The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (8 page)

McPherson’s cable also hinted at ideas he had brought with him from home. “Incidentally, Israel at war destroys the prototype of the pale, scrawny Jew,” he wrote. “The soldiers I saw were tough, muscular, and sunburned.”
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THE PROBLEM
was deciding what to demand, what to concede. A special U.N. General Assembly session on the Mideast crisis, due to convene on June 19, added urgency to formulating a stand. Yet doing so was difficult: Political positions and the machinery of policy making had both suffered battlefield damage.

Jewish claims to land suddenly stood once more at the center of the national agenda. Irredentists such as Menachem Begin and some ideologues in the left-wing, maximalist Ahdut Ha’avodah party believed that the conquests presented an unexpected opportunity to realize their dreams. The hard choice made between nationalist goals two decades earlier—favoring statehood in part of the land over possession of the Whole Land, pragmatism over visions of restoring ancient grandeur—no longer seemed final or inescapable. One right-wing splinter party quickly began running newspaper ads saying, “No Soil of Liberated Territory of Our Land Will Be Returned!”
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Yet as Yigal Allon’s case shows, even a dedicated dreamer could be shaken by seeing the actual land, with the actual people living there, and be pushed to heresy. “I consider myself a rationalist, even if I don’t lack emotions and I’m not free of myths,” Allon would say of his internal struggles after the war, proving that a person is best known by his contradictions.
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The territory of myth was in hand, but Allon’s reason told him that Israel could neither grant citizenship to over a million Arabs nor rule over them.

The pragmatists of Eshkol’s dominant Mapai party were more confused: They had accepted the need for partition, yet the music of biblical names such as Hebron and Jericho aroused them as well. As Eshkol’s ramble shows, even Gaza had ancient echoes. And victory did nothing to erase the trauma of the prewar days. King Hussein’s decision to go to war made Israel’s narrow waist seem more vulnerable. “Before June 1967, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights had not seemed to [cabinet ministers] to have vital security value,” notes military historian Reuven Pedatzur, who describes the war’s result as “the victory of confusion.”
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Now nothing was certain.

Meanwhile, Eshkol felt he had suffered half a putsch; his ejection from the Defense Ministry left him distrustful of colleagues and friends.
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His position was further weakened by a rush to reunite his Mapai with the two other parties that had broken off from it, Ahdut Ha’avodah and Dayan’s Rafi party. Israel’s political system, in which a mere 1 percent of the national vote gave a party representation in parliament, encouraged creating small parties, splitting big ones, and ruling by coalition. That, in turn, fanned an eternal hope of putting together a single party strong enough to win an absolute majority in the Knesset, allowing it to rule on its own. That hope was particularly strong in the parties representing what was known as Labor Zionism. The splits in Mapai had divided kibbutzim, separated comrades-in-arm, set sons against fathers. Now Moshe Dayan and his colleagues in Rafi were pressing to rejoin the mother party, hoping Dayan’s new popularity would complete their climb to power.

Unable to say no, key Mapai leaders, such as its aging secretary general, Golda Meir, sought a quick merger with Ahdut Ha’avodah as well, in order to reduce Dayan’s influence. Reaching unity meant ignoring old disputes about the Land of Israel and partition, even if they were suddenly more relevant than ever. Living together required indecision.
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Dayan himself did not wait for policy decisions to put his position before the world. In an interview for
Meet the Press
on U.S. television, broadcast the day after the war, he asserted that Israel should keep both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Rather than receiving citizenship, the West Bank’s Arabs “would have their own autonomy,” he said. If the Arab countries wanted peace, they would have to negotiate directly with Israel, he added, warning, “If they don’t want…to sit [with] us, then we shall stay where we are and there will be an absolutely new Israel.”
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In private, his preference was for staying put. Meeting with top generals, he suggested that Israel should “shut up and rule” Sinai.
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Forced to respond, Eshkol began a marathon of meetings—first a ministerial committee, then the full cabinet—that lasted nearly a week. What he lacked was a position worked out in advance by a few key ministers, the usual method of imposing a decision. As the debate came to a climax on June 18–19, the sharpest disagreements were on the future of the West Bank. Predictably, Menachem Begin proposed annexing it, while putting off the inconvenient decision on the status of its Arab residents.

