A Durable Peace (30 page)

In 1967 Jordan again attacked Israel. This time it lost all the land it had won in 1948. The Israeli army reentered the Old
City of Jerusalem, Hebron, and Shechem, and Israel reasserted the right of Jews to live in these cities and towns, which the
discriminatory Jordanian law had obstructed for nineteen years. The ruined Jewish communities in the Old City, Hebron, and
Gush Etzion were rebuilt, in some cases by the children of those who had been driven from their homes by the Arabs in 1948.
Over time, close to 300,000 Israelis have chosen to exercise their right to return to these communities and the new ones built
next to them. This figure includes 150,000 Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, 10,000 on the Golan, 3,000 in Gaza, and
another 150,000 in the Old City and the sprawling suburbs of East Jerusalem. (On occasion, the U.S. explains that it considers
any Jewish real estate purchases, construction, and habitation in the Old City and eastern Jerusalem to be West Bank settlement.
At other times, it stresses that Jerusalem will not be divided again.)
⁶⁶
But as is evident from the historical and political facts, these communities, whether called “settlements” or “suburbs” or
anything else, represent no new Jewish claim and no new Jewish right. They are firmly founded on the same right that was recognized
by the international community at Versailles
and freely exercised by the Jews up until the Jordanians forcibly suppressed that free exercise in 1948.

Nevertheless, many Western leaders have grown increasingly
strident about Jewish “settlement activity”—despite the fact that their own governments were signatories at Versailles and
party to the decision to grant the Mandate recognizing the right to Jewish settlement. “Never mind that,” they say. “You have
no right to be tossing Arabs off their land.”

This remarkable example of diplomatic and historical forgetfulness might conceivably be justified if Jews were taking land
away from Arabs. Careful manipulation of the media by the Arabs has left many Westerners with the indelible impression that
Arab paupers are being kicked out of their hovels in droves to make way for Jewish suburbs in the “densely populated West
Bank.” Yet the West Bank is anything but densely populated. It is in fact sparsely populated: Its population density of 150
people per square kilometer is less than 2.5 percent (one-fortieth) of the population density of Tel Aviv (6,700 per square
kilometer).
⁶⁷
This density is equivalent not to that of the suburban areas outside New York, London, or Paris, but to that of
rural
regions beyond the metropolitan belts of such cities. Four Arab cities located along the crest of the mountains, together
with East Jerusalem, account for the bulk of the Arab population, while taking up only a small fraction of the land. The rest
remains in large part vacant.

After years of looking at television shots from refugee districts, the average viewer in the West cannot help believing that
Judea and Samaria are one large, squalid, teeming cluster of shanties packed one on top of the next, all the way from Tel
Aviv to Jericho. The myth is readily punctured by a one-hour outing. Driving from Tel Aviv due east toward the Jordan River,
one sees mountain after mountain after mountain covered with—nothing. No Arabs, no Jews, no trees,
nothing.
When here and there one finally comes to an Arab village or two, or a Jewish village or two, they are followed by yet more
nothing. To the unaided eye, it is instantly obvious that entire cities can be built here without taking anything away from
anyone.

This is not only a physical fact but a legal one as well. In 1967 the Israeli government took direct possession of the roughly
50
percent of the land that had been owned by the Jordanian government,
⁶⁸
the vast majority of it land on which no Arabs were living and over which Arab individuals had no legal claim. In fact, Israeli
courts admit Jordanian land law as the decisive factor in determining legal title to West Bank land (except for those provisions
in Jordanian law that prohibited Jews from owning land at all), and while there have been cases in which West Bank Arabs have
taken the government to court and won land to which they had legal title, the simple fact is that most of it was not taken
from anyone. It was simply empty public land.

