The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (53 page)

By 1988, what looked like slow-motion annexation helped ignite the first intifada, or uprising, in the West Bank and Gaza. Nightly TV footage of crowds of young Palestinians hurling stones at troops made the occupation starkly visible to Israelis, but it did not break the political deadlock on the future of occupied territory. Another near-tie in the 1988 election left the national unity government in power.

But with the collapse of power-sharing in 1990 and Labor’s return to opposition, Yitzhak Rabin began a comeback that returned him to his party’s leadership. In February 1992, he defeated Peres in Labor’s first party-wide primary election. While Shamir’s government brought busloads of couples to shop for homes at close-out prices in West Bank settlements, Rabin campaigned for prime minister on the promise to cut spending on settlements.

That June, Rabin at last became an elected prime minister. Determined to correct the errors of his first term, he stressed his personal control of government business. He gave his old opponent, Shimon Peres, the Foreign Ministry rather than Defense, and sought to limit his authority. He pursued a peace deal with the Palestinians, which would inevitably mean giving up West Bank land. Still, he was loyal to the Allon approach, distinguishing between “security settlements” and “political settlements.” The former fit Labor’s old map and were acceptable; the latter were unnecessary.

The announcement of the secretly negotiated Oslo Accord in September 1993 seemed to mean that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was near resolution, and that the contested land would be divided, at last, by mutual consent. Israel and the PLO recognized each other. The Palestinians would gain autonomy, first in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, then in larger parts of the West Bank, for a five-year interim period, to be followed by a final peace agreement.

Yet the agreement was less than it appeared. It left all major issues—the future of Jerusalem and its holy sites, the Palestinian refugees, the settlements, borders—for final-status negotiations. Left in place, the settlements determined the map of the interim agreement; Sharon’s fingers indeed fragmented Palestinian territory. New roads bypassing Palestinian towns actually made travel to settlements faster and safer, drawing more settlers. Though Rabin remained loyal to Yigal Allon’s concept of territorial compromise, the Oslo Accord and subsequent agreements showed the influence of Moshe Dayan’s idea of functional compromise, as passed down to Peres: In large pieces of the West Bank, Israel was responsible for security and the newly established Palestinian Authority for civil administration.
²³
According to knowledgeable sources at the time, the old clash of concepts made it difficult for Rabin and Peres to agree on goals for final-status talks.

Radical Palestinian groups—notably Hamas, which merged Islam and Palestinian nationalism—sought to foil the Oslo Accord with terror attacks, particularly against settlers. The Israeli right, meanwhile, saw the agreement as a mortal threat to the dream of the Whole Land. “Visionaries have seen their vision torn asunder before their eyes,” wrote one ideologue of “redemptive Zionism” in the settler journal
Nekuda
.
²⁴
The comment was intended to make sense of a Jewish settler’s massacre of twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers during Ramadan prayers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Ibrahimi Mosque. The American-born assailant, Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein, had told friends he had a plan for stopping the peace process. His plan also used the brutal logic of terror—atrocity causes escalation, thus enlisting new supporters. Hamas responded to the massacre by initiating a campaign of suicide bombings in Israeli cities, which in turn intensified opposition in Israel to the Oslo process.
²⁵

Several prominent settler rabbis wrote to dozens of colleagues, asking their view on whether Rabin was a
moser
—a Jew who turns over other Jews, or their property, to oppressors, and who is theoretically subject to death under religious law—or a
rodef
, a person about to commit murder who may be killed to prevent the crime.
²⁶
At protest rallies of mounting intensity, the crowds came almost entirely from the religious settlement movement and its supporters, though Likud politicians were often featured speakers. In October 1995, after the signing of the Oslo II accord, which laid out Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank’s cities, Ariel Sharon spoke before tens of thousands of protesters in Jerusalem, accusing the government of “collaborating” with a terror group. “There is no memory in history of a nation willingly turning over part of its historic homeland,” Sharon said.
²⁷
Rabin, the focus of the right’s fury, was dismissive of the protests and of the talk of threats to his life.

