The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (33 page)

It was small comfort that much public fury was aimed at the left-wing Mapam. Prominent Labor backers of the Whole Land, including Rachel Yana’it Ben-Tzvi, widow of the country’s second president, published an ad attacking Mapam’s “slander” against settlement.
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Press reports said that slogans against Diklah, the right-wing moshav on the Rafiah Plain, had been painted on roads near the Mapam kibbutzim. The story sparked a blistering Knesset speech by a rightist legislator. (Later reports said the road graffiti were a year old and had been touched up by an enterprising photographer.) The right called a Knesset debate on “propaganda against settlement.”
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The military inquiry, according to a laconic cabinet statement issued in late March, found that “several officers” had “exceeded their authority.”
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The inquiry report remains classified to this day. Gazit, Admoni, and other writers would later identify the most senior of those officers as Sharon, who received a reprimand for ordering the expulsion without General Staff approval. Military Intelligence chief Aharon Yariv, who conducted the inquiry, also recommended “acquiescing in the reality that has been created,” as Gazit put it, which meant not allowing the Bedouin to return. In protest, Gazit asked to be transferred from his post as coordinator of government activies in the occupied territories. In that case, Chief of Staff Elazar told him, he would also have to end his military career—in effect, a punishment more severe than Sharon’s. Gazit backed down.
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The story of the Rafiah expulsion is absent from Sharon’s autobiography. He does, however, note that in the early 1950s, Dayan explained to him why he was chosen to lead retaliation raids: “Do you know why you’re the one who does all the operations? Because you never ask for written orders. Everyone else wants explicit clarifications. But you never need it in writing. You just do it.” Likewise, Sharon attests, Dayan gave him no written instructions for the offensive in Gaza. Rather, “from him there was only a signal, the nod of a head. That meant, as it always had, ‘Do what you want. If you succeed, fine. If it backfires, don’t start looking to me for support.’”
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Gazit, for his part, comments, “I used to say that Dayan doesn’t know how to write.” Dayan allowed trusted aides to sign his name, but his own orders were oral. At the same time, he kept close track of what was happening among the people in occupied territory, had his own informers, and often knew of developments before anyone else in the military.
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So Dayan’s role in Rafiah is an enigma. Did he give an oral order? A nod of the head? If not, did his informers tell him about the troops arriving at dawn?

“The Rafiah affair,” Gazit would write, “is a striking example of the struggle between opposed interests in Moshe Dayan’s policy.” Dayan sought invisible occupation; “on the other hand stood strategic concerns that could not be realized without hurting innocent Arabs.”
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But Dayan, holding the strategist’s pen to the map, wanted to keep half the Sinai Peninsula, with peace or without, and not only the small stretch of coastal dunes that would seal off the Gaza Strip.
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Even by the logic that said land could be held only by establishing Jewish settlements, the settlements did not need to be on the land of the Rafiah Bedouin.

Dayan’s declared view of the Rafiah Plain as the “new Jezreel Valley”
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may better explain his passion for settlement there. The Jezreel Valley in northern Israel was the “land of splendor”—in the words of a Nathan Alterman poem turned popular anthem—of the 1920s and ’30s, the heroic age of Labor Zionist pioneers.
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It was also Dayan’s childhood landscape, as a son of those pioneers. In the farm communities of the Rafiah Plain, it seems, he imagined repeating the splendor of the valley. In the beach city he would create a new Tel Aviv, urban counterpoint of the valley in early Zionism. Since the Bedouin were part of the landscape, they could be moved when the land was to be reshaped.

Perhaps Dayan merely expressed his interest in Rafiah before Sharon, as he had done before the cabinet, and the general with the bulldozers worked out what was expected of him. For what happened in northeast Sinai in January 1972 is strikingly similar to what Dayan proposed in January 1969 to his fellow ministers: The Bedouin were uprooted, and the justification given was fighting terror in Gaza.

