The Unmaking of Israel (12 page)

The leaflet represents the attitude of a significant wing of the settler movement. The West Bank olive harvest has become an annual low-level battle, with settlers stealing from and ravaging Palestinian groves, and with outpost settlers as prime suspects. Israeli human rights groups documented over thirty attacks on Palestinian property in the first six weeks of the 2010 harvest alone. Near the settlement of Talmon, unidentified Israelis set a grove on fire while Palestinians were picking the olives. A hundred trees were poisoned and another forty uprooted at Turmusayya, a Palestinian village close to the Adei Ad outpost. Attacks were rampant in the Nablus region; Gilad’s Farm is just one of the extremist settlements and outposts that ring the Palestinian city. Near Shvut Ami, fifty trees were broken or cut down, and the fruit of two hundred others was stolen. Gilad’s Farm itself is wedged between the Palestinian villages of Fur’ata and Tell. Hundreds of trees in a 120-acre area belonging to the two villages were set aflame. The olives from another of Fur’ata’s groves were harvested and stolen. One cannot presume that the offenders necessarily came from the closest settlement, especially when the campaign is so widespread. But one can be certain that each destroyed tree represented part of someone’s labor and livelihood; each incident is part of the effort to drive “the enemy . . . out of our land by harming his property.”

The handbill’s concluding prayer expresses the furious antipathy of many outpost settlers toward “the establishment.” That term is a catchall: it includes the Israeli government; the Civil Administration; the police, Shin Bet security service, and IDF; and often the first-generation leadership of the settlement movement, Orthodox politicians, and insufficiently radical rabbis—all of whom are judged to lack Jewish consciousness. The irony is that the outposts are actually a joint project of the young settlers and much of that establishment. The outpost settlers are a far-right twist on the college student who despises her parents’ bourgeois hypocrisy, demands independence, and awaits the next cash infusion from home. Politicians, government agencies, and middle-age settlement leaders play the role of parents who oscillate between encouraging their child’s idealism, lecturing her about restraint, and arguing with each other and themselves.

Gilad’s Farm is one of the many variations on this theme. The outpost was established by Itai Zar in memory of his older brother Gilad, who was murdered by Palestinian gunmen in a drive-by shooting on a nearby road in 2001, early in the bloodletting of the Second Intifada. Their father, Moshe Zar, is a prominent figure among the first generation of settlers, a well-known land dealer, and a convicted member of the Jewish terror underground of the early 1980s. According to Itai Zar, the outpost stands on land that his father bought, but for which he had not legally registered ownership. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gave verbal approval for settling at the spot and sent the family to Amana chief Ze’ev Hever to make the arrangements, Itai Zar told me.

Not all the details of Zar’s account can be independently confirmed, but it fits the pattern of the outposts. The details that he leaves out also fit the standard story line: the new settlement lacked approval from the cabinet, the defense minister, and the planning bodies of Israel’s Civil Administration in the West Bank, meaning that it was illegal several times over. One slightly unusual event in the history of Gilad’s Farm is that in October 2002, Sharon’s defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, decided to remove the outpost, apparently as symbolic proof of his willingness to enforce the law. A thousand young settlers showed up to block the evacuation bodily. Over ninety police, soldiers, and settlers were wounded in the struggle as the flimsy structures were razed.

The evening after the melee, Itai Zar and his companions returned to reestablish the outpost, with the backing of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, the main settler leadership body. By 2009, twenty-five families lived at Gilad’s Farm, and thirty young men were studying at the yeshivah. Zar speaks with deep disdain of established settlements as mere “neighborhoods with TV sets”—in contrast to the “hilltops,” the outposts, which are home to young idealists. He uses a dismissive pejorative for classic religious Zionists who support Israeli institutions, calls secular law “drivel,” and aspires to see Israel governed only by religious law. Like the anonymous leaflet writer, in short, he has very little use for the political, religious, and settlement establishments that have helped put him on the map.

