The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (34 page)

In May 1972, President Richard Nixon flew to Moscow for a summit with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. The Mideast was left as a footnote to the talks. The agreed communiqué at the summit’s end simply reaffirmed the superpowers’ commitment to Security Council Resolution 242, leaving its meaning as uncertain as ever. Sadat felt sold out. The Soviets, more concerned with détente, were doing nothing to help him get his land back. In July, to the world’s surprise, he evicted the Soviet Union’s 15,000 military advisers. The move removed Soviet reins—diplomatically and militarily.
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In theory, Kissinger was waiting for this: the strongest Arab country moving away from the Soviet Union. In practice, he was distracted. His boss, Richard Nixon, was running for reelection, and did not want Mideast initiatives, with their potential for unpopular friction with Israel. Besides, Kissinger was consumed with a larger problem in Southeast Asia—as American foreign-policy officials had been since the Middle East blew up in 1967. “The seminal opportunity to bring about a reversal of alliances in the Arab world,” he explains in his memoirs, “would have to wait until we had finally put the war in Vietnam behind us.”
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The military threat implicit in Sadat’s move was missed. Israeli leaders and generals saw the exit of Soviet advisers as evidence that Egypt had no war option.
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It reinforced confidence that the government’s policies were working. Staying put was keeping Israel safe.

EVEN THE MOST
provocative dissident in the house of Labor, though, did not trust Sadat’s talk of peace. “Egypt demands that we pull out of all of the Sinai Peninsula ‘just like that,’” wrote Arie Eliav. Without making clear what he meant by peace, without negotiating, Sadat expected Israel to give up the “strongest and most sophisticated” military bulwark it had created against the threat of eradication. “The very fact that Egypt’s rulers assume that such an act will take place on its own…testifies to the illusions under which the Egyptians are living. And what is much worse, to the secret intentions in their hearts.”
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The words appeared in the book that Eliav had given up his post as party secretary-general to write. It was called
Land of the Hart
, a traditional term for the splendor of the Land of Israel. Eliav’s thick tome argued that to reach splendor, Israel would eventually need to give up nearly all the land it took in 1967.

If Eliav did not differ with Prime Minister Meir on Sadat’s intentions, he disagreed completely on how Israel should respond. It should challenge Egypt: “We are sitting on your territory, and we are willing to return it” for full peace. That meant demilitarizing the Sinai and exchanging ambassadors; it meant Israeli ships sailing down the Suez Canal, Israeli tourists on the pyramids, Egyptian businessmen in Tel Aviv, Israeli and Egyptian soccer teams playing each other—all of which Eliav described as being, for the moment, “dreams and mirages in the barren desert of our relations with Egypt.”
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Whether the Sadat of 1972 would have accepted that challenge remains another of history’s “what ifs.” In Israel,
Land of the Hart
quickly sold close to 20,000 copies—equivalent to over a million in the United States. At the same time, Eliav reported, “women and men who had not read it were infuriated at its very appearance…. I began to taste the bitter flavor of defamatory articles, of anonymous threats…. Some of my former ‘friends’ began to vanish from my vicinity.” In Eliav’s accurately melodramatic description, the book helped transform him “from ‘a promising young man’ to a veteran wanderer in the wilderness, full of scars, burned by sun and wind.”
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Eliav wrote that as part of any peace settlement Egypt would also have to drop any claim to Gaza, whose future would be negotiated between Israel and “the Palestinian Arabs.” The question was whether Israel would give up “some, most, or all” of the Strip to a future Palestinian state.
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That underlined his most controversial argument: that a Palestinian nation existed and deserved self-determination. By now Eliav had achieved enough prominence for that assertion to grab attention. Despite the Jews’ historic claim to “the mountains of Judea and Samaria,” he said, Israel must declare its willingness to return most of the West Bank to Arab rule, under a Palestinian state that would also include Gaza and the East Bank.
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Most, but not all. Eliav presumed that Israel would annex some West Bank settlements—“the Etzion Bloc, for instance.” He mentioned, without irony, the “right of Jewish settlement in all of the Western Land of Israel”—a phrase hinting that the East Bank was also part of the Jews’ historic homeland—and “the spirit of dedication and volunteerism” that drove “young settlers,” for almost all settlers in occupied territory belonged to the young generation of Labor Zionism. The party-platform phrases, worn smooth by use, were not a sop to readers; they expressed Eliav himself, the product of his time and past, the ex-Settlement Department man—like any revolutionary, a part of the age he rejects.

