The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (40 page)

“You look at things more from the perspective of faith,” another student-soldier, Private Avraham Steinmatz, wrote from the Golan to a yeshivah friend. “I’m in the army…and here it’s really hard to feel such exalted thoughts—to believe that this terrible war…is simply ‘the beginning of redemption.’” The previous October, Steinmatz was studying at Yeshivat Hakotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, postponing his army service. When the war broke out, he joined up. Now he was a medic in the paratroops. He was writing to explain views that made him unorthodox among graduates of yeshivah high schools and the Bnei Akiva youth movment. The country needed quiet, he said, “and I’m not talking about ‘every man under his vine and under his fig tree’” of messianic days. “Every soldier leaves after him many, many broken hearts. And for what? Let’s give up territory, and we can build a country with better
values
, a country in which everything isn’t sanctified to the military.”
⁸⁴
The letter is a dissenting gloss in the margins of the time, a reminder that no social movement is a monolith.

On Independence Day in late April, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook spoke again before guests and students at Merkaz Harav. “There are people who talk about ‘the beginning of redemption’ in our time,” he said. They were mistaken. “We must see with open eyes that we are already in the middle of redemption. We are in the main hall, not the entryway.” The arrival of the first Zionist pioneers had been the beginning. The State of Israel was a great leap forward beyond that. The state, he declared, was “entirely sacred and without blemish. It is an exalted heavenly manifestation” of God’s return to Zion.
⁸⁵
Kook, as the scholar Aviezer Ravitzky has highlighted, was sanctifying the state as concept, as platonic ideal. Historical mishaps, mistaken policies, the fact that most Israeli Jews were irreligious—all that was incidental.
⁸⁶
His disciples could therefore glorify the state and denounce it: They glorified the abstract Israel, and would do battle with the actual political entity.

KISSINGER FLEW
to the Middle East on April 28. He wanted an agreement between Israel and Syria to match the one between Israel and Egypt. It would give Sadat the legitimacy of another Arab country making a deal with the Jewish state. It would be another increment toward peace—with the Soviets on the sideline, with everyone dependent on America.
⁸⁷

Israel’s offer, so far, was to pull back, but not all the way to the pre-October line, the so-called Purple Line. It would not reward Syria for attacking and losing.
⁸⁸
Syrian leader Hafiz al-Asad wanted land past that line, to match Sadat’s gain, and to show his own people that the deaths had some purpose.
⁸⁹
Kissinger would shuttle between capitals, as if trying to pull them, inch by inch, toward each other. “I was in effect alone,” he wrote of the effort.
⁹⁰
He had barely left Washington when Nixon, responding to a congressional subpoena, released transcripts of his White House conversations on the Watergate affair, with their deleted expletives and undeleted discussion of raising a million dollars in hush money.
⁹¹
Behind Kissinger was a president imploding in slow motion. Awaiting him in Jerusalem was Golda Meir, still in office, as if she had walked off a cliff but not looked down and therefore had not fallen. She, Dayan, Allon, and Eban would negotiate, with Rabin and Peres added to the team, almost as extras, while Rabin tried to form a governing coalition.
⁹²

Among supporters of the Whole Land of Israel and Golan settlers, Kissinger’s arrival was treated as the continuation of war by other means. They suspected the United States of pushing Israel for total withdrawal from the Golan.
⁹³
Just before the shuttle, “we learned of the possibility that the government will agree to a serious move west of the Purple Line,” said an unsigned report in the Merom Golan newsletter in early May.
⁹⁴
“Serious” was undefined and frightening, a threat to the settlers’ safety if not their homes. For some maximalists, conceding any land held by Israel before October 1973 was unthinkable; the 1967 ceasefire lines now defined the Land of Israel.
⁹⁵

Kissinger arrived in Israel to Likud-organized demonstrations and “signs spelling my name in Arabic—as if I were an Arab representative,” he recalled.
⁹⁶
Newspaper ads signed by “Citizens Against a Diplomatic Holocaust” welcomed “the high commissioner,” suggesting that Kissinger, the Jew who fled Germany as a teenager, was both a Nazi and a reborn representative of British imperial rule.
⁹⁷

