The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (15 page)

There is no trace of celebration, though, in the letters Kobi Rabinovich sent from Aalleiqa. Along with several other “third-years,” the young tank commander who had fought in the Sinai found it unbearable to go back to leading youth movement activities after the war. When the United Kibbutz suggested fulfilling their obligations in the heights, they took the offer. “It’s sad now…. Time doesn’t move, it lies down, still…. The people here mostly bore me,” he said in his first letter to his girlfriend, Eilat. The one comfort was that he now had time to start sorting out what he had been through in the war, to begin what became a series of letters that read like repeating nightmares.

He tells Eilat of the desert, “the land of dust, without horizons, sun-scorched, rotting its carcasses. What were we doing there? We had no choice, but woe to people who have no choice but to do that…to wipe out, wipe out creatures who don’t even know what happened.” He writes of nighttime: The tanks stopped, lights approached, an order came: “Fire! The sky is red with lead, the ground with blood, people fall twisted, seized by terror. A death trap, people running wildly about, like penned animals, their throats hoarse with shouting.” At last, “only the explosions of burning trucks were heard.” The dead “all lie, en masse, and we walk between them.”

Finally he speaks of the present: “My Eilat, the heart aches to see, here in the heights, the signs of war even on animals. Wounded limping dogs, donkeys that hit land mines.” The day before a woman from Aalleiqa had found a puppy. “She said a soldier shot the mother and [the woman] found the puppies crying next to the corpse. One was scared and shaking, so she brought it here…. It always cries, looks for a hiding place. Such a sweet lost little thing, and what about the other babies? Near here there was a training exercise, every time you heard a burst of gunfire, the puppy began to shake. [She] explained to me that it’s because his mother was killed with a burst of fire before his eyes. Maybe? If puppies are so vulnerable, what about those who understand a bit more,” he writes, and concludes, a man looking for refuge, “My Eilat, it’s good I have you. Otherwise, how would I take all this?”
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ON AUGUST
27, the cabinet finally discussed Allon’s proposal for “work camps” in the heights. “It’s clear that you neither destroy orchards nor start permanent settlements,” said Eshkol. “But if orchards exist, you have to maintain them. Certainly, we can permit the workers to use buildings there, and then we’ll see.”

The last words hint that, yes, this might become something permanent. But the cabinet did not discuss that possibility. It simply “approved working land in the Golan Heights”—testifying that the name of the region had shifted, become Hebrew, a hint of taking possession. The cabinet also ratified a proposal to operate an experimental agricultural station left behind by the Egyptians at Al-Arish in the northern Sinai. Dayan, Allon, and Agriculture Minister Gvati were assigned to work out the arrangements. The decision was considered so sensitive that it was left out of the cabinet minutes, even though those were supposed to be secret as well.

The three ministers met on September 1, with Chief of Staff Rabin and several other generals joining them. A summary of the session refers to the three ministers being “authorized by the cabinet to deal with settlement outposts”—the term in Hebrew was normally used for Nahal settlements of soldiers under military command—“in the administered territories.” The cabinet had not authorized exactly that; the trio had seized a small opening and widened it. They proposed a Nahal outpost in the southern end of the heights, and another at the Banias springs, a source of the Jordan River, which could have meant locating it in Syrian land or in the old demilitarized zone at the northern tip of Israel. At the Al-Arish farm, they proposed a settlement, either military or civilian.

As for “the group consisting of residents of the Upper Galilee,” they said, it could remain in the heights. The wording does not indicate a permanent settlement—but neither does it specify a temporary arrangement. For practical purposes, the first settlement in occupied land now had the government’s approval.
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Rafael Ben-Yehudah immediately recorded in his diary, “Decision on outposts in the heights”—in Hebrew, four terse words of success.
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On paper, the cabinet resolution of June 19, offering a pullback from Syrian land for peace, remained in force. Yet small decisions, made bit by bit, with authority stretched beyond its intent, were adding up to a new policy, neither articulated nor admitted.

