The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (50 page)

But Galili also insisted that no settlement be set up without government approval, which meant his committee’s okay. He could not bear Gush Emunim’s anarchy. The settlers had to leave Kaddum, he said, because planning professionals “believe the place does not have appropriate conditions for settlement.”
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The technical difficulty would allow him to maintain authority.

Allon, however, did want a clear stand, a set of principles on what to keep and what to concede. He had a strategic doctrine, which—he could argue with the same untired enthusiasm that had swept over him nine years before when he came up with it—adjudicated his own conflicts. “I want secure borders, I want a Jewish state, I want a democracy,” he said. As for the Arabs accepting his plan, “A compromise always has a better chance than a lack of compromise,” and at the least the rest of the world would know “that we looked for a way, we considered the Arab factor.”

For Allon, Kaddum was an affront. “The subject is not just a geostrategic concept,” he said, “…but a test of Israeli democracy.” Every previous attempt to settle in that area had been stopped. “In the end, no settlement has ever been established without approval,” he said. “I could reconstruct what happened in the establishment of Merom Golan, Kfar Etzion, and Kiryat Arba. Things aren’t as they’re described.”
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It was a confession that his past argued against him.

The National Religious Party’s Zevulun Hammer, who had helped create Gush Emunim, saw no problem in unauthorized settling. After one year, he said, Ofrah had 150 residents. “Isolated, they are building their home by their own efforts,” which showed “true pioneering.” Kaddum, too, was “a serious settlement with ideology and vision,” he said, implying that sincerity trumped legal niceties. The Hebron settlers had originally acted on their own, Hammer argued; ministers supported them, and “helped them…including with the problem of guns.”

“If it weren’t for Kiryat Arba, there’d be no issue of Kaddum,” Peres interjected, blaming Allon for the current problem.

“How is it that ten times before a decision was made to evict” illegal settlements in Samaria “and one time it was decided not to evict?” demanded Allon, blaming Peres.

“Because they decided that Zionism is racism, and that changed our decisions,” Peres answered.
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The dispute between Allon and Peres was the drama that mattered, an angry personal catfight that stood for the war of attrition within the ruling party. Peres filled Dayan’s role as spokesman for continued Israeli domination of the West Bank. Unlike Dayan, he did not speak of the Bible, but stuck to security arguments. He proposed a settlement east of Tel Aviv to widen Israel’s narrow waist—and more settlements east of that, creating a strip slicing across the West Bank, “for defensive purposes.” More building near Jerusalem would create another such strip, breaking occupied territory into fragments. Besides that, he said, “there’s a line of army bases in Samaria…I’d put a small civilian settlement next to each one,” including Camp Kaddum. “I don’t see how we can keep an Israeli passport holder from settling where he desires,”

Peres argued. Peres’s plan fit Dayan’s concept that if peace came it would require “functional compromise,” joint Israeli-Arab rule of the West Bank, with the settlers staying put. It also fit the political tactic of maintaining power inside the party by showing that one had the option of bolting and bringing the right to power.
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“I don’t understand,” Rabin said, how a strip across the West Bank could be a defensive line. The intent was: Peres does not understand defense. The prime minister said he was willing to talk about settlements meant to fatten the waist, a break with the Allon Plan, but the government could not accept Kaddum.
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The debate, held only because Gush Emunim forced it on the government, ended in a Galili compromise. The government would “increase settlement on both sides of the Green Line” and “prevent attempts…to settle without its approval.” The word for
settle
in the second clause was the formal one, “to inherit.” “No settlement will be established at Kaddum,” it said; the settlers would instead be offered a spot that fit “the government’s approved plan.”

The decision did not describe that plan. It said nothing of what would happen if the Kaddum settlers refused the government’s offer.
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Rabin and the Labor party wanted to avoid a political split. Challenged to define their stand on the country’s future borders and on the rule of law, they again chose to avoid a choice.

“We cannot accept the cabinet’s decision,” Hanan Porat declared the next day, reading Gush Emunim’s response at a press conference in the Kaddum dining hall. “We cannot acquiesce in any decision that means dismantling the settlement.” On a bare knoll above the mobile homes, three Defense Ministry contractors looked over plans for Elon Moreh’s electricity grid.
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GALILI ASSIGNED
Yehiel Admoni to dicker with the Elon Moreh group. “Be careful to take exact notes,” Galili advised in a memo (marked, habitually, “top secret”), so Gush Emunim could not twist media coverage, and “avoid discussing ideology or politics.”
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A messenger whom Admoni sent to Camp Kaddum to arrange a meeting found “construction work continues there, most obviously a large (prefab) structure for a metalwork plant,” Galili reported to Rabin. “This fact…will not make the contacts easier.”
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In late June, Admoni met with representatives from Kaddum and Gush Emunim’s secretariat. He offered four alternative settlement spots—three on the hills rising from the Jordan Rift, barely below the line where desert gave way to Palestinian fields, and one east of Tel Aviv, in the foothills on that side of the West Bank mountains. The Faithful, its representatives replied, had groups ready to take three of the proposed sites, but “the Elon Moreh group does not regard those locations as appropriate for itself, as it sees itself as the vanguard of those…who will settle the Samaria ridge.”
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In a singularly firm voice, they replied to the demand to move: We would prefer not to.

