The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (21 page)

In the same spirit, Kollek decided to squash the results of a survey City Hall had carried out among Jerusalem’s Jews on how they saw unification and East Jerusalemites. The descriptions of Arabs with which respondents identified most were “a people with many hypocrites…a people of cowards…primitive…a people that does not tend to wash.” More than 80 percent expected unification to increase crime in the city, while only half expected it would bring prosperity. The groom thought very little of the bride, results that would do nothing to promote a picture of coexistence. Kollek informed Eshkol he was destroying all copies of the survey in city hands, leaving the prime minister to decide what to do with his copy.
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Meanwhile maps were drawn up for the next round of expropriations—a thirty-acre piece of the Old City for restoring the Jewish Quarter and a larger area in the city’s north, where a new neighborhood would take the place of the abandoned pre-state Jewish farm community of Neveh Ya’akov.
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Another effort was kept even quieter. “What I can tell you is to see and not be seen,” Eshkol told the veteran intelligence operative Ada Sereni at a top-secret discussion of Palestinian refugees in February 1968. Sereni had worked for years in Europe on covert efforts to bring Jews from the Soviet Union to Israel. Now Eshkol wanted her to speed migration in another direction. “Find ways and paths that will help the Arabs to emigrate. What interests us now most is the Gaza Strip. The intent is to encourage them to emigrate, beyond what is now going on without our intervention,” he told her. Perhaps they could be channeled to South America, Eshkol suggested. “It’s possible to move people there that no one would even know about their existence in the world.”
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Sereni reported back on March 20 on efforts that included paying the fare for families who left by truck from Gaza to the Jordan River bridges and from there, “it seems, to the closest refugee camp, in Karameh,” between the river and Amman. She sought funds for more agents to spread the idea in refugee camps.
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“How many Arabs did you send this week?” Eshkol asked, opening the next week’s meeting.

“Last week there was a drop in the number leaving. It was unavoidable, because of the week’s events,” Sereni said. “The number fell to 800, from 1,200–1,500 in previous weeks.”

The “events” were the Israeli army’s massive attack on Karameh, where Fatah leader Yasser Arafat had his headquarters, on March 21. The proximate cause was a terror attack a few days before, in which an Israeli school bus hit a Palestinian-planted mine. To the IDF’s surprise, the Palestinians at Karameh put up a strong fight and Jordanian troops joined the Palestinians in a fierce battle. Karameh became a symbol of valor for Fatah, and would draw thousands of young Palestinians to its training camps. By the cold logic of terror, killing two adults and wounding ten children on the school bus had indeed provoked Israel to lend a hand in recruiting apathetic Palestinians to armed struggle.

Turmoil in Jordan did not make life on the East Bank more attractive to inhabitants of the occupied Strip. Worse, Sereni pointed out, destitute refugees who did reach Jordan were likely to join Fatah simply to gain a livelihood. She wanted funds to offer a few hundred dollars per family so they could buy land or houses. A few days later Eshkol approved funding for that purpose and more agents to work the refugee camps.
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On the settlement front, Eshkol was still playing with the idea of Hebron. At the end of March, he gave a briefing to Hannah Zemer, editor of his party’s
Davar
newspaper, whose pointed questions showed marked discomfort with entrenchment in the occupied territories. When she asked about “demands to settle in Hebron,” Eshkol answered, “If there are those who suggest creating a settlement in Hebron without dispossessing anyone, I don’t see a sin in that.”

