The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (36 page)

The very last word was reserved for Meir. Trying to decide what Israel’s final borders should be, she said, would only cause “war among ourselves” and tension internationally. The prime minister feared discord most of all. She had not wanted the party’s argument. Now, she summed up simply, “There is no need to make decisions.”
⁸²

Dayan wanted the party to endorse his positions. Again, it seemed he was defeated.

“
WE HAVE NO REASON
to doubt,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, that the military justifications for creating a buffer zone in the Rafiah Plain “have been argued before us in complete good faith.”

Landau and his two fellow justices issued their ruling on the Sinai Bedouin in May 1973. They affirmed that the Supreme Court could oversee decisions of the military. On the other hand, “on such matters, certainly the opinion of army men is to be preferred to that of the petitioners’ counsel.” True, the expulsion order had been issued retroactively—but the reasons for it continued to hold true. While terrorism had dropped off in Gaza, it might “catch fire anew.” The three justices agreed: The petition was rejected. The Bedouin could not go home.
⁸³

HOSTING SOVIET LEADER LEONID BREZHNEV
at his San Clemente estate in June allowed Richard Nixon to show that détente was progressing, that he had a firm hand on foreign policy. That was useful, because messy questions concerning the break-in a year before to Democratic Party headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex were entangling him domestically.

On June 23, the summit’s last night, with the final communiqué written, the leaders of the two superpowers went to bed early. Then something strange happened. At 10:00
P.M
., Brezhnev demanded to wake Nixon to speak again. At the unscheduled midnight meeting, in Kissinger’s description, Brezhnev delivered an hour-and-a-half monologue on the Middle East. He demanded that Nixon sign a Soviet proposal for principles for an accord: total Israeli withdrawal, in return for an end to belligerency, less than full peace. “I am categorically opposed to a resumption of the war,” he said—but if America would not agree, at a minimum, to the principle of full withdrawal, he could not prevent it. Nixon told him, “We don’t owe anything to the Israelis,” but could only promise that “the Middle East will be our project this year.”

In his memoirs, Kissinger writes that Brezhnev was trying to “exploit Nixon’s presumed embarrassment over Watergate.” The Soviet leader, he says, knew that war would result in Arab defeat.
⁸⁴
His memoirs do not suggest that Kissinger regarded himself as having missed a critical warning.

IT WAS LATE JULY.
With the elections just three months off, Dayan used his ultimate weapon. Because of the party’s policy in the occupied territories, he said, he was not sure he could run on the Labor ticket. “The territories are not a ‘deposit’” to be held temporarily, he declared.
⁸⁵
The government had to build cities beyond the Green Line. It had to allow private land purchases. He wanted to speed building at Yamit and to build a port; he wanted subsidies for Israeli businessmen to build factories in occupied land.

Dayan was national security incarnate, the man publicly regarded as the victor of 1967. If he split the party and ran separately, no one knew how many votes he might take. Worse, he might join the new alliance of right-wing parties that Ariel Sharon, now out of uniform, was putting together. The unthinkable could happen: Labor could lose power.
⁸⁶

Labor’s top leaders—a dozen minus one, since Yigal Allon was in the hospital after a heart attack—met in three urgent, interminable, secret sessions to agree on a platform that would keep Dayan in the party and that Sapir could accept.
⁸⁷
In the last meeting, responding to Sapir’s attacks on the cost of a port, Dayan pointed at the northeastern Sinai coast on a map, and said that the area “is more or less empty today. I think there’s a vital need to settle it. It’s empty,” he repeated, “…the area is empty, and it has water and sand and it has to be settled.”
⁸⁸

Yisrael Galili was assigned to write the compromise. One consideration that the secretive, powerful adviser to prime ministers did not need to take into account was the alternative platform, based on
Land of the Hart,
on which Arie Eliav and a band of young volunteers were gathering signatures.
⁸⁹
Rank-and-file independence meant mutiny in Labor, though the popularity of the petitions may explain why party leaders felt they could not drop Eliav from the Knesset ticket.

The Galili Document was brought to the party secretariat on September 3. Technically, Dayan received less than he wanted; his proposal for a port, for instance, would only be “examined.” But as Labor’s public face, the “compromise” represented victory for Dayan and the maximalists. The Galili Document promised that “new settlements will be built…the population will be increased.” Towns would be established, not just farm villages. In the next four years, eight hundred homes would be built in Yamit. Without annexation, Labor’s policy would be to dig in.

In response, Eliav delivered eight sentences from the podium, a record for bitter brevity, written in biblical fury. “This document has been brought to us by flailing the lash of time and the scourge of panic and haste. This document chastises with scorpions what I understand as the values of the Labor movement,” he said. “In this hall and this land…are those whose souls weep in secret because of this document.”
⁹⁰

The text was approved by a vote of 78–0, though the secretariat had 161 members.
⁹¹
Most opponents, in Eliav’s account, “went to the beach” to avoid endangering their political futures.
⁹²
Even he did not cast a vote against.