For between those phrases, Eliav now rejected the idea of using settlements to hold land. Those brave young settlers, he wrote, must be told that they might end up as a Jewish minority in a Palestinian state. Israel must announce that “we do not want the territory of the West Bank and the Strip for Jewish settlement, for it is not there that we will settle the millions of Jews whom we intend to repatriate to Israel.” Having announced that, Israel would “wait with infinite patience for a true partner [for peace] from among the Palestinian Arabs.”
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Eliav acknowledged that his words would be seen as “heresy and apostasy.”
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In retrospect, they also bear witness to what was established belief. Ironically, the sharpest criticism that summer of what was happening in settlements was sparked by a writer far more mainstream than Arie Eliav.

“
SADOT IS A WONDER
—a mix of zealous patriotism and the spirit of the Wild West,” wrote Haim Gouri, after a visit to the Sinai farming community in June 1972. Now writing for
Davar
, the Labor Party newspaper, he reported that Sadot’s residents “were nearly all native-born, children of kibbutzim and moshavim, farmers born and bred”—the nobility, for youth movement graduates and
Davar
readers. “They export the produce of this good earth…and import good dollars”—the latter also considered patriotic, though subtly discordant, out of key with the original ascetic ethic of pioneering.

Gouri had driven to the Rafiah Plain with a colleague from
Davar
, who had a friend from reserve duty who lived at Sadot—a bearded young man brought up on a kibbutz. On his bookshelves, Gouri found the canon of Hebrew literature—fiction by S. Y. Agnon, poetry by Nathan Alterman. Outside was the young family’s used car and their “personal Bedouin laborer, a member of the tribe that was evacuated.”

Hiring workers had caused stormy debate in the community, as in the whole moshav movement, the young man said. Gouri did not need to explain to his readers that employing Arab workers violated the principles of both socialism and “Hebrew labor,” Jews returning to manual labor. But Sadot’s members had decided they could not harvest their crops alone.

“Does every farm have a Bedouin laborer?” Gouri asked.

“Yes—actually, yes.”

“Just one?”

“One or two, or maybe a few.”

“How much do they make?”

“Eight pounds a day,” the farmer said—$1.90. The military government set the pay scale, he apologized, adding that his laborer “doesn’t exactly get eight a day. Actually he gets more. He gets vegetables from me and if a turkey is about to die, I give it to him. So actually he gets more.”

“And it doesn’t matter to you, to start your lives here with a hired Bedouin in every farm?”

“What do you want? That they won’t work, that they’ll go hungry, that they’ll be unemployed? Who works up north?” the farmer demanded, meaning inside Israel. Even Mapam kibbutzim had Arab laborers, he said. “And who’s building Jerusalem and Tel Aviv? Did we invent Arab labor? What are we supposed to do?…Not develop? Not produce?”

The Bedouin lived several kilometers away, next to the main junction, in shanties and tents, the young man said.

“The ones living next to Rafiah junction,” Gouri wrote, “lived here.”
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The ironies in Gouri’s article began with his byline.
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He did feel more at home, among
his
tribe, with people who spoke in the accents of the native-born, in homes with those writers on the shelf. He still resonated with the
In Your Covenant
vision of soil, settlement, and socialism. But at Sadot, the vision cracked. People pushed off the land returned as laborers on the farms of others. The Bedouin ostensibly posed a security risk when they lived there, but were no longer dangerous as laborers in Jewish fields. Sadot’s small farms were not plantations, and Gouri the poet did not use words like “settler colonialism,” but he drew a picture that called up that term.

