The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (44 page)

Two weeks after Rabat, PLO leader Yasser Arafat, wearing a holster and treated as a head of state, spoke before the U.N. General Assembly, invited by an overwhelming majority of the member nations. He declared diplomacy an “enhancement” of armed struggle, rejected the idea that the Palestinians’ struggle with Zionism was a conflict between “two nationalisms,” and called for a “democratic Palestine” in place of Israel.
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Arafat was asserting a claim to a whole land that—to quote another movement of radical nationalists—“belongs to us and no other nation.” Providing an extreme example of ends justifying means, he proclaimed that one who “fights for the freedom and liberation of his land…cannot possibly be called terrorist.”
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The Rabat decision, the U.N. invitation, the iconic image of Arafat on the General Assembly dais were intended to advance Palestinian interests. In fact, they also served Israeli hard-liners, giving evidence that there were two irreconcilable claims to one indivisible land, and reinforcing the association of Palestinian nationalism with terror. Those who proposed mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition and negotiations were left more isolated.

Kissinger would spend much of the next year in the nerve-wracking pursuit of another agreement between Egypt and Israel. When he came to Israel he was greeted by ever more raucous protests organized by Gush Emunim. Diplomacy left the West Bank and Gaza Strip for another time, and in the meantime settlement continued.

YISRAEL GALILI MET
representatives of the would-be settlers at Ma’aleh Adumim in late October. Their link with Gush Emunim did not seem to have been an obstacle. His talking points for the meeting, though, included the warning that “it is essential to avoid advance publicity.” To work with him, they would have to learn the art of silence. No minutes were taken of the meeting itself.
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A month later, the cabinet approved Galili’s proposal for the site. On his instructions, the ministers did not receive briefing materials in advance, “to prevent leaks and so we can discuss the subject…without sensationalist reports.” For the moment, Ma’aleh Adumim would be an industrial area, with living quarters for employees—“until a further decision.”
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The move was later described in the press as a compromise between ministers who favored a settlement and those who opposed it.
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But the allusion to a future decision meant that the cabinet was actually agreeing to the ruse of factory housing in order to create a full-fledged settlement later. In early December, Galili informed Rabin that a “work camp” would be set up within days. The only reason for delay was that Allon was about to land in Washington to talk with Kissinger, and a report on a new settlement would be inconvenient. Galili agreed to establish the “camp” right after Allon’s meeting, when Kissinger would be in transit to Brussels.
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After that, the project hit a hitch. Galili’s memos to the prime minister continued to refer to it in future tense.
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By early January 1975, he was complaining of intrigues by doves within the Labor Party and its left-wing junior partner, Mapam, to foil the plan. Secrecy was crumbling. Someone had leaked financial objections raised in the cabinet. The precocious, dovish Labor politician Yossi Sarid, now a freshman Knesset member, was “spreading reports of plotting against” poor towns inside Israel. Galili, it appears, still feared pressure to pull back in the West Bank. Reasons of state, he told Rabin, made it essential to build at Ma’aleh Adumim, but the expectant settlers and their Gush Emunim sponsors were left waiting.
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Galili was not alone in concocting ruses. Sometime in late 1974, Gush Emunim leader Hanan Porat gave a tour of Samaria to Rachel Yana’it Ben-Tzvi, the widow of Israel’s second president. Nearly ninety years old, still politically active in the Labor Party, she was an outspoken advocate of the Whole Land. Northeast of Ramallah, at an imposing peak called Ba’al Hatzor, they saw an army base under construction. They stopped the car and got out. “In our day,” she said, referring to pre-independence Zionist pioneers half a century before, “we started settlements as work camps.” Find out if construction laborers are needed, she suggested, create a camp, and simply stay. A voice from the faraway past, she was recommending to children who wanted to relive the legends to use the old method: create facts, quietly.

