The Unmaking of Israel (15 page)

In 2001—the year that Sharon became prime minister and that immigrant political leader Natan Sharansky became housing minister—the Housing Ministry “created a special budgetary clause, named ‘general development misc.,’ and used it for financing unauthorized outposts,” Sasson wrote. Responding to her questions, the ministry admitted to spending $16 million between 2000 and 2004 on outposts—but “it seems the actual sum considerably exceeds” that amount, she wrote. The ministry also bought hundreds of mobile homes for the regional councils of settlements in the West Bank, deliberately evading regulations on government purchases. Many of the dwellings were placed in outposts, including five at Amonah. The decision, the ministry told Sasson, was made by housing minister Effie Eitam, Sharansky’s successor and leader of the National Religious Party.

The lawbreaking extended further. The IDF failed to prevent the violation of property rights. The Civil Administration illegally approved hooking up outposts to the Israeli national electric grid. The Settlement Division illegally allocated state land to outposts. This is a very partial list from the 343-page report that Sasson marked as “interim” because she had exceeded the time she’d been given and was far from completing the picture of the state’s attack on its own laws.

As a cabinet minister identified by name in Sasson’s report, Eitam is unusual. Working with limited time, within a limited mandate, against bureaucrats’ stonewalling, Sasson was rarely able to follow the paper trail all the way to cabinet members—though a top Housing Ministry official asserted that one housing minister after another “assisted in setting up unauthorized outposts.” If defense ministers including Barak and Mofaz were unaware of state involvement in building outposts in occupied territory, they worked hard at ignorance.

Sasson did not find evidence directly implicating Ariel Sharon. Neither did she declare his innocence. The prime minister’s support for the outposts was a matter of record since his exhortation after the Wye summit. In 2003, the daily
Ha’aretz
reported that Sharon was meeting weekly with Amana chief Ze’ev Hever to pore over maps. Adi Mintz, a former director-general of the Council of Settlements, has described continual discussions between settlers and Sharon when he was prime minister on where to build outposts.

The locations of the outposts fit Sharon’s approach perfectly—seizing high points and filling in tendrils of settlements that separated Palestinian communities. For instance, a string of outposts links the extremist settlement of Itamar, near Nablus, with settlements to the east, on the slopes overlooking the Jordan River. The post-Oslo innovation was that a tiny number of people could stake a claim to large areas. By 2009, the outposts were home to only about 4,000 people.

Even that small number has its social divisions. At Amonah, as a settler told me in 2003, the community consisted of two camps, half-seriously called the Grays and the Greens. The Grays hoped that the outpost would grow up to look like Ofrah, with suburban houses along quiet streets. She identified with the Grays, whom she described as accepting Western culture; she herself was a university graduate. The Greens were upset that paving the road to Amonah had scarred the mountain, hoped for houses that would fade into the folds of the hills, and wanted nothing to do with Western culture.

Schematically, she was describing two faces of the outpost population as a whole. Those whom Amonah calls the Greens are the better-known side. From the start, some outposts attracted teenage boys who could not cope with the long hours of religious study expected in yeshivah high schools. The outposts gave the “hilltop youth” a chance to rebel by claiming to be better settlers than their parents. To proclaim their piety and to show they had no interest in being part of mainstream Israeli society, many adopted the ultra-Orthodox custom of growing long sidelocks. They took Ginsburg and similar rabbis as their religious guides. Politically, wrote one researcher, “most of the hilltop youth identified with the . . . path of [Meir] Kahane,” the American-born rabbi whose doctrine included expelling all Arabs from the Land of Israel. Some of those teens grew up, married young, and began families in the outposts. The hilltop youth were the flower children of the radical right, seekers of spiritual enlightenment and of other people’s land. Their lifestyle became a model for other hilltop settlers. Allegations of violence by outpost settlers against neighboring Palestinians are rife. Convictions, not surprisingly, are rare.

By fostering the outposts, government officials from Sharon down fomented the growth of a theologically driven far-right movement that saw the state and even the established settlement leadership as illegitimate.

