The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (28 page)

The group decided to make contact with other settlers in “liberated” territory. Simons and his fiancée, Dina, along with Rabbi Waldman and Benny Katzover and several others, set off in the van Allon had provided for a tour of settlements in March 1969. The Jordan Rift road was still unpaved in parts. A photo from the time shows Simons, in the black pants and rumpled white shirt of a yeshivah student, standing on the dirt track next to a sign saying “Nahal Argaman.” In the background, a couple of prefab huts and a telephone pole stand in an empty expanse.

From there they reached Merom Golan in Quneitrah. Simons was unprepared for the fact that the kibbutz dining hall was not kosher, that “such kibbutzim who have a positive attitude to Eretz Yisrael” were distant from “other mitzvot,” or religious commandments. The kibbutz newsletter recorded a pleasant conversation with the visitors. “The core group consists of students of Rabbi Kook of Jerusalem, who have been taught the abnormality of a partitioned Land of Israel, and that it must be made complete because it was given to the Jewish nation by Providence.” Both Kook’s name and his doctrine appear to have been new to the listeners. “We have no intent of pushing out our cousins,” Waldman assured his hosts, using a common condescending term for Arabs, “cousins” of Jews by dint of their descent from Ishmael and thence from Abraham, the shared ancestor buried in the Hebron tomb. Only a lack of housing held back the settlement’s growth, Katzover said, asserting that “we have a list of one hundred families who are interested in settling in Hebron.” The first meeting between the socialist settlers and the religious ones, both clients of Allon, resembled contact between two tribes, each a curiosity to the other.
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BUT THE QUESTION OF SETTLEMENT
growth may have touched a nerve, painfully. At a United Kibbutz conference in May, Yehudah Harel and other representatives of Merom Golan lobbied for the movement to invest more in “liberated territory,” starting with a new commune in the Jordan Rift. Harel demanded that established kibbutzim make more members available to help new ones, and also insisted “that it is possible today to bring outsiders”—not just kibbutz-bred young people—to a new wave of settlements.
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The demands point to what was not happening. So did a speech by Galili, demanding allegiance to the movement’s 1955 “Ideological Foundation” with its doctrine of the eternal indivisibility of the land. “No new reason has arisen to justify negating…our right to settle in the entire land,” he insisted. “If someone stands and asks why I have raised these principles…the answer is that I’m not the only one who perceives new winds, expressing heresy.”

It was not just that a few kibbutz representatives were ready to stand up and openly suggest that occupied territories could be given up for peace. Others asked whether the movement had the people to support new communes. Small kibbutzim did not want to give up members. Larger ones worried about losing their next generation—especially when only about half the children growing up on kibbutzim were staying on as adults. The war had not stopped the inner decline of the kibbutzim. Fewer young people were volunteering for a year of service to the movement. The government had extended military service for men to three years, since the army faced continual conflict on the new frontiers. After three years in uniform, giving another year was harder.
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At the edges of the stated explanations, there are hints of an unstated one: Among the children of the kibbutzim, those who stayed on as adults were not usually the ones with the passion for something new. They were simply returning to the life they knew and did not expect to live the 1930s over again.

The United Kibbutz was not alone. Leaders of Mapai’s rival kibbutz movement, though not committed to the Whole Land, still sought the chance to build new settlements. So did the various organizations of moshavim, the cooperative farm villages. The ethos of putting more Jews on the land was accepted truth. When the government approved new settlement locations in occupied territory, the movements pushed and shoved to get them. Then they searched for young people to settle them. One stopgap solution was to assign a spot to the army’s Nahal settlement arm. Groups of soldiers, graduates of youth movements in the cities, could take turns developing a new settlement until the movement was confident it had people ready, in theory at least, to spend their lives there.

The moshav movements expected better luck, for an ancient reason: At the cooperative farm villages, only one son could inherit his parent’s farm. Yet when movement officials went from village to village looking for land-hungry second sons, history’s readiest colonists, they came back empty-handed. “The sons and daughters did not believe in the future of the new wave of settlement”—that is, in occupied land—“refused to move far from their families, and demanded to settle in their parents’ communities,” an official reported back to Yehiel Admoni at the Settlement Department. According to Admoni, responsible for carrying out the department’s plans, “The most limiting factor was the human factor.”
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“Eilat, you’ve got no idea how hard it is to establish a kibbutz, a new society, so that everything will be OK…. A million problems, organizational and social,” wrote Kobi Rabinovich from Quneitrah to his girlfriend, then serving in the army. He was one of the recruits who had come and stayed—yet the letter gives another hint at why the generation of
Soldiers’ Talk
was uninterested in settlement. For that was as much as he wrote of Merom Golan. Instead, he returns to the Sinai Desert, as if living eternally in June 1967. The heat pounds him, clouds of flies swarm in the air. Standing in his tank turret, he sees distant figures in the dunes. The deputy company commander leaves in a half-track, returns with Egyptian captives. Kobi swings the strap of his Uzi over his shoulder and hikes to the commander’s tank, where curious soldiers are gathering to look. Two dark men, hands bound, sit on the earth, swatting away flies with their heads.

A few steps away, another captive lies, “moaning, wailing, groaning. A filthy rag is tied around his head, totally soaked in blood.” Bullets have shattered his jaw.

It is the last of the war letters Rabinovich left. Months later, after Eilat’s discharge, she joined him at Merom Golan. Perhaps he told her the rest of the journey to the Suez Canal on cool late nights in Quneitrah. Or perhaps this is the last scene in the repeating nightmare, the place it took two years of letters to reach and that left everything afterward, including building a new kibbutz, naked of meaning.

