The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (5 page)

Unlike Kook (or her own sources), Shemer makes no mention of God or faith. The song is a younger sister of
In Your Covenant
. It is an example of how, in an age when many people find that God has gone missing, secular nationalism can declare itself the heir of religion. Instead of finding one’s place by submerging oneself in the great religious community stretching across generations, one becomes a link in the chain of an ethnic community also stretching across eternity. No less than a religion, the national group needs grand stories to define itself, and often builds them by refashioning religious myths and images—while insisting that meaning comes out of the romance between a nation and its land, rather than between believers and their God. In the Talmudic tale that Shemer borrowed, a “Jerusalem of gold” is a symbol of love delayed and fulfilled, and the story intimates that Jerusalem itself is a tangible symbol of the marriage—often described in religious literature—between God and the Jewish people. In the song, Jerusalem is herself the lover.

Also missing from Shemer’s song are the Arabs. She describes the Old City market and the Temple Mount as empty, along with the land beyond them: “None descend to the Dead Sea / by way of Jericho.” The lost land, the lost lover, simply waits for the Jews to return.

Gazit was right, though, to link his intelligence branch staff meeting and the song. Together, they mark Israel’s contradictory state of mind at that moment, which would shape its response to the crisis of 1967. Militarily, Nasser’s moves were a shock, defying Israeli assumptions. War was not planned. It came as an avalanche, the ground of certainty sliding away. Tactically, the IDF could face the challenge. But beyond simple defense there was no agreed political goal for war, no end to be achieved by means other than diplomacy. The ruling party had reconciled itself to partitioning the land between Jews and Arabs, and to the permanency of temporary borders.

Yet there were also people for whom, quite consciously, the borders were a violation of their emotions and their ideology, and others who could resonate with that feeling. They would be ready to give meaning to what was about to happen.

THE MOST OBVIOUS
lesson of the avalanche is that brinkmanship really can lead to the abyss. Rabin and Eshkol intended their threats to frighten Syria into reining in the Palestinian groups, not to announce a war. By giving Syria and Egypt the false information that Israel was massing troops on the border, Moscow may have hoped to put them on such obvious alert that Israel would not attack. The result, though, was that Nasser marched his army into Sinai. Nasser, it seems, aimed at facing Israel down and renewing his dog-eared credentials as the defender of the Arabs, not at starting a war. When he demanded on May 16 that U.N. secretary-general U Thant remove the U.N. Emergency Force from Sinai, he may have expected a simple “no,” allowing Egypt to look strong and avoid battle. Two days later, when the U.N. chief made the stunning decision that the peacekeeping force would move aside, Nasser’s public bravado virtually required him to close the Straits of Tiran. He did so on May 22.

For Israel, that meant war had begun, and it had a paper trail to prove that the United States was committed to the same view. In 1957, Israel had agreed to withdraw from Sharm al-Sheikh only after Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, signed off on a deal: Using words approved by Dulles, Israeli foreign minister Golda Meir announced in the U.N. General Assembly that armed interference with Israeli shipping in the straits would be “an attack entitling [Israel] to exercise its inherent right of self-defense” under the U.N. Charter. Immediately afterward the American ambassador rose to the podium to confirm that the United States stood behind Meir’s declaration.
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By May 25, Israel had called up its entire military reserves. Men up to the age of fifty-four disappeared from streets, homes, jobs. It was a nation interrupted, holding its breath, waiting for the explosion that with each day seemed certain to be more destructive. Nasser’s gambit forced other Arab leaders to show they were as determined in their enmity to Israel. On May 30 King Hussein flew to Cairo and signed a defense pact with Nasser. On June 4, Iraq joined and began sending troops into Jordan. Arab radio stations broadcast calls for Israel’s destruction.
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Reasoned miscalculation had led quickly to contagious hysteria.

But there were more implications to the avalanche days, which would bend Israel’s course of action long afterward. U Thant’s instant surrender to Nasser delegitimized the United Nations and foreign peacekeeping efforts. In particular, it suggested to Israelis that they had been conned when they withdrew from the Sinai a decade before.