EVERYTHING
holds a spark of holiness, yeshivah student Dov Indig wrote. For example, there were “Hashomer Hatza’ir members who smear the roads of the Gaza Strip in order to defend ‘victimized Arabs.’” One could disagree with them, mock the contradictions in their arguments. But still, they revealed “sincere desire to repair” the world, and that desire reinforced a believer’s faith that the messiah would come, “the hope that all the positive desires…will become a mighty stream, sweeping away evil and falsehood.”
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Indig was twenty years old in the spring of 1972 when he wrote that letter, splitting his time between yeshivah studies and service in the Armored Corps. One day at a base in the Golan Heights, a middle-aged secular kibbutz member on reserve duty quizzed him about religion. Afterward he received a letter from the man’s daughter, packed with her own questions. Soon he was spending late nights corresponding with her, then with two other secular kibbutz girls as well, about faith, human purpose, and the meaning of Jewish history.
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Trying to convince one of the girls that true happiness could be achieved only through dedication to an ideal, and that religion held the highest ideal, he enlisted Molière and Victor Frankl as well as the Talmud.
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His description of Hashomer Hatza’ir’s defense of the Bedouin as both misdirected and showing a “spark of holiness” that would help bring redemption echoed the writing of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, who had described an earlier generation of socialist Zionist pioneers as “good sinners” and “the lights of chaos,” bringing the messiah without knowing it.

But the theology also fit a mood among intent young religious Zionists—arguing to oneself, most of all, that faith was the best path, that it made sense to keep praying three times a day while in the army, and all the while feeling that the model to match or exceed was set by secular Zionists who had settled the land. Having grown up on a kibbutz, “you lack the principal thing we ask of life, true happiness,” he wrote in another letter. Yet “to a certain extent I envy you,” he wrote. He was studying “the Torah of the living God, and nothing is likely to be more satisfying.” Nonetheless, “a person also needs the opportunity to realize his ideals,” which he implied she was doing simply by living in a kibbutz. “That opportunity has not yet been given to me,” Indig wrote, “though I hope to merit it one day.”
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While serving in Quneitrah, he dropped by Kibbutz Merom Golan for a look. He found small houses surrounded by gardens and lawns, a green corner of paradise in the shadow of the black volcanic mountains. A kibbutz member grabbed him, he wrote. “‘Why don’t the Orthodox establish settlements in the Golan Heights?’ he asked me. ‘The Heights…cry out for more settlers. What happened to the commandment of settling the Land of Israel?’ I was a little embarrassed, but it seems to me he’s right. Thousands of settlers should be brought to the Golan, to fill the Heights with light and life.”
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Yehudah Etzion, a tall redhead, also twenty years old, felt he was getting the chance to live his ideals. Etzion was born on a religious kibbutz, tying him to the side of religious Zionism that emulated secular pioneers, even if his family had left for the city when he was young. But his uncle was a veteran of the pre-state Lehi underground—the Stern Gang—the small, violent far-right group that dreamed of establishing the Jewish “Third Kingdom” in an expansive Land of Israel.
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That education redoubled his feeling as a teenager, watching the conquests of 1967, that “the heavens opened.”

Etzion was an early student at Har Etzion yeshivah. While there, he changed his original last name, Mintz, fitting the Israeli preference for exchanging names from “exile” for Hebrew ones. Naming oneself after the place one had settled was one way of doing that. When the yeshivah moved to Alon Shvut, Etzion discovered that outside the study hall, he could help put a new settlement together. “It got me out of the world of the book to the world of action. I built a temporary electric grid, as the son of an electrician. Partly I knew how, partly I had good hands.” He caught “the settlement bug,” but was disturbed at “slackness,” lack of ambition. “I wondered why there weren’t new settlements. There’d been a start at Kfar Etzion, at Kiryat Arba.” Elsewhere the new land was “empty,” meaning empty of Jewish settlement. He saw the West Bank hill country as “primeval,” biblical, wanted to swallow it up, join himself to it, see “the entire people return to this landscape.” His words are a lexicon of romantic nationalism. Settlement meant escaping the quotidian for the mythical. In 1972, he began organizing yeshivah students and others to settle at Susiya, in the southern West Bank, where archaeologists were excavating an ancient synagogue, showing that Jews had lived there 1,500 years before.
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In Kiryat Arba, settler Benny Katzover would recall, a question wove itself into meetings and conversations: When would another group of Jews, like the one that came to Hebron in the southern half of the West Bank, settle in Samaria, the northern half?

