The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (25 page)

The group got no answer from the military government and, true to form, stayed in the tomb on Rosh Hashanah through midday, violating the rules. A score of prominent Hebronites, including Mayor Jabari and the city’s top clerics, sent a telegram that day to the military governor, complaining that “the Israeli occupation authority in Hebron committed an offense against the pure Ibrahimi Mosque, by giving permission to a group of Jews to pray within the pure mosque…and it was therefore not possible for Muslims to pray at noon in the blessed mosque.” The site was strictly Islamic, they asserted, “and no one but Muslims may worship there.” They thereby denied any Jewish connection to the place, a formula perfectly pitched to rally secular Israelis to the settlers’ side. The answer—officially from the army commander in Hebron, but written by the justice minister and approved by Eshkol—criticized the telegram’s “sharp and unjustified” language and described the holy site as “the eternal resting place, according to ancient belief and tradition…of the fathers and mothers of the Jewish people.” The settlers got permission to spend all of Yom Kippur in the tomb, yet another success for Levinger’s methods.
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Just after Yom Kippur comes the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot, when many Israelis exploit the last blue days of the dry season for outings. On the holiday’s third day, October 9, at four in the afternoon, 4,000 Israeli and foreign tourists filled the square in front of the tomb-mosque, waiting their turn to enter. Arab peddlers, many of them children, offered combs, dolls, and kaffiyehs for sale. From the crowd, a grenade sailed through the air, landing on the top step of the stairs to the entrance. Then came the roar and screaming and blood and running, the wounded lying on the steps, mothers shouting wildly for children, the peddlers fleeing, the sirens and thumping of helicopter blades. Forty-seven people, almost all Israelis and foreigners, were wounded. Some young men from among the visitors began beating up Arabs. Shop shutters began slamming closed.

The day after next, Israeli papers reported the arrest of an eleventh-grade Hebron boy suspected of throwing the grenade, along with other members of the cell that had sent him and that had carried out previous attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The holiday crowd may merely have been a convenient target. Then again, the attackers may have seen the time and place as having added value, as a statement about ownership.
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Another letter came to the West Bank military commander in November, this one signed by the Hebron Settlers Secretariat. “Given that we are residents of Hebron and regularly walk in the city and to the Tomb of the Patriarchs,” it said, “we hereby permit ourselves to express our opinion that the indulgence toward the Arabs, with all their acts of terror perpetrated here…endangers our residents and visitors.” The settlers “expected and believed” that the army would reconsider its “lenient” policies, since “enough Jewish blood has already been spilled in Hebron.”
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The subtext was hierarchy: The army stood a notch below the town’s rightful heirs; its job was to protect them by showing Arab “local residents” where power lay. Another letter, two weeks after, demanded quicker government action on establishing a Jewish neighborhood.
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Much more quietly, another Allon-sponsored settlement project turned from plan to fact. In November, two dozen or so young men moved into the youth hostel at Kfar Etzion to become the founding class at the Har Etzion
hesder
yeshivah—
hesder
, “arrangement,” referring to the agreement to alternate between religious study and army service.

To head the institution, Etzion Bloc activists Hanan Porat and Moshe Moskovic recruited Yehudah Amital, a Transylvanian-born scholar who had arrived in Palestine in 1944 at the age of nineteen straight from a Nazi labor camp, the sole survivor in his family. Besides being a charismatic believer in the theology that made Zionism proof of impending redemption, Amital had a résumé that included army service in 1948, setting him apart from the usual cloistered yeshivah dean. The new students were told to bring plenty of blankets with them to the windy hilltop kibbutz, along with the volume of Talmud they would be studying and the biblical text of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings with rabbinic commentaries, those being the books recounting the Israelites’ conquest of the land and the rise of the House of David. Porat would give lessons, as would Yoel Bin-Nun, the Merkaz Harav student who had quoted Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook on war as part of God’s plan and whose comments remained on the cutting-room floor of
Soldiers’ Talk.
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In the Golan Heights stood at least eight Israeli settlements by that fall, according to government documents, which included the Nahal outpost in the old demilitarized zone next to Banias in the count, and more were in the pipeline. The kibbutz in Quneitrah was no longer listed as Nahal, even in official papers.
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Even the minimalist finance minister Pinhas Sapir supported settlement in the land taken from Syria.
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Sapir’s concern was over adding large numbers of Arabs to Israel’s population, and the Heights did not present that problem. Only in the left-wing Mapam did debate burn about settling in the area, though the party’s “right” faction—more or less the same faction that wanted to run for Knesset on a joint ticket with Labor—favored putting kibbutzim there.