Virtually the same position was suggested by Ahdut Ha’avodah’s Yisrael Galili, a birdlike man considered a master of backroom politics. Galili, a leader of the United Kibbutz, had been the Haganah chief of staff until he had been purged by Ben-Gurion in 1948. Now he officially served as minister without portfolio, and unofficially as a top defense adviser, receiving the same intelligence reports as the prime minister.
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Galili, who had never wavered from his party’s advocacy of the Whole Land of Israel, based his argument in the cabinet on the need for strategic depth. “I am not raising the possibility now of giving citizenship to the residents of the West Bank. I know how serious that is, not only from a moral, abstract democratic perspective, but also because of the concrete [security] risks,” he admitted, but a solution would have to be found later.

Dayan proposed an answer: Give the West Bank autonomy, with Israel keeping control over defense and foreign affairs. If King Hussein wanted peace, he would have to agree to the Jordan River as the border, giving up his claim to the West Bank.

Dayan’s rival, Yigal Allon, laid out the plan that started taking form in his mind during the war: Israel should quickly establish a Palestinian Arab entity—perhaps an independent state—in an enclave along the mountain ridge of the West Bank north of Jerusalem. At the same time, it should annex the barely populated desert lowlands along the Jordan River and the shore of the Dead Sea, along with the Hebron hills south of Jerusalem. The tiny Palestinian state would be surrounded by Israel. In the annexed areas, he argued, Israelis should quickly build settlements. “We have never held territory,” Allon argued, “without settling it.”

But there were minimalists as well. Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, the Mapai minister of justice, blasted Dayan’s proposal. “In a time of decolonialization in the whole world,” he demanded, “can we really consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defense and foreign policy…? Who’s going to accept that?”
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Shapira was speaking in terms his colleagues understood—at least when applied to more distant lands. Israel had spent the past decade developing ties with the newly independent nations of Africa, and in 1966 Eshkol had made a high-profile tour of seven countries south of the Sahara. “Our policy is that every vestige of colonialism must be displaced by independence,” he would later write to Zambian leader Kenneth Kaunda, pledging support against the white-minority regime in Rhodesia.
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In 1959, when Dayan acolyte Shimon Peres—then deputy defense minister—proposed that Israel arrange with France to lease the resource-rich South American colony of French Guiana, Mapai leaders responded with horror. Pinhas Sapir, who would later become Eshkol’s finance minister, told Peres that the idea was “a catastrophe, colonialism, imperialism.”
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Justice Minister Shapira also rejected annexation, arguing that it meant turning Israel into a binational state, in which Jews would eventually become a minority. The necessary alternative was to return almost all of the West Bank to Jordan, “because otherwise we’re done with the Zionist enterprise.” Only four other ministers (including Sapir) backed his position.
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When Eshkol summed up the debate, he dismissed Allon’s ideas as “formulating what’s good for us…playing chess with ourselves.” He said that Israel could ignore the United States for a few months, as the white government in Rhodesia was ignoring Britain—a loaded parallel—but would eventually have to provide proposals. With his warning that Israel could not negotiate with itself, Eshkol completed a remarkable process: Just a week and a half after the war, the ministers had outlined most of the key positions in an argument that would drag on for decades over the West Bank’s future.

