The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (14 page)

Stunned, a kibbutz interviewer said, “None of us wanted, at all, for there to be a war.” The enemy’s defeat, the charred convoys in the desert, the refugees—all that only depressed them, he said.

“In my opinion, that’s not such a healthy sign,” said Naftali, another student, explaining at length why it was a commandment to kill those who fought against Israel.

“What of the love of humanity in Judaism?” asked the interviewer.

And Yohanan answered, again describing the process of convincing oneself, of putting doctrine over the gut sense of morality: “The educating side of a person must come and tell him, ‘Yes there’s sadness and depression and respect for the enemy and all the feelings of mercy, but after all we’re talking here about big things.’”
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The interviewers left “perplexed and grieving,” Amos Oz wrote later, for “all this was a language totally foreign to us.” Excerpts from the exchange were published the following year in a kibbutz movement quarterly. Judging from Oz’s later comments, the original transcript contained much more about the miraculous conquest of biblical land and how it heralded the coming of the messiah—material apparently so strange it was snipped out. The excerpts appeared under a note explaining that for “technical reasons” this conversation had not made it into
Soldiers’ Talk.
Yet it seems that Oz, with his comrades, preferred to turn away from thoughts and people so foreign and threatening. Once again, it was safer to fence off those who were different.

Which was a shame, because far more people read the bestselling
Soldiers’ Talk
than the kibbutz journal, and it would have been worth their knowing of the students’ comments. They reflected a theology about to sweep religious Zionist society. For the few who were already Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s disciples, the war was breathtaking, mind-boggling proof of the doctrine, equivalent to the heavens opening. For other religious Jews, the victory needed an explanation. The messianism of the Kook school provided answers.

Messianism, it should be said, appears more foreign to secular eyes than it should. The idea that our world is rushing toward a perfected age is well rooted in Western tradition. People who have never sat in a yeshivah study hall, or heard the sermons of Christian fundamentalists, have written of the “end of history” or sung of the coming “age of Aquarius” or—as the Internationale would have it—the “last fight” that will “end the age of cant” and “unite the human race.” Messianists presume that history is a well-constructed story with a happy ending. They acknowledge that our world is terribly flawed, but assert that it will be fixed, by God or humanity or the two working together. This can be a long-distance expectation, but when part of the expectation is met, optimism can turn into a collective, infectious, energizing mania:
Look, it’s happening, get on board
.
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The students were quoting their teachers well. The elder Rabbi Kook, reading history under the influence of both Yitzhak Luria’s messianic kabbalism and Hegel’s dialectics, indeed greeted World War I as signaling rebirth: “When there is a great war in the world, the power of the messiah awakens,” he wrote.
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Very much a nineteenth-century liberal nationalist, he anticipated the end of European tyrants, heralding a universal as well as Jewish rebirth. His son, Tzvi Yehudah Kook, did in fact explain the Holocaust as “a cruel divine operation in order to lift [the Jews] up to the Land of Israel against their wills.”
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The state of Israel, he asserted after independence, was “the fulfillment of the vision of redemption.”
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The swift victory in June 1967 turned such hopes into fever. Rabbi Ya’akov Filber, a disciple of Tzvi Yehudah Kook, wrote soon after the war that “He Who Sits in Heaven did not accept that the Temple Mount and Jerusalem, Hebron and Shekhem, Bethlehem and Jericho…were outside the borders of Israel.” God had simply forced Jews to liberate their homeland. It was God’s will that Nasser sent his troops to Sinai, that diplomacy failed. God “hardened the heart of Hussein,” just as he once hardened the heart of Pharaoh to redeem the children of Israel. Now, Filber asserted, Israelis were reawakening to the divine commandment “as important as all others combined: settling the land of Israel.”
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Filber regarded the future, as well as the past, as an open book. Several weeks after the war a group of young rabbis met with the National Religious Party’s cabinet ministers, still suspect as minimalists, to sway them from any thoughts of supporting withdrawal from the newly conquered land. Filber told them, “I believe with a perfect faith, that if the Holy One, Blessed Be He, gave us the land with overt miracles, he will not take it out of our hands…. The wholeness of the Land of Israel is not within the realm of the government of Israel’s decision.” Retreat was not only forbidden, but impossible, Filber said, and his only concern was that the ministers not confuse and embarrass young people by estranging themselves from the Whole Land.
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Those ideas spread beyond Merkaz Harav. They were used in Bnei Akiva, the youth movement of the National Religious Party, to make sense of the victory. The movement’s monthly magazine,
Seeds
, was printed on the same newsprint before and after the war, with the same bylines, but there is a discontinuity in tone—not a change, but a rupture.