Still, Merom Golan secretary Yehudah Harel admitted in his kibbutz newsletter, “A year has passed…and settlement activity is not taking place on the scale we see as essential.” The dry words were his eulogy for the hope that he had held for a kibbutz renaissance, for hundreds of communes springing up in “liberated” land. No revival had swept the young generation.
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A third Nahal outpost, named Argaman, was established in the Jordan Rift nearly midway between the first two—Kalyah near the Dead Sea, and Meholah at the Rift’s north end. The soldier-settlers arrived in November and quickly planted ten acres of peppers to take advantage of the winter sun. Symbolically, the Argaman pepper field and the settlers’ tents suggested Israeli intent to claim the whole desert valley, though there was no declared policy of doing so. Dayan had once opposed settling the center of the rift, a move too visibly showing West Bank Arabs they were being cut off from the East Bank. He had since dropped his objections.
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“
THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION
is that no peace with the king of Jordan is in sight, and we should see our presence in the territories as permanent,” Dayan wrote in October, in a memo to fellow ministers. Diplomatic stalemate was a golden opportunity to push his own vision of the West Bank’s future. “We must consolidate our hold so that over time we will succeed in ‘digesting’ Judea and Samaria and merging them with ‘little’ Israel.”

He acknowledged that Israel could not come close to creating a Jewish majority in occupied land. But he again suggested building Israeli towns along the mountain ridge, near the major Arab cities of Hebron, Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin—to show that Israel was staying, and to “dismember the territorial contiguity” of the West Bank and “enable regional interconnections between [each] Arab and Israeli community.” What frightened Dayan was not ruling a large Arab population, but allowing the West Bank to remain a united Arab area that could demand independence.

He proposed abandoning the ideal of agricultural settlement, because with towns, less land would suffice for more people, and because construction and industry in the Israeli communities would provide jobs for local Arabs, “on condition that they continue to live in their existing communities.” The towns would be built next to army bases, on land expropriated from Arab owners, “with it said that the step is necessary for military purposes”—a legal justification more acceptable under the laws of occupation.

“Settling Israelis in occupied territory contravenes, as is known, international conventions, but there is nothing essentially new in that,” Dayan wrote, acknowledging and dismissing the problem. The legal challenge that would have to be solved, he said, was the status of the settlers—would they be subject to the Jordanian laws still in effect in the West Bank, or to Israeli law?
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Dayan clearly did not like the first option; the subtext is that he sought extraterritorial status for settlers. He appears to have been the first Israeli politician to raise this issue, and not by accident. Allon sought to annex the areas he marked for settlement. Dayan’s question underlined that he wanted the opposite. “Digesting” the West Bank meant that Israel would settle it, divide it so that it could not gain independence, employ its people as workers. Israelis living there would have the same legal status as those living in “metropolitan” Israel. Arabs would be subjects. Dayan enthusiastically sought to invest Israeli government funds on hospitals, waterworks, power lines, and other projects to improve Arabs’ lives.
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But they would not be citizens; they would not even be allowed to live in Israeli cities in the West Bank. Dayan wanted the West Bank as a benevolently run colony, one so close to home you could go there for lunch (or to steal antiquities) and be home for dinner.

