The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (51 page)

The next scandal followed Rabin’s trip to Washington to meet the newly elected American president, Jimmy Carter, and discuss resuming peace efforts. On his return in mid-March,
Ha’aretz
reported that Rabin and his wife, Leah, had kept a bank account in the United States after he served as ambassador—a violation of Israel’s foreign-currency laws.
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The offense was technical, but it completed the picture of a leadership that treated itself as above the law.

The attorney general decided to charge Leah Rabin, who had managed the account, while imposing an administrative fine on the prime minister. Rabin wanted to find “any way possible to bear responsibility equally” with his wife. The gruff, lonely man who had struggled for three years at consensus rule found a decision he could make entirely himself. On April 7, he declared on television that he was no longer a candidate for reelection. He also wanted to give up the premiership, but could not: He had already resigned. By law, he led a caretaker government until the May 17 elections and could not leave the post.

On April 10, Labor’s central committee unanimously chose Peres as its new candidate for prime minister. Rabin announced that he was taking a vacation, leaving Peres as “chairman” of the cabinet. To get away from “political intrigues and gloating,” Yitzhak and Leah Rabin left for the southern Sinai. At Ofirah, a settlement near Sharm al-Sheikh developing as a tropical beach resort, he would be the guest at a ceremony dedicating a new water pipeline that would let the town grow.
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Before he left, Galili gave him a note that began, “I don’t want to weigh upon you,” and then provided talking points on settlement in the area.
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The political crisis did not slow Galili’s work. In April, he completed arrangements for the first settlement east of Tel Aviv, two and a half miles outside the Green Line. A Gush Emunim group would receive the site, which would become a suburb known as Elkanah. Difficulties acquiring land had held up the project, and the Faithful’s public demands to receive the site obscured the fact that it fit the government’s new plans. Eager to avoid another fight with Gush Emunim before the election, Galili decided that land could be expropriated from its Palestinian owners if need be.
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Earlier, just before Rabin’s resignation, Galili and Peres signed off on buying 250 acres at another spot five miles farther east of Elkanah, amid Palestinian villages. The Arab owner was eager to sell quickly and the opportunity would not last, said the memo they received.
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The purchase did not yet mean approval for Israelis to move in. But it did fit Peres’s proposal to create a strip of settlements cutting across the West Bank. By some accounts, in the spring of 1977 the Defense Ministry under Peres was already planning the town that would later be established in the area, to be called Ariel.
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Building settlements did not bear an obvious political cost; refraining did. The land considered out of bounds steadily shrank.

THE RABINS
returned after a few days for Leah’s trial. She was convicted and fined $26,500. At her request, he stayed in his office during the brief court session.
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Shimon Peres was, at last, heir to the house of Labor. Two days before the election, he faced Likud leader Menachem Begin in the country’s first televised debate. The event confirmed that Begin, once chief of the “separatists,” far-right firebrand and political pariah, was a legitimate contender. Begin’s alliance of the right rejected foreign rule over any part of the Gaza Strip or West Bank. On camera, he quoted Peres’s own comments on the need to “maintain the width of the country.” The Likud, by implication, was not extreme, merely clearer in its message. Demanding all of the homeland was no longer radicalism. Peres himself stressed that Labor had put settlers “in the Jordan Rift, the Jerusalem area, Ma’aleh Adumim and on the mountain ridge.”
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The National Religious Party declared its independence from Labor. It promised to prefer a coalition with the Likud, and added to its ticket Haim Druckman—the rabbi who had presided over the seder at Hebron’s Park Hotel and in whose living room Gush Emunim was founded.
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The party that sought to avoid war in 1967 now wanted to attract young people who had camped at Sebastia, or who wished they had.

Yigal Yadin, the ex-general promising reform, finally stated his stand on peace and borders: West Bank settlements would be kept to the Jordan Rift; land would be conceded for peace, but not to the PLO.
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The ideas could have been cribbed from Allon—the former “armed prophet of the Whole Land” now on the dovish side of his own Labor Party’s candidate. Right-wingers wanting a general could vote for Ariel Sharon, running on his own ticket. A farmer and son of a cooperative village, Sharon may have had particular attraction for Labor believers in the Whole Land.

