The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (42 page)

Sharon helped pick a new spot for establishing Elon Moreh.
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In a valley northeast of Nablus, near Sebastia, a village of a thousand or so Palestinians, stood a country train station used only by memory. An embankment for the track curved through the valley; a small stone bridge crossed the dry creek bed. The stone station stood on a slight rise. From a distance, it looked like a once-handsome farmhouse, with cypresses and pines lining the driveway that led to the main road. Once the train had come here from the coast and run on eastward across the Jordan River, linking to a line that carried travelers north to Damascus or south toward Mecca. It stopped running in 1938. The glen had room for crowds.

Hanan Porat and other activists met Shimon Peres. The defense minister set appointments easily with the young settler. Peres suggested he might win cabinet approval for the Elon Moreh group to settle at an army base on the slopes rising from the Jordan River toward Nablus.
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The spot would widen the Jordan Rift strip of settlements, bringing it a step closer to the mountain ridge. Peres was offering to co-opt the group, to let it help him make policy incrementally more maximalist. The Elon Moreh group rejected increments.
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The next day—Thursday, July 25—the Elon Moreh settlers and supporters set out again, this time from a town near Tel Aviv, on dirt roads up toward Sebastia, evading army roadblocks set up to stop them. A second group, led by Ariel Sharon, took main roads. Sharon, by a Gush Emunim account, “broke through” the first roadblock he hit, and led pursuing soldiers on a wild chase through the West Bank roads, pulling them away from the settlers’ actual destination. Other supporters walked in, or succeeded in driving in by not traveling in groups: Soldiers at roadblocks were not stopping Israelis on innocent outings. The settlement bid became a game of tag that grown-ups could join. Both sides agreed the issue was authority, maintaining it or joyously flouting it.
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“The mountains of Samaria are ours and we will no longer leave them in the hands of any other nation…” said a flier for participants. “The government has no right to prevent individuals and groups from living in any place on the soil of the homeland, as individuals…have done throughout the generations.”
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The second part of that statement equated the settlers to Jews through history who had come to live in the Holy Land for religious reasons, with no political expectations beyond hoping the current emperor would not disturb them. The first part made clear that settlement was a tool in a modern struggle between ethnic groups for sovereignty. It asserted a right to rule the land, not just to live in it. Blurred perception defined the new movement: It did not distinguish between individual rights and national ones, or between the faith of the past and faith-based nationalism. The strand of nationalism it transmuted into theology was exclusive: One nation’s claims negated another’s. Compromise became equivalent to blasphemy.

At Sebastia that afternoon, the tents went up again. Fifteen Knesset members arrived, allowed through the roadblocks on Peres’s instructions, whether to avoid stoking the political fire or to maintain his personal ties with the right. Among them was Menachem Begin, who two months before opposed illegal settlement. Novelist Moshe Shamir, the onetime Marxist ideologue turned Whole Land of Israel apostle, drove in, spent the night without sleeping bag or jacket, and woke at dawn to find young men praying at the train station. “Have you seen an idea come true? Have you witnessed, tangibly, actually, the moment of a vision of redemption turning into reality?” he wrote in another of his rhapsodies, published in a major newspaper.
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He had found young people with whom he resonated.

Rabin and Peres flew above the valley in a helicopter, looking down at a crowd they estimated at 400 to 500 people and that organizers described as 2,000.
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The cabinet met in special session on Friday afternoon to confront a national crisis. Dovish ministers blasted the army’s failure to stop the settlers. Peres was quoted by an admiring journalist as arguing that “this is an illegal, unacceptable act, but these guys are not professional criminals or lawbreakers. They’re moved by national motives”
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—concisely articulating the ethic of illegalism, which valued patriotic purpose over the rule of law. The cabinet authorized Rabin and Peres to remove the settlers, with the understanding that the evacuation would not occur on the Sabbath or the next day, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, anniversary of the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, when Orthodox Jews would be fasting.
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The crowd shrank before the Sabbath and grew again Sunday, as supporters hiked in through the hills under the July sun. Among them were Merkaz Harav students, acting on instructions of Tzvi Yehudah Kook, who permitted them to break the fast by drinking water. The obligation to settle the Land of Israel took precedence, he ruled.
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In the symbolic lexicon of Judaism, the ruling intimated approaching redemption, when the fast would be replaced by a feast. Peres met a delegation from “Elon Moreh.” Despite the cabinet’s decision not to negotiate until the settlers left Sebastia, he offered them a Jordan Rift settlement nearly deserted the year before.
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The government’s project of settling the Rift was ailing and could use new energy.

