My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (32 page)

That is why some thirty years later, I am driving to Ofra—the mother of all settlements—not to fight it, but to understand it. To understand how the settlements turned from rightist fantasy to historical fact. To understand what the forces were that impelled late-twentieth-century Israel to erect a futile, anachronistic colonialist project. To understand how Ofra came to be.

On a cool winter day I drive east from Tel Aviv to Ariel on the highway, crossing the green line and cutting across Samaria, the northern West Bank. Along this road, twenty small settlements and one settlers’ town were planted. Then I drive south, from Ariel to Eli, and from Eli to Ofra. Along this road, which follows the water divide line of the Shomron Mountain range, are another twenty or so settlements, situated amid Palestinian villages. The jagged precipices of the mountainous landscape are as stunning as the demographic reality is appalling. Under December’s crystal clear skies, it seems that the entanglement created by the West Bank settlements cannot be undone. Occupation seems irreversible. The most beautiful region of the biblical land of Israel is now the most distressing region occupied by modern Israel. It is sublime and depressing here, majestic and sad. Perhaps even hopeless.

A day earlier, I had met with Yoel Bin Nun, one of the founders of the Gush Emunim settlers’ movement, and of Ofra, in his home at the southern West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut. On a cold, wet night, as the wind howled outside, I asked him how he had come to found the settlers’ movement. What were the forces that brought Israel to build settlements in the territories it occupied in June 1967?

Bin Nun’s answer was his life story, which begins with the arrival of his mother in Palestine on one of the last ships to leave Europe in the summer of 1939, on the eve of World War II. Growing up in the late 1950s in Haifa, he received an enlightened religious education and was a member of a moderate national religious youth movement. In the mid-1960s he studied in the restrained and reserved atmosphere of the elitist Mercaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem. And then, in the spring of 1967, he
experienced a defining moment. Three weeks before the Six Day War, Rabbi Ziyehuda HaCohen Kook assembled his students to share with them a yearning he had secreted in his heart for two decades. “Where is our Nablus?” the elderly founder of the yeshiva cried out, as if experiencing a divine revelation right there and then. “Where is our Hebron? Where is our Jericho? Where is our Kingdom of Israel? Where is the House of God?” A storm was brewing outside the tall windows as an incensed Bin Nun paced the room.

When war broke out in early June, Bin Nun fought in the alleys of east Jerusalem. Twenty-two days after hearing Rabbi Kook’s prophetic fulminations he found himself on the Temple Mount, the rabbi’s cries echoing in his ears. He told me that he felt as if the skies had opened and touched the earth. “All of a sudden,” he said, “the land was calling to us, beckoning us. The land filled our soul.” It was as if the Bible were suddenly alive. A historic event of biblical magnitude had occurred: the State of Israel had returned the people of Israel to the Land of Israel.

As Bin Nun spoke to me his eyes were ablaze. He stood up, he sat down, he walked back and forth in his living room tugging at his beard. He told me about the first gathering of hundreds of rabbis and yeshiva students in Jerusalem two months after the war: “Everyone there was convinced that this land was our land and we would never leave. The germ of the Gush Emunim settlers’ movement was formed on that day. True, it did not yet have a name, or a platform. But in the summer of 1967 it was already clear that the national religious community, who up until the Six Day War did not dare covet Greater Israel and did not swear by Greater Israel, was now completely devoted to Greater Israel.” Religious Zionism was determined to settle Judea and Samaria and make them an integral part of the sovereign State of Israel.

Yet not much happened between the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Yes, Gush Etzion, to the south of Jerusalem, was rebuilt after being abandoned and destroyed in 1948; in Hebron a new Jewish community was established, forty years after the massacre of 1929. But the overall number of settlers in the West Bank was less than three thousand, and not one of them lived in Samaria. The Labor government did not allow the expansionist yearning of the national religious movement to be fulfilled. Yet the Yom Kippur War weakened the Labor government. The postwar trauma and bewilderment allowed the messianic
impulse that already existed to become a determined and aggressive political force. The dam that had kept at bay those eager to settle Judea and Samaria could no longer stand against the rising tide.