As a movement, Bnei Akiva resembled a thin kid with glasses running after several hefty ones, asking in a squeaky voice and misused slang to be included in the next adventure. Its mandate was to teach kids that they should grow up to live on Orthodox kibbutzim—to be just as good Israelis as the secular kids in left-wing movements, but continue to keep kosher, pray daily, and observe the Sabbath. It was not easy. The Israeli ruling class regarded religion as something of the past, and saw establishment of the state as proving the victory of secular Zionism. Bnei Akiva was trying to accept and reject that victory at the same time. Its members sang songs from the Palmah underground and learned of the heroism of the Etzion Bloc fighters, just as good as secular fighters, and meanwhile they bore a litany of insults and sometimes blows from members of the Labor Zionist movements. The simplest solution was to give up Orthodoxy. For those who stayed in the movement, the required goal was to serve in Nahal, the army unit that combined active duty and settlement training, and then move to a kibbutz—though, as with the secular movements, few actually stayed.
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Largely in response to their parents’ desire to keep their sons Orthodox, a growing number of yeshivot were established that combined secular high school studies, an intense Talmud program, and dormitory living. In name, many of the yeshivot were linked to Bnei Akiva, but kibbutz members who ran the movement thought poorly of them. Eventually, the yeshivot set up their own, semi-independent organization, to reduce interference from the youth movement.
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The last issue of
Seeds
before the war carried the text of a long speech by Ya’akov Drori of Kibbutz Sa’ad at a movement convention. He attacked yeshivah high schools for encouraging their students to continue on to higher yeshivot instead of to kibbutz, “that special creation unmatched by anything in the most enlightened of peoples.” Some of the yeshivot, he said, regarded the Orthodox kibbutzim as insufficiently religious because of men and women “sitting together in the dining hall or singing Sabbath songs together or even dancing the
horah
together.”
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Overweening piety was not the movement’s goal, he implied.
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The same Drori wrote in the following issue, immediately after the war, “We have merited to see the process of deliverance progress from ‘the beginning of redemption’ to more advanced stages.” He congratulated the National Religious Party’s ministers for seeking to avoid war—because God had used their efforts to bring greater conquests. “That delay was undoubtedly the result of Divine providence, for otherwise who knows if Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Rachel’s Tomb and the Tomb of the Patriarchs would now be in our hands,” Drori wrote, adding a prayer that God would give the politicians strength to resist concessions. “A religious party more than any other…is commanded not to give up one inch of holy soil in the borders promised by God.” He also had a practical proposal: reestablishing the kibbutzim of the Etzion Bloc. If the government had not yet decided on permanent settlement, he said, it could immediately create a Nahal paramilitary outpost.
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If someone was looking for a large group of young people in Israel who had grown up in the shadow of others’ heroism, scared they had missed the chance at revolution, it was among the readers of those words.