THE SINAI DUNES
were as hot at the end of May 1969, when the first Nahal soldiers came to establish their outpost in the region. A person’s feet sank into the dry sand as if it were marshland. But there were no longer expanses of corpses to draw flies. Two miles north lay the Mediterranean coast. The old international boundary between Israel and Egypt, erased from Israeli maps, was eight miles to the east.
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Between the dunes, in spots where sparse rainfall flowed together, Bedouin farmers tended almond, peach, olive, and castor-oil trees and patches of wheat. Near the beach, where groundwater rose almost to the surface, they farmed a strip a few hundred meters wide that yielded richer crops. Herds of sheep and goats added to their livelihood. So did working for whoever ruled the area—Egyptians before, Israelis now. They were settled tribes; some lived in tents, but more in tin shacks and concrete houses.
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The Nahal unit consisted of seventy-three men and women, from the religious Bnei Akiva youth movement. On the way to the Sinai, they told a reporter, they sang over and over, “Who has kept us alive, and sustained us, and brought us to this day”—words of a blessing recited at celebrations. “When we got here, there was nothing…. The wind lifted the sand, which cut into our eyes, and in front of us stood two lonely structures in the desolation,” the reporter quoted them.
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The outpost was named Dekalim, “palms,” then renamed Diklah, the singular form. By one account, the palm in question had grown from a date in the pocket of Avshalom Feingold, killed by Bedouin during World War I on his way from Turkish Palestine to deliver information from a Jewish spy ring to the British in Egypt. The prosaic name thereby gave the place a martyr and instant historical pathos.
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Immediately, a dispute began between Bnei Akiva and Beitar, the youth movement linked to Menahem Begin’s right-wing Herut party, over who would turn Diklah into a civilian settlement. The rightist movement was a minor player in the settlement effort; the fact that it took part demonstrated the pervasive influence of the left’s ethos of liberating land one field at a time. Beitar won, and sent the next groups of Nahal soldiers.
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Diklah was the easiest spot to begin settling in the area because farmland was available. It had 500 acres, according to Settlement Department documents—fields formerly cultivated by an Egyptian authority for desert development and taken over by the Israeli military government, which employed Bedouin to work them.
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But the army apparently needed to establish its possession of the spot where the outpost’s houses stood. A month after the Nahal soldiers’ arrival, the military commander of the Gaza Strip and northern Sinai, Brigadier General Mordechai Gur—the officer who led the conquest of Jerusalem’s Old City in 1967—issued two decrees. An attached map showed the Nahal outpost, with a line drawn around it, expanding its area. “I hereby declare that the area whose borders are marked on the diagram is seized for military purposes,” said one decree. The second declared the land a “closed military area,” off-limits to civilians. In theory, “seizing” land was less draconian than expropriation—it left legal ownership in the original hands, while giving the army use of the real estate for as long as military need existed. Practically, there was no measurable difference. The owners were to receive compensation, but lost their land. A prefatory sentence in the order seizing the land said the measure was “required for immediate and pressing military needs.”

Another pair of decrees seized and closed some 4,000 acres, about six square miles, just to the east, where Settlement Department plans called for three moshavim to be established.
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The orders, also citing “pressing military needs,” took effect the next day. Later, top officers would argue that the seized land was clearly marked with barrels, but that in an “act of leniency,” the army allowed local Bedouin to continue working plots inside the boundaries.
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The decrees aroused no public notice. Settlement of the Rafiah Plain of northeastern Sinai had begun.

Incrementally, new “facts” appeared elsewhere. That summer, a second Orthodox kibbutz was established near Kfar Etzion, on the site of another of the fallen communes of 1948. No pretense was made that it belonged to Nahal.
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In the Jordan Rift, soldiers arrived in autumn to establish two new outposts. One was earmarked for the United Kibbutz, meeting the demands of activists in the movement to start another commune in the dry land next to the river.
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The outpost, called Gilgal, sat at the foot of a hill that looked like a sleeping dinosaur, its head down, its feet stretched toward the houses, creases visible between its toes. Meanwhile the first outpost at the Rift’s north end, Meholah, was turned over to civilian settlers, an explicit statement that settlement in the region was intended as permanent.
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Allon’s map was slowly filling in.

ANY SUSPICIONS
that Golda Meir was a caretaker prime minister, filling the office only until the October 1969 election, were soon swept away. She enjoyed power. She called back former aides to work for her, a sign she intended to stay on the job. She blasted the four-power talks on the Middle East, declaring that outside powers would not dictate to Israel. She ruled by reacting to events; taking the initiative, Medzini says in his biography, “would only arouse problems in her governing coalition and in the delicate fabric of her party.”
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Dayan made particularly clear that the Labor Party could come unraveled unless the platform fit his hard-line views. “I’m not a devotee of the formula that we’ll stay at these lines until peace comes,” he told a party forum. He did not want to retreat, even for peace, and especially not in the West Bank. Labor’s policy, he said, should be that “we will establish permanent facts with settlement and military consolidation.”

Labor’s nightmare was that Dayan would run on his own ticket. Besides, maximalism had support in the party. So language was found to satisfy Dayan. The 1969 Labor election platform did not say anything about what Israel would be willing to give up. It did say that Israel would not return to the prewar lines, and that it would establish settlements “in accordance with security considerations and the development of the state”—the vague last phrase meaning that security would not be the only consideration. A closed-door meeting adopted a secret “oral doctrine,” the approved gloss on the platform, saying that if negotiations were ever to take place, Israel’s position would be to retain the Golan and Sharm al-Sheikh, and to allow no Arab military in the West Bank.
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The hawkish face of Labor matched Meir’s own.
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