Porat’s Gush Emunim colleagues were doubtful—except for Yehudah Etzion, then living in the movement’s office in downtown Jerusalem, the agitator’s agitator. He and Porat found the contractor building the base and subcontracted as a “work brigade” to put up the fence. Shimon Peres’s settlement adviser, Moshe Netzer, gave them a permit to work in the area.
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The “brigade” consisted of Etzion and three friends who commuted daily from Jerusalem to their project, and volunteers they rounded up—yeshivah students, Bnei Akiva teenagers, anyone willing to work for a day. They worked through the winter.
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The army got used to their presence between the Palestinian villages. Etzion brought his fiancée, Hayah, to the steps of a building on a deserted Jordanian base nearby and said, “This will be our home.”
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They married in January. Among religious Jews, it is traditional to follow a wedding with a week of smaller celebrations, reciting the seven blessings of marriage each time. On a surprisingly sunny afternoon, the Elon Moreh group showed up at the Sebastia train station to celebrate. A newspaper headline described the visit as “nostalgic,” as if their settlement attempt at the spot was a long-ago escapade of youth. The article, though, quoted Gush Emunim leaders as saying this was “a demonstrative act, intended to warn…the government what to expect.” The army did not disturb the romantic event.
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March 1975 was the season for the sport of settling, as the Bloc of the Faithful played that increasingly unforgiving game. As the challenger, the Faithful chose the time and venue of matches, which the Rabin government and the army were bound to accept, lest they lose by default. Losing, for the government, would mean an end to its control over where and when Jews could settle in occupied territory. It would mean yielding command over defense and diplomatic strategy, which even a government divided is loath to surrender.

Gush Emunim’s goal, short of a knockout, was to wear down government resistance and to pull public opinion to its state of mind: Settle everywhere, keep everything, reject all compromises as products of outside pressure and inner weakness. The timing of its new campaign had partly to do with Henry Kissinger’s latest round of shuttle diplomacy. Kissinger was seeking a second Israel-Egypt accord, in which Israel would pull back farther from the Suez Canal for arrangements a step closer to peace. In a newsletter for supporters, Gush Emunim attacked the proposal that Israel would cede a Sinai oil field, since that would make the country more dependent on foreign supplies, and thus more vulnerable. Nationalist values of pride and militant self-sufficiency had become religious principles.

“More than ever, we are certain today that a ‘phased withdrawal’ beginning in Sinai will be prevented by settlement in Judea and Samaria, the Golan and Sinai,” the newsletter said.
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The logic is emotional: Settling in the West Bank would keep Sinai oil by showing that Jews do not yield. It would “heal the county’s spirit.”
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The timing also reflected tension within Gush Emunim. Hanan Porat, as ever wanting to be the “vanguard,” not a “separatist,” believed repeated clashes with the army cost the movement support. By March, the Elon Moreh group and other advocates of direct action tired of waiting. They decided to move, without asking the movement to bring out thousands of supporters again.
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Ultimately, their logic was that defiance would bring admiration.