While his settlement plan was marked “Secret,” Dayan gave speeches promoting “an effort to bind the two economies”—of Israel and the West Bank—“so that it will be difficult to separate them again.”
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His most prominent opponent was Finance Minister Sapir, Mapai’s master of backroom political and economic dealing, a gruff, bearlike man, often vulgar, strangely vulnerable. In the fall of 1968, Sapir was temporarily serving as the Labor Party secretary-general, after the apparently exhausted Golda Meir gave up the position. His unwritten mandate was to keep the fragile new party together—and to maintain the dominance of the Mapai machine, keeping both Dayan’s wing and Allon’s from taking over. That gave him even more reason to resist Dayan’s program which, he argued, would add so many Arabs to Israel it would cease being a Jewish state. At the end of October, he spoke to an audience of seventy people in a Beersheba hall with seating for 1,200. Several days later Dayan packed the same hall, with 2,000 or more people standing outside to listen to his speech from loudspeakers. Dayan called for linking Beersheba economically with Hebron and Gaza, and attacked “party secretaries who know how to organize elections” but did not understand the Jewish tie to Hebron.
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In early December, when Eshkol was finally feeling well enough to take part, the cabinet devoted three sessions to Dayan’s ideas and the future of the West Bank. Dayan said his proposed cities and the roads linking them to Israel would stay Israeli “till the end of all generations.” The rest of the land could conceivably, in some indefinite future, be turned over to Jordan, he said, though the economic ties would remain. Explaining why Israel should spend money on social services for the territories, he recalled a visit to the West African country of Togo. People still had good memories there of German colonial rule before World War I, he said; the Germans “left orchards and culture.” Israel, he argued, should follow the example of benevolent colonialism.

“I’m going to explode,” Sapir interrupted, saying he cared more about poverty inside Israel than “the Bedouin woman in the Sinai you describe so emotionally,” and insisting that Dayan’s “integration” meant annexation.
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Sapir had more support in the cabinet than in Beersheba, and Dayan’s proposals were rejected. “I think there is much more diplomatic and defensive logic to the program that Minister Allon submitted,” said one cabinet minimalist.
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The debate sparked by Dayan defined Allon as a moderate. The Allon Plan was the “absolute minimum” to which most cabinet members would agree, an Eshkol aide told an American embassy staffer, though he added that officially adopting it would likely push Dayan, the rightist leader Menachem Begin, and three other ministers to resign.
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Yet even as Sapir objected to creating an economy of Arab “hewers of wood and drawers of water” and white-collar Jews, he did not try to block the powerful pressures for employing West Bank Arabs in Israel.
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Dayan’s “integration” plan did not die. It remained as a blueprint of what would happen, bit by bit, in the absence of annexation or withdrawal.

APPEARING IN THE MIDST
of the Dayan-Sapir spat, Labor politician Arie Eliav’s articles in his party’s newspaper in November 1968 may not have received proper attention at the time—like a historical landmark that a family drives right past while arguing where it is going.

“We must see the existence of the Palestinian people as a fact,” Eliav asserted. It could be, he admitted, that Zionism’s struggle with Arab nationalism had accidently begat the Palestinian nation, but the parentage was irrelevant. Israel needed to declare that “we will never repress the rights of the Palestinians to national self-determination, and we are willing to help them establish a state.”
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Eliav was forty-seven, with a hint of a Russian accent from the country he left as a child, and a hint of pudgy Russian cheeks. Before independence he had served in the British army, then captained an illegal immigration boat running the British blockade on Palestine. After a stint of intelligence work and another as an Israeli naval officer, he became Levi Eshkol’s assistant at the Settlement Department, build-ing farm villages and towns for Jewish refugees. It was a standard heroic CV. By the time of the 1967 war, he was deputy industry minister, a rising Mapai man. His next step was not standard: He asked Eshkol for six months off. His postwar euphoria had given way to hungry curiosity. He spent the months in Gaza and the West Bank, listening to refugees, engineers, lawyers, leaders, and a host of others late into the nights.