The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (12 page)

AT AALLEIQA
, Ben-Yehudah, Sat, and Allon were contravening government policy on the future of the heights, even if only Allon knew it. That summer, there was no policy at all on the future of the West Bank.

What the public heard of the government’s plans for occupied land were comments such as Defense Minister Dayan’s statement, “Until there are peace agreements, we’ll hold on to all the territories the IDF conquered…with our fingernails.”
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Regarding Egypt and Syria, that fit the June 19 decisions—rejecting 1957-style pressures while suggesting that land could eventually be given up for peace. So did Dayan’s public remark that “the Gaza Strip is Israel and I think it should become an integral part of the country,” even if the Foreign Ministry reassured the United States that the government was not about to annex the area.
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In fact, both Dayan and the ministry were expressing government policy: The political consensus was that Gaza would be annexed, but only after its refugees were somehow resettled elsewhere—in the Sinai, or the West Bank, or the East Bank.

The West Bank’s future inspired no such certainty. Publicly, Eshkol spoke of Palestinian autonomy. “It’s possible to think about a Palestinian unit, whose border is the Jordan and that will include the large urban centers such as Nablus, Jenin, Qalqilyah, and Jericho,” he said in an early July interview.
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That offered a way to keep the Jordanian army out, while keeping the residents off Israeli voting rolls. Eshkol’s list included only cities in the northern West Bank. The subtle implication was that Bethlehem and Hebron, south of Jerusalem, would stay under direct Israeli rule. Those were the West Bank cities that most strongly conjured up the Bible, read as national epic.

Unknown to the public, Eshkol may also have been sending a message to Jordan’s King Hussein to make concessions, quickly, if he wanted to regain the West Bank. At the end of June, Hussein had visited Washington and lunched at the White House with Lyndon Johnson and his aides. McGeorge Bundy and Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach told the king that the United States could not impose a solution. If he wanted the West Bank back—they warned him explicitly that he could not count on regaining every inch of it—he had to negotiate with Israel.
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Eager, but afraid of crossing Egypt’s Nasser, the thirty-one-year-old king met secretly in London on July 2 with Eshkol’s emissary, Yaacov Herzog, the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office. When asked if he was ready to sign a peace treaty, the king said, “Give us time,” and that he had to work with the other Arabs.
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It was a narrow opening, but it meant Eshkol had to decide which option he preferred.

To advise him, he had a committee of top officials, headed by Herzog, conducting feelers with public figures in the West Bank. That panel, and another representing the Foreign Ministry and intelligence services, sent him a flurry of evaluations, with contradictory advice to hurry up and wait. The West Bank’s future needed to be arranged quickly, said a Foreign Ministry memo in mid-July, both because of its large population and because “internationally, the impression could be created…that Israel is maintaining a colonial regime.” The authors, Shlomo Hillel and Mordechai Gazit, would be known as hawks in the years to come. Strikingly, as professional diplomats they were laying before Eshkol the two key arguments against keeping the West Bank that Israeli minimalists would cite in the decades ahead: the danger to Israel’s Jewish majority, and the stain of colonialism.

In July 1967, though, colonialism was also the argument against establishing a Palestinian state that, the memo said, “would be regarded in the world as an Israeli puppet.” As the least-worst option, Hillel and Gazit suggested that such a state be created, but seek confederation with Jordan to gain legitimacy as an Arab country.
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By the end of the month, the two retreated from that position. Summing up both committees’ work on July 27, they again urged haste in deciding policy. But now that mainly meant choosing a position to present in talks with Hussein. Israel, they said, should drop the idea of Palestinian independence or autonomy, as local Palestinian leaders’ initial openness to the idea was evaporating. An attached report on the contacts with those leaders said that they now believed Israel might withdraw, as it had from Gaza in 1957, and anyone who had cooperated with Israel would meet a “bitter fate.” Failing an agreement with Jordan, therefore, Israel should “keep all possibilities open.” That meant avoiding decisions and maintaining military rule indefinitely.