Jerusalem, 13 Elul, 5727
September 18, 1967

Top Secret

To: Mr. Adi Yafeh, Political Secretary of the Prime Minister From: Legal Counsel of the Foreign Ministry Re: Settlement in the Administered Territories

As per your request…I hereby provide you a copy of my memorandum of September 14, 1967, which I presented to the Foreign Minister. My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Sincerely,

T. Meron

THEODOR MERON’S NOTE
and attached legal opinion, preserved in Levi Eshkol’s office files, testify to two things.
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The first: As of mid-September 1967, Eshkol knew that settling civilians in occupied land, including the West Bank, violated international law. The second: By early September, after nearly three months of weighing the West Bank’s future, Eshkol was actively exploring settlement in the region.

As legal counsel to the Foreign Ministry, Meron was the Israeli government’s authority on international law. He had achieved that position at a remarkably young age and with an even more remarkable biography. Born in Poland in 1930, he had spent four years of his youth in the Nazi labor camp at Czestochowa. For the entire war, “from age 9 to 15, I did not go to school at all,” he told a
New York Times
interviewer decades later. “There were tremendous gaps in my education. It gave me a great hunger for learning, and I dreamed that one day I could go to school.” After reaching Palestine as a teenager he voraciously made up for lost time—earning a law degree at Hebrew University, then a doctorate at Harvard, then studying international law at Cambridge. The boy who received his first education in war crimes as a victim was on his way to becoming one of the world’s most prominent experts on the limits that nations put on the conduct of war.

Those who received his opinion could not know where Meron’s career would later lead: Following another decade in Israeli foreign service, he would become a law professor at New York University—and later, in a new century, president of the U.N. tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia. That record, though, does add historical weight to what he wrote in September 1967. And even then, the legal mastery of the Foreign Ministry counsel must have been known in the inner circles of government.
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Meron’s actual opinion, dated September 14, is addressed to Foreign Minister Eban, his superior. But he states that he is relating specifically to “what I heard from Mr. Adi Yafeh,” Eshkol’s aide, “concerning the possibility of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the heights.” Virtually at the same time, Eshkol received a report from the Jewish Agency Settlement Department on the potential for settling at the Etzion Bloc. The land available for farming was limited to a mere seventy-five acres, it said, and those were being worked by the Palestinian refugees living on the site where Kibbutz Massu’ot Yitzhak once stood. That ruled out field crops, the report said, but settlers could raise chickens, engage in manufacturing, and develop tourism.
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Triangulate the two answers, and they point back to Eshkol as the man asking the questions.

The key provision in international law that stood in the way of settlement, Meron wrote, was the Fourth Geneva Convention on protection of civilians in time of war, adopted in 1949, which stated that an “Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”
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The authoritative commentary, he added, stated, “This clause…is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories.”
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Writing those words, Meron knew all too vividly who the “certain Powers” had been.

The prohibition, Meron stressed, is “categorical and is not conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer, and is aimed at preventing colonization of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering state.” If Israel did decide to put its citizens in occupied land, therefore, “it is vital that [it] be done by military bodies and not civilian ones…in the framework of bases” clearly temporary in nature. Even for that purpose, Israel had to respect the 1907 Hague Convention on war, which stated, “Private property cannot be confiscated.”
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Because the Golan Heights lay outside of mandatory Palestine, Meron said, they were “undoubtedly ‘occupied territory’ and the prohibition of settlement applies.” Regarding the West Bank, he noted, Israel argued that the land was not occupied, since Palestine had been divided in 1949 by armistice lines that were explicitly military and temporary. Jordan’s annexation of the West Bank was unilateral and, Israel asserted, the armistice had expired when Arab aggression set off war in June 1967.

