The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (19 page)

Eshkol did not answer that question because his cabinet, with its rainbow of views, could not do so. In a more typical Eshkol talk, a zigzagging argument with himself before a convention of his party’s kibbutz movement, he asserted that “any minister who has gone up to the heights” agreed that Israel must keep the Golan—yet he concluded that “we’re not rushing to decide.” Decisions would make life inconvenient for Eban, he said. Israel’s “security border” had to be the Jordan, he added, but in the West Bank cities of “Nablus and Jenin, [the Arabs] are as numerous as olives” on the local trees. The solution was to keep the unpopulated land between the river and the Arab cities, he suggested, borrowing Allon’s ideas.
⁸²

But while the cabinet debated Allon’s plan, it never accepted or rejected it. Without winning approval for his new borders, Allon erased the old ones. On the same day that Eshkol spoke in the Knesset, but with none of the fanfare, he sent written instructions to the head of his ministry’s cartography department, which produced virtually all of the country’s maps. Henceforth, maps should bear the title, “Israel: Cease-fire Lines,” he said, referring to the cease-fire at the end of the fighting in June. “The mandatory borders and the armistice lines will not be printed.”
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With that, Allon redrew Israelis’ picture of their own country. If the generation that grew up after 1948 had learned to see the land beyond the armistice lines as foreign, the next generation would learn the opposite. Henceforth, bored schoolchildren staring at the classroom map would see Nablus and Gaza, Quneitrah and Al-Arish as part of Israel.

The redrawing of maps fit with changes in language. Already, the government had adopted “administered territories,” suggested by the army’s chief legal officer, as a compromise term between “liberated territories” and “occupied territories.” By December, the biblical name “Judea and Samaria” replaced “West Bank” in official documents.
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Eventually, according to Allon, Eshkol phoned him, invited him for a tête-à-tête to discuss the Allon Plan, and told him, “If we call for a vote, there’s no chance of a majority.” Instead, Eshkol committed himself to following Allon’s guidelines for where to build settlements in occupied land.
⁸⁵
The real map of what Israel would keep would be drawn one fact at a time.

Allon took Eshkol for a field trip, two happy boys with aides and bodyguards riding in jeeps down from Jerusalem to the Jordan Rift, over 1,000 feet below sea level where it meets the Dead Sea, between hills that look like piles of sand poured out by a gargantuan child with a bucket. Then they drove north through the dust-heavy air along the river, really a twisting creek—which Allon regarded “not as a river but simply an anti-tank canal”—all the way north back into Israeli territory. Eshkol kept ordering the driver to stop, so he could jump out to look at a stream or have someone turn a shovel so he could examine the color of the soil, because, as Allon would admiringly describe him, “He was a man of the soil, a man of settlement in every sinew of his body.”
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At the end of the year Eshkol met with Allon and Dayan, and they agreed to set up two Nahal outposts, real ones this time, one at the north end of the rift close to the old armistice line and another at the south end, close to the Dead Sea, in the furnace-hot region where Beit Ha’aravah had stood before 1948. That satisfied the longing to restore any lost spot settled in pre-state days, but putting the outposts at the ends of the rift was also meant to appease both Allon and Dayan, since the latter wanted to leave untouched what the former wanted to settle and so preferred to leave the rest of the rift empty.
⁸⁷

For the Golan Heights, the Settlement Department drew up plans for a score of farming settlements and a town that would together bring 50,000 Israelis to the region. As a modest start, two more civilian communes were established by January, and two military outposts. Actually, the department’s aim was to build only civilian settlements in the Golan, but while the kibbutz movements were eager to sign up for land for new communes, they did not have prospective settlers for them. Eager as an older generation was to return to the golden age of settling the land, they lacked young people willing to sweat, plant new fields, and commit themselves to communal life.
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Measured against the official policy that left the future of occupied land open, the new settlements loomed as a muscular statement. Measured against kibbutz sage Yitzhak Tabenkin’s dreams of hundreds of new communes, against Allon’s vision or the Settlement Department’s plans, the effort to plant settlements in the newly conquered territories was anorexic. A new supply of settlers was needed.