In July 2005, the Peace Now movement petitioned the High Court of Justice, demanding that the Civil Administration raze the nine as-yet-unoccupied houses at Amonah. In a pretense of law enforcement, the Civil Administration had issued demolition orders the year before and then done nothing about them. Responding to the suit, the state promised to remove the houses once the withdrawal from Gaza was out of the way.

After repeated delays, the operation was set for February 1, 2006. The Council of Settlements called on supporters to come to Amonah to block the demolition. Several thousand Orthodox young people answered the summons, barricading themselves in and on top of the houses and forming chains around them, determined to erase the shame of Kfar Maimon and the Gaza pullout. Over 7,000 police and troops were deployed against them. In a last-minute legal gambit, the Council of Settlements asked the High Court of Justice to allow it to move the houses to state-owned land. When the court rejected the request, the police advanced. Cursed as “Nazis,” bombarded with stones, lightbulbs, and concrete blocks, they pushed their way to the houses with baton blows, some rendered from horseback. Over 200 police and demonstrators were injured by the time the houses were razed.

The following week, the council held a protest in downtown Jerusalem. The crowd, again, was very young, and was not enamored with the organizers. The middle-aged leaders’ latest offense was offering the court a compromise before the demolition. The council is known in Hebrew as “Yesha”—an acronym for Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that just happens to mean “salvation.” Teenage girls held up hand-scrawled signs saying, “Get rid of the Pesha Council,” using the Hebrew word for “crime.” The same pun appeared as a headline on flyers that boys handed out to passersby. Teens wore T-shirts that read, “Disengage from the State—Connect to Torah.”

After Amonah, a stalemate set in. The Sasson Report, two scathing reports by the state comptroller, a warning from attorney general Meni Mazuz that anyone “allocating government funds for illegal purposes” could be prosecuted, and a wave of legal actions by human rights groups all combined to cool officialdom’s ardor for outposts. Since 2005, establishment of new outposts has virtually stopped, and development of existing ones has slowed. At Gilad’s Farm, Itai Zar says he has been unable to get approval for a power line “because of Ariel Sharon, because of the Sasson Report.” Cheftziba Skali testifies that development “is choked now.” At Migron, the largest of the outposts, with over 300 residents, the community’s security coordinator says that development stopped in 2005. Sporadically, the Israeli police and army have razed new buildings at outposts.

Yet the Sasson Report did not push the government to remove existing outposts. Nor has it fulfilled its obligation under the Roadmap to evacuate the outposts established after March 2001. Four years after she submitted her report, Sasson spoke with frustration about her recommendation for a criminal investigation of implicated officials. “An investigation was opened, but what came of it? We’ve never heard,” she said.

In response to petitions to the High Court of Justice by human rights and peace activists against illegal building in outposts and older settlements, the government has manufactured reasons not to act. Migron is the classic case. Itay Harel established the outpost in 1999, on high ground overlooking the bypass highway from Jerusalem to the settlements north of Ramallah. The settlers could be called Grays—young professionals and university students, not hippies of the right. Harel, who grew up in Ofrah, is a social worker. Still the moving spirit at Migron, he is the son of Yisrael Harel, founder of the Council of Settlements. The land is owned by Palestinians, though settlers claim that a company owned by the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council bought part of it in 2004. The claim rests on a document that the man purportedly signed and had notarized in California over forty years after he died.

In 2006 the Palestinian landowners, assisted by Peace Now, asked the High Court of Justice to order the IDF to remove Migron. The state’s reply confirmed that the outpost was on stolen land. The defense minister hoped to reach an agreement with the settlers so that they would leave peacefully, the state’s lawyer wrote. Over two years later, in February 2009, the Defense Ministry reported to the court that it had reached an agreement with the Council of Settlements for Migron’s residents to leave voluntarily once a neighborhood was built for them in the nearby settlement of Adam. One flaw with that plan: the settlers had no intention of carrying out the agreement reached by the council, and were not shy in saying so. Even among the Grays, the old channels of collaboration between the government and the settlers have no hold. Nonetheless, the Defense Minister continued to report to the court on the sham agreement, and Migron stayed in place.