Ironically, Kissinger’s account of the shuttle contains his first discussion of Israeli settlements as a diplomatic issue, and his position is simple: He “stressed to all the Arab leaders that Israel would not give up a single settlement for the disengagement and I had told Israeli leaders I would not press them to do so.”
⁹⁸
Transcripts of his conversations during the frenetic, interminable talks substantiate that. In a meeting with Meir, for instance, he reported on dickering with Asad about an Israeli proposal for the disengagement line. Kissinger told Meir, “He said, ‘They don’t want to give up settlements, Druse villages; all right. But why not a paralle[l] line with those two principles?’”
⁹⁹
As that dialogue reflects, Asad himself had accepted that the disengagement would leave the settlements in place.
¹⁰⁰
Instead, the talks revolved around Israeli return of the ghost town of Quneitrah, precisely because it would give Asad his symbolic gain without moving settlers.
¹⁰¹

Outside Meir’s house, a group of intellectuals held a hunger strike—among them Moshe Shamir and and Tzvi Shiloah, secular founders of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel. The crowd grew—boosted by Golan settlers, and by Kiryat Arba residents who arrived in rented Arab buses, and Etzion settlers. Gush Emunim took a key role, stepping beyond party activism to street protests. Demonstrators slept on the street. In the morning, they held prayers there.
¹⁰²

By Friday, May 11, press leaks indicated that Israel would give up Quneitrah, and that the argument centered on nearby hills and on fields belonging to Merom Golan.
¹⁰³
At the kibbutz itself, pounded by Syrian shells, members were living in bomb shelters. The way to hold the ghost town, Yehudah Harel decided, was the old and certain method: Put a settlement there. A place safe from shells was needed. He and another activist went looking. Under an abandoned Syrian military hospital, at the western edge of town, was a bunker. The pair stopped by Northern Command headquarters and spoke with the second in command about their plan. “First, you didn’t ask me…. Second, if you’re not already sitting there, you may be too late,” the officer replied, or so Harel would tell the story.
¹⁰⁴

On Saturday night, at Merom Golan’s weekly general meeting, Harel laid out his plan: The kibbutz and other Golan communities would loan members to set up the new commune. Permanent settlers would be recruited from Galilee kibbutzim. The proposal passed after midnight. At 1:00
A.M
., in the clubhouse bomb shelter, a committee laid plans. By morning, people were moving into the bunker—cleaning, setting up the generator, bringing water, drawing up a work schedule for Merom Golan fields that would also be loaned to the instant settlement. Several days later the name Keshet was chosen, the Hebrew equivalent of
qantir
, “rainbow” in Arabic.

At the Jerusalem protests, a flyer appeared, urging people to “Stand Up and Go” to Quneitrah to bolster the settlement.
¹⁰⁵
Gush Emunim volunteers began arriving, carrying sleeping bags and religious tomes. Harel had believed he was establishing a secular commune that would belong to the United Kibbutz. One night he came to the bunker and found rooms full of Orthodox Jews studying. He found the man from Merom Golan coordinating the settlement project. Pretty soon, Harel said, we will have a yeshivah here, and no one will work. “What’s with you?” the man said. “These people work the hardest.” In the meantime, the effort to recruit long-term settlers from the secular communes of the Galilee failed completely. Absolutely no young kibbutz members were interested.

Hanan Porat came to visit Harel. An all-night conversation ended with Porat agreeing to find Orthodox settlers. He turned the project over to a young student at Merkaz Harav. Five years before, when a van of Orthodox settlers from Hebron showed up at Merom Golan, kibbutz members had met them with almost anthropological curiosity, and learned that they were disciples of a certain “Rabbi Kook of Jerusalem.” Now Harel drove with Porat to the yeshivah, to receive Kook’s permission for his student to leave his books.

Negotiating with Kissinger, Meir paid no attention to Keshet. On May 29, before dawn, after a month of talks that verged perpetually on collapse, agreement was reached. As Kissinger had intended, Israel agreed to pull back to the Purple Line, the post–Six-Day War cease-fire line, and give a bit more, the bit being Quneitrah and a couple of hundred meters beyond. A corner of Merom Golan’s fields would be in the demilitarized zone between the two armies. As in Sinai, both armies would thin their forward forces. A U.N. “observer force” would stand between them.

Harel was in a bind. He knew that Kook’s followers would not voluntarily leave the bunker if it was to be handed over to Syria. After the disengagement accord was signed, a government-appointed geographer came to mark the line with barrels. Keshet was on the wrong side. Harel asked if he would bend the border a bit. The man refused; it would be unprofessional. “That night,” Harel would recount, “we came and moved the barrels.”

