The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (17 page)

“Dear Hanan Porat,” Amir wrote. “At a meeting on Monday evening between several activists in the ‘movement’ and a few of your people, such as Rabbi Levinger…it was agreed and decided that the deed
will be done
”—he drew a heavy line under the lovely verb—“and absolutely as soon as possible. The initial makeup will be about 35 people, and its purpose will be mainly as a demonstration, with about 20 Orthodox settlement people and youth and the rest city people, mostly secular, some of them writers and professors…. We decided to ask you (a) if you are ready to come with us, (b) if there are any other students from your yeshivah who would be willing to…spend at least a week at the place.”
³⁹
Soon after, September 25 was set as the day for defiantly establishing a settlement, or at least publicly acting like it for a week or so to break down Eshkol’s presumed resistance.
⁴⁰

In the meantime, though, Porat found himself sitting in the prime minister’s office, along with other Etzion young people, Moskovic, and Michael Chasani, a Knesset member from the National Religious Party, who was the prime mover in setting up religious farming settlements. It was Friday morning, September 22. In that day’s newspapers, the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel made its public debut, with large advertisements declaring, “We are faithfully obligated to the wholeness of our land…. No government in Israel has the right to relinquish that completeness.” Among the names at the bottom was Moshe Moskovic.
⁴¹

No minutes were taken of the meeting. A summary in the prime minister’s files says that the group pressed for permission to settle in the old Etzion Bloc. Eshkol explained that “no decision had been made on the future of the administered territories…. Nonetheless, the prime minister took on himself…to check the situation” and promised a quick answer.
⁴²
As participants remembered the conversation, Eshkol’s comments were pithier—but just as ambiguous.

“So,
kinderlach
,” the prime minister said, using the Yiddish word for “little children,” “you’d like to go up? Go ahead up!”

The verb suggested settlement, but left room for uncertainty. Porat pushed. “We’re getting close to Rosh Hashanah,” the Jewish religious new year. “Will we be able to pray there on Rosh Hashanah?”

“Nu,
kinderlach
, if you’d like to pray, go ahead and pray.”

“When we say ‘to pray,’” Porat said, “we mean to return…to this land, this home.”

“You use big words,” Eshkol answered. “I’ve said what I’ve said.”
⁴³

When the story was passed down, Eshkol’s comments were retold—depending on the storyteller’s personality—as everything from warm approval to an absolute no, overcome only by the activists’ defiance.
⁴⁴
At the time, though, no one was sure what Eshkol meant. Members of the Kfar Etzion second generation spent that Friday night and the next day at Moskovic’s yeshivah, debating what to do if the government said no.
⁴⁵

Eshkol solved that problem for them. “We’re taking care of the matter of outposts,” he told the weekly cabinet meeting that Sunday, using the word for Nahal paramilitary posts. “By ‘we,’ I mean the Agriculture Ministry, the Settlement Department, and I’m in on the business. Regarding the Etzion Bloc…within two weeks…they’ll be entering the place.”

Eshkol’s wording fit an administrative decision, as if he were reporting in his old role of Settlement Department chief on developing a district within Israel. The announcement surprised his colleagues, who would have expected a cabinet debate on a strategic matter such as settlement in the West Bank.

Eshkol’s explanation was that “the Etzion Bloc enters [the category] of one of the army bases” along the West Bank mountain ridge, approved the month before on Dayan’s suggestion. He was not preempting a decision on the future of occupied land, he said, indicating that the Etzion area could be connected to Israel by a corridor. “The only question is how to do it so that we take as few Arabs as possible,” he said, “and what will happen afterward with the whole West Bank.”

When a minister from the dovish, left-wing Mapam party pointed out, correctly, that the cabinet had specifically resolved that the bases would be built without housing for families, Eshkol answered, “Right now we’re only talking about the Etzion Bloc, and as for what we discussed, we said the opposite.”