The new controversy over hired labor at Sadot burned for months. Another
Davar
commentator, in an article called “The Whole Country Is Sadot,” attacked Gouri for having a “divided heart” and speaking quietly. “If this happened in a distant land…” he said, “our poets would raise an outcry.”
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Gouri’s ambivalence, though, again rendered him a one-man Greek chorus for the Labor ruling class.

The reports on Sadot further damaged the prestige of settlement which “until then was sky-high,” in the view of Yehiel Admoni of the Settlement Department. Outside of the left-wing Mapam party’s refusal to build kibbutzim in the Sinai, though, the impact was minimal. Admoni would not enter Sadot, which made little difference. The farmers’ quick economic success freed them of dependence on the Settlement Department. Two more farming communities were planned next to Sadot, on land from which Bedouin had been expelled. Government allocations of irrigation water were large enough to ensure that those settlements, too, would have crops that required employing Bedouin laborers.
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Gouri’s host, in any case, was right: Laborers from the occupied territories were working on the building sites of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In that sense, the whole country was Sadot. The most prominent advocate of an open flow of workers was Dayan, who in the summer of 1972 pressed his demands for economic “integration” of the occupied territories with Israel. He also wanted to encourage Israeli investment in the land under military rule, to create manufacturing jobs there. Dayan’s constituency included both ideological believers in keeping land and business interests able to profit from cheap labor.
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The Arabs were expected to accept Israeli rule in return for higher income—as Israel’s working class. In Dayan’s view, the status quo of no war no peace, of occupation without annexation, could last indefinitely.

THE ISRAELI LEGAL SYSTEM
has a fast track to the Supreme Court: An individual can petition the country’s highest court directly against an alleged injustice by the executive branch. Following the war in 1967, the IDF’s top legal authority, Advocate General Meir Shamgar, chose not to challenge petitions to the court by residents of occupied territory against the military government. Shamgar’s step subjected the army’s actions to judicial review. It also extended the court’s authority beyond the borders of the state to occupied territory, in a hint at annexation.
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Whether liberal or nationalist, Shamgar’s decision stuck, in part because he went on to become the country’s attorney general, on his way to a long, influential stint as a Supreme Court justice.

In July 1972, nine Bedouin sheikhs asked the Supreme Court to order the army to let them go home. Telling Petitioner No. 1’s tale, the suit at last gave the Bedouin a voice.
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Though collectively accused of helping terror groups, the Bedouin had fewer qualms than Palestinians in turning to the Israeli court, legitimizing its power. In a letter beforehand to Israeli leaders, Abu Hilu had protested that his tribe was wronged even as it “cooperated in living under the protection of the state in security and peace”—a declaration of fealty that Gaza militants would have regarded as outright collaboration.
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The sheikhs’ lawyer—a Mapam man, Haim Holzman—argued that what happened in the Rafiah Plain had no legal or military basis, and violated the Geneva Convention’s ban on the transfer of occupied populations. Days after filing the petition, Holzman asked the court to act quickly: The Rafiah district commander had called in his clients, told them their lawyer was a communist, and urged them to drop the suit. Meanwhile, “earthwork by agents of the authorities has begun in the petitioners’ land, causing destruction of their orchards and crops.”
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The court ordered the government and Southern Command chief Ariel Sharon to show cause for the expulsion.
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The government’s response, strikingly, did not include depositions by Sharon or by Dayan, the responsible minister. What they could truthfully declare, one must conclude, was deemed unhelpful to the state’s case.

Instead, depositions by other officers explained that the Bedouin had not actually been driven from their land, because part of the land they were working had been seized under the 1969 orders. As for the rest, it was seized in that strange decree issued after the expulsion but effective beforehand.
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The most important argument, on the need for a buffer between Sinai and Gaza, came from General Yisrael Tal, a hero of the 1967 war whose record was not stained with “exceeding authority.” Tal detailed attacks on Israelis and local residents in the Rafiah Plain or elsewhere by terrorists who had used it for shelter. Egyptian intelligence agents, he added, had passed through the area or had hidden there. To break that pattern, a fenced buffer zone was needed—without “the permanent presence of local residents,” he said, and with “Jewish settlement and presence.”
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