Bin Nun reconstructed for me the sequence of events. As the 1973 war drew to a close, a group of young religious women met with Prime Minister Golda Meir and suggested that she establish a Jewish settlement in Samaria to boost morale and to prove that the Yom Kippur trauma could not break the spirit of the people of Israel. Meir thought the young women had lost their minds. But when Hanan Porat, Benny Katzover, Menachem Felix, and Yoel Bin Nun returned from war in the early winter of 1974, they picked up the struggle from the point at which the women had left off, organizing a sit-down strike near Golda Meir’s residence and offices. To their surprise, hundreds and then thousands joined them. A mass movement was born that pressured the government to allow the building of a first Jewish settlement north of Jerusalem.

The standoff between the energetic zealots and the enfeebled Labor government lasted a year and a half. Time and again the determined young believers tried to seize land for settlement in Samaria, and time and again they were evacuated. Time and again illegal outposts were erected in the West Bank, and time and again they were demolished. But the ongoing confrontation with the establishment forged, consolidated, and empowered what was now the confident settlers’ movement of Gush Emunim. More and more religious young people identified with the new protest movement and joined it. Even among the nonreligious there was growing sympathy for those who were perceived as the new pioneers of a new era. There was something attractive and tempting in the enthusiasm and devotion of those determined to go to Samaria. Even Israelis who realized that settling occupied territory was illegal and immoral and irrational found it difficult to resist settlement. Gush Emunim was seen as the new torch of Zionism, at a time when other torches were being extinguished.

It was not the rabbis who led Gush Emunim, Yoel Bin Nun told me. The real leaders were a dozen or so dynamic and charismatic young men in their late twenties and early thirties. They had in them a rare combination of fervor and pragmatism, idealism and slyness. They had both religious faith and political skill. They admired the historical Labor Movement, and they despised what Labor had become. Combining
messianic Judaism with Israeli chutzpah they were determined to replace—even to inherit—the idealistic pioneering movement that the Labor Movement had once been. In flannel shirts, army coats, and knitted yarmulkes, these men became Israel’s new avant-garde. They mobilized thousands, inspired tens of thousands, and had the tacit support of hundreds of thousands. They evoked fear in the hearts of Israel’s elected government. While the moribund Labor Party was seen as yesterday’s leader, Gush Emunim perceived itself as the leader of tomorrow. It challenged secular Zionism and democratic Israel and demanded to establish in Samaria its own Ein Harod.

Ofra is no Ein Harod. It did not issue from a desperate Diaspora but from a sovereign state. It did not intend to give the Jews shelter but to build the Jews a kingdom. It did not stand up to a foreign power but against the Jewish democratic state. And yet, for its founders, Ofra is the direct descendant of Ein Harod. Like Ein Harod, it pitched a tent where no Jews had lived for thousands of years. Like Ein Harod, it was founded against all odds. Like Ein Harod, it evinced the triumph of willpower. In its own way, Ofra tried to impose its own Zionist utopia on reality, just as Ein Harod did fifty-four years earlier.

Pinchas Wallerstein welcomes me to his red-roofed Ofra home with a warm handshake. Another founder of Ofra, Wallerstein is very different from Bin Nun. Short, clean-shaven, vigorous, and practical, he is not a man of deep thought but of swift action. Yet, like Bin Nun, he answers my questions with his life story: his impoverished childhood in the Haifa working-class suburb of Kiryat Atta; a father who left home at 5:00
A.M
. every morning to distribute fresh bread from a horse-drawn cart; a mother whose ready smile hid a heavy Holocaust anguish. Both his father and mother were alone in the world; their families had been annihilated. Yet their young son, an Israeli Sabra, was determined not to be miserable, not to feel poor or bitter. Although he was small and dyslexic, he became a social dynamo. Although he was expelled from his high school yeshiva, he was a leader in the national religious youth movement, which became his real home. Although he lived on the fringes of Israel, he admired the kibbutz and dreamed of being a kibbutznik. In the 1967 war he was badly injured and was hospitalized for
two years. But he overcame his disability and his dyslexia, married and had children, and finished school. He was always restless, always looking for something else, somewhere else. After the 1973 war, Wallerstein realized that he wanted to find a way to resuscitate Zionism. At the age of twenty-five, he became the leader of a group of young men and women seeking to settle in Samaria. But only in early 1975 did he come up with a practical idea that would actually make settlement in Samaria possible: rather than clash with the government, he would lull it into accepting and later endorsing a cunning settlement fait accompli. The pragmatic Pinchas Wallerstein then made all the preparations needed to spearhead the first settlement on Shomron Mountain.

Another founder of Ofra, Yehuda Etzion, greets me with suspicion. What exactly do I want? What am I looking for in Ofra? The tall, bearded settler finds it inconceivable that a left-wing journalist like me can be balanced and fair. Yet after an hour of idle chat, he softens. He makes me strong Turkish coffee, offers me raisins and roasted almonds, and begins to talk. Etzion is a person of depth. Unlike Bin Nun and Wallerstein, he felt the yearning for the land of biblical Israel from early childhood. He remembers the fury his parents felt after the War of Independence because Ben Gurion did not insist on keeping the Old City “in our hands.” He remembers the admiration for the brutal Stern Gang of pre-Independence Israel who vowed to forcibly evict the British from the land. And yet even for Etzion, the Six Day War was the tipping point, the big bang. When East Jerusalem was liberated he felt a delirious joy, he tells me. He felt a yearning for the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples once stood. He experienced the realization that the Temple Mount was what mattered, and the determination to climb up the mount. To bring the Bible to life.

Six years after the skies opened in 1967, the skies came crashing down with the Yom Kippur War. The questions hit him as he was carrying corpses down from the Golan Heights: What has happened to us? Why have we fallen? How did we become so terribly weak?

Yehuda Etzion tells me that worse than the war was the political avalanche in its aftermath. Suddenly the government of Israel was willing to give up everything. Outside pressure was building, but from within there was no real resistance. On the contrary, there was cynicism, nihilism, defeatism. In the winter months that followed the war he
realized that something had gone terribly wrong, that something profound had been lost. Over the years Israel had experienced a spiritual decline. Secular pioneering Zionism had been replaced by complacent Zionism and seized by a secular weakness of will. There was cultural assimilation. There was mental surrender to the West. And war made all these underlying processes apparent. True, the Third Temple had not fallen this time around, but it might fall when encountering the next challenge. So the mission of salvation was now on the shoulders of believers. The torch had been passed to religious Zionism. And it was the mission of religious Zionism to light the fire on the mountaintops. One settlement on Shomron Mountain would not solve the problem. But one settlement was certainly feasible. And it could make a statement. It would lead Zionism in a totally new direction.

Etzion tells me that Gush Emunim had a strategic rationale for building Ofra: the understanding that eventually Israel’s permanent border would pass along the last Jewish furrow. They believed that no territory without Jewish settlement would remain Jewish. But Etzion admits that this hawkish strategy was only a small part of the ambitious endeavor. “Nablus, the capital of Samaria, is the most significant city in the land of Israel,” he tells me. “It’s the city where Joshua renewed the covenant with God after the conquest of Jericho. Nearby Elon Moreh is the site where Abraham built his first altar after he entered Israel. At Elon Moreh, God said to Abraham: ‘To your offspring I shall give this land.’ So divine revelation takes place in Elon Moreh and in Nablus. The first
aliyah
of the people of Israel to the land of Israel was
aliyah
to Shomron Mountain. Secular Zionism never climbed Shomron Mountain. It remained in the plains. The renewal and revival of Zionism after the Yom Kippur War was not just about taking strategic control of the highlands of the West Bank. It was about bringing the people of Israel to the mountain of Israel. We would revive Zionism and save Israel by climbing up the mountain, by realizing that without a spiritual depth the State of Israel cannot hold. We would revive it through the understanding that the Zionism of the plains is doomed. Our way is the way of our fathers; we must go back to the land of our fathers, go back to the mountains we lost. We must bring Zionism back to the mountains and bring the mountains back to Zionism.”

Whereas Wallerstein is matter-of-fact, Etzion is imposing. In the
simple living room of his modest Ofra home, his words touch me. Although I reject his worldview and despise his actions, I am not indifferent to what he says. Surprisingly, I recognize the great forces that pulled him to Ofra. I can understand what he says about the plains and the mountains and the history of Zionism. With horror I realize that the DNA of his Zionism and the DNA of my Zionism share a few genes.