The places that Galili offered, though, mapped the government’s own plans. Widening the waist was now policy. Admoni favored the move: It demonstrated that the Green Line was history. Moreover, the underground aquifers that provided much of Israel’s water lay under the West Bank foothills, and relatively few Palestinians lived there.
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The principle remained of not settling Jews in heavily populated Arab areas, not sketching borders that would annex hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. But from both east and west, settlements narrowed the strip of territory that Israel designated for future Arab rule, and reduced resources such as water and empty land. Palestinians, ruled by Israel but not part of its polity, did not have a voice in those decisions.

With Gush Emunim’s response, according to Admoni, negotiations ceased.
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In the months afterward, Allon and other cabinet members wondered publicly when the settlers would be evicted from Kaddum. Rabin’s answer was, “I have patience.” The archaeologist and ex-general Yigal Yadin, who had announced that he would run for prime minister on an independent ticket aimed at government reform, said on the radio, “The Kaddum settlement affair is part of the widespread anarchy in Israel.” At Elon Moreh, the metalwork plant got Defense Ministry business.
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AFTER
nearly two years, the fence around the base at Baal Hatzor was completed.
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The “work camp” at Ofrah kept growing. A small cherry orchard had been planted. Apartments for more families were being built. A synagogue was dedicated, built by the Religious Affairs Ministry.
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Since the settlement did not officially exist, it did not need to fit the categories for rural life—commune or cooperative farm village—set by officials faithful to Labor’s settlement tradition. Ofrah’s settlers quickly decided they did not want a socialist economy. But the idea of a village where people privately farmed or ran businesses or commuted to city jobs was new and needed definition. A maverick planner working with Gush Emunim provided it: Ofrah would be a “community settlement.”
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In practice, that term meant a small, closed residential community, managed by an association responsible for “preserving the character of the settlement,” as a Gush Emunim report explained. New residents would have to be accepted as members, so that all would share an “ideological-social background.” They would enjoy “single-family homes, quiet streets, fresh air,” a dream beyond the reach of most Israelis. The community would grow no larger than a few hundred families, attracting educated professionals to an “island” of a “selected population,” deliberately “homogenous.”
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The plan took what had developed de facto in Alon Shvut, the settlement dominated by the Har Etzion yeshivah that Yigal Allon had sponsored, and made the concept explicit. The “community settlement” would be an exclusive exurb, in which the shade of one’s religious commitment could be a criterion for entry. Ofrah became the model, to be applied by other Gush Emunim communities.

Here is another irony. Gush Emunim began with hopes of transforming Israeli society, igniting a revival of faith. Yet by setting settlement as its strategy, it drew its supporters out of Israel to occupied territory. Young Orthodox Jews who had grown up in the cities, contending with a cacophony of political and cultural argument, moved to small communities of people like themselves, comfortable colonies with Palestinian towns and villages as scenery, a barely noticed backdrop. In their new homes, they did not need to face the secular Israelis who had mocked them on their way home from Bnei Akiva meetings. They became a sect, apart from the Israel they sought to lead.

IN DECEMBER
1976, two hundred settlers were living in Camp Kaddum—thirty-five families with eighty children, and sundry singles. “Intensive construction activity is under way,” in coordination with the Defense Ministry, the daily
Ha’aretz
reported. Extensions had been added to the mobile homes. Classrooms and a grocery had been built.
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Despite the cabinet’s decision, Elon Moreh was flourishing.

Yitzhak Rabin’s government was not. Rabin and Peres continued to feud on the front pages, like a celebrity couple on the way to divorce. Rabin accused Peres of campaigning from within the cabinet to replace him as Labor’s candidate for prime minister in the elections scheduled for the following fall.

Inflation, meanwhile, approached 40 percent. The government had never managed to heal an economy wounded by the 1973 war. Nor had Rabin, the ex-general without party experience, done anything to reform Labor’s despised political machine and its reign of patronage. The issues were knotted together, because the party controlled much of the economy—through state and union-owned companies created years before to build the country, and through government financial help to favored entrepreneurs.

In the fall, Rabin had nominated a Labor loyalist to be the next governor of the Bank of Israel, the country’s top professional economic post. Asher Yadlin was head of the union-run HMO that provided health care to most Israelis. He was also under police investigation, it quickly emerged, for bribe-taking. The nomination was dropped. Next the news broke that Housing Minister Avraham Ofer was suspected of embezzling funds for party use during his tenure as head of a giant union-owned construction firm. These were the latest scandals, not the first ones.

Junior coalition parties were eager to quit, so they could run untainted by incumbency. Meanwhile, Yigal Yadin, the archaeologist-general, created the Democratic Movement for Change, a collection of rebels—intellectual reformers, businessmen certain they could run things better, Laborites frustrated by the machine, Likud dissidents—united mostly by unhappiness with the existing parties. The new ticket generated instant enthusiasm. Yadin hoped to ride to the premiership.

Rabin’s ruling coalition unraveled in late December. The pretext was a Friday afternoon military ceremony, greeting the arrival of Israel’s first F-15 warplanes from the United States, which stretched into the Sabbath. The National Religious Party’s ministers abstained in a vote of confidence; Rabin dismissed them, resigned, and called early elections. He may have hoped a shortened campaign would give his opponents less time to hurt him. It was a mistake.

Two weeks later, on January 3, Ofer shot himself, leaving a note that he was innocent but could not bear the charges in the media. Soon after, Rabin’s onetime nominee for central bank chief was sentenced to five years in jail.
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In February, a Labor Party convention narrowly chose Rabin over Peres as its candidate for prime minister. By an equally narrow vote, it adopted a platform promising to settle Israelis in areas matching the Allon Plan—rejecting Dayan’s demand for settlement throughout the West Bank. The party had a position, barely.
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