Once the U.N. vanished, it was up to the United States to fulfill its commitments from 1957. The Johnson administration’s response would undermine Israeli trust in American guarantees as well, and would complete the proof that the Sinai deal was worthless.

At the start of the crisis, as NSC staffer Saunders wrote in a secret summary afterward, the administration “decided” to keep Israel from acting on its own militarily. The quotation marks are Saunders’s own; the policy, he says, was assumed rather than discussed. War, in principle, was something to be avoided, and would “put off the day of Arab-Israeli reconciliation just that much further.” But by Saunders’s inside account, Johnson and his aides also felt “deep concern for our own position if Israel got in over its head and asked for help in the middle of the Vietnam war.”
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Johnson knew he could not convince Congress to let him send American soldiers to another strange part of the globe when he was already sinking in a quagmire elsewhere.
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Instead, the administration both reassured and cajoled Israel while seeking another solution. On May 23, Johnson went on TV and radio to voice “support of the political independence and territorial integrity of all the nations” of the Middle East, and to stress that the Straits of Tiran were international waters, open to all shipping.
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Soon after, Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban arrived in Washington. The eloquent, Cambridge-educated diplomat knew the 1957 commitments well; he had helped negotiate them.

The climax of his visit was a Friday night meeting with Johnson. The president read from a text carefully prepared by his aides, his own emendations scrawled in, telling Eban: “The United States has its own constitutional processes which are basic to its actions on war and peace.” In other words, he lacked Congress’s backing for military action. “Israel would not be alone unless it decides to go alone,” Johnson said, a warning that if the Israeli cabinet decided to go to war, the United States could not back it up. Instead, he urged waiting for America to “pursue vigorously” organizing an international naval force to open the straits.
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Eban himself wanted to avoid war. Returning quickly to Israel, he presented Johnson’s comments to the cabinet as a promise of help, just barely convincing the ministers to postpone attacking Egypt.
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But Johnson found it hard to enlist other countries in a naval force. Worse, America’s own participation depended on congressional approval, which Congress was not ready to grant. Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, described the reluctance on the Hill as “Tonkin Gulfitis.”
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With Johnson straitjacketed by Vietnam, Israel would at last decide to go it alone.

BEFORE THAT
, though, the crisis would warp Israeli politics, eroding Eshkol’s power, forcing rivals into an unworkable partnership, and paralyzing policy for years to come.

By May 1967, Eshkol had ruled for four years, serving as defense minister as well as prime minister. He was seventy-one, born in a small town in the Ukraine, in the crumbling empire of the czars, raised in a Yiddish-speaking, religious family: an Everyman of Eastern European Jewry, except that instead of joining the much larger Jewish migration to America, he had left for Palestine at age nineteen. His father, who stayed behind, was murdered in a pogrom. In Palestine, Eshkol’s path was again archetypical, this time for the “new Jew” that socialist Zionism sought to mold. He helped establish a kibbutz, Deganiah Bet on the Sea of Galilee, became a dedicated farmer and a dedicated Mapai man.
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Balding, round-faced, he was a master of the backroom meeting, and particularly of seeking and listening to opposing viewpoints. “I can talk for an hour in favor of anything, then for an hour against,” he liked to say.
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His public speeches were often tangled, the monotonal soliloquies of a man meandering through all possibilities without quite making up his mind.
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His ascension to leadership in Ben-Gurion’s place appeared as a victory of the party machine over dynamic personality and vision—a sign the party was growing up, or growing old.

Yet Eshkol did have his own appeal, crafted out of self-deprecatory jokes and constant use of Yiddish. That was a subversive combination, as hinted by his phrase for Israel,
Shimshon der nebechdikker,
“poor little Samson.” Samson was the image of the new Jew to which secular Zionism aspired: a Hebrew-speaking Hercules, powerful and passionate, taken from the Bible but oblivious to piety. Not only is
nebechdikker
Yiddish, the language of exile, but the word encapsules the “old Jew”—powerless, ironic, deflecting insults with jokes. The contradiction defined Eshkol himself—a man of the earth, a womanizer, builder of a powerful army, whose use of Yiddish in policy discussions nonetheless contained a whispered jibe, as if to say to the “new Jews” around him, “Gentlemen, whom are we kidding?”