Occasionally, a dot appeared, very briefly, on the map. A group of rightists claiming thirty members arrived several times in the area near Nablus, the largest city in the northern West Bank, and each time was quickly evicted by the army.
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The evictions, as much as the settlements established by the Labor government, underlined that the Allon Plan was de facto policy: The heavily populated hill country north of Jerusalem remained out of bounds.

The Nablus group—mostly secular, mostly students—sought advice from the Hebron settlers. Its members sought only to demonstrate in favor of settlement, an unimpressed Katzover concluded, not to do it themselves. Meanwhile, the question of Samaria kept “coming up with longing and pain. As the years passed, the pain and shame became stronger,” Katzover recalled—shame that there was “empty territory,” that “the whole world sees…Samaria is empty.” In 1972 the idea still did not occur to Katzover that he would do something about it himself. But in his testimony, as in Etzion’s, is the first scent of an intoxicating impatience.
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THE MOST
impatient man in the Middle East, though, was Anwar al-Sadat. Egypt’s leader wanted the Sinai Peninsula back. Recalling the lessons of his Nile Delta peasant childhood, speaking of neighbors who would fight for fifty years over a meter of land, he said in a
New York Times
interview after taking power that “our land…means our honor here…and one dies for this honor.”

Sadat was willing to do almost anything to get the Sinai. That included war or even peace—though this is considerably more obvious in the lovely light of later events than it was in the present tense. In the
Times
interview, he said that “if you want to seek peace,” all that was needed was fulfilling Resolution 242. By saying “peace,” Sadat cast aside the “no peace” of Khartoum. But he also said he would “Never! Never! Never!” establish diplomatic relations with Israel, and that Israeli use of the Suez Canal would depend on first solving the Palestinian refugee problem.
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He thereby effectively rejected two pieces of what Israel regarded as peace, while insisting he would not “surrender one inch” of Sinai.

Read in Golda’s kitchen, Sadat’s words proved he would remain hostile even after an agreement—and that he was still rejecting the obvious, that the price of peace was for him also to give up land.

At one point, Sadat tried asking
Newsweek
journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave to pass the message to Israel that he was ready to talk peace. De Borchgrave flew to Israel and called the precocious Labor politician Yossi Sarid, Pinhas Sapir’s protégé, who had completed his graduate studies in New York and had returned to Israel. De Borchgrave knew Sarid as a source well connected to Labor leaders, and indeed, Sarid went to Meir the same day. “She gave me an icy look,” he later wrote. “She told me…first, there is nothing new here; I’ve already heard about it. Second, do you have any idea what he wants from us, Sadat? He wants all of Sinai. And she then fell gloomily and angrily silent.”
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Sadat also spoke publicly of regaining his land by force. Repeatedly, he had referred to 1971 as the “year of decision” leading to a political solution or war.
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When the year ended with neither, he looked like a man speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. Arie Eliav would later describe the common perception of Sadat in Israel: “In Egypt ruled a president who appeared spineless and weak-kneed to Israeli policymakers and public opinion. This man…dared several times to threaten Israel that he would take up arms if it did not withdraw from all of Sinai, but who took him seriously? Particularly when each time he gave a target date for attacking Israel and afterward stammered and backed down.”
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Israeli intelligence knew that Sadat was pressing the Soviet Union for better arms. According to a highly placed Israeli source in Egypt, Sadat would not go to war unless Egypt received Soviet fighter-bombers with the range to attack air bases inside Israel, and Scud missiles able to hit Israeli territory. An idea became accepted truth in the Israeli military: Since Moscow had not provided those arms, Egypt would not attack.
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This was to be known as “the concept.” It rested on the deeper assumption that American arms and Israeli territorial depth served as overwhelming deterrents to all-out war.