LYNDON JOHNSON’S
foreign policy team had reason to feel satisfied after the Security Council’s unanimous vote on November 22, 1967. Five months of excruciating diplomacy since the war finally yielded a resolution by the United Nations’ most powerful body on the Mideast conflict—and it was a restatement of Johnson’s Five Points. Formally, the vote meant that the Soviet Union and the United States had found an agreed formula; tacitly, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt were grudgingly willing to live with it. Resolution 242 would become the point of reference for future diplomacy.

The resolution called for ending “all claims or states of belligerency,” which was somewhat less than Israel’s demand for formal peace agreements. At the same time, it required “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” In sharp contrast to 1956, Israel’s pullback was conditioned on ending the state of war. The principle of reaching Arab-Israeli peace by trading land for peace became international policy.

As often happens in diplomacy, agreement was built on ambiguity. The reference to Israeli withdrawal “from territories” rather than “from the territories” was the key. For the Soviets and Arabs, that meant a full retreat to the prewar lines. In Israel’s reading, the absent “the” indicated that it needed to give up some land, but not necessarily all.
⁸⁹

But the ambiguity also helped bridge the gap between the United States and Israel on the extent to which borders could be changed. It even papered over what White House staffer Saunders called the “wide gap within our ranks” in the Johnson team over what the United States meant when it called for the “territorial integrity” of Mideast states. Secretary of State Rusk, Saunders noted, was telling foreign ministers that America would like to restore the pre-June boundaries as part of peace. Other officials—left unnamed by Saunders—saw no reason to “go that far” in pushing Israel, in part because “we [in the administration] honestly feel that the Arabs asked for what they got by pulling the rug out from under our 1957 peace settlement.” Johnson himself seemed to lean that way, telling Arab visitors that the United States was unable to force Israel to pull back completely.
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Without the crucial “the,” Resolution 242 allowed for both positions. It also moved the burden of negotiating between Israelis and Arabs to a U.N. emissary. Swedish diplomat Gunnar Jarring, innocent of any Mideast experience, was appointed to the job.
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In January, Levi Eshkol flew to Texas to meet Lyndon Johnson at his ranch. Cold, bitter winds blew at the air base where Eshkol landed. The key subject on the agenda was Israel’s desire to buy arms, particularly fifty advanced F-4 Phantom warplanes, to match Soviet rearming of the Arabs. Johnson joked with Rusk that “it shouldn’t take the air that these people are here for the express purpose of buying bombs and threatening world security.”
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The fat pads of briefing papers by Johnson’s Mideast hands recommended delaying the sale of the Phantoms, lest the military buildup end all chance of peace. But Eshkol should get other planes, to make Israel feel secure enough to agree to concessions. Johnson’s pre-summit reading described the danger of Israel sticking to a “narrow and rigid” insistence on face-to-face talks with the Arabs, but also cited Abba Eban’s assurances that Israel sought only “minor border adjustments.” The Israeli foreign minister remains an urbane mystery: Was he out of the loop in Jerusalem; or did he hope to lock his government into his own dovish stands with the promises he made abroad?

The briefing papers said nothing of settlements. The subject had come up briefly when Eban came to Washington and met Dean Rusk, but it was a technical problem, not one for the leaders of nations to discuss.
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But in the long conversations in the warm living room of Johnson’s ranch, first Rusk and then Johnson asked Eshkol to describe “what kind of Israel we would be expected to support.” The line seems rehearsed, a friendly push for a commitment to peace rather than land. Eshkol evaded answering.
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Johnson posed the question yet again—“What kind of Israel do you want?”—in a one-on-one conversation with Eshkol. Afterward, Eshkol told Allon he had replied, “My government has decided not to decide.”
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The lack of an answer had no effect on the summit’s outcome: Johnson held out the possibility of supplying Phantoms later and promised lighter Skyhawk warplanes immediately.
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The Bundy Doctrine held sway; the United States would not use arms to pressure Israel.