Gilad’s Farm and the outpost enterprise as a whole deserve attention not as aberrations, but as symptoms of a larger syndrome. Since the Oslo Accord of 1993, the split in Israel’s personality has widened into a gulf.

On one hand, Israel recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization and the reality of Palestinian peoplehood. It has intermittently engaged in a diplomatic process whose only logical outcome is creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In parallel, the government stopped approving new settlements in occupied territory. It even removed the small number of settlers from the Gaza Strip. Could these changes only be taken by themselves, they would mean that Israel had made the long-delayed, necessary choice to give up the occupied territories for peace and for the sake of its own future as a democracy and a Jewish state.

Yet in the same years, the machinery of the state has aided and abetted a dramatic expansion of West Bank settlement. Cabinet ministers, officials, and settlers have joined in pervasive disregard for the law and for responsibility to democratic decisions. Reversing one of the signal achievements of Israel’s early years, the government ignores court decisions upholding human rights as a matter of course. A new generation of settlers has come of age, as radical or more in its theologized politics, alienated from the institutions of the state that have so assiduously fostered its growth.

The meaning of these changes is a democracy in greater danger, a state that is weaker and less capable of ending the occupation. To understand the outposts, it’s necessary to look at the wider changes that spawned them.

Yitzhak Rabin was able to sign the Oslo Accord because the heat of the Palestinian uprising, the Intifada, transmuted his understanding of the conflict. As defense minister when the uprising erupted in December 1987, Rabin promised to suppress it with “force, might and beatings.” Yet in the cabinet, Rabin eventually became the strongest voice insisting that the Intifada was “a popular, national uprising” that could not be stopped by military means, according to former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Perry. Put differently, he realized that Israel would have to reach a modus vivendi with the Palestinian national movement.

I mention Rabin not to endorse the great-man reading of history, but from a literary perspective: as in Shakespeare, the tragedies of aristocrats represent the inner battles of the common man. In Israeli society of the 1980s, to speak of two states for two peoples was to place oneself on the radical left. At first glance, it was the Oslo Accord that made such ideas legitimate. In fact, the agreement was possible only because the uprising burned away many Israelis’ indifference to the occupation.

Yet Rabin was not ready to go directly to a peace agreement including borders and evacuation of settlements. The Oslo Accord created an interim stage leading to an unknown outcome. The Great Decision actually contained another refusal to decide. In that way as well, Rabin represented the common man.

Postponing a final-status agreement proved disastrous. Under Oslo and its follow-up agreements, a Palestinian Authority was created to exercise limited autonomy in parts of the West Bank and Gaza. Since no settlements were evacuated, the PA received fragmented enclaves. The map of autonomy was dictated by the map of settlement that Ariel Sharon had drawn. Meanwhile, both Israelis and Palestinians had every motivation to “create facts” to predetermine the permanent-status agreement. But Israel had more power to do so: setting up Palestinian institutions in East Jerusalem could not have the same impact as building new Israeli neighborhoods there.

Since settlements remained in place, the Rabin government embarked on a West Bank road-building program so that Israelis could drive around Palestinian-controlled cities. The bypass roads made the commute from settlements to Israeli cities safer, and had the unintended effect of shortening the drive considerably—thereby making it easier for Israelis to move to settlements deep in the West Bank. The new roads were a particular boon for rightists who had been dithering between convenience and their desire to join a settlement to help block a future withdrawal. Rabin quite literally paved the way for his opponents. “The greatest of the settlement builders was Yitzhak Rabin. What caused Ofrah to develop? The road came to us,” says Pinchas Wallerstein, the longtime head of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council, the local government for settlements north of Jerusalem. The praise is backhanded; neither Wallerstein nor other settlers who express the same idea think that Rabin had any intention of helping them.

