The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (43 page)

Galili reported to the Settlement Committee that land east of Jerusalem had been declared closed, officially for military use, in fact available for the industrial park. There were groups of citizens interested in settling in the Ma’aleh Adumim area, he added, which meant that more was planned than factories. Apparently Galili did not mention that those groups, though organized earlier, had now taken Gush Emunim as their sponsor. He did say that he and Rabin had met several days before with the Sebastia settlers, and offered them Ma’aleh Adumim. They rejected all compromises.
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In the month after the Sebastia bid, the settlers’ representatives were actually treated to two meetings with Rabin and Galili, and at least one with Peres. The country’s leaders did not want another face-off, and hoped to recruit the young, fervent activists for their own settlement plans. Peres again proposed that they take over a Jordan Rift site that had been nearly deserted by Likud-linked settlers. The Arabs were actually most interested in getting the Rift back, he said, hinting at the contacts with Jordan, and the Rift settlements were in danger of collapse.
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Seven years after the Settlement Department’s plan for putting 32,000 Israelis in the Rift in a decade, there were a few hundred Jews there. The spirit was willing among officials with receding hairlines who sat at conference tables, wearing the Labor uniform of white shirts open at the collar, remembering the slogans of their youth. But the money was lacking, especially after the war. A greater problem was that few young Israelis were ready to put down roots in the Rift. Many passed through; few stayed.
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North of Jericho, below the ridge that looked like a sleeping dinosaur, the small concrete houses and vegetable fields of Gilgal now belonged to a young kibbutz. The former Nahal outpost had been turned over to the United Kibbutz the year before. For the moment, it consisted mainly of people who would have been college freshmen in another country. To hold the spot, the movement sent children of veteran communes who volunteered for a year of service after high school and before going to the army. None expected to spend their lives there. In September 1974 the kibbutz newsletter greeted “our replacements, our heirs, our hope”—the second round of teenagers, fourteen so far and four or more expected, replacing the first group, who described themselves as “elders in every respect, gushing with experience,” and who would soon leave for boot camp.
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A seventeen-year-old named Vered, from a kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, arrived on the un-air-conditioned bus through the desert, got off at “nowhere,” and walked from the main road to the patch of green in the midst of the yellow countryside. There was a lawn, and prefab buildings the size of mobile homes that slept eight people each, and heat “like an oven, impossible to breathe.” The size of the rooms did not matter, because no one spent waking time in them. People rose at four in the morning to work in fields of eggplants, peppers, and onions until midmorning when the sun became monstrous, slept again until afternoon, worked into the dark, spent their evenings excitedly together in the clubhouse or on the lawn in front of the dining hall, clasped by the emptiness and the shadow of the ridge, and then slept a couple of hours before returning to labor. No one skipped work. You were judged by how you worked, and how you got along.
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There was no TV. Everyone ate together. If one person put on a record, everyone could hear it. The tiny apartments had sinks but no refrigerators; a refrigerator would have been private property. “We were fulfilling part of our education, the dream of our founding fathers,” one of the volunteers from a veteran kibbutz later explained. “We were their dream.” To spend a season or a year at Gilgal was to treat the kibbutz ideal as still young, still vital—with a hint of self-consciousness that something was being reenacted. “We behaved,” Vered would recall, “like children playing kibbutz.” The pre-army volunteers were joined by city-raised graduates of youth movements serving in Nahal, alternating between active duty and stretches at Gilgal, where they were expected to settle after military service. “I loved the
firstness
of it, that we were starting something new,” another early settler explained Gilgal’s attraction. The kibbutz was part of a government plan, uncontroversial, expected to last. Sometimes a Labor politician came to sit on the lawn and talk.