At midnight Mordechai Gur—the paratroop commander who took the Old City in 1967 and now the new military chief of staff—came to the train station and unsuccessfully urged the group to leave. Early Monday, after waiting for the settlers to finish morning prayers, soldiers began carrying them to thirty-one waiting buses—all in good spirits, with troops and settlers apologizing to each other, according to news reports on the end of the carnival.
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It was the first attempt to settle at Sebastia; it would not be the last.

Attorney General Meir Shamgar decided not to file charges. Shamgar said he wanted to avoid giving them the chance to exploit a trial as a political stage.
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Yet his decision hinted at what Peres had said aloud: Offenses committed out of nationalist zeal would be forgiven. “After all, this isn’t an enemy that has come to conquer the country,” Peres said at a post-crisis meeting of Labor’s Knesset delegation, answering angry doves such as Arie Eliav and Yossi Sarid who blasted him for indulging the settlers. A legislator from Peres’s Rafi faction of the party—a kibbutz man who had signed the original manifesto of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel—insisted no law was broken at Sebastia, and called for settlement in the area. In the Knesset plenum, Moshe Dayan criticized putting any limits on where Jews could settle on the West Bank, asserting that “our visa to Judea and Samaria is that they are Judea and Samaria and we are the people of Israel.” Though the doves were more vocal now, Labor still represented nearly the entire range of Israeli views on the West Bank’s future. The party mainstream supported settlement in occupied territory and had never officially adopted a map of where it would be allowed or barred or endorsed a rationale for such distinctions.

“This is a government of settlement, but it has an earlier and a later,” Peres asserted.
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It was an invitation to a pressure group to make the “later” happen sooner, especially after a success in mobilizing supporters that exceeded expectations. The Elon Moreh group merged with Gush Emunim, and a joint leadership met to plan the next steps of a quickly growing movement.
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YIGAL ALLON
conveniently missed the Labor catfight over Sebastia. He favored “removing the squatters,” as he told Kissinger.
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But speaking too strongly against “squatters” could have provoked questions from colleagues with memories of Hebron.

Then again, he did face Kissinger’s rather undiplomatic quip, at a dinner at the Israeli embassy in Washington: “What are you doing, being merely a ‘deputy’ prime minister?” The professor, like a demanding father, expected complete success of his former students. The small talk between courses that night between senators and congressmen was about trying Richard Nixon in the Senate.
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The House Judiciary Committee was already approving articles of impeachment. “He is listening to tapes and climb[ing] the walls,” Kissinger said afterward at Camp David, where he and Allon went to talk privately.
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Despite the president’s implosion, Kissinger was pressing ahead with his Mideast efforts, pushing for an interim agreement between Israel and Jordan. He did not need to push Allon hard. The foreign minister rejected the proposal from Zaid al-Rifai, now King Hussein’s prime minister, for a deal based on Israel pulling back six miles from the Jordan River along the length of the West Bank. That would mean giving up the Rift. Instead, Allon suggested returning Jericho to Jordanian rule, as a first step toward realizing the Allon Plan—although, he admitted, he had no mandate to concede land. He and Kissinger agreed on tactics: Kissinger would suggest Jericho and a bit more to Rifai and Hussein, as an American idea, something that perhaps could be sold to Israel. Allon said he was “very happy” they had found a way to get talks rolling.
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When Rabin heard, he was less pleased. Three days later, before Allon left Washington, he gave a message to Ambassador Simcha Dinitz to pass to Kissinger. “As already explained to you, any territorial concession by Israel on the West Bank requires new elections,” Kissinger was now told. “The cabinet is not prepared to call an election involving territorial concessions within the context of an interim agreement.”
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Nonetheless, when Jordanian prime minister Rifai arrived in Washington immediately afterward, Kissinger did suggest an Israeli pullback from “Jericho, a corridor and part of the West Bank,” stressing, “I’ve never discussed [this] with the Israelis.” Rifai was willing to start from there, saying, “We can improve on that in actual negotiations.”
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By then, the secretary of state was truly flying solo. Nixon had just been forced to release the final, incriminating Watergate transcripts. Two days after Rifai’s visit, he resigned. When King Hussein himself arrived in mid-August, Kissinger was secretary of state to a new president, Gerald Ford. Hussein, though afraid of Arab reactions to a corridor running through Israeli-held land, accepted Kissinger’s pledge to press forward on a disengagement agreement. Kissinger argued that it did not matter if Israel’s opening offer was “outrageous”; what mattered was that Israel agreed “to disengage over the Jordan,” to pull back in some way. From there, negotiations would take on their own life.
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Instead, progress ended. Rabin came to Washington, but the meeting of the unelected prime minister and unelected president was “close to a disaster,” the epitome of bad chemistry, in Kissinger’s telling.
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Rabin insisted the Israeli public would only accept West Bank concessions for a full peace treaty. Ford found Rabin dour, tough, and inflexible.
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Tremendously insecure, shy, and politically besieged would have been more accurate.