It is to this land, virtually as barren and lifeless as it was when Mark Twain and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley visited it over
a century ago, that Israel is now bringing life. The Jewish West Bank town of Ariel, for example, now has fifteen thousand
residents, a shopping mall, a hotel, a college, an orchestra, and an avenue named after George Bush for his role in the war
against Saddam. The town is planned for more than a hundred thousand people, and from the car window you can see why: There’s
nothing in the way. Ariel was built on an empty hill, and there is plenty more where that came from in every direction you
look. And the same is true for Ma’aleh Adumin, Immanuel, Elkana, Oranit, Givat Ze’ev, Efrat, Betar, and other major urban
settlements.

Not surprisingly, the reassertion of the right of Jews to build their homes and their lives in East Jerusalem, Judea, and
Samaria after an absence of nineteen years has raised howls of protest from the Arabs, and particularly from the PLO. It is
this decision to grant Jews the right to live where Arabs do not want them that has sired the entire international campaign
castigating Israelis for their “settlement activity”—which is to say, for moving into the neighborhood.

In this campaign, the sour logic of the Reversal of Causality is at its most pernicious. For what is manifestly occurring
is that the West, which so sharply condemned anti-black apartheid in South Africa, is being used by the Arabs as an enforcer
of the anti-Jewish apartheid that pertains in the Arabs’ own countries. The Arab
states generally prefer not to have Jewish residents (Morocco being the only real exception), but some are more devoted to
this than others. Most zealous are some of the other “moderate” monarchies. Saudi Arabia will not honor any passport if it
indicates that the bearer has ever been to Israel. In Jordan, the sale of land to a Jew was punishable by death. Yet rather
than criticizing the patently anti-Semitic laws in force in Jordan and Saudi Arabia or asking these governments to alter these
laws (much less imposing a UN resolution or economic sanctions to prompt them to do so), the United States and the other democracies
issued statement after statement in
favor
of the application of apartheid to Judea and Samaria, demanding that Jews submit to Arab anti-Jewish strictures and stay
out of territory that the Arabs wished closed to them. More incredible, the West regularly demands Israeli government intervention
to prevent Jews from going to live where only Arabs supposedly should live. And this from people who would recoil in disgust
if they heard that Jews were being told they had no right to move into any neighborhood or any suburb in any other part of
the world.

The absurdity of this approach is most pronounced in the international tumult that erupts every time a Jew attempts to buy
or rent a house in Silwan, a neighborhood not far from the center of municipal Jerusalem. Silwan had Jewish residents until
1948, when it ended up on the Jordanian side of the cease-fire line (by a few hundred yards) and the Jews were thrown out.
Today Jews buying homes there are challenged not only on the basis of individual property claims, which can be settled in
court, but by an additional principle that Jews are forbidden to live there even if their individual property rights are unassailable.
Silwan is the Arabization of the Hebrew name Shiloach, given to the spring and pool that supplied water to Jerusalem in ancient
times. It was around this waterworks, described in the Bible in detail and very much intact today, that King David first built
and fortified the capital of the Jewish people. Silwan, in fact,
is
the City of David. It is this place,
two hundred yards from the Western Wall, that Jewish “settlers” are told to stay out of.

Usually the demand to stay out of such neighborhoods and the 150 Jewish cities and towns in the territories is not presented
in terms of dismantling them but in terms of a “freeze” on Jewish construction (no one ever speaks of a freeze on Arab construction).
This term became even more familiar under Israeli’s Labor government between 1992 and 1996, which committed to freezing some
of the settlements. But freezing these communities is condemning them to gradual and certain death, as is ultimately the case
with anything alive. A freeze would prevent the natural growth and health of these communities, ensuring that there would
be no new hospitals or clinics, no new schools, no new stores, libraries, or services of any kind. It could mean that children
could not build homes near their parents, that struggling young communities would be doomed to keep struggling forever. Why
would anyone want to live in such places, frozen in time as though in a fairy tale? The answer, of course, is that no one
would, which is why a “freeze” is such a handy euphemism for people who wish to find a polite way of saying, “No Jews.” This
is perhaps why in practice the policy did not materialize under the Labor government. Between 1992 and 1996 the Jewish population
of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria grew an unprecedented 50 percent. Life has a power of its own.