“
ON THE BANKS
of the Suez all is quiet,” declared an entirely typical election ad in the press for the Labor-Mapam Alignment on September 20.

HENRY KISSINGER
finally gained full control of American foreign policy, under a president whose power was fracturing. On September 22, taking over from Rogers, he was sworn in as secretary of state, while remaining national security adviser as well. Nixon was busy fighting to keep a Senate committee and a special prosecutor investigating the Watergate affair from getting the tapes of his office conversations. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, was under investigation for bribery. Kissinger, meeting with foreign ministers at the U.N. General Assembly, proposed that negotiations on the Egypt-Israel track should start in November, after the Israeli election. Both sides seemed willing.
⁹⁴

THREE DAYS BEFORE
the holiday of Yom Kippur, Yehiel Admoni headed north to the Golan Heights for a work visit. Before he left, the Settlement Department official got a request from Yisrael Galili: Check if the kibbutzim are “prepared for defense” and have reserves of food and water. “He warned me,” Admoni later wrote, “to check the matter discreetly, so as not to raise suspicions. He said that and no more.”
⁹⁵

The order came at eleven o’clock Saturday morning: Women and children must immediately evacuate Merom Golan.

October 6, 1973, Yom Kippur, was a tranquil early-autumn day at the kibbutz resting in the mountain valley—though afterward one could remember low dark notes in the soundtrack of the days and hours before: rumors breathing through the kibbutz of Syrian troops building up across the cease-fire line; an air-raid siren a few days before; the army van that came early the same Saturday to take a member hastily to reserve duty; sonic booms waking those still sleeping at 9:30 that day.

Yehudah Harel drove downhill from the kibbutz to the big IDF base at Naffakh for explanations, and then the kibbutz secretariat met (three of the five members would be dead within three weeks) and agreed that the “noncombatant population” would leave for a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley that quickly agreed to host them. The women rushed to empty their houses of everything packable, some joking that they should stay and the men take the children, and by 1:40 they were waiting for the army buses, except that ten minutes later someone spotted Syrian jets bombing the army observation post on the mountain two miles south and turned on the siren. Within seconds, while everyone rushed for the bomb shelters and rifles were being passed out, the shelling began, not a drizzle but a cloudburst of fire, as was falling all along the front, for now it was the front.

At dusk the pounding let up, so the buses left, some men leaving as well to report to reserve units, the remaining ones counting the minutes of quiet until they guessed that their families were out of range. As darkness fell, the roar of artillery and tank fire rose again, outgoing and incoming, ever closer. “We’d read a lot of the generation of 1948,” one man wrote of that night, “but we never imagined we’d experience what they did,” holding World War II–vintage Czech rifles and preparing to defend an isolated settlement against an onslaught.
¹

Along the length of the Golan line, 900 Syrian tanks were pouring forward against an Israeli armored force of fewer than 180 tanks; 40,000 infantrymen against a few hundred. At the Suez Canal, an even larger Egyptian force was crossing the waterway, by boats and then bridges, smashing down Israeli embankments with water cannon, overrunning or rolling past small Israeli forts of the front line—the Israeli forces in Sinai, as in the Golan, fighting without help of the reserves, the bulk of the army. Only that morning had Israel’s leaders begun calling up reserves, because only then did they half-accept that war might break out.
²

The Yom Kippur attack surprised Israel because Israel’s generals and political leaders did not believe attack possible, and it demonstrated how tenaciously human beings can defend belief against evidence. Arabs could not fight, as 1967 taught. The subtle lessons of the six years since, of living in a society of Jews and “Ahmeds,” added to the dangerous contempt. The Syrian troop buildup, the Syrian bombers being moved up to forward bases, the intelligence reports that the Egyptian “exercise” along the canal would turn into an invasion and that Egyptian soldiers had orders to break their Ramadan fasts—all were dismissed.
³
Israel’s chief of Military Intelligence—General Eli Zeira, a Dayan favorite—stuck to “the concept” that Egypt would not attack without new weapons, and that Syria could not fight alone. Both Zeira’s reasoning and his suppression of dissent fit the mood of the time that Arabs would not dare challenge Israel’s power.

