The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (37 page)

The prime minister’s first reaction to Dayan’s talk of doom was, by various accounts, to consider suicide.
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Instead, she applied her iron will to repressing panic, stopped listening to Dayan, and depended on Chief of Staff Elazar. Elazar “worked under the most difficult conditions, but there’s no doubt he directed the battles,” according to Tzvi Tzur, a former chief of staff who served as Dayan’s adviser. “Dayan was fairly shattered.” On October 9, Dayan gave an off-the-record briefing to the country’s newspaper editors, and said he intended to go on TV that evening. An editor phoned Meir and urged her to stop his appearance; he would undermine the nation’s morale. Meir put former intelligence chief Aharon Yariv, who had returned to uniform, to stand before the cameras in Dayan’s place.
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Haim Gouri, now fifty years old, found himself on the Egyptian front. He was called up on Yom Kippur, told to report to the General Staff in Tel Aviv. He belonged to the army’s education corps now. Other men his age were quickly sent home as it became clear there was nothing for them to do. The poet who earned his fame writing the war of independence was asked to stay and write the back-stiffening order of the day for the entire army. Afterward he got a request for another call to arms from a commander in Sinai, which Gouri said he could only compose from there. Another officer drove him to the front in a private car. Somewhere close to the canal he wrote a poem called “Poison,” not intended for inspiration, in which the man with the strange ability to place a society inside himself, who had declared in a poem, “I am a civil war,”
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foretold the desires to know and to deny that would sweep Israel.

he wrote, and then, as if answering,

THE PENDULUM
swung back. The Syrian tanks, which could in fact have reached Tiberias had they found the empty hole in Israel’s defense after their first assault, retreated to the prewar line in the face of battered, outnumbered Israelis fighting in the overnight-repaired tanks of slapped-together units, and then farther back, as an Israeli offensive seized a thumb-shaped piece of land pointing toward Damascus.
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In the second week of war, Israeli forces in the Sinai broke through a gap between the Egyptian Second and Third Armies, crossed the canal, and began pushing south to cut off the Third Army from behind. A division under Ariel Sharon, who had returned to the army for the war, tried to batter its way northward, toward the city of Ismailiya, behind the Second Army.
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By then giant American planes carrying arms were landing in Israel, a step pushed by Kissinger, because the Soviets were airlifting supplies to Syria and Egypt, and the American client had to beat the Soviet one, especially after Vietnam. Nixon approved the move, thankfully distracted by a foreign crisis from Vice President Agnew’s
nolo contendere
plea on corruption charges and resignation. Kissinger wanted Israel to take new Arab land on at least one front before a cease-fire. But he was pleased at Israel’s dependence on the United States, particularly because Egypt’s national security adviser Hafiz Ismail had contacted him barely after the war began, hinting that America could be the mediator afterward. In return, a week into the fighting, Kissinger sent a message to Egyptian president Sadat, promising, “The U.S. side will make a major effort as soon as hostilities are terminated to assist in bringing a just and lasting peace to the Middle East.”
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The airlift would cement Nixon’s pro-Israel reputation, soon to be nearly the only reputation he had left, and the negotiations to follow would mark Kissinger as Middle East peacemaker—and obscure any memory of the peacemaking opportunities he ignored before the war. A clever man climbs out of a hole into which a wise man does not fall, says a Hebrew proverb. Kissinger proved extraordinarily clever.

The cease-fire, voted by the U.N. Security Council, took effect on October 22, then fell apart as Israeli forces kept moving, with Kissinger’s secret approval, and completed the siege of the Third Army.
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An hour before the cease-fire was to begin, reservist Kobi Rabinovich of Merom Golan—promoted on the battlefield to company commander—was leading his tank unit in the dash to surround the Third Army. As he stood in the turret, head out to see the battlefield, a bullet hit his neck. He died immediately. He was twenty-eight, now married and the father of an infant son.
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War was his enemy, he had once written, but a strange enemy because he loved the big machines called tanks and the meaning that the army gave him. His enemy had defeated him.

Merom Golan lost four men, out of a hundred adult members. The proportion was unusually high, but it fit a wider logic: Kibbutzim were an elite; members of the elite went to combat units; in a young commune, more were on the front lines.

By the war’s end, 2,656 Israeli soldiers had fallen, equivalent to the United States losing 165,000 men in nineteen days.
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Israel was a country of bereaved parents, widows, orphans too young to remember fathers. The number of Arab dead has been estimated as anywhere from 8,500 to 15,000. Chroniclers of war write that Israel achieved victory. Surprised, outnumbered, it avoided collapse, and ended with its troops near Damascus and besieging an Egyptian army.
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Of that kind of triumph, Pyrrhus said 2,250 years before, “One more such victory and we are utterly undone.”

The Israelis have suffered World War I–level losses, Kissinger told his State Department staff, “so it will take them a couple or three weeks to absorb the impact.” He was summing up who had gained what in the war and was very happy with himself. The bottom line was that “we are in a very central position,” that both sides were now dependent on the United States to work out solutions. The Arabs would have to negotiate with Israel. But they had forced “a realization on the part of the Israelis that this cockiness of supremacy is no longer possible—that like other countries in history, they now have to depend on a combination of security and diplomacy” for safety.
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That was October 23. The unraveled cease-fire would yet spark a Soviet threat of intervention and a U.S. nuclear alert, a brief moment when the superpowers approached war—a final frightening blast of brinkmanship handled by Kissinger because Nixon was lost in his Watergate battle, having just fired the special prosecutor and facing rising calls for his own impeachment. “They are doing it because of their desire to kill the President…. I may physically die,” Nixon said of his domestic opponents, talking to Kissinger by phone as the secretary of state dealt with the Soviets.
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But Egypt agreed to negotiate directly with Israel on the Third Army’s fate.
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When an Egyptian general and an Israeli general sat down in a tent on the road to Cairo, it proved Kissinger right: Israel had gained direct talks, and had lost its hubris. The cease-fire left Israel with most of its men in uniform, unable to go home because war could reignite any moment. On the Egyptian front, the armies were dangerously tangled. Syria would not even reveal how many Israeli prisoners it held. Egypt was blockading the straits of Bab al-Mandeb at the Horn of Africa, blocking sea traffic to Eilat without need for Sharm al-Sheikh. The illusion that Arabs could not fight was memory. Israeli generals now wanted an army so large that it would bankrupt the country. Israeli leaders knew that military strength was insufficient; they needed diplomatic compromise. Though his army was besieged, Sadat had achieved his political goal. By Clausewitz criteria, he had won.

