The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (23 page)

To decide on a proposal for Hussein, Eshkol met at the end of May with Allon, Dayan, and Eban, assuming that any consensus among that awkward group could be imposed on his fractious party and cabinet. Nearly a year had passed since the war. “The truth is we don’t know so clearly what we actually want,” Eshkol said, which was why he was unhappy with ministers presenting negotiating positions publicly, or running to Hebron to support a settlement begun without government approval. He wanted agreement with Jordan; it would satisfy Johnson and let Israel avoid “swallowing another million Arabs,” he said. “There have been imperialist countries larger than us, and they taught [the colonial subjects] their languages and created francophones and anglophones…. Then the people knew to say ‘enough, we don’t want you here,’” Eshkol warned.

Dayan’s suggestion was that Israel should insist on keeping its army bases on the mountain ridge, and on the Jordanian army staying out of the West Bank. Militarily, Israel would rule the region. But the civilian administration would be Jordanian—except, perhaps, in the Etzion Bloc and the Jordan Rift, where Israel now had settlements. The Arab residents would be Jordanian citizens, voting for the Jordanian parliament. Israeli citizens would be free to go where they wanted up to the Jordan River, to live in Hebron or perhaps elsewhere in the West Bank, without need for visas, thereby expressing their “Jewish connection to the cradle of the homeland.”

“So from the start you say, ‘Yes, it’s your country, but I’m a permanent resident here’?” Eshkol asked.

No, Dayan answered, “I don’t say it’s your country. You give the name, I say to them. Or to you. It doesn’t interest me.” Israel could claim the West Bank, and Jordan could claim it. “I don’t say this is the classic, accepted structure of borders between two countries,” Dayan admitted. Borders and formal ownership did not interest him in affairs of state—which fit the way the inveterate philanderer and antiquities raider behaved in private life. His offer to Hussein was that the West Bank could be the mistress of two countries. He was willing to make a similar offer to Palestinians, he said, relating to a new proposal by the Ramallah lawyer Aziz Shehadeh and Nablus mayor Hamdi Kanan to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state. But he did not actually expect talks to lead anywhere. As he saw it, Israel would rule the West Bank indefinitely, and should “integrate” the region with Israel proper and Gaza.

If Dayan’s proposal was the only security solution, Eban answered, “then we may despair” of agreement with Hussein. Instead, endorsing Allon’s approach, he pushed a “clean-cut” division of territory, with Israel retaining a strip along the Jordan River.

Suddenly, at the meeting’s end, Dayan blurted out that he “was familiar with Yigal’s conception” and could live with it. The comment backs up Gazit’s description of Dayan as an outsider in the government, willing to present ideas but not to fight for them. In his own realm, he was the sole ruler; in the cabinet, a loner.
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The meeting ended with no formal decision, but implied support for Allon’s position. Afterward, Labor’s political committee debated the Allon Plan, and the leaks gave the proposal more headlines. The decision by Eshkol and the Labor Party’s secretary-general Golda Meir to make Allon deputy prime minister and head of a new ministry for immigration—infuriating Dayan—could only increase interest in his plan.
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But neither the party nor the government adopted the Allon Plan, allowing other politicians to continue pushing their views.

So when Dayan met Jabari and a delegation of local leaders in early June, he not only rejected their request to remove the Hebron settlers but also said that the government’s policy in the occupied territories was to “function as if peace had come.” The occupation, he implied, had become normalcy, an imposed but positive coexistence between Israelis and Arabs.