For Eshkol, given to delaying choices, it was appealing advice. Still, his experts had failed to address an issue that concerned him—the future of places to which Jews felt a bond. On a page of the memo dealing with how to administer the West Bank, the prime minister scrawled the words:

“Holy places” apparently referred to sites such as the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, the burial place of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, and Leah. Beit Ha’aravah was an isolated kibbutz near the northern tip of the Dead Sea that had been abandoned during the 1948 war. At the end of July, one question weighing on Eshkol, the former head of the Settlement Department, was what to do about the lost kibbutzim in what was now Israeli-occupied territory.
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Yigal Allon’s advice, on the other hand, was to redraw Israel’s borders, avoiding all delay. In late July, he submitted to the cabinet the first detailed version of what became known as the Allon Plan. Since discussing the idea with his friends while riding into the Syrian heights during the war, he had devoted days of driving the countryside with an aide, who was an ex-intelligence officer and “an excellent scout,” and more hours of racing thoughts, suddenly “free of preconceptions like the Whole Land of Israel” and simultaneously in pain, by his own description, from shedding them. The love of a political idea was part of who he was, and now, like Pygmalion, he was falling in love with a political idea he had created himself. The plan would soon become the point of reference for Israeli debate on the future of occupied land, the concept that one accepted, amended, or rejected. For Allon, who thrived on people liking him, a good word about his plan became the equivalent of a warm slap on the shoulder.
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Israeli’s eastern border, Allon wrote, should be the Jordan River and the line down the center of the Dead Sea. He proposed to his cabinet colleagues that they vote immediately to annex the barely populated strip six to nine miles wide along the Jordan. Farther south, he said with uncharacteristic ambivalence, Israel should annex all of “the Hebron hills”—meaning all of the West Bank south of Jerusalem—or perhaps only the desolate lowlands next to the Dead Sea. That is, he leaned toward annexing Bethlehem and Hebron, noting that Rachel’s Tomb was in the former and the latter held the Tomb of the Patriarchs, sites “that are valuable to us nationally and traditionally.” He was willing to pay the price of giving Israeli citizenship to what he estimated as the 80,000 Arab residents. But he also allowed for the option of leaving the two cities as an Arab enclave, like the larger enclave he would create north of Jerusalem, where most of the West Bank’s Arabs lived. The enclaves, surrounded by Israeli land, would be given autonomy or, as he called it on another occasion, “home rule.”
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The result would be “the Whole Land strategically and a Jewish state demographically.” On annexed land, he said, Israel should establish settlements “camouflaged as military strongpoints,” if need be, until annexation was completed.

Allon’s flamboyant contradictions shone from the plan. It let him renounce the Whole Land yet swear allegiance to it “strategically.” He wanted immediate decisions, yet he could not make up his mind about Hebron: Reason said to give up large Arab populations, romance said to possess the biblical city. He called for clear decisions and clear borders, a strict, ordered reality—yet the borders could leap out of his unruly imagination. The plan was coauthored by a young rebel and an experienced politician, both of them Yigal Allon. In the months ahead, Allon began revising his plan, adding areas in the Sinai, and the Syrian heights, to his annexation map.

Only after submitting his plan to the cabinet did Allon discuss it with his “masters and teachers and the best of my comrades” in the United Kibbutz, a flagrant violation of convention in the disciplined movement. Though he was pushing annexation and settlement more actively than any other minister, he could not count on his movement’s support. He would recall having “a long painful conversation, one of the most painful in all my life, with Yitzhak Tabenkin.” His cabinet colleague Yisrael Galili not only disagreed with the plan, but was hurt because, Allon said, “perhaps for the first time in my life, I hadn’t chosen to have a personal conversation with him before such a far-reaching step.”
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When he presented his proposals to the United Kibbutz central committee in August, he did not ask for a vote; he knew he would lose. His speech got brief coverage in the party press. A U.S. diplomat cabled home that Allon was seeking to appear as hard-line as Dayan, who now spoke of keeping the West Bank; the two were the presumed competitors to succeed Eshkol.
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In fact, Dayan had submitted his own secret plan. Predictably, it was the photo negative of Allon’s. The mountain ridge—not the lowlands along the Jordan—was the strategic land Israel needed, Dayan asserted. Israel should therefore build five large army bases on the ridge. Each would be connected by roads to Israel proper, and next to each civilian settlements should be built.