IN THE SYRIAN HEIGHTS
, the settlers at Aalleiqa slept in a eucalyptus grove, next to a stream, until they could clean up rooms in the base, in shacks made of cement blocks, without foundations, closer to being ruins than buildings. A member of Mahanayim came to spray pesticide, unsuccessfully, against the bedbugs. Northern Command chief David Elazar provided several soldiers to guard the unofficial settlement, and gave the settlers permission to eat the canned Chinese meat in the Syrian storerooms. It took a week to get a generator, two to set up a radio link with Kibbutz Gadot in the valley below.
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Eytan Sat drove up to Quneitrah, the Syrian ghost town at the edge of Israeli-held land, where the military governor had set up his office. The air was thick with flies, drawn by corpses left from the war. Sat asked for a written permit for civilians to be in occupied territory. The governor “didn’t have much to do, because he didn’t have anyone to govern,” Sat would recall. “He sat whisking flies away from his face. A fat guy sitting in this Syrian armchair. I wait for the verdict…and he doesn’t take it serious like me, and he writes a letter, ‘I hereby approve for a group of farmers from the upper Galilee…’.” With that note, the settlers gained the first toehold of approval—not to create a settlement but to stay overnight in the heights.
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Gershon Meinrat was twenty-one when he came to Aalleiqa with a friend from Kibbutz Beit Hashitah, one of the big communes founded in the 1930s, where he had grown up. He was done with his two years of regular army service and was now obligated to give another year of service to the United Kibbutz. One day a phone call came from movement headquarters in Tel Aviv: “Head up to Gadot, they’re waiting to take you up to the heights.” Eytan Sat had convinced the movement’s youth director to send some of the “third-years” to help out. Meinrat was happy to go, less for politics than for what he called “the adventure shtick.”

There was plenty of work—building corrals, gathering cattle and sheep, inoculating them, harvesting the barley and chickpeas in fields of a few acres surrounded by stone fences, whose owners had lived in village houses of stone stuck together with mud and who were gone now. The pay that the settlers received from the Agriculture Ministry went into a shared kitty. Haim Gvati, the Mapai agriculture minister, was in on the effort, though there was a dispute with the ministry over whether they could keep the herd they were gathering.

They all knew they were building a kibbutz. They wanted to create a new, better commune—which was, after all, a hope shared by other young people, in other countrysides, in that era. And yet, Carmel Bar noticed, “Everyone who came from a kibbutz wanted to do things exactly as at his kibbutz.” It made sense because “it’s impossible to draw an animal you don’t know.” A strange comment, because the founders of their own kibbutzim had conjured up a creature never seen before. But the settlers were second-generation revolutionaries, and the second generation of a revolution is likely to be an institution.
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Then again, adult solidity had not yet set in. Every kibbutz has a work director, in charge of drawing up a daily schedule of where members will work. When Yehudah Harel arrived at Aalleiqa on September 1, he found a notice on the bulletin board from the work director, asking everyone to let him know before taking vacation—which in kibbutz terms indicated mad individualism, people taking off when the mood hit them, without the collective’s permission. It had taken him two and a half months to get his own kibbutz’s permission to leave for the heights. The United Kibbutz, in his description, had a tradition of “Bolshevik” discipline. In the end his comrades gave in when he threatened to go anyway. At Aalleiqa, someone told Harel to grab a Syrian mattress from a storeroom and throw it wherever he wanted to sleep. Rafael Ben-Yehudah immediately made Harel secretary of the commune, at age thirty-two the house grown-up, in charge of creating order.

Harel had been thirteen when Israel was established, old enough to absorb the dream of the kibbutz revolution in its glory before statehood, just young enough to stand on the sidelines of the battles in 1948. “We thought we’d missed the war of independence…. The kibbutz movement was no longer what we’d thought it was,” he would later say, describing his sense of the mood at Aalleiqa. Now it seemed history was offering a second chance. “We dreamed…that a new era was beginning, that we would be the first settlement of hundreds, that thousands of young [ Jews] would immigrate from abroad, that everything we’d read in books about the kibbutz movement and the war of independence, we were doing.”

Best yet, the decision to create a kibbutz had not come from bureaucrats. The atmosphere was anarchist. “On the first day I was there,” Harel would recall, “in the middle of lunch, I got a real shock—there was a burst of gunfire, from an AK-47 from inside the dining hall. Someone stood by a window and shot a wild dog.” When they were in the mood, they slaughtered a Syrian sheep to supplement the canned food. The women did the cooking. The men herded cattle on horseback, cowboys on a secret frontier. The base had a spring-fed swimming pool. “Every evening—these were young people—they sat and sang.” At night, the only lights in the heights came from their encampment; the sky was wild with stars. It was a picnic, a celebration—the true evidence this was not in fact the 1930s. “In other kibbutzim, people generally tell how hard it was at first. Here, you’ve got to tell how
easy
it was at the start.”
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