While worrying aloud about the size of the Arab population, Eshkol favored annexing Gaza and vaguely suggested “autonomy or something else” for the West Bank. Wanting to eat his cake and push it away, he articulated the spirit of the meeting.
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As for Egypt and Syria, a resolution to offer a return to the international borders in return for full peace and security arrangements passed the cabinet on the morning of June 19 by a 10–9 vote, a majority but not a mandate. Eshkol appointed a committee to word a compromise. That afternoon—by the grace of time zones, morning at the White House and at U.N. headquarters—a new resolution was in hand, and the cabinet unanimously adopted Israel’s first diplomatic response to the Six-Day War. To Egypt and Syria, Israel offered “a full peace treaty on the basis of the international border and Israel’s security needs.” The international border meant the boundaries of Britain’s Palestine mandate, not the armistice lines with their demilitarized zones. The cabinet decision also said explicitly that “the Gaza Strip falls within the territory of the State of Israel.” Israel’s requirements for peace included demilitarizing the Sinai Peninsula and “the Syrian heights,”
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free passage in the Straits of Tiran and the Suez Canal, and a guarantee that the Jordan River headwaters would not be diverted. “Until the signing of a peace treaty,” the statement read, “…Israel will continue holding the territories it now holds.”
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With the June 19 decision, Israel offered to give up most of the land its army had conquered. Though ministers might interpret “Israel’s security needs” in different ways, they were clearly offering Israel’s two most hostile neighbors a near-total pullback. Even Begin voted for it, indicating that his map of the homeland did not include the Sinai or Syrian land. Allon later attributed his “yes” vote to the “psychological error” of believing that the Arab states would now make peace.
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Others, such as Galili and Dayan, apparently read Arab intentions pessimistically—and so expected that Israel would be able to stay put.

For all, the crucial subtext was the experience of 1956–57. Israel’s leaders expected to be pressured by the United States to pull out. They were willing to agree, but this time they asked a higher price. Egypt and Syria had to accept Israel and agree to peace. Full peace, rather than land, would guarantee Israeli security.

At the same time, Israel sought to keep Gaza, based on the hope that its Palestinian refugees could be resettled elsewhere.
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And regarding the West Bank and the Kingdom of Jordan, the proposal said not a word. Were security the only issue, Israel could also have offered Jordan a pullback in return for peace, demilitarization, and border adjustments. But this piece of occupied territory was a lost, longed-for part of the Land of Israel.
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Despite the anxiety about U.S. pressure, therefore, Eshkol could not lead; the government could not decide.

ISRAELI POLICYMAKERS
actually had less to fear than they thought. The United States was not preparing an encore of its 1957 demand for full withdrawal. From the moment Washington woke up to news of the fighting on June 5, Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy team almost reflexively worked to avoid the Eisenhower administration’s example.

After war broke out, “we ‘decided’…to go for a full Arab-Israeli settlement and not just for another truce,” NSC staffer Harold Saunders writes in his inside account—again noting that the decision was instinctive, that “the men around the President just started talking this way.” One reason, Saunders says, was the hope of exploiting the crisis to reach peace. Another was that “we were convinced that we just could not move Israel against its will.”
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By June 6, Johnson’s national security adviser, Walt Rostow, wrote a note to the president suggesting that the United States should seek “to negotiate not a return to armistice lines, but a definitive peace in the Middle East.”
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The next day, in another note, Rostow added Cold War context: The U.S. interest was full peace, with Israel accepted by its neighbors—and with Arabs no longer needing Soviet support to fight Israel.
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Rostow, though, had his hands full with the war in Vietnam. Seeking reinforcements, Johnson called back Rostow’s predecessor, McGeorge Bundy, who had left the White House the year before to head the Ford Foundation. For the next month, Bundy coordinated a special National Security Council committee on the Middle East. In Bundy’s view, part of his task was to provide “a special balancing weight against the normal bias of Arab-minded State Department regulars” so that policy would match the White House’s greater concern for the “rights and hopes of Israel.”
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Bundy regarded Johnson’s inability to provide stronger backing to Israel before the war as “instructive to both sides as to the limits…of the executive assurances.”
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That is, the promises made by Eisenhower had proved hollow at the first test and had failed to prevent war.