Eshkol had stronger reasons than ever to avoid defining his goals. He was returning home to the ceremony merging his Mapai party with Allon’s Ahdut Ha’avodah and Dayan’s Rafi party, in a celebration of Labor Zionism unity. Even as Israeli politics was redefined by the issue of territory, the new Labor Party contained nearly every possible view on the matter. The aging Golda Meir, appointed Labor’s secretary general, urged avoiding “stormy debates” that might divide the party. When Eshkol held small meetings to set policy, he had to invite Dayan as well as Allon. Labor’s symbol should have been a large red question mark.
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But facts could still be created. Replying to a right-wing legislator’s question in the Knesset in late February 1968, Eshkol said there were already ten “outposts” in the “administered territories,” with establishment of seven more approved. Eshkol’s figures are taken from a summary apparently provided by the Settlement Department. It lists slightly more than eight hundred Israelis living in the “outposts” in occupied land.
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In the Knesset, of course, Eshkol said nothing of Theodor Meron’s inconvenient legal opinion.

Yaakov Perry spent the winter studying from morning till after midnight, sometimes straight through the night. The course consisted of Palestinian Arabic—not as one language, but a Babel of dialects of towns and villages, so students could know where a suspect was from or change their own speech to fit a disguise—and local customs and the reading of handwriting, so they could read a half-educated informer’s note in a second, and the art of “winning the heart of potential agents,” as Perry wrote many years later, after a long career in the Shin Bet. That winter he was twenty-three years old, having spent less than two years in the security agency, a square-jawed young man whose hairline was just hinting at later baldness, who had expected to study music at Juilliard until, in a fit of frustration with drunken fellow musicians in a radio orchestra, he answered a cryptic ad offering “challenging work.” The promising trumpet player sought to become an artist of secrecy.

The Shin Bet handled counterintelligence—catching spies, uncovering terror groups, preventing attacks. “Defends and Shall Not Be Seen” was inscribed on its seal. The full name of every employee, up to the agency’s director, was classified. Until June 1967, it was a compact agency of a few hundred staffers. Suddenly it had to add the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and West Bank to its watch, along with the Sinai’s sparse population and the Syrian Druse who remained in the Golan Heights. By that winter, the agency was expanding like a company whose product has found a new market. It called back retired agents and borrowed from the Mossad, the service that spied on foreign countries, but also began wholesale recruitment of young people right out of the army.
¹

The Shin Bet buildup was one piece of the entrenchment of Israeli rule over the occupied territories—a piecemeal process, guided by no agreed government policy, based on no explicit decision except, perhaps, the ambiguous government response to the Khartoum summit. Left undefined was how long Israel would stay put, what outcome it sought, and—most important—what Israel’s attitude and policy would be toward the people over whom it now ruled.

In the war, Levi Eshkol was fond of saying, “We got a lovely dowry. The trouble is that with dowry comes the wife.”
²
His government was unable to give up the dowry of land or make up its mind about what to do about the bride, the people. It could not answer, even for itself, the question that Lyndon Johnson put to Eshkol: What kind of Israel do you want?

IN THE LONG MEANTIME
, that meant the Palestinians lived under military rule, which meant they lived under the rule of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The military government was tossed together in a hurry after the unplanned conquests. In August 1967, needing help, Dayan told Colonel Shlomo Gazit, the outgoing head of Military Intelligence’s research department, that he was canceling his leave for university study. “We’ve held the territories for over two months and we still can’t see the end,” Dayan told Gazit, as he appointed him to the new, half-undefined position of “coordinator of government activities in the territories,” perhaps best translated as viceroy to Dayan. Gazit expected to fill the job for a few months, until the occupation ended.
³

Dayan ruled the occupied land directly, personally, with minimal oversight from cabinet or parliament. That role became his central concern, filling his time. According to Gazit, Dayan’s appointment book stayed virtually empty, except for the cabinet meeting at the start of each week and the military staff meeting at the end. He decided how to spend his day when he got up each morning, visiting Arab mayors and Israeli officers to see what was happening in the field, issuing verbal commands on the spot, to be translated by an officer at his elbow into formal orders. He cut the military general staff out of the loop.
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Dayan transformed himself into the sultan of the occupied territories.