But those claims, Meron told Eban and Eshkol, would not convince the court that mattered, the court of world diplomacy. The international community had rejected Israel’s “argument that the West Bank is not ‘normal’ occupied territory, and certain countries (e.g., Britain in its U.N. speeches) have explicitly asserted that our status in the West Bank is that of an occupier.”
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Moreover, Israel’s own actions showed recognition of that status. The army command in the West Bank had already issued a legal proclamation stating that “military courts will fulfill the Geneva provisions” and that when a military decree contradicted it, the Geneva convention took precedence.
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If Israel decided to send settlers to the Etzion Bloc, Meron said, it could argue they were returning to their homes, and he assumed property rights would not be a problem. Nonetheless, Israel would face objections based on the Geneva convention, and other countries “are likely to see our settling at the Etzion Bloc as evidence of intent to annex the West Bank.” Were settlements to be built in the Jordan Rift—the part of the Jordan River valley in occupied territory—the problem would be worse, since the claim of returning to lost homes would not apply.

As the prime minister weighed the fateful issue of settlement in the West Bank, his own counsel’s advice endorsed the key legal arguments that Israel’s government would face afterward from foreign and domestic critics. Meron’s opinion was kept secret, though the paper trail shows that Defense Minister Dayan and Justice Minister Shapira received it.
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The lawyer’s last points provide further evidence that Eshkol was specifically interested in settling the Etzion area, and also had his eye on the Jordan Rift. Pressure from activists and other politicians played a part in the decision taking form. But so did a failure of Arab diplomacy, and Eshkol’s own inclinations.

FIRST CAME PILGRIMAGES.
The morning after the war ended, a soldier born in Kfar Etzion hitched a ride to the lost kibbutz in an army jeep heading south from Jerusalem. Told at a military roadblock that he could only enter occupied land on duty, he said it was his duty to “go home.” His account of his trip is both intense and strangely impersonal, like the descriptions of other children of the Etzion Bloc who came after him. They speak as a chorus, using the same words, images, and biblical verses, quoting an unwritten catechism.

On the road, the soldier wrote afterward, he imagined seeing ancient heroes and war of independence battles—Ruth and Naomi and King David in Bethlehem, the Maccabees fighting in the hills, 1948 convoys ambushed at twists in the road. Of the actual town of Bethlehem he says only that it was draped in white flags; he makes no mention of seeing people there. At Kfar Etzion, he found the minaret of a Jordanian army mosque, surrounded by metal military sheds. “Everything I knew about Kfar Etzion rose in my mind, a confusion of facts, descriptions, stories…,” he said. “Suddenly before my eyes stood a picture of the mass grave at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, surrounded by a crowd of people, and beyond the graves, this hill I’m facing, Kfar Etzion, destroyed, in ruins!”
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Hanan Porat came two weeks later with a large group—survivors, widows, young people evacuated as children. They argued over the location of the erased chickenhouse and cowshed. Women searched for the remains of their houses. One survivor found a hoe on the ground and “pounded crazily…on the roof of the bunker where the last defenders of the bloc had blown themselves up when all hope ran out, as if he wanted to signal to someone down there,” Porat wrote, in an account he entitled “Homeward!” that he read aloud later at a celebration at Merkaz Harav yeshivah for students home from the war. “It’s too late,” said another survivor, touching the shoulder of the one with the hoe, “too late.” The second man had just lost his own son in battle. He walked “with his mouth tight, a strange glint in his eyes.” A memorial ceremony was held for the dead of 1948 and the dead of what Porat called “the war of redemption” that had just ended, and a speaker called on the government, “Please, let us come back and build our home here. Don’t deliver this sacred mountain again into the impure hands of the murderers from Hebron.” Porat’s sister read a concluding poem by ultra-nationalist poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, which proclaimed, “The twilight of dawn is ahead of me / And the twilight of dusk is behind me.”
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Other people were making pilgrimages that season as well. On a July afternoon, lawyer and refugee Aziz Shehadeh descended from his current home of Ramallah to his lost home, Jaffa, driven by a Jewish lawyer with whom he had worked before 1948. Shehadeh, in his son’s telling, was also stunned by the gap between memory and reality, like a person “who makes a long and difficult trip to see a dying loved one” and discovers her ravaged by age. He found his mother-in-law’s house, paint peeling from the front gate. A familiar barbershop remained, and the church where he was married, but the courthouse where he had argued cases had been demolished. It would have been easier, he thought, were everything gone. The son’s telling says nothing of noticing the Arabs who had stayed in Jaffa and become Israeli citizens, or of the Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab countries living in the houses left behind by families such as Shehadeh’s. From Jaffa, the Jewish lawyer drove his friend to Tel Aviv, which Shehadeh remembered as Arab Jaffa’s Jewish suburb and which was now the real city, alive with traffic, “young people out for the evening, sidewalk cafés,” countless lights that could be seen from Ramallah and that Shehadeh had believed were the lights of Jaffa. He grew furious with Palestinians who had spent nineteen years “bemoaning the lost country” instead of building their own lives, and even more insistent on creating a Palestinian state next to Israel.
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Another refugee, Sabri al-Banna, came to Jaffa from Nablus with his family, at least according to one of the contradictory stories of his life. Al-Banna was about thirty years old. From the street, he would have seen the mansion of his childhood, with its wide portico framed in classical columns. Now it was an Israeli military courthouse. Soon after, he left for Amman. Under the name Abu Nidal, “Father of the Struggle,” he began a career of terrorism that would frighten the world.
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Presumably, refugees from the village where Massu’ot Yitzhak once stood also visited Jaffa. But the pilgrims making their opposed journeys were invisible to each other, and each side treated loss and longing as its own discovery.