“And then our boys will have to serve an extra three months…to guard those yeshivah students,” Zemer warned.
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Another warning on settlement came soon after, from the U.S. State Department. A message on April 8 to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv noted that Nahal settlements were “taking on aspects of permanent, civilian, kibbutz-like operations and some are, in fact, civilian kibbutzim with Nahal covers.” Eshkol’s Knesset comments about the number of “outposts” added cause for concern. The embassy, said State, should remind Israel’s government of America’s “continuing opposition to any Israeli settlements in the occupied areas.” Even when under military control, settlements violated Article 49 of the Geneva Convention. They indicated that Israel did not intend to reach a peace accord involving withdrawal. The sharp language makes clear that the United States saw settlements, including Nahal ones, as illegal under international law. But the message was drafted by the midlevel diplomats who handled technical issues, and was sent by diplomatic mail rather than cable, meaning it would take about a week to arrive.
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By the time an embassy officer could meet a Foreign Ministry official of similar rank to pass on the protest, the next escalation in settlement almost certainly had begun.

PASSOVER BEGAN
at sunset on Friday, April 12. That day the Park Hotel in Hebron filled with guests. It was a square, two-story stone building with small rooms, which had lost its clientele of Arab pilgrims to the city of the prophet Ibrahim and was now getting a rush of customers ostensibly coming only to conduct a Passover seder, the festive dinner celebrating the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, in the city of Abraham.
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By most accounts General Uzi Narkiss, head of the army’s Central Command, granted Levinger permission for his group to stay overnight. Narkiss was convinced they were coming only for seder night. Approval was needed because Narkiss’s most recent order permitting Israelis to visit the West Bank allowed them to enter and leave only during daylight hours.
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In another version, by the pro-Dayan writer Shabtai Teveth, they need not have bothered with permission, since the poorly worded order accidentally allowed entering occupied land during sunlight of one day and leaving during daylight of another. The order would have to be amended before the defense minister gained control over the presence of Levinger and company—providing an additional reason, in Teveth’s view, for Dayan’s slow response, beside the fact that on that Passover night he was lying in a hospital bed recovering from injuries to his vertebrae, ribs, and vocal cords sustained three weeks earlier (on the day before the Karameh operation), when he took time off from military planning to loot an archaeological site for Bronze Age relics, and a cave collapsed on him.
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Dayan, in any case, did not know in advance of Levinger’s arrival. Yigal Allon did, or at least knew that Levinger was considering the Passover plan. “I’ll tell you just what happened,” Allon explained to an interviewer eleven years later, by which time he was eager to defend himself against the charge of supporting defiance of the government. “They…wanted to turn the seder at Park Hotel at the entrance to Hebron into the first toehold of settlement. They turned to me. Why? I don’t know! Maybe because they knew I’d helped the Etzion Bloc people, I’d helped in the Jordan Rift and the Golan…. I said I’d help them under two conditions. First, that the seder would be held with the agreement of the military governor. Second, that if the government or the prime minister decides that there shouldn’t be a settlement in Hebron or nearby—they talked about the city of Hebron—they’ll accept the decision.”
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Some guests at the Park were supporters who did not intend to stay. Moshe Shamir, the formerly far-left novelist from the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, showed up. Journalist Yisrael Harel was there, interested but uncommitted to remaining. The dean of Moskovic’s Or Etzion yeshivah, Rabbi Haim Druckman, came to conduct the seder. Even within Levinger’s group of would-be settlers, some thought their stay was to be symbolic, and came with only a few days’ clothes. Miriam and Moshe Levinger and their four children arrived in the afternoon—at Miriam’s insistence, with a truck carrying their refrigerator, washing machine, and the rest of their household.

