The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (52 page)

Strangely, though, both the 1967 war and Israeli efforts afterward to erase the old boundary had an opposite effect in the international arena: They changed the perception of the Green Line from the marker of an armistice to Israel’s legitimate borders. The implication of demanding Israel’s withdrawal or condemning settlements beyond the line was to confirm that everything within the line was rightfully Israel’s.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the settlements is that they frayed the Jewish state. The process began in the summer of 1967 and reached a climax at Sebastia in the last month of 1975. The process of consolidation, essential to a new state, was reversed. A generation that built the state began unintentionally removing stones from its structure. The attempt to relive the bright anarchy of youth undid their accomplishments.

A decade after Labor’s fall, the Israeli author Meir Shalev wrote a novel called
The Blue Mountain
about a village in the Jezreel Valley created by early Zionist pioneers who drained swampland and turned it into fields. One of their children is obsessed with commemorating their heroism. At last, he smashes an irrigation pipe; as water floods a field, he proclaims, “Here will be established a swamp!”
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The story can serve as a parable for the settlement enterprise.

ON THE
afternoon of May 19, 1977, Menachem Begin drove his small car up into the hills of the northern West Bank, accompanied by two paramilitary Border Police jeeps. The final election results were not yet in—the counting of soldiers’ ballots continued—but Begin’s victory was certain. At Camp Kaddum, the prime minister–elect would be the guest of honor at a ceremony installing a new Torah scroll in the settlement’s synagogue. There he was joined by Ariel Sharon and the National Religious Party’s Zevulun Hammer and other politicians who had shared in the glow of Gush Emunim’s settlement bids and would serve in the new government.

Begin, with a ring of thin black hair and heavy black glasses that magnified his eyes, looked exhausted. His two bodyguards could not hold off the crowd. People kissed him, embraced him. Yeshivah students danced around him. After a brief tour, he stood in the square between the mobile homes and took the velvet-covered scroll in one arm, putting the other around Ariel Sharon’s shoulder. Four men took the corners of prayer shawl and held it over his head; a band prepared to play. Before the ceremony, Begin made a statement to the crowd. “Soon,” he said, “there will be many more Elon Morehs.”
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So argued the government of Israel before the country’s Supreme Court in the spring of 2005, defending its decision to dismantle all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank. The state’s lawyers said that the settlers who had gone to court to challenge the legality of that decision should have been fully aware from the start that “the government and/or Knesset have the authority to evacuate said settlements and end said occupation of the territory.”
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Rarely has a legal argument been so fraught with irony. The state argued that while it had ruled the West Bank and Gaza Strip for thirty-eight years, the character of its rule was inherently temporary. Israel held those territories only in the meantime, until the status of the land was resolved in a diplomatic agreement or until Israel chose unilaterally to leave. Settling Israelis on occupied land was permissible—so the government said, repeating a stance it had first taken before the Court in 1978—because the settlements, too, were potentially ephemeral, always capable of being erased.
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Yet the purpose of settlement, since the day in July 1967 when the first Israeli settler climbed out of a jeep in the Syrian heights, had been to create facts that would determine the final status of the land, to sculpt the political reality before negotiations ever got under way. By the summer of 2005, nearly four decades after the project began, the facts included nearly 250,000 Israelis living in 125 officially recognized West Bank settlements.
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Another 180,000 lived in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem—land regarded by Israel as part of the state but by other countries as being under occupation.
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In the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed in 1981, 16,000 Israelis lived in 32 settlements.
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Until August of 2005, 9,000 Israeli settlers resided in the Gaza Strip in 21 settlements.
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Numbers alone cannot express how the landscape of occupied territory has changed. East of Jerusalem, the apartment buildings of Ma’aleh Adumim rise starkly from the desolate slopes leading down toward the Dead Sea. The settlement that Yisrael Galili sought to establish surreptitiously as a “work camp” has grown into a bedroom community of thirty-one thousand people, the single largest Israeli community in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem).
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North of Jerusalem, a highway built to serve the settlements runs through the hill country, bypassing Ramallah and other Palestinian towns and villages. On the way to Ofrah, now a gated exurb of over two thousand people, the road passes settlement after settlement—Adam, Kokhav Ya’akov, Psagot—carpets of houses with red-tile roofs on the hilltops overlooking Palestinian towns and villages.
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On other hills stand “outposts,” the newest wave of settlements, clumps of mobile homes lacking official approval but established with the active assistance of government agencies, often on privately owned Palestinian land.
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Indeed, the overall settlement effort reflects a vast investment of state effort and funding, though the full extent of Israeli government investment is unknown, even to cabinet ministers and Knesset members. The national budget contains no chapter entitled “settlements.” Subsidized mortgages for settlers are buried in the housing budget, extra outlays on settlement schools are woven into the education budget, the costs of guarding settlements are submerged in the defense budget. Asked for the cost of settlement activity in 2003, a Finance Ministry spokesman said, “We don’t have any way of making an estimation.”
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In effect, the settlements have been integrated into the legal and governmental structure of Israel proper, though they lie outside its internationally recognized territory and most lie outside what Israel itself regards as its boundaries. The problem that Moshe Dayan raised in 1968, the status of Israelis living in occupied territory, has been answered with legislation, regulations, and orders of the military government that grant settlers the status of Israeli residents. Municipal governments and regional councils—the equivalent of counties—have been set up to administer them. Meanwhile, neighboring Palestinian communities remain under military law or, since the 1990s, under a complex mix of Israeli military and Palestinian Authority administration. Under the two-tier legal system, Israel holds what Levi Eshkol called the dowry—the land—without consummating the marriage by integrating the people who live on that land into its polity.