That contented view was seeping into the Israeli public as well. “This is peace. It is being created little by little, in the endless meetings happening constantly between them and us,” Haim Gouri wrote in his paper, describing summer traffic across the Jordan River bridges. Gouri guessed that the Arabs waiting to cross were quietly cursing foreign rule, but also that many were saying that “a year has passed since the war and the way is open…and people come and go and it’s possible to live and the Jews are not so bad.”
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The contacts with Shehadeh and other moderates from the northern West Bank collapsed. Eshkol was slow to respond, then willing to offer only autonomy. In July, Jabari tried to sail with that breeze, suggesting that he be appointed governor of the West Bank, under the military government. Dayan favored the idea; it was a way to declare the occupation over, to proclaim normalcy, while Israel remained in control. But the other West Bank leaders were unwilling to accept Jabari, and the plan was trimmed to him becoming governor of the Hebron district. Before signing, Dayan said at a meeting with Eshkol and other ministers on July 23, “I suggest we exchange some words [with Jabari] on a Jewish settlement at Hebron.” The cabinet was ready to examine building a Jewish neighborhood next to the city, he noted. Jabari should know in advance. “I have no doubt,” Dayan said, “that he’ll swallow that.”

Eshkol mused aloud about where the neighborhood should be, but assumed it had to be close to the city’s contested holy site. “I don’t know exactly where the Tomb of the Patriarchs is there,” he said.

“It’s in the middle of the city,” Dayan told him.

“Maybe we’ll make a different tomb?” Eshkol joked, and adjourned the meeting.
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But the self-rule plan also fell apart. Jabari decided he would be satisfied only with the entire West Bank—or as Gazit has argued, he used that as an excuse, after Jordanian radio broadcast warnings against reaching separate agreements with the enemy.
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It makes little difference. Ultimately, self-rule was not intended to end occupation but to make it less visible—to hide the bride and keep the dowry—while allowing settlement to continue.

West Bank Palestinians interested in statehood alongside Israel had more reason for discouragement, and fear. The Palestine Liberation Organization—set up by Arab governments but increasingly dominated by Fatah—declared in July that anyone trying to set up a “counterfeit Palestinian entity” in the land occupied since June 1967 was an “enemy of the Arab Palestinian people.”
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The PLO sought the Whole Land of Palestine, and rejected halfway measures. In 1968, the two-state option resembled Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine: It could be imagined, not built. But it was dangerous to imagine. At night, young Raja Shehadeh heard the radio station of the Syrian-backed Palestinian group Al-Saika warning his father, “We shall eliminate you…. Traitor. Collaborator. Quisling.”
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THE KATZOVER WEDDING
was set for August 7. Benny had met Binah while he was in the army. They announced their engagement after he moved to Hebron, and she joined the informal commune in the government headquarters building. Unmarried women shared a single room crowded with bunk beds. Families and singles ate together in a shared dining hall. In the kitchen next door stood the refrigerators that families had brought with them.

In the midst of a revolution, there is little room for private life. The settlers’ first wedding would be a celebration of their presence, orchestrated by the collective. A thousand people were invited, including the entire cabinet. Buses were chartered to bring guests. The radical nationalist Shlomo Goren, who that year stepped down as chief army chaplain to become chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, would officiate at the ceremony.
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The Israelis in Hebron were either disturbingly dug in, or disturbingly denied their due, depending on who was commenting. In late July, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Roger Davies phoned Israeli diplomat Shlomo Argov to check on a media report that military authorities would soon begin building a yeshivah, synagogue, and nursery school in the government headquarters courtyard. Davies had been asked to convey that State was perturbed at “what seems to be the permanent civilian settlement in Hebron” and that “this could only complicate Israeli efforts to obtain a peace settlement with Jordan.” Davies scrawled Argov’s answers that, well, yes, Hebron was a “controversial issue within the cabinet” but there was a matter of “reestablishing Jews in [the] City of Prophets,” presumably Davies’s mistranscription of “Patriarchs.”
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Shortly afterward, the settlers sent a letter to Eshkol, demanding construction of a yeshivah campus with housing for students, teachers, and staff, along with approval for a Jewish neighborhood—a project they justified both by the “deep historical tie to the city of our fathers” and by Hebron’s record as “a center of murderous activity” against Zionism and Israel. They also complained that too few Jews were visiting the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a problem they ascribed to the authorities’ refusal to let the settlers open a kosher restaurant next to the holy place. “UNTIL WHEN WILL OUR BRETHREN BE PREVENTED FROM EATING IN A JEWISH RESTAURANT AS IN ANY CITY IN ISRAEL?” the letter shouted, with no intent of irony. The subtext was the settlers’ frustration with Dayan, who had put off requests to open businesses in town by telling them to get licenses from city hall—that is, from Mayor Jabari.
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On the wedding day, assuming that guests would arrive early to visit the tomb, the settler group set up a table outside the holy site to sell soft drinks. They brought the supplies for the so-called kiosk in a van that Allon had provided to the community. Military governor Ofer Ben-David gave permission or turned a blind eye for the happy day. The wedding meal was held in the government headquarters courtyard, with disposable plates flying in the wind.