In the morning, according to Harel, a U.N. officer came and approved the line as marked by the barrels, not noticing the change. Afterward, the Keshet settlers agreed to turn the bunker over to the IDF, moving first to railroad cars placed in a nearby nursery, later to a permanent site.

On May 25, four days before Kissinger wrapped up his deal, Avraham Steinmatz, the yeshivah-student-turned-medic who wanted to give territory for peace, was hit by a Syrian shell while treating his wounded commander. He was one of the last fatalities before quiet came.
¹⁰⁶

IN BATTLE, THE
tradition that settlements would stop an army had proved as obsolete as cavalry. Despite the small defeat in Quneitrah, diplomacy appeared to offer a different lesson—settlements could constrain the government, trump international pressure, keep land in Israeli hands.

“In the course of the struggle,” Yehudah Harel wrote soon after, “we felt greatly the lack of a movement standing behind us.”
¹⁰⁷
The truth was slightly different. Another movement had taken the place of the United Kibbutz. Its teacher was not the socialist sage Yitzhak Tabenkin, but Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook. Secular believers in the Whole Land were now supporting actors. The word
settler
would mean something new.

A line of cars and trucks rolled out of the small village of Meholah. In Gush Emunim accounts, it would always be called a “convoy,” a word with a whiff of struggles to cross hostile territory, an inference of glory.
¹

Meholah was picked as the launching point because it was a backwater. A community of religious farmers, it lay below sea level at the north end of the sauna-hot Jordan Rift, just outside the Green Line, the first settlement established in that part of occupied territory in 1968. Yehudah Etzion’s father lived there, and the tall redheaded settlement activist enlisted his father in the group intending to defy government policy and settle near Nablus. The group had sent letters to Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, announcing its intent to “take the first practical step” and establish a settlement on its own, but did not want to be stopped by the army on the way.
²
No one would think of starting from Meholah. It was June 5, 1974, Rabin’s third day as prime minister, and Peres’s third day as defense minister. They were not getting a grace period.

The two dozen or so vehicles carried a hundred would-be settlers and supporters—men, women, and children—and tents, tools, kitchen gear, a library of religious books for study, even a seesaw and playground slide, “everything we would need for months,” as one activist said afterward, the inventory indicating confidence that they were moving in to stay. From Meholah they headed up into the folds of the steep scorched West Bank hills on back paths till they reached the crest highway north of Nablus—or Shekhem, the biblical name used in Hebrew. Then they drove in a procession through the Palestinian city, past the military government headquarters, and on to the edge of a large army base near the Palestinian village of Hawarah, in a valley where the breeze rustled through tall purplish fierce-pointed thistles and grass. It was midmorning. The rush began, people putting up tents and a flag pole with an Israeli flag, pounding fence posts, stringing barbed wire around three sides of the instant settlement, the fourth side being the perimeter fence of an army base expected to provide security once the matter of defying military law by settling in occupied territory without permission was cleared up. The mood, organizer Benny Katzover would recall, was “extraordinary exaltation”—as one would expect of a group of mostly young people certain they have seized the ideals forgotten by the old people in power, and breaking the law to do so.

Ariel Sharon arrived along with another novice Likud Knesset member named Geula Cohen, who had earned her fame before statehood as the impassioned radio voice of the ultra-right Lehi (Stern Gang) underground, and with Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook himself, wearing his rabbinic long black jacket and black hat in the June sun. Sharon, Cohen, and the white-bearded yeshivah head planted saplings while schoolgirls smiled next to them for a photographer.

The encampment was called Elon Moreh, a name chosen by Katzover and Menachem Felix during the months the two friends from Kiryat Arba had spent lobbying for approval to settle near Nablus. The name was an attempt, according to Katzover, to soften their image by not stressing “Shekhem,” the West Bank’s major town. “Elon Moreh” was an obscure synonym for the city used once in Genesis, referring to the place where God promised Abraham that his descendants would inherit the land of Canaan. The settlement would thereby relive the ancient past and carry out prophecy, while skipping the uncomfortable present. Katzover, in particular, tended to see himself as walking the Bible’s landscape—ironically, an imitation of secular Zionists who stressed the Bible as a story of national birth, and who treated Jewish religious tradition as the unhappy product of exile, best erased. It was a tension typical of his peers, and indeed of the other militant religious movements emerging in the world in ostensible rejection of Western values. What looked and felt like a return to old-time religion actually represented a radical synthesis in which believers absorbed a modern political ideology and converted it into principles of religious faith.