Not all Etzion Bloc survivors wanted to rebuild. At the new Kibbutz Massu’ot Yitzhak in southern Israel, most of Moshe Moskovic’s neighbors told him, “We were there, we fought, we fell, we came here and built a beautiful community. Don’t bother us with memories.” Some wanted to build a monument to the dead in the Etzion Bloc, but no more. The old Massu’ot Yitzhak had taken up three years of their youth, ending in a nightmare. At the new one they had invested nearly two decades of adulthood. Moskovic, though, still felt “a debt to the place, to the people, to the rocks”—perhaps, by his own pensive admission, because he had not been there when his kibbutz fell. His neighbors had no objection to him using his time and connections as regional council head to seek government permission for a new settlement. The opposite of activism was disinterest, not protests.
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Among Kfar Etzion’s second generation, though, many agreed with Moskovic. The oldest among them were in their twenties, they had been raised on martyrdom, and they had built nothing of their own yet. In early July, dozens of them gathered at the military cemetery in Jerusalem, at the grave of one of their number who was killed the first night of the war a month before. Afterward, they regrouped at a yeshivah in town to discuss “going home.” Hanan Porat and two others were chosen to coordinate the effort and get government approval.

Soon after, everyone received a mimeographed questionnaire. “Are you prepared to settle immediately, if it becomes possible?” said one question. Another asked for suggestions on how to deal with the “hostile Arab environment” at Kfar Etzion. No suggestions were sought on whether the Etzion Bloc should be annexed, or whether all of the West Bank should be, or what status the Arab residents should have. On paper, the effort seemed aimed at fulfilling a private right, or obligation, of return, divorced from politics.
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But the larger issues could not be evaded. Porat and his friends met with Defense Minister Dayan. In Porat’s account, Dayan told them that he did not want Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The defense minister said, “Friends, I understand the sentiment, but we don’t conduct policy according to sentiment.”
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Yigal Allon, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. By his testimony, he “never forgave Ben-Gurion for keeping us from retaking the Etzion Bloc” at the end of the war of independence, and he had kept up a personal connection with the survivors. The delegation that visited him snapped into his categories: people wanting to reestablish a kibbutz to hold a strategic spot.
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