The Supreme Court justices, however, are painfully aware that the proceedings in settlement cases have become a mockery. In September 2009, the court held a hearing on a petition by Yesh Din to implement demolition orders against five apartment buildings on stolen Palestinian land next to the Beit El settlement. The state’s representative in court gave what had become the standard answer: the government has to set priorities in enforcing demolition orders in the West Bank, and the court should not interfere. Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch answered angrily. “We have heard many cases like this, and out of all the declarations about law-enforcement priorities, in not one case have we seen the orders implemented,” she said. “There are no priorities, because nothing is ever done.”

Beinisch’s remark was a verdict on a country with a split personality, a government divided against itself. Civil society was flourishing. The justice system was ready to review executive action. The government condemned violations of the law in the West Bank. Yet it had often collaborated in those offenses, and it would not end its collusion with the settlers. So Supreme Court hearings became theater, disconnected from the real world. With the executive branch uninterested in enforcing the law or carrying out court decisions, the judicial branch was powerless to protect human rights.

Yet more is at work here than politicians’ pro-settlement policy or concern that the ruling coalition will come undone if they evacuate settlers. There’s another fear. “They’ll only say it softly, as a secret: it might break the back of the army,” says Talia Sasson. “A large portion of the combat troops today are settlement supporters. They’re the backbone of the army.” The fear has a basis. The army has changed, and that change is another part of the story of a country taking itself apart.

Chapter V
Disorderly Conduct

Captain Moshe Botavia said no. It was August 18, 2005. Botavia was a company commander in the IDF combat engineering corps, deployed in the northern West Bank—in official Hebrew, Samaria. That day, police and troops were evicting settlers who had refused to leave Neveh Dekalim and Kfar Darom, two of the largest Israeli communities in the Katif Bloc of settlements in the Gaza Strip. A deluge of news from Gaza poured from Israeli television and radio.

Botavia, a career officer, had grown up in Kiryat Arba. His unit was assigned to help remove two of the four small West Bank settlements included in the disengagement plan, along with a nearby army base. The settlements, Ganim and Kadim, on the outskirts of the Palestinian city of Jenin, were already ghost towns. Many residents who’d come in search of a quiet, comfortable community rather than out of ideological zeal had left for safety during the fury of the Second Intifada. The rest accepted the government’s instructions and moved out by August 2005. Whatever the engineering unit had to remove or raze was inanimate. Nonetheless, Botavia could not bear taking part. He was expecting a last-minute miracle to save him from the task. When no miracle came, he told his commander that he could not lead his soldiers in the field.

Botavia was arrested, held for three weeks, then released from prison and from active duty pending trial. Under questioning, he said he’d refused orders under “family pressure.” In prison, he wrote a letter expressing remorse. Just before his trial, though, when the settler newspaper
Besheva
interviewed him and other soldiers and police who’d refused to take part in the withdrawal, he proudly recounted that he had told his commanding officer, “I can’t get up in the morning . . . say prayers about the wholeness of the Land and its sanctity, and in the afternoon do something that’s the complete opposite.” Sacrificing his military career wasn’t easy, he said, “but everyone has limits, values that he has grown up on.”

The court-martial sentenced Botavia to time served and let him keep his rank for reserve duty. The judges, explaining their leniency, cited his “extreme and tragic dilemma . . . between his devotion to his ideology . . . and his zealotry for the IDF.” On appeal by the prosecution, a higher military court demoted him to second lieutenant, thereby allowing him to remain an officer. The appeals court’s ruling is a tangle of conflicting allegiances. Citing a 2002 Supreme Court ruling on left-wing reservists who refused to serve in the occupied territories, it describes insubordination on political grounds as being “particularly severe.” A few sentences later, under “arguments for leniency,” it portrays Botavia as coming from an exemplary family whose “love and devotion for the homeland” had led them to settle in Kiryat Arba. Refusing orders for ultranationalist reasons was good and bad at the same time.