On one level, the settlement effort may be seen as falling far short of its advocates’ expectations. In the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, Israelis remain a small minority of the population. Even in the Golan Heights, the Israeli population is outnumbered by the Druse, the only Syrian residents who remained at the time of the Israeli conquest.
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In East Jerusalem as well, Arabs continue to outnumber Jews in the land annexed in 1967.
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On another level, settlement has undone partition of the contested land. The two rival ethnic groups live intermixed in the same territory—an artificially created Bosnia. The problems raised by the opponents of annexation since 1967 have become steadily more acute. Pinhas Sapir’s demographic projections of 1972 have been borne out: Even after massive emigration from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, the Arab population in Israel and the occupied territories has moved steadily toward parity with the Jewish population.
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Formal annexation of the West Bank would mean the creation of a binational state.

Yet the endless interim of occupation has come at high cost—to use Yisrael Galili’s words from June 19, 1967, both “from a moral, abstract democratic perspective” and “because of the concrete [security] risks.”
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Twice—in the late 1980s and again at the start of the twenty-first century—Palestinian opposition to occupation has erupted into violent uprisings, including waves of terror attacks against Israeli citizens. Defending settlements has become an ever-greater burden on the Israeli military. And while the settlements are not the only reason that diplomatic efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been frustrated, they have complicated the task of drawing new partition lines as part of such a resolution.

IN ISRAELI MEMORY
, the right’s rise to power in 1977 is often seen as heralding a revolution in settlement. A more accurate description would be an escalation of existing trends. The shrinking enclave in the northern West Bank from which Labor had unsuccessfully sought to bar settlers was now opened to them. The Golan Heights were declared part of Israel. In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, legal changes were made to ensure settlers extraterritorial status. Gush Emunim found the Likud-led government more willing to cooperate with its efforts. Still, the religious radicals reverted to confrontation when coalition politics or diplomatic pressures led the government to go slow or even dismantle settlements.

Indeed, the Begin government’s most revolutionary step may have been its decision to evacuate settlements under the 1979 peace agreement with Egypt. Anwar al-Sadat achieved his goal of regaining the entirety of the Sinai by putting aside all the taboos of Khartoum. Moshe Dayan, who had finally bolted Labor to become Menachem Begin’s foreign minister, played a key role in reaching an agreement that required Israel to pull back all the way to the international border and remove its settlements—including Yamit, his personal project—from Sinai. With that, an Israeli taboo was also shattered.

One critic of the agreement was Yigal Allon, who claimed that Sadat could have been convinced to make peace while leaving the northeastern part of the Sinai in Israel’s hands.
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Allon died of a heart attack at age sixty-one in February 1980, cutting short his fight to replace Shimon Peres as head of the Labor Party. The man who believed he would redraw borders therefore did not live to see the evacuation of the Rafiah Plain farm communities. Allon’s lifelong rival, Dayan, died soon after, in October 1981, and therefore saw neither the bulldozing of Yamit by the Israeli army nor the return of Sinai Bedouin to their land.

