The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (3 page)

Even the militant Herut party of Menachem Begin, with its roots in the radical nationalism of the European right between the world wars,
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softened its irredentist claims in return for respectability. In 1965 it ran for parliament on a joint ticket called Gahal with the mainstream Liberal Party (“liberal” in the European sense of capitalism and small government). Herut agreed that “integrity of the homeland”—meaning the claim to territory beyond the Green Line—would not be part of their joint platform.
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The shift went beyond political programs. A growing number of Israelis had grown up or arrived in the country after independence. In the Hebrew literature created by young writers of that time, notes Israeli historian Anita Shapira, there was “no hankering for some ancient historical agenda with Biblical sites and vistas…. Tel Aviv, the new Jerusalem, the kibbutzim—these were the foci of the new Hebrew literature.”
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For the post-independence generation, Shapira argues, Arabs were not extras in a romantic vision of the biblical past but hostile strangers across the border or dangerous infiltrators crossing it. Even the term “Land of Israel,” the Jewish homeland, shifted meaning: In pre-state days, it meant at least all of British Palestine, or could include the East Bank of the Jordan or stretch farther, depending on one’s reading of the Bible and history, or on how much one compensated for present Jewish weakness with the grandeur of myth. After independence, in the Hebrew of at least some young Israelis, “Land of Israel” was virtually a synonym for “State of Israel.”

So at Ramat Rachel, General Narkiss told Gouri that the border was established fact. “It’s our fate to live like this, and so we live,” he said, adding, “A generation has arisen that has never known the land beyond the border.”

From the kibbutz, they headed into the city, following the border. Narkiss told of a nun at the Notre Dame convent, which faced the armistice line, who once coughed while standing at her window. Her false teeth fell into no-man’s-land, and U.N. observers searched for hours among ruins and trash to find them. In Abu Tor, a neighborhood divided in two, Gouri’s photographer snapped a small boy and girl, holding hands, in an alleyway ending in barbed wire. “They were born here,” Gouri wrote. “Here people live; love and death, birth and burial, week-days and holidays roll on. For a moment you forget the wounds of this city, the cruelty of its tornness.”
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YET GOURI
did not really forget, and he was not alone.

He and Narkiss had been born in British Palestine and had reached adulthood in the years before partition. As poet and writer, Gouri often acted as witness, as Greek chorus, for a significant slice of the native-born—those who had grown up in socialist Zionist youth movements tied to the United Kibbutz, who had served in the Palmah and remained loyal to the party known as Ahdut Ha’avodah, the Unity of Labor.

A strange pamphlet called
In Your Covenant
bears testimony to the passions of their youth.
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The booklet was produced in 1937 by older members of the youth movement called Hamahanot Ha’olim, the “Ascending Camps,” who spent the summer together working at Kibbutz Gvat in the Jezreel Valley. Like other Zionist youth movements, Hamahanot Ha’olim was the creation of young people, not of adults trying to provide wholesome education. Youth itself, the newness offered by the young, was part of these movements’ ideology, along with intense politics and a return to nature. Hamahanot Ha’olim stood out because it was founded in the Land of Israel, rather than among Jews abroad, and its members sought to demonstrate their credentials as children of the homeland through outdoing others in the romance with the countryside, exploring its contours and trekking for days through its hills and gorges.
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The event that shaped the summer was the Peel Commission’s partition proposal.
In Your Covenant
is an answer, an adolescently anguished rejection. The word
Your
in the title, in feminine singular, refers to the Land of Israel.
Covenant
alludes both to marriage and to the covenant with God in traditional Judaism. The name itself conjures up the Freudian view of Zionism: The Jews have declared God the Father dead, and have married the motherland.
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Hiking and working the land are the acts of physical love.

Maps in the booklet show the Land of Israel as including both sides of the Jordan River and stretching northward into Lebanon. A table explains that the total territory of the land including Transjordan and parts of southern Syria and Lebanon—identified by biblical names—is nearly 29,000 square miles, while the Jewish state proposed by the commission is less than 2,200 square miles.