Zeira’s superiors were equally able to deny evidence. On September 25, King Hussein secretly flew to Israel by helicopter to talk to Golda Meir. The two met regularly but Hussein had asked for this conversation urgently. Syrian forces were “in position of pre-attack,” he said, citing a high-level Jordanian mole. If Syria planned to fight, it would be in cooperation with Egypt. A worried Meir was reassured by Dayan, after he was reassured by military intelligence.
⁴

The next morning, responding to the head of the Northern Command’s concern about increased Syrian artillery facing the Golan, Chief of Staff David Elazar sent two tank companies to the Heights. If the Syrians were planning anything, the generals reasoned, it would be no more than an artillery barrage or a limited bid to overrun an Israeli settlement. Those hypotheses apparently lie behind Yisrael Galili’s request of Yehiel Admoni to check if the kibbutzim were “prepared for defense.”

In the pre-dawn hours of Yom Kippur, the head of the Mossad intelligence agency called from Europe, where he had just met Israel’s top Egyptian source: War would explode before nightfall on two fronts. At a sunrise meeting with Elazar, Dayan was doubtful. Military Intelligence chief Zeira reported that U.S. intelligence did not expect war. (A U.S. official explained afterward to Kissinger that “we were brainwashed by the Israelis, who brainwashed themselves.”
⁵
) Dayan wanted to call up 50,000 reservists, Elazar wanted 200,000. Without waiting for approval, Elazar had already ordered a call-up of key staff officers and commandos.

When Elazar and Dayan met Prime Minister Meir, Dayan wanted to wait till the afternoon to evacuate women and children from the Golan settlements. War, he believed, was still only a risk, of lesser weight than the political risk of panicking the country with a false alarm. He was the person responsible for the country’s safety, the symbol of the calm his party promised; war would mean he had failed, and it is human to reach for the reading of reality that puts off such a danger. Meir, perhaps because she was less wedded to a military conception, ruled for evacuating the families immediately and a compromise of calling up 100,000 men.
⁶

She agreed with Dayan, though, on rejecting a preemptive air strike. She had sent a message to the United States to pass to the Soviets for their clients: If you are planning war because you think
we
are about to attack, you are mistaken.
⁷
That ruled out preemption. Besides, this was not 1967; the world did not know a crisis existed; Israel would appear the aggressor, endangering U.S. support.

The lack of crisis headlines, of evening anchors in New York and Paris speaking rapidly of Mideast troop movements, was further indictment of failed conceptions. In 1967, Egyptian forces crossing the Sinai ignited the crisis. Now, with Israel holding the Sinai, that tripwire was gone. In 1967, Israel was frightened. In 1973, it did not see the danger and so did not sound an alarm. And for six years Israel had told the world that holding land guaranteed its defense. That argument left it naked of the rationale it needed internationally for preemption. Territory may have created defensive depth, but it also chained Israel in ways it had not foreseen.
⁸

It had also not foreseen the kind of war Sadat meant to fight. Israel presumed that his military goal would be to reconquer all of Sinai, and he lacked the means to do that. But his actual plan was only to seize a narrow strip of land. That would be enough to awaken the United States, force it to intervene diplomatically, and begin the process that would get him his territory. War would be a continuation of diplomacy by murderous means.
⁹
It would demonstrate that Israel’s “defensible borders” were the opposite of a deterrent.

HAIM GOURI
went to a synagogue on Yom Kippur, not to pray, because he did not believe, but to visit a friend as he did every year, and “to hear the melody and the prayers.” On Jerusalem’s streets, the poet-journalist saw speeding jeeps, a strange sight because normally not a car moved on the sacred day. Couriers were out delivering call-up orders.

In the prime minister’s Tel Aviv office, the cabinet met, listening to a shaken Moshe Dayan. At 2
P.M
. came news of the attack, which had not waited for dusk. Sirens rose outside. The limits on calling up reserves evaporated. The army’s plans presumed it would have forty-eight hours warning to mobilize its forces, but there was no time at all.

Yeshiva student Dov Indig returned to his Jerusalem home after the holiday ended at nightfall. He had not received orders, but he was reporting for duty anyway, along with a childhood friend, Chaim Sabbato. Though they studied at separate yeshivot, they had trained together, Sabbato as a tank gunner, Indig as a loader.

“War, war, what do you know of it?” Indig’s mother said, packing cookies for him. She was from Romania, the sole survivor in her family of another conflict. “I know what war is, who knows when you’ll return…”

“But Mom, we’re not in Romania and this isn’t a world war,” he answered. “A little trip and we’ll be home in a few days.”