Before sunset, Levinger and a companion visited Hebron’s military governor and demanded assistance with security for the seder. In Levinger’s telling, the governor at first refused to have anything to do with them. Then he relented, tore off a long strip of paper from the margin of the newspaper he was reading, and scribbled, “To the police commander. Give the bearer of this note four rifles and two Uzis.” At police headquarters, the commander honored the note. Soon after, Druse Border Police came to the hotel. Since they were not celebrating, they said, they would stand guard.
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How many people took part in the seder depends on the narrator. Yisrael Harel, who years later said it bothered him that he had failed to feel a “mythic experience” that night, estimated that there were forty to forty-five people present.
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Levinger has given numbers as high as one hundred.
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Druckman asked each participant to say something about the holiday. Moshe Shamir, by one account, commented on a piece of the seder liturgy known by its refrain, “It would be enough for us.” Each of God’s miracles in the course of the Exodus would have been sufficient, say the classic verses of thanksgiving; how much more so should He be praised for all of them. No, Shamir declared, the individual miracles were not enough! All were needed! It was a sign of weakness to be satisfied! The text was criticism, he insisted, of Jews willing to “settle for the achievements of the past,” like those who a year earlier would have been willing to settle for a Jewish state without Hebron. Druckman gave a kiss on the forehead to the former Marxist who had seen the light—though the comment showed exactly what the old Shamir shared with the new: a revolutionary’s disgust with halfway and compromise, a certainty that anything short of everything is nothing.
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When the seder ended after midnight, the participants went outside to dance with the Border Policemen in the streets of a town known among other Arabs as bleakly conservative. After a night’s sleep, the group marched through town to the Tomb of the Patriarchs carrying Torah scrolls, singing and dancing.

The Tomb, sacred to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque, was already a flash point. A stone complex dating back to King Herod’s time two thousand years before, it had been converted to a church by the Byzantines, then to a mosque after the Muslim conquest. From the thirteenth century, Jews could come no closer than the seventh step of the wide stone stairway leading to the entrance. That rule vanished when Israeli troops rolled into the town. What remained was uncertainty and conflicting claims. Eventually Dayan flew to Hebron to meet the sheikh of the mosque and work out a modus vivendi for Muslims and Jews to share the holy place.
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Now, on their first full day in town, the settlers were indicating that quiet compromise was not on their agenda.

In another corner of occupied territory, that Passover seder night was also the first that the settlers in the Syrian officers’ quarter of Quneitrah celebrated together. The Golan kibbutz now had a population of 117, and was growing up: There were now a few married couples, and five children. Carmel Bar, the original settler, invited his parents from their Tel Aviv suburb, signaling that this was really home. The guest of honor, the living representative of kibbutz tradition, was the white-haired secular sage, Yitzhak Tabenkin.
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“Sometimes I have to look at others to see that we, we’re actually happy,” Golan settler Kobi Rabinovich, still haunted by Sinai battles, wrote to his girlfriend. “I can see that I have it so good. It’s good, good for me that I have you, and I don’t need any more. But why is the world like this, so much sadness and evil? I feel like I have no right to have this.”
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The words are an unintended gloss on “It would be enough.” The man singed by war, lacking a grand idea that turns death into a detail, looks at normal life and says, “This is too much.”

Shin Bet man Yaakov Perry did not get home for seder. At dusk in his office in Nablus, finishing a quiet day, he received an informant’s urgent message that a group of armed Palestinians would cross the Jordan that night, on their way to a holiday attack in Israel. They would be led by a commander known only as Samir, who had repeatedly escaped capture. At midnight Perry waited in ambush with a squad of paratroopers above the river. Silhouettes rose from the darkness just when the informant said they would. But after the soldiers’ first shots, the intruders escaped westward. Before dawn, troops caught up with them outside the village of Beit Furik, near Nablus. The firefight, Perry records in his memoirs, was tough. A paratroop sergeant was killed, several Palestinian gunmen also fell, and others surrendered.

The Palestinian commander escaped again, toward the cover of the houses. By now there was a drill for this, Perry writes: Jeeps with loudspeakers rolled through the village, ordering all men to the local school. In the first light of this spring morning, soldiers and Border Police searched houses and yards. In the schoolyard, Shin Bet agents questioned the men, one by one, through the day. At last, on a hunch, Perry records, he confronted one of the remaining men, and said, “I know you’re Samir.” He was right.
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For most Israelis that day, the occupation was unnoticeable, in part because of an informant’s tip. At the Park Hotel, the occupied were half-visible, like the outlines of the seated people seen from a stage, the faceless and essential audience. In Beit Furik, the occupation was quite apparent.