The plan meant permanent Israeli rule over the West Bank’s Arabs, who would nonetheless remain Jordanian citizens. In the West Bank, according to Dayan’s conception, two nationalities would live, connected to different countries, with no border between them, but the Jews would retain control. More precisely, Dayan, as defense minister, would retain control. If there was a philosophy behind his proposal, it found expression in his later comment to the Palestinian poetess Fadwa Tuqan of Nablus: “The situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will…. You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.”
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Dayan’s cabinet colleagues approved putting army bases on the ridge, but rejected his settlement proposal, which implied permanence. They also debated Allon’s proposal, which satisfied neither extreme, without making a decision. Repeatedly, the cabinet postponed formulating a policy on the West Bank’s future. Or rather, postponement became policy. At one meeting of Mapai’s “political committee,” the party’s inner circle, Foreign Minister Eban argued that any decision would only tie Israel’s hands. This was not 1956, he said; now the diplomatic deadlock was working in favor of Israel, and it should wait to hear Arab proposals. Golda Meir, the chain-smoking Mapai secretary-general and former foreign minister, agreed. “Why should we talk?” she said. “Nothing’s pressuring us. Let Hussein talk.”
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The fear of pressure to withdraw immediately was fading. In that respect, Eban was correctly reading the signals from Washington. In a memo that might be called the Bundy Doctrine, written in early July, Johnson’s emergency adviser laid out his view of future U.S. Mideast policy. His lesson from the war was that “if Israel were in imminent danger of defeat…the U.S. would confront extraordinarily painful and unattractive choices.” To avoid needing to go to war on Israel’s behalf, America had to ensure Israel’s ability to defend itself. So the administration could not easily withhold arms as a means of pressure. The United States did need to maintain its ties with moderate Arab regimes, and did favor Israeli withdrawal—but the result had to be peace. The onus was therefore on the Arabs: Unless they offered peace, the United States would not lean heavily on Israel for concessions.
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Later in the summer, Bundy wrote to Johnson, “We can’t tell the Israelis to give things away to people who won’t even bargain with them.”
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The position was logical, yet it had the unintended consequence of allowing Eshkol’s government to avoid making choices.

EUPHORIA
IS THE WORD
most often used by Israelis describing the summer of 1967. The biblical verse cited most, in a season when the Bible was quoted constantly, was from Psalms: “When the Lord brought back those who returned to Zion, we were like dreamers.”
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In more modern terms, victory felt hallucinatory. The prewar fear of impending annihilation did not vanish. For many people, rather, it amplified the proportions of victory to miraculous. The old Jewish script that made sense of the new events was the one of redemption at the end of days, and a person did not have to be religious to allude to it. Chief of Staff Rabin, granted an honorary doctorate by Hebrew University, spoke of a “sense of salvation” and of soldiers “touching the very heart of Jewish history,” experiences that broke “the shell of shame and toughness” and made paratroopers cry at the Western Wall.
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Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold” remained the unofficial national anthem, with a new verse proclaiming, “We’ve come back…/ To the market and the square / A shofar calls on the Temple Mount,” turning the hymn of longing into a song of consummated national love.
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Those weren’t the only feelings that drove Israelis to visit the West Bank en masse, as the government steadily reduced restrictions on daytime travel in occupied land. There was curiosity, and the simple falling of barriers, and childhood memories, though some also came with Bibles in hand, to read verses about wars of kings and judges as they visited the places where ancient battles had been fought.
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