“It wasn’t a commune at night,” in one early member’s words, meaning that free love was not part of the experience. But couples formed quickly. Nothing was simpler than getting a room together. Gilgal was “a matchmaking business,” as Vered put it, eventually the meeting place of “thousands of couples around Israel.” Few stayed to live there. In the memories of early settlers, Gilgal was a “train station,” a confusion of arrivals and departures. Every week, it seemed, there was a going-away party. More people were on the track to university campuses, fitting bourgeois parents’ dreams, than to the youth movement vision of kibbutz life. A new beginning of a fading idea, Gilgal would grow slowly and stay small.
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Against that gray backdrop Gush Emunim appeared, sudden and pyrotechnic, producing gasps from ex-pioneers of Yisrael Galili’s generation. Gush Emunim was a magnet for people who wanted to settle in occupied territory, but not according to government maps, and not in the kind of collective farming communities that Laborites expected. Galili feared the new movement’s energy and wished he could harness it. “There are those in whom I detect a sort of dangerous flame that is likely to burn…the tissues of the democratic experience,” he wrote to a fellow kibbutz man, a supporter of the Whole Land of Israel enthralled by the new would-be settlers. Galili admitted nostalgia for such enthusiasm. But the settlers refused to follow democratic decisions—in practice, the choices of Galili’s committee. If Gush Emunim accepted discipline, “they could be a positive factor in carrying out the existing settlement [map] which is still weak…and needs to be strengthened quickly.”
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To his comrade, Galili did not try to justify that map. Galili believed in the right and responsibility of elected representatives to make secret decisions, and he believed in settlement. If he could direct the new movement to the places he chose, he would be satisfied.

THE
“
OPERATION
” was supposed to be secret and involve thousands of people, a contradiction in terms. The word
operation,
with its scent of military daring, hinted at the romantic picture that Gush Emunim’s activists were drawing of themselves. This time they would move at night. They would start from points all along the Green Line. They would head for two separate targets, an abandoned police station among the Palestinian villages northwest of Ramallah and Jericho, to show both the government and Kissinger what they thought of reports that Israel might give up that town to Jordan. Since Hawarah, “settling” had morphed into a form of mass protest.

An order passed through the chain of activists to move on the evening of October 8. The religious holiday of Simhat Torah ended at nightfall, so synagogues could be used to get word out, and a school vacation made teenagers available. The “secret” reached the police and army with equal speed. Checkpoints went up on West Bank roads. Police showed up at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv, where crowds were gathering, and told drivers of chartered vehicles to go home. From the nearby Orthodox farm community of Nehalim, a line of “two hundred vehicles,” according to an activist’s account, rolled out with headlights off, led by Meir Har-Tzion, an ex-commando who had fought under Ariel Sharon in the 1950s and was legendary either for his bravery or his cold-bloodedness, depending on whom you asked. For Gush Emunim, recruiting this secular icon of machismo was another confirmation of being the new vanguard. Har-Tzion pushed through one roadblock, got stopped at another, and led his charges on foot twelve miles through the dark to the abandoned police station. Across the West Bank, in a vast game of hide and seek, groups broke up, got lost, headed for hilltops. When day came, soldiers began pulling protesters to buses. A party led by Levinger spent two days in a canyon near Jericho before being dragged out. For the next week, new groups kept heading out and getting caught. By one press estimate sympathetic to Gush Emunim, 15,000 people took part all together.
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A spoof diary of a “settler for half a night,” printed in handwriting with childish drawings, appeared in the monthly magazine of Bnei Akiva. The narrator describes hearing from “the gang” at synagogue about the “operation,” and tags along because “why not? It’s not a bad trip for school vacation.” He rides on the roof of a packed car that evades “an army of one soldier” at a roadblock. “Maybe it’s illegal, but they explained to me that the ends sanctify the means,” he writes. They reach their destination, which “doesn’t seem like the best spot for a picnic, especially at night, but I kept quiet, because ‘the ends sanctify etc.’” Stranger yet, he is asked to put up a fence around the picnic grounds. When two soldiers pick him up “like a stretcher…I saw that one of them was Kirshenpluk, our neighbors’ son,” who promptly drops him in surprise. Home at last, he gets a visit from friends who want to sign him up for a “real” settlement, but he needs to prepare for college entrance exams. “Who’s got time to settle?” he concludes.
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The satire constituted a certificate of success for Gush Emunim. Not only had it brought out religious teenagers, it had reached the critical mass where people came without needing to understand or believe. “Settling” for a day was now the way to rebel and conform at the same time. In the year since the war, the Bloc of the Faithful had been born as a lobbying group within a middle-rank party, reinvented itself as settlement organization and protest group, and metamorphosed to subculture—a mood, the next happening thing.