So forty would-be settlers cast off Yisrael Galili’s admonishments of silence and showed up early one March day at Ma’aleh Adumim, set up a water tower and a prefab concrete building, and by afternoon were removed by troops, four soldiers carrying each settler, the drill now practiced. Galili’s government project would henceforth be linked in public consciousness with the government’s foes.
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The Elon Moreh activists, announcing their willingness to “give our lives” for “redemption of the land,”
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returned by night to Sebastia and were discovered in the morning, the men barricading themselves in a second-story room of the crumbling station, struggling and shouting insults and demands to disobey orders as they were extracted through the windows by soldiers balancing precariously on ladders balanced against the pink rough-cut stone walls. A watching journalist reported “intense hostility” between settlers and soldiers, “unlike anything during previous settlement attempts.” Still, the incident “did not get the media coverage we expected,” an activist later complained, because the same night eight Fatah men landed on the Tel Aviv beach and took over a seaside hotel, in the Palestinian organization’s own effort to scuttle Kissinger’s mission, and by dawn three Israeli soldiers and eight civilians and seven terrorists were dead, the hotel was recaptured, and the country was in mourning.
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The setback did not stop Gush Emunim. A hundred people briefly locked themselves into a Jordanian bunker cut into the mountainside at Ba’al Hatzor, the peak northeast of Ramallah.
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Forty others managed to spend a Sabbath in abandoned houses near Jericho before the ritual removal by troops.
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“Friends tell us we are banging our heads against a wall…. But we’re convinced that the wall’s foundations are crumbling, and in the end we’ll succeed,” Elon Moreh organizer Menachem Felix said at an evening press conference—after which his group gathered in a quiet Tel Aviv suburb to set out for Sebastia, got arrested and released, regrouped in an orchard, dodged roadblocks to reach the ruined station, staged a repeat of barricading themselves in, and were pulled out, kicking, shouting, clawing. “Settler Yehudah Etzion prostrates himself on the ground, crying bitterly and kissing the soil,” a photo caption read the following day, showing the tall curly-haired activist stretched flat out. This time they got the press they wanted, especially since after being booked and released in Jerusalem they burst into the Prime Minister’s Office in giddy fury, sat in, and were dragged out and arrested the third time in twenty-four hours—which to their dismay, still did not earn them the trial for which they now begged.
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The settlers could take comfort, though, in the collapse of Kissinger’s shuttle effort. Kissinger blamed the Rabin government’s insistence that Egypt declare “non-belligerence,” virtually agreeing to peace, while Israel kept most of the Sinai. Kissinger’s approach was for Sadat to sign on conditions that added up to non-belligerence, without using that term. Nor were Israel’s leaders ready to give up the strategic Mitla and Giddi passes in the Sinai. On his last day in Israel, Kissinger got a tour of the ancient desert fortress of Masada with Yigal Yadin, the archaeologist and ex-military chief of staff who had excavated the site. At Masada nineteen centuries earlier, the Jewish rebellion against Rome ended with the last rebels committing suicide to avoid capture. Kissinger’s memoirs give no hint that Yadin mentioned his own thoughts of political rebellion, nor that Kissinger might have had associations of the reports he was getting from Saigon and Phnom Penh as America’s anti-communist allies in Southeast Asia collapsed. That evening, Kissinger told the Israeli troika that “our strategy was designed to protect you” from international demands for a full withdrawal. “I see pressure building up to force you back to the 1967 borders—compared to that, ten kilometers is trivial. I’m not angry at you…. It’s tragic to see people dooming themselves to a course of unbelievable peril.”
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But he was angry. According to Harold Saunders, a member of the U.S. negotiating team, it was the only time in the Mideast shuttles that Kissinger “showed personal emotion…deep but controlled emotion.”
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Yitzhak Rabin could not bend, Saunders writes, because Shimon Peres threatened to quit the government if he did.
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It was Dayan’s old tactic: If Peres’s faction split with Labor, it could bring down the government, forcing elections or bringing the right-wing Likud to power.

Then again, Kissinger may well have overreached that spring, seeking an agreement before it was ripe in order to compensate for other setbacks. While he negotiated in the Middle East, “the disintegration of Vietnam was bringing American foreign policy to its nadir,” he mentions as an aside, petulantly adding that Rabin had other concerns. For years, America’s troubles in Indochina had protected Israel from pressure. Now Vietnam was the source of U.S. pressure.
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Ford announced a “reassessment” of U.S. policy toward Israel, which threatened a rethinking of the alliance.
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In his memoirs, Kissinger says that Ford “interpreted the stalling tactics of the Israeli troika…as reflecting their assessment that he was too weak” to fight Israel’s supporters in Congress.
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Read that as Ford’s own insecurity: As an unelected president, he believed he had to show he had a backbone. He had more in common with Rabin than he realized.

AT THE END
of March, as far as the Israeli public could see, Gush Emunim’s settlement campaign had burned itself out. The Rabin government’s wall had not fallen.

The public did not, however, see Yehudah Etzion’s “work brigade” building a fence around the military base on the peak of Ba’al Hatzor northeast of Ramallah. Etzion made contact with the Gush Emunim group that wanted to settle at the biblical site of Shilo—several dozen singles from around Israel, many of them students, and a dozen or more young married professionals with children
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—and suggested they settle instead at his imagined “work camp,” seven miles to the south. To Etzion’s dismay, the group’s leaders were not enticed by Zionist nostalgia to join in pounding fence posts while winter wind lashed the hills, but the opening for settlement did attract them.
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By January, a letter to members had announced the possibility of establishing a community at Ba’al Hatzor, to be called Ofrah.
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The name belonged to a town mentioned in the Book of Joshua that once stood in the area, providing a requisite biblical aura.
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A flier later passed out among Gush Emunim supporters, aimed at recruiting more people to work or to settle, noted that the brigade was also open to women, who could perform service jobs, and asserted: “It is possible…to create the fabric of a de facto settlement…and eventually receive some form or another of government approval.”
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The organizers wanted a low profile, but within a circle that included dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people, their goal was known.