He regarded himself as a benevolent ruler. Soon after the war, officers began allowing West Bank trucks to ford the Jordan River to carry produce to the East Bank, giving farmers an outlet without undercutting the Israeli market. As winter rains approached, Bailey bridges were put up to replace those destroyed in the war. Dayan, artful improviser, enshrined the measure as his “open bridges” policy. West Bank and Gaza residents could cross into Jordan. De facto, they could also enter Israel and get jobs in manual labor.
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By October, Dayan formulated a policy of “invisible” rule, with the goal that “a local Arab can live his life…without needing to see or speak with an Israeli representative.” The army was to avoid unnecessary patrols in Arab towns, keep Israeli flags to a minimum, refrain from interfering in how Arab mayors ran their towns.
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Dayan presumed that as long as life improved economically for his subjects, as long as he was a stern but kind ruler, they would tolerate his rule indefinitely. In his memoirs, he expressed fascination with the West Bank’s biblical history. Without pausing, he went on to portray the Arabs who lived there now, “the field hands behind a wooden plow and pair of oxen, the women moving sedately from well to village with a pitcher on their heads…. I did not think of them as being interposed between me and the land.” He felt closest, he said, to the Bedouin of the southern Gaza Strip, who maintained their desert customs. Dayan, infatuated with the ancient past, unabashed about his decades of pilfering of antiquities from archaeological sites he obsessively sought out, did not see the Arabs as standing between him and the land because they were figures in his diorama of the romanticized Bible.
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That they would step off his stage and seek to live by a script they wrote themselves was not on his mind.

Then again, military orders issued in the summer of 1967 forbade strikes, the celebration of Egyptian national holidays in Gaza, the publication of political material without military government approval.
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One needed an Israeli permit to cross the bridges, or to sell goods in Israel, or for other matters.
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The raw material most easily exported to Israel was physical labor. “At the end of the sixties,” Gazit would write with striking honesty nearly three decades later, “the world was already watching the end of the era of colonialism, and precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.” That was all the more surprising, in Gazit’s view, because Israel’s leaders were themselves the veterans of a national liberation struggle against foreign rule.
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Colonialism
is a loaded word today, but if we accept British scholar Stephen Howe’s bid to restore its dry meaning—a system “of rule by one group over another, where the first claims the right…to exercise exclusive sovereignty over the second and to shape its destiny”—then Israel was indeed backing into colonialism in the occupied territories.
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Colonialism, like the conquest itself, reflected a vacuum of strategy. It was born of a national evasion of choices.

PROTESTS IN DAYAN’S DOMAIN
—a strike here, a petition elsewhere—were sporadic.
¹²
For most people in the towns, villages, and refugee camps, it appears, politics was something that happened elsewhere, in Arab capitals or perhaps the camps of the fragmented Palestinian organizations in neighboring Arab countries. But the organizations, especially Fatah, the nationalist group led by a militant named Yasser Arafat, did have local supporters, and the Jordan River was easily crossed by others. Entering Israel proper was even simpler. The Palestinian groups, dedicated to “armed struggle,” did not acknowledge the Jewish presence as any more legitimate within the Green Line than in occupied territory, and civilian targets were more available inside Israel.

The first burst of attacks began toward summer’s end of 1967. A bomb at a farmhouse killed a small boy and wounded his parents, a kibbutz factory blew up, a mine derailed a freight train. The Shin Bet was unready but lucky: The would-be revolutionaries all knew each other; organizations unraveled with the first arrests.

And soon reorganized. A bomb was discovered before it exploded in a movie theater in downtown Jerusalem, mortar shells fell on a Tel Aviv suburb.
¹³
The strategy of Fatah and its rival organizations was terrorism—another word that must be rescued from shouted use. Used quietly, as the political scientist David Rapoport has written,
terrorism
properly refers to a doctrine of revolution that dates back to nineteenth-century Russian anarchists. Its goal is to awaken an apathetic populace; its means is atrocity, beyond any conventional use of force. Terrorism, says Rapoport, was invented to “provoke government to respond indiscriminately, undermining…its own credibility and legitimacy.”
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Fatah cribbed the strategy from
The Wretched of the Earth
, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon’s treatise on decolonization, which anointed “absolute violence” as the only means of ending colonial rule. By killing, rebels would spur rulers to slaughter, in turn provoking more of the oppressed to rise up.