Despite the spoof’s gentle jabs, Bnei Akiva’s magazine both reflected and shaped the Orthodox youth movement’s own transformation into a support auxiliary for Gush Emunim. Articles by rabbis of the Kook school appeared as the proper religious commentary on current events. In the autumn of 1973, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner not only proclaimed the just-ended war to be “a stunning victory unlike any we have known since we returned to our land,” but he also asserted that Jewish heroism in battle was “a manifestation of the sacred” and heralded the messiah’s coming.
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To mark the seventieth anniversary of the death of Zionism’s founding father Theodor Herzl, the magazine published an essay by Har Etzion yeshivah head Yehudah Amital proclaiming the death of Herzl’s secular nationalism. Herzl expected that the Jews’ return to their land would make them a normal nation, accepted among other nation-states, Amital explained, but diplomatic and military threats to Israel proved that “the Jewish problem” was unsolved. Herzl—and secular Israelis—were mistaken. “But there exists a different Zionism,” Amital said, “the Zionism of redemption,” to take the place of Herzl’s ideas.
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Rather than secular Zionism being the heir of Judaism, religious Zionism would be the rightful successor of secular nationalism, free to take possession of its myths and rituals and assign them new meaning.

A columnist answering teenagers’ questions of belief wrote that “in our generation, the generation of redemption,” the Land of Israel was the primary value, which “comes before anything else.”
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A teenage girl identified only by her first name, Osnat, described a trip by her Bnei Akiva chapter to Samaria—the northern West Bank—and quickly segued to amazement at “talk of ‘peace or territories’ from Jews.” Her movement’s pressing task was “to support the hawks’ position.”
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Dissenting voices did appear on occasion, as in a pro-and-con debate on the Sebastia bid. The “con” writer dutifully affirmed that “the Land of Israel…belongs to us and no other nation,” but objected to putting greater stress on land than on the search for religious meaning.
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Osnat answered him, in the joyous righteousness of youth, with hope that “you too will soon be privileged to see the light.”
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The dissenters looked as painfully out of place as a bow tie at a rock concert. Not that every member read the ideological debates. It was possible to tag along on a settlement “operation” because everyone else was going, be evacuated by the neighbor’s son, and move later to a settlement—citing your Bnei Akiva upbringing, and insisting you had never read Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s messianic writings.

GATHERING IN RABAT
on October 28, 1974, the leaders of the Arab countries recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people in any Palestinian territory that is liberated.” King Hussein, utterly isolated, gave his assent.
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Until now, the PLO’s base of support was mainly Palestinian refugees living outside the land once labeled Palestine on maps. Young people from the occupied territories crossed into Arab countries to join. Inside occupied land, the PLO’s influence was weak, though Israel’s perceived defeat in 1973 boosted backing for the nationalists. The Rabat decision speeded the trend. Rather than recognizing West Bank support for the PLO, Rabat created it.
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If there had been an opening for an Israeli-Jordanian agreement, Rabin had feared to step through it. By the end, Hussein had as well. Now it was shut. The commitment by Golda Meir and then Rabin to hold new elections before ceding West Bank land, at least partially a product of Gush Emunim’s pressure on the National Religious Party the previous spring, was a key factor in the setback.

By coincidence, Rabin succeeded in bringing the Orthodox party into his coalition virtually at the same time as the Rabat summit.
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That gave him a stronger parliamentary majority, along with a more maximalist cabinet. On paper, the “Jordanian option” remained Labor’s policy for the future of the West Bank’s Palestinians. In practice, the political changes both in Israel and among the Arabs made that option a dead letter. “I tried to convince them to go ahead with you anyway, and we would protect them,” Kissinger told the Israeli troika, describing his meeting with Hussein just after Rabat. “He wouldn’t hear of it.”
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