Their meetings with Labor politicians had not won them official sanction. Active support came from political rebels such as Cohen and especially Sharon, who promised financial and organizational help and told them they were doing “the most important thing for Zionism. I’m at your service.”
³

The Yom Kippur War had interrupted their efforts. Afterward, their patience vanished. The interim agreements made members of the group “feel the ground quaking beneath us.” Everyone knew that King Hussein was standing in line to negotiate next. Labor’s small, hard-fought concessions made it the party of weakness in the eyes of Whole Land advocates, for whom weakness was a cardinal sin.
⁴
For some in the group, the war posed a theological demand. “When the Jewish people doesn’t perform its task, it receives blows to chastise it, and to return us to the correct path,” believed Yehudah Etzion, who possessed particular confidence concerning God’s intent for history.
⁵
The war was not a retreat in redemption, he was sure, but rather was punishment of Israel for not marching forward.

So in the spring of 1974, the Elon Moreh group had begun talking of a wildcat settlement, a fait accompli that the government would be forced to accept. The idea got a cool reception from veteran activist Hanan Porat, who had joined in a capacity best termed “outside agitator,” since he did not intend to move to Elon Moreh. Porat saw acting illegally as the last option. His misperception of Kfar Etzion’s founding was that an unwilling Eshkol had given in at the final moment to political pressure, and he hoped the same would happen now. Likud leader Menachem Begin, with whom the group consulted, also opposed a wildcat attempt. The
Altalena
affair, Katzover felt, still weighed on him. Sharon, on the other hand, was in favor.

Katzover and Felix decided to consult their rabbi, the response of traditional yeshivah students. In Katzover’s account Tzvi Yehudah Kook, also uncertain, asked to speak with Begin, who told him the attempt could cause civil war. The rabbi said no. Try again, the group’s members said. The young men went to the old rabbi’s Jerusalem house and “preached Zionism,” telling him the Land of Israel was in danger. Kook asked to consult Shlomo Goren, the shofar-blasting army chaplain of 1967, now chief rabbi of Israel. But Goren, despite his militant messianism, also rejected confrontation.

Soon after, the two organizers showed up again at Kook’s Jerusalem house. We’re going to do it, they informed him. This was not how yeshivah students spoke to their rabbi. Chaos was creeping into the world.

“What do you want of me?” he demanded.

“Your blessing.”

The old man smiled—so Katzover would remember—and blessed them. The day-and-night planning began, the writing of lists, the gathering of equipment, the exuberant free fall of organizing after the decision to act and before meeting reality. Sharon, famous for his love of maps, chose the spot for them, picking land on which he said there were no private claims and that was next to a base. In building an instant settlement, they were reenacting the story every Israeli schoolchild learned of pre-state pioneers braving Arab and British antagonism, but this time the antagonism came from the state that was expected to protect them. The date was set for June 4.
⁶

ON JUNE
3, Rabin’s government barely won parliament’s approval. His coalition leaned unsteadily on two splinter parties, without the National Religious Party. Seeking to pull the Orthodox party back into the government, Rabin repeated Meir’s pledge: He would negotiate with Jordan, but would call new elections before any “territorial concessions involving parts of Judea and Samaria.”
⁷
He thereby entered office wearing diplomatic handcuffs he had locked on himself.

That evening the would-be settlers of Elon Moreh gathered at out-of-the-way Meholah and loaded their trucks. Then the phone rang: Tzvi Yehudah Kook wanted them to wait twenty-four hours. Hanan Porat would later say that he had gone to the rabbi, warning of a blow-up—and suggesting that Peres, newly installed as defense minister, might arrange official approval. Kook sent his secretary to Peres, asking to meet him urgently. According to a press report, it was Begin, not Porat, who pushed for the meeting. Either way, maximalists believed that Peres was on their side.
⁸

On June 4, therefore, Peres sandwiched a meeting at the rabbi’s home into his first full day in office. According to the press report, he told Kook he “identified with goals of the group’s members,” but he personally did not have the power to approve their settlement.
⁹
Attempting to convince Peres ended Kook’s own ambivalence. He reportedly told the defense minister that the settlement bid involved a religious obligation that one must “die rather than disobey,” and announced that he would take part.
¹⁰
When Sharon brought the rabbi to the encampment the next day, it was a sign that escalation had begun.