That circle included some officials. The Shilo group’s letter said, “We are in the midst of discussions with political and defense elements” on setting up the settlement.
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Beyond that, Porat was a prominent Gush Emunim leader, and Etzion a known militant. Anyone who had contact with them could figure out their interest in the area. Moshe Netzer, the defense minister’s settlement adviser, could see that the ideology-driven members of the work battalion he had approved were not looking for “a solution to the problem of making a living.”
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Both Netzer and Peres favored Jewish settlement on the mountain ridge and were at odds with Rabin and Galili on the issue.
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When Netzer let the project develop, he was serving his boss’s purpose, whether or not the boss knew the details.

But Peres almost certainly knew the intent. A Gush Emunim document from early 1975 claims that agreement had been reached with Peres on establishing a camp for civilian employees of the army at Ba’al Hatzor, but that the cabinet had delayed the plan.
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Even if the report is an example of the movement’s inclination to interpret a minister’s evasive grunt as effusive assent, it indicates that the group was already in touch with the defense minister, who did nothing to put a stop to the work brigade. If their reading of Peres’s stance is accurate, they had his full support, but he wanted cabinet ratification.

The activists took their next step on tiptoe, holding their breath. In mid-April, a few people gathered in Gush Emunim’s office and divided up assignments. Etzion gave one a long handwritten list of equipment to buy: “30 beds, gas/kerosene lanterns, mattresses, food for a day or two, 15 jerry cans, generator, wire, lights…cooking gas, kitchen implements, weapons, polyethylene [sheeting]…sleeping bags.”
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The plastic sheeting was for covering the empty windows and doorways in concrete shells the Jordanian army had left when it abandoned its half-built base near the village of Ein Yabrud. The date that Etzion and his friends picked for moving in was Sunday, April 20, a normal workday, with no high-schoolers or other hangers-on available to draw attention.
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A dozen people working on the fence came at the day’s end to the ghost base at Ein Yabrud. A similar number from the Shilo group arrived at the same time, packed into the minimum of cars. The watchman—a Palestinian from a nearby village who worked for the Israeli army and who lived at the base with his herd of goats—looked on as the cars came down the dirt driveway and people began to unpack. “It’s okay,” someone said, but the guard mounted his donkey and rode into the dusk toward Ramallah military headquarters.
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As night fell, the settlers set up camp. Now and then, a straggler arrived. One was Yoram Rasis-Tal, a young Orthodox Jew who had ended up on the Shilo settlement group’s phone list almost by accident. Settling, in Rasis-Tal’s mind, meant that “a group of people gets together in the evening…goes up to some hilltop, and in the morning the army brings them home,” and he wanted to take part. When a stranger called him at two that Sunday afternoon and told him to come to the movement office in Jerusalem by four, he informed his boss he was leaving early, his wife that he was coming home late. By the time he reached Jerusalem, the group had left. The secretary pointed vaguely at a spot on a large-scale map, and Rasis-Tal hitchhiked north—a ride in an Arab car, another in a donkey cart, another with a Jew who let him off somewhere past Ramallah. On foot on the mountain road, wearing a thin sweater in the cold of the hills, he continued until he saw flashlights flickering in the dark. At Ein Yabrud, in an improvised kitchen, two “girls” were cooking vegetable soup in an industrial-sized can, formerly full of pickles, that served in place of a forgotten pot. The first person who tasted it turned red and said nothing. “Look friends,” suggested the second, “since this is the first, historic soup, let’s keep it to display in the museum when it’s built.”
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The army commander from Ramallah, Moshe Feldman, drove in an hour and a half after the watchman rode out. All right, Feldman said, looking around at a familiar scene, pack up and go home. “This isn’t what you’re used to,” Etzion answered. “It’s coordinated with the Defense Ministry.” Feldman drove back to Ramallah to make phone calls.

In the most common account of the evening, this much was coordinated: Porat had gotten himself on Peres’s appointment schedule for that night. When word arrived of the settlement bid, or soon after, he was sitting with the defense minister. You can see there’s a big constituency that doesn’t want to see that area empty of Jews, Porat would recall telling Peres. You’re a smart guy, he said, create a safety valve before there’s an explosion, and let them stay as a work camp.