Still, experts and polls predicted a Labor victory. The party always ruled. But the exit polls on the night of May 17 heralded an overturning of the given order. Begin’s party won forty-three Knesset seats. The Labor-Mapam Alignment took just thirty-two, half what it had at its founding eight years earlier. Yadin’s list, mostly supported by former Laborites, had fifteen. With the help of the Orthodox parties and Sharon, whose ticket won two seats in parliament, Begin would be the next prime minister.

The reasons included scandals, mismanagement, and festering fury over the debacle of October 1973. They included the anger of Jews who had come from other Middle Eastern countries after independence and had been treated as outsiders by Labor, the party of the European founders. They included, too, the queasy feeling in the gut experienced by Labor loyalists who had watched Rabin and Peres feud, the government unable to clear out Sebastia or Kaddum, the party finally nominating Gush Emunim’s patron as its leader. “How many voted Likud because of the Land of Israel and how many because of Yadlin in jail and Rabin resigning…and ‘we’re sick of it’ and strikes and ‘we feel shafted’ and ‘let’s try something else’ and all the rest of the causes?” wrote a bitter Haim Gouri in Labor’s newspaper.
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The reasons were tangled. The result was that a coalition unambiguously dedicated to the Whole Land would now rule.

TEN YEARS HAD
passed since Haim Gouri and General Uzi Narkiss stood in the shade of Ramat Rachel’s pines, looking out at what seemed to be the unreachable landscape of nostalgia.

The battles of June 1967 put that land in reach. An overwhelming and unexpected victory brought Israel sudden glory and accidental empire. By 1977, maps in Hebrew that showed the Green Line were pictures of another age, stuffed in drawers, torn at the folds. Young men and women of draft age remembered the smaller Israel vaguely, from the time in their childhood before places beyond one’s neighborhood become solid.

The conquests came at a crucial moment in Israel’s development. The settlement ethos had been fading. New settlements were hardly being built. The country now faced the challenges of consolidation that came with independence: integrating its founders and latecomers, learning to treat its laws and institutions as its own, defining the relations between the government and pre-state institutions such as parties and unions.

The victory of 1967 suddenly imposed new challenges: the future of the land, and of Israel’s relation to the people who found themselves living under its rule. Yet the war also created political paralysis and a diplomatic stalemate. Pushed together by the crisis of June 1967, the rival parties of Labor Zionism merged, creating a single party that represented the entire range of views on the future of the land.

Asked by Lyndon Johnson, “What kind of Israel do you want?” Levi Eshkol could not answer. Johnson, the leader of Israel’s essential ally, did not press the point because he did not want to repeat America’s error in the 1956 Suez Crisis, and because his attention was elsewhere. Internally and internationally, it was easier to avoid decisions, or to keep them as vague as possible.

Instead, Israel’s founding generation discovered that the accidental empire gave them the chance to return to the methods of their own younger days, when Jewish independence was a dream rather than a constrained and complicated reality. The partition of Palestine and the 1949 armistice lines were erased, or so it seemed both to those who had accepted them and to those who despised them. Once again, borders might be drawn by quietly creating facts. The glory days of Labor Zionism would return. Young people would again build kibbutzim, and the cause would trump laws and formalities. A solution would appear for dealing with the Palestinians: A new wave of immigrants would maintain Israel’s Jewish majority, or Gaza’s refugees would emigrate, or improved living standards would convince Palestinians to accept unobtrusive Israeli rule, or populated parts of occupied land would be given up for peace while unpopulated areas would be settled.

The most extravagant hopes of early settlement proponents were not fulfilled. Despite the dreams of Yitzhak Tabenkin, the white-bearded sage of the United Kibbutz, hundreds of new kibbutzim did not rise from the earth. Despite the plans of the Settlement Department, tens of thousands of Israelis did not move to the Jordan Rift or the Golan Heights.