On November 4, 1995, a radical young supporter of the Whole Land, Yigal Amir, assassinated Israel’s prime minister. It was the final, horrifying act of the tragedy of Yitzhak Rabin: The forces of chaos he had suppressed on the Tel Aviv shore in 1948, and to which he had yielded at Sebastia in 1975, now swept him away.

Rabin’s murder marked the start of unprecedented instability in Israel. The young and politically inexperienced new Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, narrowly defeated Shimon Peres in the next election. Unable to reconcile his hardline nationalism and his public promise to honor Israel’s signed commitments to Oslo, Netanyahu could not provide direction.

In October 1998, Netanyahu and Sharon, now the foreign minister, attended a summit conference with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and U.S. president Bill Clinton at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland. Under pressure from Clinton, Netanyahu signed an agreement to continue implementing the Oslo accords by turning over another 13 percent of the West Bank’s land to the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Afterward, speaking on Israel Radio, Sharon urged settlers to “grab more hills, expand the territory. Everything that’s grabbed, will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their hands.”
²⁸
That accelerated a new kind of settlement drive, the rapid establishment of the improvised mobile-home “outposts” on the hills of the West Bank, without official authorization. The outpost settlers, many of them young people who had grown up in the ideological settlements, were few in number, but their presence staked a claim to more land, filling in Sharon’s fingers. Government funding came via the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division; the Housing Ministry built roads; the Defense Ministry provided additional aid. Again, officials put a cause regarded as patriotic above the rule of law.
²⁹
And again, slow-motion diplomacy encouraged rapid settlement.

Nonetheless, the Wye accord led to the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. Promising a push for peace, Labor’s new leader, Ehud Barak, swept to a landslide election victory. In July 2000, seeking to reach the overdue final-status accord, Barak, Arafat, and Clinton met for an ill-fated summit at Camp David.

Amid accusations and self-justifications, the debate on the causes of Camp David’s failure will last many years. Two factors, though, deserve mention here. First, the Oslo process, meant to build trust, did the opposite. Palestinian terror groups continued their attacks in Israeli cities, undercutting the belief among Israelis that an agreement could bring peace, or that the Palestinian Authority was interested in ending the conflict. Meanwhile, between 1993 and 2000, the population of Israel’s settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (again, excluding East Jerusalem) rose from 116,000 to 198,000. The spread of red rooftops on the hills undermined Palestinian confidence that Israel would, indeed, leave the occupied territories.

Second, the summit revealed the gap in the two sides’ understanding of the entire process. Palestinian negotiators insisted on the Green Line as the basis for peace; they regarded their recognition of Israel within the pre-1967 boundaries as conceding most of historic Palestine, and saw no reason for further concessions. Israel saw the land up for division as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and insisted that the new border would run through occupied territory, leaving key settlements and strategic ground in its hands. It was the same disagreement that Yigal Allon and King Hussein had confronted in 1968, though without the urbanity of that meeting. “The Palestinian perspective was that Oslo was a compromise and that it was the last compromise. We were not aware of this,” Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s foreign minister at the Camp David summit, said later. “We…thought that somewhere down the road there would be another compromise.”
³⁰
The statement is striking, because throughout the Oslo years, Palestinian and Israeli leaders had stated their goals publicly. Each side, though, assumed that the other’s statements were bluff. Once again, they had been playing chess with themselves, believing that at the moment of truth, the people across the negotiating table would accept the inevitable.

Instead, the process collapsed. By the fall, a new and more brutal intifada began. The political pendulum soon swung yet again. Ariel Sharon, now head of the Likud, seventy-three years old, became prime minister, determined to put down the uprising with military force. Though he now spoke of agreeing to a Palestinian state, he said it would control just 42 percent of the West Bank’s area—the size of the divided territory that was already administered by the Palestinian Authority.
³¹
In fact, the proposed state was an updated version of Sharon’s idea of self-ruling enclaves separated by Israeli fingers.