At the time the Oslo Accord was announced, settlers had no praise, even ironic, for the prime minister. Protests began even before the signing of the accord on September 13, 1993. At mass rallies, secular right-wing politicians such as Knesset members Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu spoke—but the protesters were almost all Orthodox settlers and supporters. For the settlers, the accord was much more than a political defeat. Though the agreement did not immediately require evacuation of settlements, it pointed in that direction—threatening their homes, their understanding of their place in society, their life’s work, and the theology that gave it meaning. After years of believing they were Israel’s vanguard, settlers now felt like a betrayed minority. The sacred state was relinquishing sacred land, introducing a contradiction into the heart of their beliefs.

Rabbis of the religious right described the threat in incendiary language. Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, head of the state-supported Birkat Moshe yeshivah in the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, compared anyone who carried out orders to evacuate a settlement to Jewish collaborators with the Nazis. In an article published by the Committee of Rabbis in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, Rabinovitch described “any activity reducing our hold on the Land or banishing Jews from regions of our soil” as violating an underlying “purpose of the Torah” and referred readers to a medieval text prescribing capital punishment for blasphemy.

“Visionaries have seen their vision torn asunder before their eyes,” wrote ideologue Dan Be’eri in the settler journal
Nekuda
, half a year after the accord. Be’eri was describing the spiritual crisis among believers in “redemptive Zionism.” More specifically, he was explaining what brought Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein to murder twenty-nine Muslim worshippers in the Hebron holy place known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque on February 25, 1994. Beforehand, Goldstein told friends he had a plan for ending the Oslo process. He stopped shooting only when Palestinians managed to kill him.

Yitzhak Rabin was not alone in describing Goldstein as “mentally ill,” a description that erased the context of the settler movement rebelling against the state that had nurtured it. Meanwhile, the extreme edge of the religious right eulogized Goldstein as a hero and martyr. Among his posthumous admirers was Bar-Ilan University law student Yigal Amir. On November 4, 1995, Amir carried out his own plan to prevent dividing the Land of Israel. He assassinated Yitzhak Rabin.

It is impossible to measure Amir’s share of responsibility in the breakdown of the Oslo process. History cannot be rewound and run again, with Rabin alive, for comparison. But Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, a much weaker candidate, lost the 1996 election to Netanyahu by a mere 1 percent. Netanyahu spent three years as prime minister trying to avoid diplomatic progress.

As for the trauma of Rabin’s murder, much of the public reaction focused on the fact that a Jew had killed another Jew, as if violating ethnic solidarity were Amir’s primary offense. Defending his university, for instance, Bar-Ilan president Shlomo Eckstein said, “We try to educate our students to love all Jews.” The operative corollary was to seek “national unity,” meaning Jewish unity: reconciliation between secular and Orthodox, or between Jews on the left and right. When Labor’s Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu in 1999 on a platform of renewing peace efforts, he showed fealty to the unity story by bringing the pro-settlement National Religious Party into his coalition and making its leader, Yitzhak Levy, the housing minister. Levy accelerated building of new homes in settlements to an unprecedented level; Barak acquiesced as the concrete mixers worked overtime.

The unity narrative evades the significance of Amir’s act: beyond the normal horror of murder, it was a poor man’s version of a coup, an attack on the elected leader in order to change a democratically chosen policy. Amir acted as the self-appointed messenger of a political camp that saw the state as legitimate only insofar as it fulfilled its purportedly God-given mission—holding the Whole Land for the Jews. Afterward, avoiding conflict between Jew and Jew served politicians as another justification to support settlement, thereby making a future confrontation over democratic decisions all the more likely.

Between 1993 and the unsuccessful Camp David summit in 2000, the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip grew 70 percent, from 116,000 to 198,000. Throughout the Oslo years, Palestinians could watch the red-roofed houses of the settlements spreading on the hills, making it harder to believe that Israel really intended to allow Palestinian independence. The reason for the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian talks in 2000 remains the subject of intense debate, but the growth of the settlements surely figures as one factor. More important for the present discussion, by talking peace while building houses in Ofrah, Ma’aleh Adumim, and a host of other settlements, successive governments showed strategic schizophrenia and undermined their own credibility.