By May 17, 1977, though, there were nearly eighty Israeli settlements in occupied territory.
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Their population has been estimated at 11,000 or more.
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Most of the Israelis living beyond the Green Line were in several towns. In the farm communities of the Jordan Rift, so central to the Allon Plan, about 1,800 lived. These figures do not include annexed East Jerusalem, which Israel treated as part of the state. The new neighborhoods there had drawn 40,000 or more Israelis across the pre-1967 armistice lines.
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The numbers, though, are just one part of the story. The first decade, under Labor rule, broke boundaries, established methods, and opened the way to continued settlement building that followed under governments of the right.

Not only was the Green Line erased from maps, the boundary between legal and illegal action was blurred. Levi Eshkol chose to use the cover of Nahal paramilitary outposts to circumvent international law. Yigal Allon, who would later decry Gush Emunim’s anti-democratic behavior, lent political and logistic support to the first wildcat settlers in the Golan Heights and Hebron, setting a precedent for Shimon Peres’s assistance to Ofrah and Elon Moreh—and for officials afterward who would continue to lend a hand to unauthorized settlements.

Limits were set and ignored. Kiryat Arba, backed by Allon, broke the logic of his own plan. In its last months, the Rabin government yielded to the temptation of building settlements near the Green Line along Israel’s narrow waist, next to Israel’s major cities. Labor was set to accelerate settlement-building if it retained power. At the same time, Gush Emunim had established its footholds next to Palestinian cities, with the help of some officials and the acquiescence of others. The government was just one body among others determining where Israelis would settle.

The Orthodox movement that became the best known face of settlement was a child of that decade. The triumph of 1967 turned messianism into mainstream belief among religious Zionists, particularly young ones. Paradoxically, the shock of 1973 gave birth to Gush Emunim, an organized movement dedicated to overcoming doubt through feverish action. Its activists took settlement as their method, and set out to prove they were the rightful heirs of secular Zionism. Initially, at Kfar Etzion and Hebron, the religious settlers received support from Laborites, especially Allon. Later, politicians of the right lent a hand to their rebellion. Neither the secularists of the left or the right understood the theology of their partners or the energy they were helping to unleash.

By 1977, new types of communities were ready to draw larger numbers of Israelis into occupied territory—“community settlements” and the seeds of larger suburbs near Israeli cities. The Jordan Rift’s kibbutzim would remain small and struggling, but commuter communities between Palestinian towns would grow.

In practice, a policy of postponed choices also emerged on the Palestinian question: Since the land remained under Israeli rule, so did the people who lived on it. Yet they were not made citizens, since that would create a binational state. Palestinians remained subject to military rule, without political rights. They became part of Israel’s economy, mainly as providers of cheap labor and buyers of Israeli goods. Meanwhile, the settlers who lived next to them had the rights of Israeli citizens.

The two-tier legal and political system in occupied land made it distinct from pre-1967 Israel. Yet as an expression of Israeli desire to erase the Green Line, the settlements also represented a return to ethnic conflict over the whole land. Looked at from one angle, the settlements were the colonial project of a sovereign state; seen from another, they represented a return to the struggle before statehood. In both aspects the settlement effort spurred Palestinian nationalism—and was also spurred by it.

Arab leaders, prisoners of their own past, also played a key role in settlement. Whatever the intent of the Khartoum decisions, their bellicose language convinced Israel’s government that peace was out of reach. Direct negotiations, recognition, and peace—what Khartoum rejected—were precisely the tools that Arab leaders had in their hands to sway Israeli opinion. Waiting to use them allowed and encouraged the growth of the settlements.

The American role consisted mainly of being distracted and taking time to respond. The Johnson and Nixon administrations were burdened with the Vietnam War. Nixon and Kissinger in particular treated the Arab-Israeli conflict as one arena of the Cold War, and waited to become involved until the crisis of October 1973 forced them to. Only gradually did the importance of settlements as a diplomatic issue emerge, once they had already altered the map of occupied territory.