But it is not only the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria that would be devastated by a freeze. Most of the “settlers”
live in what in the West is usually known as a suburb: a large-scale industrial and residential development, ringing an urban
center that is crucial for the natural development of all cities—and which normally develops without any relation to politics.
Thus, the great majority of the 250,000 Jews living in what are being called “settlements” are for the most part suburbanites,
living in much the way that New York City commuters whose homes are in New Jersey or Long Island live, driving twenty or thirty
minutes from “the heart of the West Bank” to downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. With
out its suburbs, a city would become overcrowded, living conditions would decline, and industry would be forced to relocate.
The ultimate result of constraining the development of suburban areas is the strangulation of any metropolis and its eventual
decay. Yet Tel Aviv is only a few miles from the West Bank, and Jerusalem is surrounded by the West Bank on three sides. (In
fact, more than half the city, “East Jerusalem,” may be said to be
on
the West Bank.) To imagine the effect on these cities if all contiguous real estate were forbidden for development, one has
to imagine what New York City would be like today if New Yorkers had never been allowed to “settle” New Jersey, Connecticut,
or Long Island. Throttled, the city would have declined long ago.

The campaign of delegitimization that has challenged the right of Jews to live in the heartland of Israel and in its capital
is predicated on the bizarre idea that Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem are “foreign land,” seized by Jewish interlopers
from those who had owned them since antiquity. To entertain this idea, of course, requires an astonishing flight of historical
amnesia. For these were places where Jews had lived—for millennia in places like Hebron and Jerusalem, and for decades preceding
the War of Independence in the emerging Jewish communities in Judea and southern Samaria. When my parents were students in
the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem in the early 1930s, a common pastime was to go down to bathe
at the Jewish resort of Kalya on the Dead Sea and find refuge from the scorching sun in the orchards of Jericho. The destruction
of the Jewish communities in 1948 did not mean that the Jews of Israel lost their attachment to the lands that were abruptly
cut off from them. From 1948 to 1967, when the territories were occupied by Jordan, Israelis knew much of this “foreign terrain”
by heart from their studies of the Bible and subsequent Jewish history. Some could look out their windows and see the hills
of Samaria rising above their homes. Others knew the land from their parents who had lived in Judea before being driven out
by the Jordanians. Most of all, Israelis remembered the Western Wall, the hallowed rampart
of the Jewish Temple that was buried inside the Arab-controlled section of divided Jerusalem. The holiest place of Judaism
was barred to them as Jews—even though it was only a few hundred yards away across a no-man’s-land.

The eerie feeling of imprisonment, of being so close and yet so very far away from the cradle of Jewish history, was hauntingly
captured a few weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War by the publication of Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” a song
that deeply moved the entire country:

Amid the slumber of trees and stone

Imprisoned in her dreams

The city dwells alone

Within her heart a wall

How have the wells gone dry

The market square forsaken

And no one climbs the Temple Mount

In Old Jerusalem

In the caves carved in the stone

The winds cease not to cry

And none descend the Dead Sea road

By way of Jericho
⁶⁹

After the walls dividing the city suddenly came down during the Six Day War, thousands of Israelis streamed through the Old
City to the wall—following the steps of the soldiers to the place where, just hours earlier, secular, battle-weary paratroops
had wept to a man over the privilege granted to them of sewing back together the broken heart of the Jewish people. Like the
soldiers, the citizens of Israel stood before the ancient Wall, touching the massive stones in wondrous awe. From there, in
the days and weeks that followed, they made their way, at times wide-eyed with a barely contained excitement, to Bethlehem,
Hebron, Shechem,
Jericho, Beth El, and all the other places in whose names, landscape, and history was cemented the identity of the Jewish
people.

This exhilaration was felt by almost all Israelis, and each one experienced it in a different way. My brother Yoni, like many
Israelis, would often spend his weekend leaves from the army exploring such sites: