The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (11 page)

At the same time, a second tier of labor settlements developed—cooperative villages, or
moshavim,
where members sold their produce together but had family fields and houses. The socialism was softer; the stress on “Hebrew labor” remained.

The outbreak of an Arab revolt in 1936, followed by the Peel recommendations to partition Palestine, brought a shift: The strategy was now to place settlements in new areas of Palestine, to prevent division of the land, or at least to make sure that as much as possible ended up in the Jewish share.
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Labor Zionists, who dominated the growing Jewish community in Palestine, scorned grand political statements. Settlement, carried out quietly, would establish facts, conquer the land, set borders. The Jewish Agency and its Settlement Department coordinated the entire effort.

The settlements, particularly kibbutzim, now became military strongpoints. The creation of the Palmah as a kibbutz-based underground army sped the transformation. When the battle for the land exploded in full force in 1948, kibbutzim served as frontline fortresses. Settlement, Yigal Allon would write in a 1954 paean to the fallen kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc, “served as the main source of independent [Jewish] military power,” especially because of the “great resemblance between a kibbutz and a military unit”—both being built on volunteerism, discipline, and dedication to the group.
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With no advance intent, the monastic orders had become military orders, adding machismo and tragedy to the romance of settlement.

After the 1948 war, kibbutzim were established in a rush along the armistice lines. In the state’s first years, Levi Eshkol’s Settlement Department filled whole new regions with moshavim, cooperative villages populated by new immigrants.

Yet at that very moment, the settlement ideal was yellowing into history. The socialist Zionist youth movements of Eastern Europe that once supplied legions of eager new kibbutz members had vanished in mass graves and crematoria ash. Few of the Jews who poured into newly independent Israel from other Mideast countries sought a secular replacement for Judaism—and many regarded the kibbutzim as an arrogant gentry, pampered by the ruling parties. Kibbutz members were disproportionately represented in the Knesset and officer corps. But the new country’s modernizing economy offered new paths to success, opened by academic education—a subtler substitute for Talmud study.

To help the youth movements within Israel, the army allowed their graduates to serve together in a unit—Pioneering Fighting Youth, known by the Hebrew acronym Nahal—in which they split their time between combat duty and stretches at border kibbutzim or at outposts, half military, half agricultural, that in most cases eventually became new settlements. After Nahal, the next stage of movement-scripted life was supposed to be joining a settlement. Yet in the post-independence kibbutzim, new members joined and left, while most communes remained tiny.
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The kibbutz movements were now monastic orders of an established faith that had gained power but lost its passion.

Worse, ideological battles ripped apart the kibbutz movements in the early 1950s. In the United Kibbutz, supporters of the far-left sage Yitzhak Tabenkin and his radical Ahdut Ha’avodah party faced off against backers of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and his political party, Mapai. A major issue was support for the Eastern Bloc or the West, North Korea or South. Another was Ben-Gurion’s preference for the state over party and proletariat. It was a theological schism in the church of atheism. The movement split, as did individual communes, and sometimes families. The United Kibbutz remained the foundation of Ahdut Ha’avodah; a rival kibbutz organization aligned with Mapai was established. The third major kibbutz organization, linked to the radical-left Mapam party, was also roiled by ideological battles. Afterward, graduates of the youth movements within Israel were sent to strengthen the existing kibbutzim rather than establish new ones.
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Tabenkin and his disciples still spoke of the Whole Land of Israel and hated the armistice lines. They resembled the aging American wagon-train veterans painted by John Steinbeck in 1930s California: “a line of old men along the shore hating the ocean because it stopped them.”
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Pioneering was glorious and obsolete.

Since 1952, the United Kibbutz had managed to establish only one new commune. Between 1961 and early 1967, only ten new kibbutzim and moshavim “ascended to the soil.”
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Malaise set in at the Settlement Department. A committee recommended slashing the size of the department.
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Building settlements to create facts belonged to the era of ethnic struggle, not to a time when a state existed, marked on the map, with an army on its borders.

YEHIEL ADMONI
reported back for work at the Settlement Department on June 12. A forty-year-old Palmah veteran and agricultural adviser, Admoni had spent the last two years studying at Purdue University in Indiana. Through the old boys’ network, he managed to get a flight home in mid-war. He found the department office ruled by euphoria and chaos. The decade of decline was over. “Within six days, the fullness of the land had become ours,” he later wrote. A fever to work seized bored bureaucrats. Plans blossomed. “The golden opportunity had fallen into our hands to go out to the open expanses,” says Admoni, who was particularly impressed by how quickly Meir Shamir, the head of the department’s Galilee office, got to work on settling the high ground taken from Syria.
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Admoni, who took over as the department’s number-two man, under Mapai politician Ra’anan Weitz, explains that after the war, settlement “was again needed, as in the ’30s, to share in the political and defense effort by settling…regions that the state saw as essential to its security.”
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The comment is remarkable in two ways. First, it labels the years between 1948 and 1967, the years of state-building, as a moratorium, a parenthetical phrase. Zionism, as it were, had hibernated in those years. Now the glory days would resume. Yet the 1930s had been a time when two national groups wrestled, under foreign rule, for liberation at the price of the other. Now that struggle would also resume—except that one group had achieved political independence in part of the land, its army ruled the remaining territory, and settlement would be imposed by the powerful side in land inhabited by the weaker side. Second, the department leapt into this task before any government decision that it was needed. More was at work than a bureaucracy rushing to prove it still had a function. A generation sought to prove that its ideals were still relevant.

On June 13, before Eshkol began his cabinet consultations on the future of the occupied land, Ra’anan Weitz organized a trip into the hills south of Bethlehem, where the four kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc had stood until the day before Israel’s establishment. With him he brought a survivor of each of the communes.

At least one of Weitz’s companions came to the exploratory visit with an intense commitment to resettle the area: Moshe Moskovic, the man from Massu’ot Yitzhak who had given up his seat on the Piper to the besieged settlements in April 1948. His kibbutz’s survivors had rebuilt their community east of Ashkelon in southern Israel. Moskovic, a born politician, bubbling ideas, always smiling, had become head of the regional council—a kind of county government—in the area. To commemorate the lost land, he had started a yeshivah that combined a modern high school curriculum and traditional Talmud study, brought a charismatic disciple of Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook to head it, and named it Or Etzion, the Light of Etzion. He was close to Eshkol and counted Allon as a longtime friend. In his journal, at the first news of the Etzion area’s reconquest, he wrote plans for rebuilding, not just what had been there before, but more, bigger, an Etzion Bloc that could not fall again.

Weitz’s delegation found the kibbutz buildings razed, the orchards uprooted, “shattering our dreams and expectations,” Moskovic wrote afterward. A Jordanian army base, now abandoned, stood on Kfar Etzion’s grounds. The next night, Moskovic got a call from the man from Revadim, the secular kibbutz originally located in the Etzion Bloc and linked to the left-wing Mapam party: His dovish movement rejected settling in the West Bank, for political reasons. It was groping toward the position that Israel should negotiate with King Hussein to trade the West Bank for peace. Moskovic did not let that dissuade him. He typed up his program for the bigger, better Etzion Bloc and sent it to Weitz. His plans could have been blueprints for rebuilding a community destroyed in a hurricane; they said nothing of strategic goals, Arabs, or the future of the West Bank. He was driven, he explained afterward, by the thought that “it’s pure chance I’m here and not lying in the dust. Had I been in the bloc at the time, grass would be growing out of me.”
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At Kibbutz Ne’ot Mordechai near the northern tip of Israel, on the other hand, strategic goals were explicitly on the mind of forty-six-year-old commune member Rafael Ben-Yehudah. Ben-Yehudah had left his native Vienna as a teenager in 1938, a month after the Nazis marched in, reached Palestine with a boatful of illegal immigrants who swam to shore, spent World War II in communes of landless workers, became a follower of Yitzhak Tabenkin, and helped found Ne’ot Mordechai on the Jordan River. On June 14, Ben-Yehudah sat down to talk with Dan Laner, a member of Ne’ot Mordechai and the chief of staff of the army’s Northern Command. Ben-Yehudah had decided, even before the cease-fire, that he wanted to establish an Israeli settlement quickly in the occupied Syrian heights. The region’s future was up in the air, and Ben-Yehudah wanted to make sure that the Syrians and their artillery would not return. Laner, also a Tabenkin disciple, promised his support. Sometime in the next few days, it appears, Ben-Yehudah brought in Meir Shamir from the Settlement Department.
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Ben-Yehudah would find another partner in Eytan Sat of Kibbutz Gadot—the kibbutz on the Jordan that was destroyed in Syrian shelling weeks before the war. Gadot was a United Kibbutz commune, and the thirty-one-year-old Sat had virtually no family but the movement: When he was seven his father died, and his mother sent him to grow up in a children’s house at Kibbutz Gvat in the Jezreel Valley. When he was sixteen, “the age when your personality forms,” by his own description, his kibbutz split in the great schism. He stuck with the United Kibbutz side and “the world of the revolution.”

A few days after the war, Sat was released from his reserve unit to manage the rebuilding of Gadot. But he quickly turned his energies to a new project. In Sat’s mind was the memory of the shellings, of having to carry a gun with him when he went to work at the kibbutz cowsheds next to the border, and of 1957, when Ben-Gurion had been pressured to withdraw from Sinai. The way to prevent that from happening now, he said, was to create a “settlement on the Syrian heights—a civilian presence, so that no one could just order a withdrawal. There’d have to be a debate in the Knesset.”
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This was one more variation on creating facts: from the bottom up, the activists pulling in sympathetic officers and officials, intent on dragging the government after them. They would set policy, and draw the map of the country themselves.

Look north or south, and you see low green fields, a prairie tamed, flocks of birds scooting above eucalyptus and pines planted by the farmers. Look east or west from Kibbutz Gadot, and mountains point toward the sky. To the west, across the valley, rise the Galilee hills. On the east, the stark climb of the land is even closer, right past the creek, neither deep nor wide, known as the Jordan River. In June, the air is hot, quiet, and heavy with the stink from the cowsheds. The river marks a geological border between two plates of the earth’s crust, one bearing Africa, the other Asia, moving in opposite directions. The green valley is the bottom of a rip in the world.

The clubhouse at Gadot was also ripped when thirty or so representatives of the farming communities of the valley and the Galilee hills gathered there in mid-June 1967 at Eytan Sat’s invitation. In normal days, a kibbutz clubhouse was the collective living room where members spent their evenings. At Gadot it was still torn by shells that had fallen during the war. There was no electricity. Were Sat a calculating politician, one might guess he chose the venue so that the reminder of the Syrian shelling would lend support to his proposal. Since he is gruffly practical, more bulldozer than calculator, it is likely he simply used the normal spot for a meeting. In either case, most of the people he called together were surprised by his idea of establishing a Jewish settlement on the newly conquered heights to the east. Some regarded it as “delusional,” according to Yehudah Harel, who was there representing Kibbutz Manarah in the Galilee hills. Others were cautiously receptive. In the end, the group agreed he should check out the response from the relevant authorities, a nondecision providing him an entirely informal mandate for going ahead.

As the meeting’s end, Harel told Sat, “Count me in.” Harel, thirty-two years old, was the son of a Tabenkin disciple and had practically grown up on the knees of the United Kibbutz’s spiritual master. In his youth, by his own testimony, he was “on the extreme left. You could say I was a communist,” though of the anarchist leaning encouraged by Tabenkin, for whom the way to communism was by establishing communes rather than establishing a party or taking control of a state.

The day before the Gadot meeting, Harel and his father visited Tabenkin, who spoke of building settlements on the Syrian heights. Harel thought his white-bearded mentor “had gone nuts,” he later recalled. “It was clear to us that Nablus and Gaza were the Land of Israel, but the Syrian heights? Only Tabenkin could say that, because he was out of touch with reality.” Yet when he heard Sat propose the same thing, as a plan of action, he was primed. “It was an anarchist approach” that appealed to him. “You don’t
talk
about the Whole Land. You start settlements.” Harel also worried about the precedent of 1957, and about Syrian shells again falling on the kibbutzim of the valley. A way was needed “to keep the politicians from giving up the heights.”
¹
Distrust of politicians was part of what he had learned from his teacher. While settlement in the high ground would most often be justified by the need to protect the valley from Syrian guns, that concern was just one ingredient in the mix. Two others were as essential—the sense of a covenant with a homeland that stretched beyond political borders, and commitment to direct, anarchic action by a vanguard whose very willingness to act testified to its glowing truth. It required Tabenkinism.

In fact, Tabenkin was already wrestling with younger leaders over how his movement should respond to the conquests. At a meeting of the United Kibbutz secretariat, he rejected “any concession of [land] in our hands.” He acknowledged that adding over a million Arabs to Israel’s population created a problem—but said it could be solved through Jewish immigration. Israel’s victory, he presumed, would arouse a vast awakening among Diaspora Jews, a great selling of homes and packing of bags. Unnoticed, he reversed the logic of maximalism: Before statehood, advocates of the Whole Land insisted on the need for territory to accommodate the desperate, threatened Jewish masses of Europe. Now the need to keep the land obligated the Jews of Leningrad, Los Angeles, and London to come to Israel, regardless of whether Soviet Jews could or Western Jews felt any need.
²
But that was a surface contradiction. With iron consistency, he believed in possessing the Whole Land, and in the primacy of principle over pragmatism.

Honored as the eighty-year-old ideologue was in his movement, by now he had competitors who—unlike him—had served in the military and in cabinets, who had considered strategy, compromises, and changes. Next to him, they were pragmatists. At the same secretariat meeting, Yigal Allon proposed quickly establishing settlements in “strategically important” areas in the West Bank—a hint that some territory was not essential—and at “problematic” spots along the international border with Syria. Crossing that line into the heights was not yet on his agenda. Yisrael Galili, the birdlike minister without portfolio, rejected “weak knees” and “talk of retreat”—yet urged avoiding any public statement on Israel’s future borders. “It seems to me there are territories we won’t be able to hold,” he said.
³

Given Galili’s stance in the cabinet in favor of keeping the entire West Bank, it would appear he was referring to the Sinai and the Syrian heights as land that might have to be given up. From then on, though, Galili’s views would remain a shimmering ambiguity, with as many interpretations as people who knew him. Did he want to keep every inch of territory, but silently, unnoticed? Or was he open to compromise, as long as he could avoid a split in the United Kibbutz movement? The mystery was a deliberate achievement. Galili wrote an incessant stream of letters, phrased countless resolutions and decisions, yet according to his closest aide, “he never wrote his true thoughts, because what’s written can be revealed.” In conversation, he told people he might deny everything he had said.
⁴
As his political power grew over the next decade, he would turn ambiguity into national policy.

Tabenkin had the upper hand. A movement resolution, adopted two weeks after the war, called for “action of major dimensions to settle areas of the Land that were cut off from us in the War of Independence and to consolidate our gains on the new borders” and for “the masses” of Diaspora Jewry to immigrate.
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The old sage expected a great awakening within his movement as well. All the dreams of the 1930s were ripe for fulfillment. On June 23, kibbutz members from around the north came to Kibbutz Dafnah, at the very tip of Israel, in the valley below the heights, to hear Tabenkin lecture. He called for settling, quickly, throughout the newly conquered land, of establishing hundreds of new settlements—at a time when there just over 230 existing kibbutzim. Both Eytan Sat and Rafael Ben-Yehudah were there, and met, and decided to join forces.
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A week later they drove east together from Gadot, down the narrow country road to the one-lane bridge across the river, into the land that had lain beyond enemy lines, upward, the road rising steeply in switchbacks, until they could look back down at the valley, hundreds of feet below them, the fields and kibbutz buildings laid out, so the two practical men must have thought, like targets. Today’s job was to find a spot for a bridgehead. The road, straighter now, kept rising. Cattle, left behind by vanished villagers, grazed in yellow grasslands and abandoned fields beneath the wide sky.

They checked the Syrian base next to the village of Naffakh, just a nine-mile drive from Gadot and 2,000 feet higher, where the land was poor for farming but the deserted buildings were in decent condition, and another Syrian base farther north, with better land but worse quarters. On the way back down they agreed that Ben-Yehudah would take care of technical arrangements, and Sat would find recruits to settle at Naffakh in two weeks.
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Very quickly, they found another ally from a northern kibbutz: Yigal Allon. According to Sat, Yehudah Harel made the connection; he was “born into the party’s old-boys’ club.”
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On July 3, Allon submitted a proposal to the cabinet to allow the Settlement Department to establish two or three temporary “work camps” in the heights, to house laborers from the Galilee who would farm the land. If the government preferred to disguise the camps as military rather than civilian, the workers could be reservists, the proposal said.
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He had changed his mind about staying within the international border; the heights were now on his settlement map but, he later explained, “I thought it would be easier for me, politically or psychologically, to define it as an experimental farm and not necessarily as a permanent settlement.”
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While the proposal lingered on the cabinet agenda, Allon pushed ahead. “The army needed…people to take care of the abandoned livestock on the Golan Heights—abandoned cows, wild horses that ran around,” he later said. “There was no problem reaching an understanding that our guys would do the work.” As for cash, “as labor minister I had a large budget…for work projects for the unemployed.” The settlers, therefore, would be registered as needing jobs. He wrote to the Settlement Department. “Since I knew they didn’t have much money, the misers, I said that when it comes to funding the people’s work, I’ll cover it.”
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Ben-Yehudah’s pocket calendar filled with details. Get food, mattresses, guns, flares, a pipe wrench, official permits from the army to be in occupied territory. Get maps, DDT, a generator. Explain to his own kibbutz why he wanted time off, that he did not intend to leave, only to get the project going. Meet representatives of the Upper Galilee regional council, explain that the settlers would gather the cattle, sheep, donkeys, harvest the abandoned crops, plant for next year. He marked down a promise from the council of 10,000 Israeli pounds ($3,300) and the loan of a jeep. He and Sat met General David Elazar of the Northern Command and Settlement Department chief Ra’anan Weitz.
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On July 13, Ben-Rafael and Sat came to the little town of Rosh Pinah, to meet Weitz’s deputy, Yehiel Admoni, who drove up from Jerusalem, and his Galilee man, Meir Shamir, in Gittel’s restaurant, the size of a living room, with shaky tables that Gittel waited on herself serving the food she cooked. There was a balcony looking out over the highway north, the place you went to sit to be seen in the Galilee. Admoni was impressed that Ben-Yehudah and Sat were serious, and the department agreed to help, knowing, as Admoni acknowledged, “that they weren’t talking about gathering cattle…but about settling in the Golan.” The department agreed to kick in for supplies and a van, without telling or asking higher officials, and “disguised the action” as “arrangements with the regional council.”
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It was a congenial conspiracy, not of rebels but of well-connected people, who had fought together in the Palmah or who regretted being born too late to do so, who spoke in the same accent, had the same friends, and assumed they could bend the rules because their cause was so accepted, so absolutely assumed.

Eytan Sat went from kibbutz to kibbutz in the north, meeting with the secretary of each, asking for young volunteers. He did not find the great awakening imagined by Tabenkin. Young people did not enlist in droves. Though Yehudah Harel wanted to come, his kibbutz did not want to let him leave. The effort was a failure, Sat felt, but he signed up one here, two there. “In some cases, the kibbutz secretary said to me, this is a bachelor, maybe he’ll meet someone,” he would recall. In the back of his diary, Ben-Yehudah listed a dozen and a half candidates.
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One was twenty-four-year-old Carmel Bar, a shepherd at Kibbutz Mahanayim, westward across the valley from Gadot, just released from his reserve paratroop unit. Romanian-born, Bar had spent part of his early childhood in a Cyprus detention camp where the British kept Jews who tried to enter Palestine illegally. Immediately after independence, when he was five, his family reached Israel. Eventually he came to Mahanayim with a youth movement settlement group. It was a schoolbook Labor Zionist biography; if there were an Israeli Norman Rockwell, he would have painted pictures of Bar. After Sat’s recruiting stop at Mahanayim, someone dropped by Bar’s room and asked if he was interested. He agreed, though “for my sins, I can’t say why,” he later recalled. “I was a bachelor…educated in a youth movement, with hot blood,” ready for an adventure.

Ben-Yehudah and Sat, meanwhile, made a small shift in plans. The water supply was poor at Naffakh. The destination became the Syrian base at nearby Aalleiqa. One day Bar got a phone call, telling him what time to be out on the road. It was a Sunday morning; his mother had come to visit the day before and complained that he was moving even farther from the Tel Aviv area. At the appointed time, an open jeep pulled up, driven by Rafael Ben-Yehudah. Bar dropped his sleeping bag in the jeep, climbed in, and introduced himself. Ben-Yehudah, supremely taciturn, answered, “Eh.” They crossed the river and headed uphill. To each question Bar asked, Ben-Yehudah again answered, “Eh.”

At Aalleiqa, Bar got out. There were Bedouin there from Israel, hired by the Agriculture Ministry to begin collecting the livestock, and Ben-Yehudah paid them in cash and cigarettes. One young member of Gadot had already arrived, but left the next day. For practical purposes, Carmel Bar was the first Israeli settler in occupied territory.

The date was July 16, 1967. It was five weeks after the end of the war, less than a month after the cabinet voted that Israel would withdraw from the heights for peace. Contrary to custom, there was no ceremony, no speeches by officials, to celebrate establishment of a new kibbutz. There was no news coverage. For a day Bar was alone, and then a handful of others came, and more in ones and threes, most even younger than him, men back from war, lost in what had been routine and looking for something new.
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