Actually, the Etzion Bloc was not the whole story. Eshkol said he was also checking into reestablishing Kibbutz Beit Ha’aravah, at the north end of the Dead Sea. A Nahal group was already setting up an outpost near Banias, on the border of the Golan Heights, he added. “I think someplace that was decided on,” he said, vaguely. Agriculture Minister Gvati assured his colleagues that the Banias spot was “kosher,” inside the borders of mandatory Palestine. “I’m not quite sure of that,” Eshkol replied. Gvati was actually right that the spot was inside the mandatory borders—it lay within the former DMZ, on land that Syrian forces controlled de facto before June 1967 but over which Israel had claimed sovereignty. But Eshkol appears not to have been exercised about whether the outpost was on “kosher” land.
⁴⁶

Eshkol was as vague about what he had approved at the Etzion Bloc. He spoke of an “outpost,” but added, “in the course of time, kids become goats.” Everyone knew that outposts normally grew up to be civilian settlements. Using the word
outpost
was a way to impose a far-reaching decision with a wink. And by speaking of an outpost, Eshkol was also exploiting the loophole in Meron’s legal opinion: Kfar Etzion would be labeled a military base.
⁴⁷

In the end, the cabinet adopted a strange “decision,” saying that “the prime minister has announced that an outpost will be established soon at the Etzion Bloc.”
⁴⁸
It was a resolution to acquiesce. Or perhaps the official record of a decision was also a
fait accompli
: A U.S. diplomat in Tel Aviv reported a leak that some ministers were surprised after the meeting to see the minutes listing a decision they knew nothing about.
⁴⁹
Either way, Eshkol’s move was a front-page story the next morning in Israeli papers, and in the
New York Times
. The
Times
reporter, naturally knowing nothing of Aalleiqa, said this was the “first announcement…of concrete plans for settlement of the territories seized from the Arabs in June.”
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As those newspapers were sold, Porat and two friends were called to the Settlement Department office in Jerusalem to get the news officially, drink a toast, and begin planning. It was September 25, the day Porat and Levinger had marked for illegal settlement, but there is no available evidence that Eshkol knew that.
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Thirty sons and daughters of Kfar Etzion would return to the spot, a memo from the meeting says, beginning with fifteen to twenty who would set up camp two days hence. The memo says nothing of Nahal, or of the settlers being soldiers. Bizarrely, it states that “preparations around the founding should be kept to a minimum” as if, despite that day’s headlines, the media might ignore the event.
⁵²

From there, according to Porat’s later account, he headed to Tel Aviv to meet Levinger at National Religious Party headquarters and give him the good news.

Except Levinger was not pleased. “We decided to do it today,” he insisted. The equipment was already on a truck at Nehalim.

“We have the good fortune of being able to do it through the state,” Porat answered.

“But we prepared for today.”

“Listen, circumstances changed,” Porat said.

Waiting was out of the question, Levinger said. The tone rose. A moment before stepping onstage in the theater of defiance, Levinger found that he was losing his part. At last Porat said, “You know what, you go ahead on your own.” With that, Levinger backed down. Without the returning children of Kfar Etzion, the drama would lose meaning.

The difference in approach remained between them, though, in the years to come. His view, Porat later said, was that “we have to be a vanguard, not separatists.” The words are loaded. “Vanguard” in Hebrew also means “pioneers,” the term used by Labor Zionists for themselves, meaning people who create facts instead of talking. “Separatists” meant the Zionist right, which split from the Mapai-controlled Zionist Organization in the 1930s, eventually developing into Menachem Begin’s Herut party, and which the left dismissed as preferring proclamations and public posturing to actions. Arguing about how to carry Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s vision of redemption through territory, the two disciples were reenacting an old argument, and Porat claimed the methods of the Zionist left.
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THEY MET AT
eight in the morning, September 27, in a Jerusalem parking lot—the handful of young men and women who would move into the Jordanian army buildings, along with survivors, widows, Jewish Agency officials, and reporters. The national bus cooperative, Egged, provided a bus of 1948 vintage, complete with the sheets of steel plating that the Haganah had used to turn buses into ersatz armored vehicles for convoys through Arab-held territory—except the “armor” was plywood painted gray, with the words “Once We Traveled Like This” daubed on it. The driver was the one who had driven the last bus to Kfar Etzion before it fell. Newspaper descriptions of the event give the strange feeling of a historical pageant designed to ride down Main Street on an anniversary, except in this case the point was to leap back in history and make it come out right, with the children acting their parents’ part.