Soldiers arrived, followed by generals who tried to convince the would-be settlers to leave voluntarily. Finally, the soldiers were told to pull down the barbed-wire fence. The settlers spread out, holding on to the posts. “The order was given not to use force,” a newspaper reported afterward, “and new efforts at reaching an agreement began.” The depiction is tense and comic: The army does not know how to cope with a hundred civilians camped in a field, because facing Israeli civilians was outside military experience, especially civilians engaged in the patriotic act of settling the land.

The generals phoned Prime Minister Rabin. They passed the phone to Sharon, the prime minister’s old military comrade, who suggested a compromise: The settlers would move to a nearby army base, and stay until the cabinet discussed their request to settle in the area.
¹¹
After talking to his unhappy generals, Rabin agreed. The Elon Moreh activists leaned toward accepting. This could be a repeat of Hebron; the temporary would turn permanent.

Then they told Kook. “Is anything wrong with this spot?” the rabbi asked. We want to be near Shekhem, someone explained, we never were dead-set on this place precisely. “Is anything wrong with this spot?” Kook repeated. “If not, the demand that you leave is wrong. It is forbidden to leave.” He turned to the officers and said, “Bring out the machine guns”—as if, it appeared to Katzover, “he were standing on the
Altalena
.”

Night fell. The generals walked away. Soldiers rushed forward, ripped up the fence, began pulling the male settlers toward two waiting buses. They had orders to avoid violence, but found themselves dragging men who kicked, pushed, and shouted, lying on the ground, holding on to rocks. Women struck the struggling soldiers. Through the melee stormed Sharon, “seized by immense fury,” and roaring, “Refuse orders! Refuse orders!” Spotting a tangle around Hanan Porat, he rushed over. “This guy was wounded in the Yom Kippur War!” Sharon shouted. “How dare you?” A soldier trying to lift Yehudah Etzion found himself flung away by the stocky ex-general, who himself remained immune, protected by the force field of celebrity.

“Arik,” a captain told him, “when you gave the order to cross the canal during the war, I knew it was suicide, but I went anyway, because it was an order. Now you tell us to disobey our commanders’ orders?”

“This is an immoral order and you have to disobey that kind of order. I wouldn’t follow an order like that!”

Eventually, when all the men had been dragged from the field, Kook, too, agreed to board one of the buses, which took the men south to the police station in Jerusalem. They were released that night. The women and children got on waiting buses without resistance and were taken home. Troops took down their tents.

“I do not know if we fully get what happened at Elon Moreh south of Nablus,” Haim Gouri wrote the next day, after reading his newspaper in his small Jerusalem apartment. The poet-columnist stressed that he wrote as “someone who supports the Galili Document,” as a Labor maximalist. But the affair, he felt, “takes us back to the very beginning of the state, to the dispute we thought was over the day the Knesset was established and one army was set up that followed the orders of a government enjoying the legislature’s confidence.”
¹²
He, too, had a whiff of a sea breeze carrying smoke from the
Altalena
.

LET THE
camera linger on the uniformed men dragging protesters through the dark to buses. Leave the shouts too distant for words to be clear. Without a subtitle to identify the location, the scene could be a campus quad, outside an administration building occupied for a day. There is nothing intrinsically left or right, it turns out, in “liberating” space, in defiance or in going limp as you are carried away.

Around the world, founders of the 1960s New Left had suffered an “illegitimacy complex” in the words of the social critic Paul Berman; raised comfortably on stories of their Old Left parents’ heroism, they felt moral failure. Some solved their problem by rallying to the support of distant liberation movements—Latin American Marxists, Algerian or Palestinian nationalists—romanticizing their extremism and imagining away their victims.
¹³

By the twists of history, those who suffered an illegitimacy complex in Israel were not children of the Old Left, but its stepchildren, young religious Zionists. They accepted secular Zionism’s demand that Jews shed Jewish weakness and return to a half-imagined age of physical labor and military strength. But in Israel’s schoolbook legends, the heroes were secularists who settled the land, defied the British, fought in the war of independence. A counter-tradition of heroes belonged to the separatist right-wing undergrounds of the 1940s. Packed with anger at the left’s perfidy, that tale led to the
Altalena
. But it was also secular, someone else’s story. To make matters worse, Orthodox Zionists suffered a second illegitimacy complex: Next to the ultra-Orthodox, they felt like religious amateurs.