Close to midnight, Sabbato later wrote, they boarded the bus at the call-up point and rode north. At the tank base below the Golan, madness was in command. Indig and Sabbato were assigned to different tanks. A clerk refused to hand out rifles until he could find a pen to fill out the forms. An officer arrived, shouted, “Men are getting killed up there and you look for pens!” and kicked open a crate of guns. Sabbato grabbed an Uzi without a shoulder strap. He and two yeshivah comrades, Eli and Roni, found themselves in a tank under the command of a reservist, who when he heard them praying proclaimed, “I’m an atheist.” At dawn, without adjusting the gun sights, they rolled down to the narrow bridge across the Jordan River and up the switchbacks toward the Heights, passing a tank coming down on which bandaged soldiers were crowded, shouting, “Where are you going? Have you gone nuts? Syrian tanks are here…Go back, quick!”
¹⁰

At 3:30
A.M
., orders reached Merom Golan for the men to leave. Yehudah Harel, displeased, drove down again to Naffakh and found soldiers desperately preparing to retreat. “You can evacuate or not,” the commander told Harel. “I’m just telling you that between you and the Syrians I have no forces.” Army engineers had orders to prepare to blow up the bridges over the Jordan River, so if the Golan fell it would be harder for the Syrians to advance into Israel proper. Harel returned to the settlement and whoever could fit into the kibbutz’s own vehicles left, the rest going in trucks sent by the army, following retreating half-tracks down toward the Jordan.
¹¹
One more preconception, the faith in settlements as fortresses, evaporated. Instead, border kibbutzim were another burden on an army holding off collapse.

Years afterward, Chaim Sabbato wrote a novel that was actually a strict, and thus nightmarish, autobiography of the war, called
Adjusting Sights
, which in Hebrew also means adjusting the intent of prayer. Sabbato’s account testifies to the horror that Israel’s soldiers, caught unready in battle, would bring home. More particularly, it gives voice to the new class of yeshivah-student soldiers, who faced the war as a spiritual test and who would become crucial actors in the internal Israeli conflict that followed.

Obsessively, Sabbato’s story returns to the third day of combat, the morning after the Syrian tanks reached the fence of Naffakh base and were repulsed. Before sunrise, in a unit of survivors, Sabbato’s tank rolls out for the counterattack and is caught in battle, his commander shouting, “Gunner, fire!” and Sabbato answering, “But my sights aren’t adjusted,” the commander telling him to fire anyway, enemy tanks so close they fill his sights, tanks carrying his friends getting hit around him, men who studied Talmud and went through basic training with him, and suddenly the commander shouts, “Gunner, pray!”

“You pray!”

“I don’t know how!” the commander says, so Sabbato shouts ancient words from Psalms, “Please, O Lord, deliver us! Please!”
¹²
Their tank is hit, they manage to escape, Sabbato carrying his strapless Uzi, four men running through a tank battle, watching as soldiers leap from tanks, “aflame completely, like torches.” When Sabbato and his comrades find cover, Eli announces he won’t be taken captive, he has a grenade, and Chaim and Roni—arguing as if sitting in the yeshivah study hall reasoning out a passage of Talmud—quote rabbinic rulings against suicide and insist one cannot learn from the example of King Saul, who fell on his sword lest the Philistines capture him.

“What will be?” says Eli, wondering if the Syrians will cross the Jordan, if civilians will fight them in the streets of Tiberias. “Can it be we won’t win? And what of the beginning of redemption? Can there be a retreat in redemption?”

No, Sabbato says, citing a rabbi who declared during World War II that Rommel’s army would not reach Palestine because it had been promised that the Jews will not be forced into exile again.

That is one pole of Sabbato’s story. The other is the question of how Dov Indig was killed, because he has heard only that that his friend has fallen. Months later he learns that Indig’s phylacteries were found in their embroidered velvet bag in a scorched tank, hit the afternoon he reached the front.
¹³

Binyamin Hanani, who as a teenage yeshivah student wrote that no other generation of Jews “has felt Him so clearly just behind the wall,” also died in the Golan, on the second day, leading a hopeless bid to reach a besieged Israeli strongpoint.
¹⁴
Har Etzion student Daniel Orlik fell the next day in the Sinai. By the end of that day, 724 Israeli soldiers had been killed, more than in the entire war in 1967.
¹⁵
A simple explanation would have been that redemption was not beginning. Among the faithful, there would be other explanations.

“
THE THIRD TEMPLE
is in danger,” Moshe Dayan said at sunrise Sunday, the second day of war—meaning that Israel itself faced destruction. He had come to the Northern Command’s new headquarters, moved back from Naffakh to a mountain inside Israel, and learned the full consequences of refusal to see war approaching.
¹⁶
Dayan was on the edge of despair, or past the edge. Later that morning, a general who flew with him to the Sinai heard him mumbling nonstop about the fall of the Third Temple. As Dayan walked from the helicopter to the command post, an Egyptian MiG attacked the base; he apathetically ignored calls to take cover. That day he proposed retreating deep into the Sinai, which would have granted Egypt a greater victory than it imagined.
¹⁷
The next day, after an Israeli counterattack failed on the southern front, he spoke of drafting older men and teenagers, shocking his generals and Golda Meir.