The next morning the kiosk was back, with a large sign reading “Hebron Settlers.” Now Ben-David called Gazit, who did not intend to let Levinger get away with overextending his welcome again. Gazit took off by helicopter from Tel Aviv for Hebron, while on his orders the governor headed for the kiosk and told the three settlers behind the table to remove it. Levinger, also on the scene, asked not to dismantle the kiosk before the crowd of locals. The governor ordered his soldiers to take it away. The settlers were incensed, they told reporters afterward, at being humiliated in broad daylight “with Arabs standing and laughing at us.” The proper hierarchy of power, they felt, had been turned upside down. When Gazit landed, determined not to allow “wildcat creating of facts, as on Passover,” he canceled the three settlers’ permits to live in Hebron. They had until noon on Sunday, three days hence, to leave town.
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Sunday morning was when the cabinet met. It immediately became the court of appeals for Gazit’s order, with settlers—including Katzover, the new groom—lobbying ministers and Knesset members. Allon, in Katzover’s telling, promised them the order would be rescinded, and that they would get permission to open businesses. Reporters poured into Hebron. One of the Kiosk Three, a young woman named Hannah Meir, proclaimed, “Our settlement here is a supreme imperative that takes precedence even over orders and decisions of the government.” That day the government decided only to give the threesome a week’s extension. By bizarre coincidence, the settlers were again helped by a death, this time that of Moshe Dayan’s father.
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The defense minister was in mourning, and his colleagues politely awaited his return.

In the meantime, four political parties demanded a Knesset debate. From the podium, Eshkol sounded resolute. “The settlers entered the place [Hebron] as visitors and presented all of us with a fait accompli…. Turning that behavior into a system…will undermine the authority of the military government,” if not of the state itself, he said. “No Israeli citizen who cares about national security can agree to be the party to such a thing.”
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When Dayan returned to work, he met with a delegation of Hebron settlers. They, too, framed the issue as the rule of law—from the opposite direction. The group had held a general meeting, Levinger said, and resolved that there were “matters in which we think that we are not permitted to be subject to the laws of the military government.” Among the “traditional Jewish laws” they cited as higher authority was the Law of Return—Israeli legislation that granted every Jew the right of repatriation to the State of Israel. In their reading, that became a principle entitling Jews to return to the entire Land of Israel, and to any place in the land they chose.
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Allon again acted as the settlers’ patron when the cabinet finally debated Gazit’s order. “I don’t want to institute a system of exiling a Jew from his place of residence, even if he lives there under a permit from the military government,” Allon argued. “Just as I would not be exiled from Ginossar, a Jew should not be exiled from Hebron.”

“They’re living in an area under military government, and they must have permits!” objected another Labor minister.

“They live there for security purposes,” Allon answered, giving the wildcat settlement a role in national defense.
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The cabinet session again ended without a resolution. In Hebron, the settlers chose tactical retreat. “In a general meeting…we reached the conclusion that we must not break the law in dedication to our cause,” said a note they sent to Dayan, “and we commit ourselves to obeying the military government’s laws and orders in their entirety.”
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Dayan recommended renewing the settlers’ permits to live in Hebron.
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The following Sunday morning, August 25, the cabinet ratified that decision—and set up a committee on settlement in Hebron.
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In practice, the committee’s mandate was to choose a location for a Jewish neighborhood, a matter that Eshkol handled personally. Before the ministerial panel met, he had a report in hand from three top officials whom he had assigned to find possible locations.
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