They had another role to play as well: They were to present themselves to the press as Nahal settlers, in line with the official announcements. The flyer they had received from the organizing committee had not mentioned that story line. None of the actual characteristics of an outpost existed: The settlers were not soldiers, and therefore were not serving in Nahal, a branch of the army; there were no officers, no uniforms, no military tasks such as conducting patrols of the area. Nonetheless, the next morning’s papers all dutifully reported the establishment of a Nahal security outpost.

The old bus led a small “convoy” through the hills. At Kfar Etzion, a member of the National Religious Party’s Young Guard told a reporter that “without our determined decision, who knows if we’d be standing here.” The morning before, he asserted, Knesset member Michael Chasani had told Eshkol that the trucks were ready at Nehalim to roll. Only because of that threat, he said, did Eshkol give permission to go ahead—a story that salvaged a fragment of the drama of defiance even if it did not jibe with the headlines two days earlier about Eshkol’s cabinet announcement.

Chasani gave a speech about the Etzion Bloc’s heroic defenders in 1948. As he spoke, “a number of women, widows of the fallen, stood to the side and wept bitterly—among them ones whose children have now come to settle here,” the normally dry
Ha’aretz
reported. The writer did not know that the night before, Porat was called to an apartment of a survivor to meet five widows who, as Porat later described the scene, spoke as an angry chorus: “We were bereaved of our husbands at the Etzion Bloc…and we’re not ready to be bereaved of our children too…. You can’t go off for an adventure at the price of our children.” Porat told them a new era of history was dawning, “and we can’t stand on the sidelines,” besides which they had the army to protect them.

Zorach Warhaftig spoke, too, praying that “this settlement will be forever and the sons will return for eternity,” which in the
Jerusalem Post
’s English report, quoted in diplomatic cables, came out as a simple assertion by a cabinet member that the settlement was permanent. “Today,” proclaimed Porat, “we have removed the shame of the term ‘administered territories’ and returned to the true and fitting term, ‘redeemed territories.’” After the speeches, Levinger installed a Torah scroll in one of the Jordanian buildings, converting it into a synagogue, and the convoy left for Jerusalem, leaving Porat and a dozen or so friends to face the sudden, quiet loneliness of the windy hilltop.
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One invited dignitary refused to come. “This ascent to the soil and others like it in the administered territories and especially in the West Bank, I reject as a serious error,” wrote Joseph Weitz, an unexpected critic, to Chasani. Weitz was the old man of settlement. He had served for decades as a top official of the Jewish National Fund, for much of that time responsible for acquiring real estate and assigning it to new farming communities. The head of the Settlement Department, Ra’anan Weitz, was his son.

But the elder Weitz saw settling in occupied land as a failure to understand that times had changed. A new settlement was not “a ‘position’ or ‘weapon’ as in the ‘days of storm’ of our struggle before the establishment of the state,” he wrote to Chasani, with a carbon copy to Eshkol. The future of the West Bank would be determined in negotiations for peace, “which is vital to the future of the state.” Returning to the Etzion Bloc would “anger our few friends and provide our many enemies with a stick to beat us.” Besides, he said, “you know how few young people are willing to join rural settlements.” Did it not make more sense to put them on Israeli soil, in places to which Israel’s claim was clear, “not just in the view of Isaiah and Jeremiah but also in the view of the gentiles”?
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