“
THE QUESTION ASKED
in these days, which I hear whenever I meet with civilians or soldiers, is: What is the meaning of this war?” Rabbi Yehudah Amital said, speaking before students in the study hall of Har Etzion a month after the war.

The question “is asked against the backdrop of our certain faith that we live in the time of the beginning of redemption,” he said. The Six-Day War, he said, “taught us that wars have a real purpose, which is conquering the land.” So what, he asked, was the point of this one?
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The losses among the
hesder
yeshivah students proved that they had joined the elite. Har Etzion counted eight dead out of fewer than two hundred students.
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The yeshivah’s mourning was a microcosm of the national shock. Both the rabbi and his listening students had reason to feel that the world had been upended. “Is this a step backward, heaven forefend?” he asked. “Does not the very outbreak of the war…raise the possibility of a retreat in the divine process of the beginning of redemption?”
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The rhetorical question acknowledged that the war, in its senseless fury, was an assault on theological confidence, on the certainty rife since June 1967 that the actual footsteps of the messiah could be heard echoing in quiet hallways. History was supposed to move in one direction, but the war seemed to be disproof. The question also said:
That cannot be
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The essential gloss on Amital’s discourse had been written nearly two decades earlier, by the pioneering cognitive psychologist Leon Festinger and two colleagues. Their book,
When Prophecy Fails
, deals with dissonance, the conflict of belief and fact, based on study of messianic or millennial movements, groups that predict the world’s transformation or end. History is littered with such movements, and each reaches a moment of “disconfirmation,” when it becomes obvious that normal life will continue. At that point, some people drop out. But those who have invested themselves in the idea do not want to give it up. Instead, writes Festinger, “the introduction of contrary evidence can serve to increase the conviction and enthusiasm of a believer.” Explanations will be found, prophecies reinterpreted or added. Indeed, the faithful will actually intensify their efforts to convince others, because the more that other people accept the idea, the easier it is to presume it true. To use the term of another scholar of messianism, the historian Albert Baumgarten, the movement will demand that its members “up the ante,” to show their faith by devoting themselves more. “Upping the ante” can include selling possessions, provoking government authorities, or giving up one’s current community for a new one. For surely an idea that produces such commitment must be correct.
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Amital’s lecture is evidence of the war’s impact on religious Zionists of the Kook school, which by now included not only rabbis and students at Merkaz Harav and a small number of Orthodox settlers, but also
hesder
yeshivah students, many members of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and other young people who had read the doctrine in books, heard it in sermons, or picked up fragments of ideas from friends. The war had to be fit into the expectations it seemed to defy. In order not to lose faith, one had to redouble it.

So, Amital explained, the war was part of the messianic process. Any war over the Land of Israel was actually a war over Jerusalem, and so fulfilled the prophet Zechariah’s vision of the battle for Jerusalem at the end of history.
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When gentiles waged war against Jews, they were actually waging war against God. Attacking on Yom Kippur proved this. Their actual target was the “Jews of Yom Kippur,” religious Jews, who represented God. Therefore, “The meaning of Israel’s victory is: the victory of the divine idea.”
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Amital’s portrayal removed the war from the context of politics and normal history, and put it in the mythological realm of darkness battling light: Gentiles attacked precisely because final redemption was beginning, and it threatened their existence “as gentiles, as the impure. Evil is fighting for its existence.” Nonetheless, Israel experienced “great deliverance,” a victory not yet appreciated.
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Once the messianic process has begun, he reaffirmed, no retreat was possible. That faith, he told his students, must glow from them, so anyone meeting them would believe as well.
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Amital’s words were quickly published and widely distributed. Festinger would have written in the margins: Doubt would drive certainty, would ignite a new flame.

BEFORE THE CEASE-FIRE
, as soon as the Syrians began retreating, a few men returned to Merom Golan.
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As they farmed, wounded soldiers wandered into the fields. Trucks carrying harvested potatoes, heading down out of the Heights, passed ammunition trucks coming up. In the kibbutz orchards, hundreds of trees had been splintered by shells. When the fighting stopped, the women and children returned. The settlement was lucky; the Syrian high tide had not actually swept over it.
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At Ramat Magshimim, an Orthodox settlement farther south in the Heights, Syrian soldiers had entered one gate as the last of the settlers left via another on the first night of war.
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This was proof, if anyone needed it, that evacuating the settlers had been essential—which did not lessen the fury and frustration some felt. The most ideological faced their own Festinger moment: Their belief said that settlements helped Israel to hold land; the war said otherwise. Settler representatives met in a Merom Golan bomb shelter near the end of October, and set an immediate goal of doubling the number of Israelis in the Golan, which—six years after the Settlement Department had drawn up plans for 50,000 Jews in the region—stood just above 1,700. There were seventeen Israeli farming communities in the Heights, some with only twenty families. A Merom Golan man proposed pushing the government to build a town, which he said “would prevent a repeat” of the evacuation—as if the presence of more civilians would have kept the army from retreating.
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