There are texts praising physical labor, fitting the youth movement’s proletarian ideology, but more of the booklet is devoted to the homeland. One section chronicles a hike through the northern tip of British Palestine and across the border into the Syrian heights, the area known as the Golan in Hebrew, overlooking the Jordan Valley. Another travelogue describes how movement members explored the Land of Israel by trekking into biblical Gilead, in Transjordan. A short essay on the Peel plan declares, “We have never accepted our unnatural border in the north…. We have always longed for the far bank of the Jordan…the one complete Land cannot be torn asunder.” Another writer rejects the “fate of Nebo”—an allusion to Moses looking at the promised land but not being allowed to enter.

The next year a group of Hamahanot Ha’olim graduates founded Kibbutz Maoz Hayim, just west of the Jordan River, fifteen miles south of the Sea of Galilee. “May this house be the gate to Gilead. The lights of the labor of Hebrew settlements will yet glow in the Golan, Bashan and Horan…,” the commune’s charter declared, using biblical Hebrew names for regions east of the Jordan, and in the next breath: “The working man will yet arise and build his home in a world of brotherhood and freedom.”
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The contrapuntal music of socialism and nationalism was perfectly in tune with the positions of the United Kibbutz, whose leader—father figure, teacher, ideologue, secular equivalent of a Hasidic master—was Yitzhak Tabenkin. Raised in a religious family in Warsaw, Tabenkin gave up faith to become a student, in his own description, of Karl Marx and Zionist poet Haim Nahman Bialik. Early in his career, he referred to kibbutzim as “communist settlements,” later giving up the term because he did not accept the Soviet approach to communism. Tabenkin thought poorly of the political concept of the state. Much closer to anarchism, he aimed at creating Jewish socialism from the bottom up, one commune at a time, but he also insisted that his utopia be built in what he called the Whole Land of Israel. At times his arguments had the veneer of scientific socialism: The land was by nature a single economic unit. At times he used arguments drawn from history and the Bible, which secular Zionism had transformed from scripture to national epic.

The tangle of nationalism and Marxism looks strange only from the anachronistic perspective of a much later European or American leftism. A similar mix drove Ho Chi Minh and other Third World revolutionaries, not to mention Joseph Stalin. In Tabenkin’s eyes, the Middle East’s political borders—including the League of Nations’ post–World War I grant of a mandate over Palestine to Britain—were the imposition of European imperialists. The Jews sought national liberation.
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Tabenkin belonged to Mapai in its early years, but he opposed the Peel plan and quit Mapai’s central committee because the party did not take a strong enough position against the proposal. In 1944 his faction of the party, regarding Ben-Gurion as lukewarm on both proletarian and national issues, walked out and created Ahdut Ha’avodah.
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In the meantime, Tabenkin’s United Kibbutz had become the sponsor of the Palmah. The underground army drew many of its recruits from Hamahanot Ha’olim and similar youth movements, and itself resembled a youth movement with guns—disdainful of rules, rife with backslapping camaraderie, in which privates called their commanders by their first names. When Palestine descended into war in 1948, the Palmah formed the core of the Jewish forces and then the Israeli army. Yigal Allon, a kibbutz member and the Palmah commander, became a general, in command of the southern front at age thirty, and pushed the Egyptian army out of the Negev desert, securing that area for the new state. His chief of operations, another Palmah man, was the twenty-six-year-old Yitzhak Rabin.

Allon, “the armed prophet of the Whole Land” (in the description of Haim Gouri, who served under him),
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argued for territorial maximalism, the military justifications of his generation supplanting Tabenkin’s socialist reasoning. Late in March 1949, as Israel was on the verge of signing an armistice with Transjordan, Allon sent an urgent message to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. Transjordan’s army, the Arab Legion, remained the greatest Arab threat to Israel, he said. It continued to hold the hill country north and south of Jerusalem; it could slice Israel in half to gain access to the Mediterranean. “We must aspire to reasonable depth,” Allon wrote, and argued, “One cannot describe a stronger border than the line of the Jordan the entire length of the land.” Allon was certain his forces could quickly seize the West Bank, and he wanted Ben-Gurion’s permission to do so. As for the Arab residents, he assumed most would flee, and proposed planning the operation to leave them escape routes.
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Ben-Gurion refused, and earned yet another reason for Ahdut Ha’avodah’s fury.

