits and let ships carrying Israeli cargo pass through the canal, which would reopen. The danger of new war on the Egyptian front receded. The U.N. buffer, an idea discredited in 1967, regained meaning as a way to prevent a surprise attack. Israel could let the reservists sent to the Sinai front three months before go home. Kissinger brought a note from Sadat to a stunned Meir that said, “When I threatened war, I meant it. When I talk of peace now, I mean it.”
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For the settlers in the Golan and the West Bank, and for other Israelis who believed the territory “liberated” in 1967 was part of a Whole Land that was Israel’s by historical or theological right, the accord held a different message: Israel was giving up soil. Even before going home, Kissinger flew to Jordan to talk to King Hussein, then to Damascus to see Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad, then hopped back to Israel, meeting Allon and Foreign Minister Eban in an airport lobby to report that both Arab leaders had ideas for disengagement agreements.
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That meant Israeli pullbacks.

It did not mean that Kissinger endorsed all their demands. Already in December, after an earlier trip to Damascus, he told Meir and her top ministers his picture of where negotiating with Syria would lead: Asad would settle for Israel pulling back “from new territory you took, plus some symbolic step in withdrawing from the old territory.”
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That accurate evaluation of the endgame was not meant for the Israeli public, which knew only that Asad wanted the Golan.

Since the war, a Merom Golan member named Eli wrote in the commune’s newsletter, too many people had taken a turn in the “negative direction” of thinking Israel could trade territory for peace. In Labor, even in the United Kibbutz, he worried, support was slipping for settlement beyond the Green Line. The world had grown strange.

“Leaving during the war had a terrible influence,” a woman named Batsheva said at a kibbutz general meeting. “Today settlement appears in all the media as something unimportant that just gets in the way.”

The answer, Eli replied, was that “security is not a sufficient reason [to give] for our existence here.” No one would consider giving up the valley below, in pre-1967 Israel, for peace, and conceding the Golan was no different. A public campaign had to be launched, the kibbutz members decided. Allies had to be found.
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The socialists of Merom Golan were ready for strange bedfellows.

“
TRUE, THERE
were mess-ups, but we won the war!” Hanan Porat thought, in a mix of frustration and his forced-march optimism, as he worked his way back to health. Called to his paratroop unit the evening after Yom Kippur, the passionate believer from Kfar Etzion had made it safely across the Canal. On the road to Ismailiyah, the shell with his name on it fell. His shoulder and five ribs were broken. A helicopter flew him out; the first, emergency operation to keep him alive was performed at a Sinai base and the second in a hospital outside Tel Aviv.

In the hospital and then the rehabilitation center, watching TV, reading, Porat confronted national depression. A kibbutz reservist named Arnon Lapid, who had served in Sinai, wrote a much-discussed article called “Invitation to Weep.” He suggested that his readers join him to weep for their dead, and for “the dreams from which we’ve awakened…the gods that failed, the false prophets who rose to greatness…the powerful friendships cut off…the truths that turned out to be lies…. We will pity ourselves, because we deserve to be pitied, a lost generation like us of a tortured nation in a land that devours its inhabitants.”
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Porat, utterly committed to the idea he was living in the messianic dawn, rejected such ideas. Israel had won, he thought, “and we should be declaring a day of thanksgiving and saying psalms of praise.”
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What was needed was “a revival movement” to change the mood. It had to come from the bottom up, because “there was a terrible crisis of leadership.”

Porat’s description of his goal bursts with contradictions: He rejects melancholy; he has lost faith in the nation’s leaders; he wants to restore faith in the nation. A “revival movement”—an idea religious in essence—will answer the political crisis. Those tensions would be at the core of the movement he helped create, which became Israel’s most successful or most dangerous (or both) grassroots rebellion: Gush Emunim. Add to that another irony, Festinger’s irony: A movement confidently declaring that Israel was striding toward redemption was ignited not by the mania of 1967, but by the depression of 1973.
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In early January, finally at home, Porat got a call inviting him to a meeting at the home of Rabbi Haim Druckman, head of the Or Etzion yeshivah, in southern Israel. The election results had put some of Porat’s friends in a more practical frame of mind. The ticket for which they voted reflexively, the National Religious Party, had shrunk from twelve seats to ten in the 120-member parliament. And yet, they realized, it held more power than ever. Without it, Meir’s shrunken Alignment would find it nearly impossible to form a governing coalition. The ruling party was dependent on its former vassal.