Allon later claimed that he held back from an all-out political fight over the need to negotiate with Jordan because of Hussein’s hesitations. A summit of Arab leaders was scheduled for Rabat, Morocco, at the end of October. On the agenda was whether to allow Hussein to negotiate for the West Bank or to give that mandate to the PLO. Allon wanted a commitment from Hussein that he would stick with an interim deal no matter what happened in Rabat. Otherwise, Labor could find itself facing elections over a nonexistent accord. “We’d have been like the kid relieving himself behind a bus and the bus moves,” he said.
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Hussein was unwilling to give any such promise, and preferred to wait till after the summit.
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THE LAND
lay on dry slopes leading up from Jericho to Jerusalem. In Hebrew it was called the Red Ascent, Ma’aleh Adumim, after the color of the rock. The Arabic name meant the Blood Ascent, supposedly for the blood of travelers spilled by bandits.

In August 1974, settlement czar Yisrael Galili wanted to build at Ma’aleh Adumim. For several years an idea had floated through officialdom of putting an industrial park for Jerusalem there, outside the territory Israel had annexed. Even inside the city on annexed land, though, construction did not keep up with plans, and apartments built for political purposes sometimes stood empty.

Now, facing diplomacy and the potential for a pullback, Galili sought to ring the metropolis with settlements. If new borders were drawn, they would not be next to the city. If Jericho were given up, a settlement between there and East Jerusalem would keep the Jordanians away from the Holy City. Once again, slow diplomacy spurred settlement efforts. There were doves in Labor who questioned such plans, but Rabin and Allon supported the policy. The more hawkish Peres did all the more so. Intent on accelerating settlement, the defense minister had just appointed Moshe Netzer—the kibbutz member and former Palmah officer responsible for reestablishing Kfar Darom in the Gaza Strip—as his settlement coordinator. Unencumbered by the romance of farming and enamored of the defense industry, Peres put another old friend in charge of moving defense factories to settlements. Building a wide ring around Jerusalem fit their plans.
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With Rabin’s approval, Galili put the head of the Jewish National Fund in charge of a panel to develop Ma’aleh Adumim.
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As the Settlement Department’s Yehiel Admoni read the map, the Red Ascent broke the Allon Plan’s boundaries and opened the way to further eating away at the land available for returning to Arab rule.
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Allon himself insisted that building at the site east of Jerusalem fit his intent and claimed credit for the idea of settling there.
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Even among those involved in Labor’s settlement project, there was no agreed line of what the Allon Plan allowed. Instead there was a rough concept, and as time passed the concept appears to have shimmered, shifted, and grown.