For secular believers in the Whole Land, the Sinai withdrawal was a political disaster. For the Bloc of the Faithful, it represented the theologically unthinkable, a reversal of the messianic process. While Sinai settlers accepted generous compensation and left peacefully, thousands of withdrawal opponents—most identified with Gush Emunim—filled Yamit. Rabbis promised divine intervention. In the final, three-day showdown in April 1982, Israeli troops had to struggle hand-to-hand with protesters, pulling the last ones from rooftops.

Prominent Gush Emunim activists had planned to stop the pullout by far more extreme means: blowing up the Dome of the Rock, the Islamic shrine at the center of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yehudah Etzion, the founder of Ofrah, was a leader of the conspiracy. The withdrawal, he believed, was a sign that God was again chastising Israel for not pursuing redemption. Only the fact that the group’s bomb expert came down with hepatitis just before the withdrawal scuttled the plan. In 1984, the Shin Bet arrested members of a settler underground that had carried out terror attacks against West Bank Palestinians—and discovered during the interrogation that they originally came together for the Temple Mount plot. Among those arrested were Rabbi Moshe Levinger’s longtime disciple Ben-Tzion Heineman and settlers from Ofrah, Keshet, and Kiryat Arba. Levinger’s son-in-law was convicted of murder in a terror attack on a Hebron college that left three students dead.
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At first, the underground case appeared to give warning of how far the mix of messianism and nationalism could take people beyond law or the moral constraints of their own religion. Yet the sentences in the case were remarkably lenient, as if to reinforce the culture of illegalism. Gush Emunim fragmented between supporters and critics of the underground, but when the conspirators left prison some assumed leadership positions among settlers who were rapidly expanding their hold on the West Bank.
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Though the Sinai pullout taught that settlements had not determined the outcome of diplomacy, the Begin government responded by redoubling its efforts to create facts elsewhere. Ariel Sharon, serving as agriculture minister, replaced Yisrael Galili as head of the Settlement Committee. Working with Gush Emunim, Sharon applied to the West Bank the same logic that had driven his plan for “fingers” running through the Gaza Strip: Settlements would control the high ground, separate Palestinian towns, and fragment occupied territory to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Sharon would eventually propose granting the Palestinians limited self-rule in “autonomy enclaves” left between his settlement fingers. Sharon’s approach to settlement was an extreme version of Allon’s—holding land he considered essential for security—while lacking Allon’s conclusion that Palestinian autonomy under permanent Israeli control would be regarded internationally as colonialism.
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Not constrained by Labor’s old commitments to creating villages based on socialism, Likud officials endorsed the “community settlement”—small, closed Israeli exurbs, dominated by religious nationalists of the Gush Emunim camp, which soon sprouted along the West Bank’s mountain ridge. Closer to the Green Line, large suburban settlements grew rapidly. Here, so-called “quality of life” settlers—many secular, many unconcerned with politics—were attracted by subsidized homes and easy commuting to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

The Likud also devoted attention to Gaza, where Labor had already established five settlements—three in the southern corner of the Strip, an area labeled the Katif Bloc. With the loss of the Rafiah Plain, the government developed the Katif Bloc as the buffer that would separate Egypt from the Strip’s burgeoning Palestinian cities and refugee camps.
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By 1987 just 2,500 settlers would control 28 percent of the Gaza Strip’s land.
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Meanwhile, graduates of
hesder
yeshivot and other educators who identified with Gush Emunim’s nationalist faith assumed a dominant role in the state-run religious school system. A new generation of Orthodox Israelis absorbed the paramount value of the Whole Land as an assumed truth. That ethic, combined with government subsidies, attracted Orthodox young people to settlements and sealed the public image of “settlers” as men wearing crocheted skullcaps and women in the long skirts of the Orthodox—though in fact the followers of Gush Emunim’s ideology were outnumbered by “quality of life” suburbanites.
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Begin resigned in 1983, succeeded as Likud leader and prime minister by Yitzhak Shamir. In the next year’s election, Shamir faced Shimon Peres, who was reinventing himself as a dove. At first, say Labor insiders, the change was tactical—as leader of the opposition, Peres could establish a distinct political identity only by placing himself left of the Likud. With time, the tactic turned into principle.

Israel approached the 1984 election while suffering hyperinflation and mired militarily in a quagmire in Lebanon. Yet the vote was a dead heat, forcing Labor and the Likud to share power. Peres and Shamir traded the role of prime minister; Yitzhak Rabin became defense minister. The arrangement slowed the establishment of new settlements but not the growth of existing ones. The number of Israelis living in West Bank settlements, beyond annexed East Jerusalem, rose 80 percent over the next four years.
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