Then came an unexpected turnabout. At the end of 2003, Sharon announced his intent to carry out a “disengagement” from the Palestinians, a “redeployment of IDF forces…and a change in the deployment of settlements…[to] reduce…the number of Israelis located in the heart of the Palestinian population.”
³²
Soon after, he explained his meaning: Israel would pull out of the Gaza Strip, evacuating all its settlements there, along with a handful of small settlements in the northern West Bank.
³³
The longtime architect of settlement now intended to remove settlers—albeit as a unilateral action, a new way to create facts, to impose the lines he regarded as most defensible.

Sharon’s goals remained veiled. One of his closest confidants, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, spoke of unilateral withdrawal as a way to preserve Israel’s Jewish majority—an acceptance of the argument against the Whole Land that dated back to Ben-Gurion’s decision not to conquer the West Bank in 1949.
³⁴
Another confidant, Sharon’s chief of staff Dov Weissglas, described the pullout as “formaldehyde” for the peace process—in effect, a diplomatic shortening of the lines, a way to reduce international pressure for greater concessions.
³⁵
The pullout could be read as a response to Palestinian violence, Palestinian numbers, or U.S. concerns, or perhaps all three.

Sharon’s determination, however, was unquestionable. Surviving the fury of hard-liners in the Likud and other right-wing parties, ignoring protests and rulings by some pro-settlement rabbis that soldiers should disobey orders to evacuate settlements, the prime minister pressed ahead, winning Knesset approval and Supreme Court affirmation of the legality of his plan. Among the general public, he maintained the support of a solid, if unenthusiastic, majority for the pullout.
³⁶
One subtext was exhaustion with Gaza. Another was that settlement, once a secular sacrament, was now firmly identified with Orthodoxy in the long-running Israeli
Kulturkampf
.

While some settlers left Gaza quietly, others convinced themselves that with sufficient prayer and protest, the withdrawal would not take place. Young protesters, many from West Bank settlements and outposts, dodged roadblocks to reach Gaza. One of the journalists who went to see the settlement of Kfar Darom in its last days was eighty-two-year-old Haim Gouri. “It was a journey of one day in my life, just one. Yet my whole life was in it…all my memories and soul-searching,” he wrote. He looked at settlers who “really believed it was possible to continue to live like this next to the urgent poverty of the Arabs.” Yet when settlement had begun in the Katif Bloc and Kfar Darom, he recorded, “I cannot recall that I expressed doubts.” He met “the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of religious Zionism, which in days long past was so different,” and heard “the sacred mantra: ‘There will be no disengagement!’ because ‘The soldiers will refuse to carry out the orders’ and because ‘The Holy One will perform miracles for us.’” A settler invited him to return at the summer’s end, after the miracle, to lecture on literature. Politely, he accepted.
³⁷

Twice, Jewish extremists tried to stop the pullout with terror against Arabs. An army deserter opened fire on a bus in an Israeli Arab town, murdering four people before he was lynched by the crowd. In a factory at the settlement of Shilo in the West Bank, a settler turned on his Palestinian coworkers, murdering four. This time, terror did not produce immediate conflagration, and the withdrawal went ahead.

On Wednesday, August 17, 2005, columns of uniformed men and women entered the first settlements to begin removing settlers. Only a handful of soldiers refused orders. The heavens did not open. In a scene played again and again on Israel television, a father pushed his young daughter at soldiers, screaming a challenge, “Expel her! Expel her!” Soldiers and police who had trained at taking insults listened with haunting calm. A few families stepped out of their homes wearing yellow stars, equating the pullout with a Nazi deportation. The next day, hundreds of young infiltrators chose the synagogue at Kfar Darom as the arena for their final struggle. As troops climbed ladders to reach the synagogue roof, protesters hurled lye in their faces. That was the worst confrontation. The evacuation lasted but a week, much less time than anticipated. The struggle postponed at Sebastia thirty years before at last played itself out.