Murder, wrote Fanon, is also therapeutic; it “frees the native from his inferiority complex…it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”
¹⁵
Put bluntly, he prescribed killing to heal the injured masculinity of the colonized. In Ramallah, Aziz Shehadeh’s son responded to the presence of Israeli soldiers with long guns and half-buttoned shirts by forlornly trying to get his father to notice he was shaving and by listening to the urgent masculine voices on Palestinian radio broadcasts. Some of his high school classmates left for training camps beyond the river.
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In February 1968, Yaakov Perry finished his retraining and was assigned to the Shin Bet’s new bureau in Nablus. He was the third man in the office. He received a 9-mm pistol, a first-aid kit, an army uniform with captain’s bars for when he needed that camouflage, and responsibility for dozens of villages and refugee camps in the hill country stretching south to Ramallah.

His first, pressing task was to recruit informers. People asking for permits or other favors from the military government were sent to talk to “Captain Yaakov,” and Perry led the conversation to collaboration. In one case, an aging sheikh from a refugee camp sought permission for his wife to receive gynecological treatment at an Israeli hospital but refused to aid “infidels” and stormed out of Captain Yaakov’s room. In his memoirs, Perry writes that he granted the permit anyway—and that later the old man came around, asking for a promise that his tips would be used only to prevent injury to women and children. His payment was an old truck that allowed him to drive from village to village, “selling clothes, granting spiritual comfort and gathering information” that he wrote up in hints spiced with Koranic verses. Payment to informers was always modest; sudden riches would look suspicious. But they had to be paid, Perry explains, so that they knew they were stained irreversibly, with no way home.

Perry, like other Shin Bet agents, drove a white Israeli-made sedan called a Carmel, with a fiberglass body and an extra roof antenna. Army officers drove the same car. Even when he wore civvies, the car and antenna identified him as a Shin Bet man. Eventually the antenna was removed, but a telltale scar remained in the fiberglass.

At times, Perry writes, the army and Shin Bet carried out “strangle-hold ops” in the casbah, the crowded old town, of Nablus. Troops encircled the area, all men were ordered to gather at a central point, soldiers searched houses and rooftops for suspects and arms caches. Though terror did not ignite popular revolution or spur Israelis to slaughter, it did help ensure that the occupation was not invisible.

Nor was Perry invisible. When his first son was born, Fatah Radio announced the news, with the comment, “We know just where your wife takes walks with the baby.” Perry gave her a loaded pistol, which she kept under a blanket in the baby carriage.
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UNLIKE DAYAN
, Amos Oz refused to romanticize. In an essay published in
Davar
, the newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, the young kibbutz novelist scorned those who looked at Palestinian Arabs as “a colorful component of the biblical setting, or at best as natives who would drool with gratitude if we treated them kindly.” Oz did not make policy suggestions, but he did argue for a very different way of seeing the relationship between Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine—bleakly.

Oz’s essay reverses the roles of generations: An author in his twenties grimly rejects the naïveté and extravagant hopes of older leaders. Philosophically, Oz insists that Zionism aims for a Jewish state in part of the homeland, not at possessing the entire homeland. Subtly, he also engages in a literary dispute: Oz argues against politicians but also writers, like those of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, who cast history as epic poetry. History is a claustrophobic modern novel, he implies, whose characters refuse to be wholly heroes or victims, and whose conflict will not reach a resolution but, at best, an uncomfortable accommodation.

Zionism, Oz writes, is an escape from the nightmarish Jewish fate in Europe of being persecuted as a perpetual “symbol of something inhuman.” Jews need a state to live as individuals, not as a character in someone else’s myth. Yet neither that motive nor the Jews’ historical tie to their land can matter to the country’s Arabs. “The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him,” he argues. That right justifies only grabbing a place on the plank, not pushing others off. It gives moral basis to partitioning the land, not taking it all.

The irony, Oz suggests, is that to evade this problem, many Jews have turned Arabs into characters in a Jewish myth: Canaanites to be embraced or driven out, primitives to be uplifted. The fact is that the Palestinians are a people, entitled to determine their own future. “The land is our land. It is also their land. Right conflicts with right,” tragically. The only possible compromise, “burdened with bitterness,” would be between “an inconsistent Zionist and an inconsistent Palestinian.” For Israel to seek everything will confirm the Arab belief in the “Satanic power of Zionism.” It will turn Jews into a symbol of something inhuman, in the land where they came to escape that fate.
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