By the time the Straits were closed, though, the panicked Israeli public wanted a hero, without the irony. After the cabinet’s vote to delay war, an exhausted Eshkol spoke to the nation by radio and stumbled over handwritten corrections in a text written for him at the last moment.

That was the breaking point. Newspaper ads, protesters outside his office, delegations of politicians demanded that Eshkol appoint an experienced defense minister. He could not ignore the pressure: An Israeli prime minister rules only at the pleasure of the coalition of parties that gives him a parliamentary majority, and is only the first among equals in his cabinet, which must approve his policies. Eshkol would not consider one popular candidate for the defense post, his predecessor and rival David Ben-Gurion, who accused him of having created the crisis. That left two candidates—the former generals Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan.

The two men shared such a common past, and were such opposites, that they seem like a pair of forever-wrestling twin brothers. Both were born in Palestine and grew up in farming villages; both rose to leadership through the military. An early photo shows them at the founding of Hanita, a kibbutz on the northern edge of British Palestine, in 1938. Between them is their mentor Yitzhak Sadeh, a radical socialist and military pioneer. The two young men hold rifles. Dayan’s face is angular, with high cheekbones and a sharp chin. The operation in Vichy-ruled Syria in which he will lose an eye is yet ahead of him; he does not yet wear the patch that he will despise for the stares it attracts, the attention it draws. But at age twenty-three he already leans back, away from the camera, self-conscious, barely smiling, an inch or two of air between him and Sadeh. Writing later of that period, Dayan would say of himself, “Emotional partnership, sociability, and absolute egalitarianism were not in my nature.” Allon, three years younger, shorter, square-faced, his shoulder pressed warmly against Sadeh’s, grins widely, seizing the foreground.
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The stones marking the border with Lebanon originally cut across the hilltop chosen for the kibbutz, Allon recalled years later, and “it bothered me because it wasn’t…symmetrical or aesthetic, so I rounded up my guys and we moved the border stones a few hundred meters northward.”
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As much as the picture, the story portrays Allon: carefree, in command, unconcerned with rules, happy to redraw an international border to fit his imagination.

When Sadeh later organized the underground Palmah fighting force, he chose Allon and Dayan as his first two company commanders. Allon was the star. By 1945 he took over as the Palmah’s commander and its avatar: He was, says historian Anita Shapira, “the person who in the eyes of an entire generation symbolized…the image of the human being…conceived and educated in the Land of Israel in the era of struggle for a Jewish state.”
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A colleague would describe Allon as someone who could put his hand on your shoulder and convince you of anything; Dayan “didn’t tend to put his hand on anyone’s shoulder,” Shapira says.
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He had a reputation, however, for more extensive physical contact with numerous women.

Following the war of independence, Allon, a member of Tabenkin’s United Kibbutz movement, belonged to the pro-Soviet, far-left opposition. In October 1949, Ben-Gurion gave orders to replace him as southern front commander—with Dayan. This led to two conversations with Ben-Gurion in which, Allon recalled, “it was made clear to me that my movement and ideological comrades were suspected of disloyalty to the state’s security and independence.” At age thirty-one, Allon left the army. Perhaps Ben-Gurion’s fears made sense. Just a year and a half had passed since the pro-Soviet coup in Prague. And charismatic revolutionary generals have done worse after victory than Allon, who ended up neither in exile nor with an icepick in his skull. He spent two years at university in Oxford and London, and later studied international relations with Henry Kissinger at Harvard, but returned home to become a leader of the leftist Ahdut Ha’avodah party as it finally broke with Moscow. By the 1960s, his party joined the governing coalition and he was minister of labor: a man of moderate power, adored by his former soldiers but unable to electrify others.
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