Druckman and others from the militant wing of religious Zionism—the amorphous group gestating since 1967—decided on a gambit: They would pressure their party to insist on a coalition including Begin’s right-wing Likud. That, Druckman explained at the January 8 meeting in his home, would express the “moral” value of national unity. It would also create a government in which advocates of the Whole Land and settlement had the upper hand.

Druckman’s pitch hints at another tension between aspirations: Like Porat, the rabbi spoke of a wide agenda, of transforming the public’s values. In practice, the issue that he and others could define and make operative was territory and settlement.
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A platform written by Porat for the movement illustrates the gap: It aims at turning religion into an all-encompassing political ideology. Its language is rich with calls for strength, for Israel’s “absolute independence,” and for self-sacrifice and struggle, along with attacks on Western individualism—all reminiscent of European reactionary politics fifty years before, and of the other politicized religious movements, loosely labeled “fundamentalist,” that were springing up from Iran to the United States and attacking Western values.
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Porat’s platform subsumes Zionism into messianism—so that “fulfillment of the Zionist vision” is the route to “complete redemption of the people of Israel and the entire world.” Explaining the country’s current mood of crisis, it avoids mention of the war and its graves, instead attacking people who put “personal ego above national destiny.” It calls for immediate annexation of the land taken in 1967, and proposes that “alien minorities” choose between permanent disenfranchisement, swearing fealty to Israel, or emigrating. Israel, it says, should adopt “a resolute security doctrine, not deterred by ‘moral’ or political considerations”—a striking formulation in a religious context. Individuals, it asserts, should cease seeking personal satisfaction and see themselves as branches of a tree, part of the organism of the nation.

And, the document declares, the path to virtually every national goal is “settlement throughout the Land.”
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From its start, the group imagined itself as a movement of national salvation. Practically, it focused on virtually one concern: settling Jews in occupied territory. In doing so, it aspired to seize the mantle of pioneering from the secular left.

Many of those gathered in Druckman’s living room that first stormy January night had already defined themselves by settlement—Porat; his patron Moshe Moskovic; Moshe Levinger; Eliezer Waldman, the rabbi who wove mystic significance into living in Hebron; Yoel Bin-Nun, the redemption-obsessed young teacher at Har Etzion. The plan to pressure the National Religious Party suited the leaders of its Young Guard, also present—Knesset members Zevulun Hammer and Yehuda Ben-Meir, a New York–born, thirty-four-year-old psychology professor and ordained rabbi. They hoped to use the activists as a “front organization,” in Ben-Meir’s words, to impose their agenda on the party. In the end, Ben-Meir confessed years later, “the monster turned on its maker.”
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A Young Guard meeting the next week in a Tel Aviv hall drew hundreds, and went down in the new group’s memory as its founding convention. The name Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, came out of a conclave of settlement representatives in the Kfar Etzion dining hall soon afterward—even if a Merom Golan member who drove down did not notice the formation of a new movement, only that religious settlers had passed a resolution backing settlers from the Golan Heights.
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Gush Emunim had a way of absorbing partners, subsuming them into its manic energy.

THE MOMENT WAS
ripe for protest movements. The war had knocked people loose from normal life. Reservists released from the Sinai front came home carrying anger and unanswered questions. Motti Ashkenazi, commander of the only strongpoint along the Suez that had not fallen, came alone to stand outside Prime Minister Meir’s office, silently, bearing a placard attacking her and Dayan. A news photo brought another protester, then battalions of them.
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Meir looked out her office window one day and saw a middle-aged man holding a sign: “My son didn’t fall in battle. He was murdered, and the murderers sit in the Defense Ministry.”
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Young Labor activists lobbied ministers to press for Dayan’s resignation.
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A father wrote to the Speaker of the Knesset, demanding to testify before the state commission of inquiry investigating the intelligence failures and lack of preparation for war. His son, he explained, had served at a training base and was sent unprepared to the front. “If until now I trusted the government with a full heart…today I see how blind I was…. My son’s blood cries out to heaven,” he wrote.
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Meir, Dayan, and Chief of Staff Elazar met in mid-February with top army commanders to discuss the war. A colonel stood and said, “We learned in the Palmah and the IDF that someone is responsible for everything. The defense minister is responsible for the IDF, and thus for what happened. He should draw conclusions and leave.”
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