Later that year, Ben-Gurion invited a select group of writers and intellectuals to his Tel Aviv home for a discussion of the new state’s direction. Haim Gouri, still in uniform, newly celebrated for his poetry, was the youngest. During a break in the discussion, he walked into the prime minister’s study and asked why he hadn’t allowed Allon to finish the job. “Tying ourselves up in hostile Arab territory would have imposed an unbearable choice,” Ben-Gurion answered, “accepting hundreds of thousands of Arabs among us, or mass expulsion with the methods of Dir Yassin,” a reference to the Arab village near Jerusalem where members of two right-wing Jewish organizations had committed a massacre in April 1948. Ben-Gurion wanted a state with a Jewish majority more than he wanted the entire homeland, and though he had no objections to Arabs fleeing, he believed they would no longer do so unless Israel used harsher methods than he could accept.
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Tabenkin and his followers, though, remained committed to the dream of possessing the Whole Land. Tabenkin regularly expressed his vision for the future as “the entire Jewish people, in its complete land, nearly all in communes, as part of a worldwide alliance of communist peoples.”
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The United Kibbutz’s “Ideological Foundation,” adopted in 1955, insisted on the complete homeland as the basis for a socialist state of “the Jewish people…and the Arabs living in the land”—phrasing that treated the Jews as a nation, and the Arabs as individuals without national rights.
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After the 1956 Sinai war, the Ahdut Ha’avodah party opposed withdrawal. But by the 1960s, the hope of the Whole Land seemed distant, and the party ran for parliament as the junior partner in an alliance with Mapai.

Yet some continued to believe. In July 1966, Gouri wrote of imagining “all of Jerusalem before me, Jerusalem of then, before the border, of our youth, the days of
In Your Covenant
,” and of imagining, too, “a distant 1948, somewhere in the future.”
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As usual with revolutions, the reality had turned out smaller than the vision, and in this case the difference could be seen on a map. Ergo, the war of independence was not over. A 1948-to-come would complete the dream.

General Narkiss and Gouri finished their May 1967 tour of the border in Jerusalem by stopping at a café. There they found General Mordechai Hod, the commander of the Israel Air Force, who had come to Jerusalem to relax. A couple days before, Hod said, he had gone with Shlomo Goren, the chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, to a spot nearby from which one could see the Western Wall in the Old City. The Wall forms one side of the Temple Mount, the thirty-five-acre plaza where the ancient Temple once stood. For centuries, a narrow courtyard next to the Wall’s immense stones was the most sacred spot for Jewish prayer. Zionism turned it into a secular, nationalist symbol as well, again embracing the mythological energy of religion, sans the obligations and God. But in the years since the Arab Legion had conquered the Old City in 1948, Jews could not reach the site.

“You saw the Wall?”

“Yes, we saw it. General Goren’s eyes filled with tears and I—don’t quote me—I was also very moved.”

Narkiss and Gouri left their tiny cups of Turkish coffee on the table. The lookout point was an abandoned position from 1948, shaded by a pine. The golden Dome of the Rock, the Muslim shrine at the center of the Mount, glowed in the last light of day. With his binoculars, Narkiss found the top three rows of stone, gazed silently, and said, “That must be the Wall.” Gouri stood entranced by the Old City. “I think we’ll get moving,” Narkiss said at last, and Gouri felt he was waking up.
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SEVERAL DAYS LATER
, Hanan Porat stood in a somber crowd of a hundred people at Mount Herzl, the military cemetery on the west of Jerusalem. The mass grave they faced held a crowd of similar size: over a hundred bodies. It was May 14, 1967. More important, it was the fourth day of the Hebrew month of Iyar—Israel’s Memorial Day and the eve of its Independence Day, a sequence of holidays requiring that respect be paid to the fallen before celebration begins. Porat was twenty-three years old. Unlike many people his age in the crowd, he was not facing his father’s grave.