The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (16 page)

Porat, however, thought in different categories. In late July, he wrote a letter to a secular high school girl who had stumbled into the Merkaz Harav victory party, dragged along by friends from the religious Bnei Akiva youth movement. Fascinated by his “Homeward!” speech, she had written to ask for a copy. Sending it, he explained that he was brought up to believe in “fulfillment”—a term taken from secular Zionism, meaning that ideals are useless unless acted on, as by starting a kibbutz. He wanted to “fulfill” both Torah—meaning the teachings of Judaism—and “national desires, which also flow from the wellspring of Judaism.” This was straight from the rabbis Kook: Judaism has swallowed nationalism whole, as if a snake had swallowed a mongoose and roughly taken its shape. Even when secular Zionists are certain they are rebelling against religion, they are fulfilling God’s will—but the ideal is a religious pioneer, synthesis of yeshivah student and communal farmer, and Porat described himself in those terms.

The longings of the children of Kfar Etzion, “a handful of dream-weavers” for their lost home, he wrote, actually have cosmic significance. “Take [our feelings] and multiply them by ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million, and you’ll get the longings of a whole nation for a whole land” during the 1,900 years of Jewish exile. Now, “before our eyes the curtain is rising on the ‘twilight of dawn’…of the beginning of redemption.” The believers alone understand the full drama, “the great process by which the Master of the Universe is leading all of us on the way upward, homeward: all of the Jewish people in all of the Land of Israel.” Returning to Kfar Etzion would be a representation of that greater march of history.
¹⁸

Clean-shaven, casually dressed, a paratrooper and a child of kibbutz, Porat could appear to the politicians and officials he met that summer as a blue-eyed poster boy for the Labor Zionist ideal, albeit one whose skullcap identified him as a member of the rather tame, running-to-keep-up Orthodox auxiliary rather than the secular mainstream. Yet his reason for wanting to rebuild Kfar Etzion was also a practical application of Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook’s radical messianism, the same doctrine that had stunned the kibbutz interviewers for
Soldiers’ Talk
when they met his classmates. You needed to look at Porat twice to see him once. By supporting the first Porat, an Allon or Eshkol would inadvertently cultivate the second.

The man who knocked at Porat’s yeshivah dorm-room door one night presented less ambiguity. Moshe Levinger was the rabbi of the Orthodox cooperative farming village of Nehalim, east of Tel Aviv. He was thirty-two, thin, with a scraggly black beard, a rumpled white shirt, and a curt manner. He was also an alumnus of Merkaz Harav, where in his words he had learned “the commandment…that the Land of Israel must be in the hands of the Jewish people—not just by having settlements, but that it’s under Jewish
sovereignty
.” The significance of sovereignty indeed existed in his master’s teaching, but the fact that Levinger heard that part most loudly said something about the listener. Levinger measured the world on the vertical axis running from weak to strong, and so learned that power was a religious obligation. As one associate would explain his demonstrative lack of respect for those higher than him on the social or political ladder, “he regarded himself as small only before God”—an attitude that could awe young religious Zionists suffering a group inferiority complex. To follow Levinger was to feel strong, even when he was ordering you around.

Levinger’s reaction to the war was that Jews should settle in the West Bank to ensure Israeli sovereignty. Some of Nehalim’s residents were refugees from Neveh Ya’akov, the farming community north of Jerusalem abandoned in 1948. Levinger tried to convince them and others from the spot to return, with no luck. Again, it seems, those who had rebuilt their lives did not long for return. When Levinger heard of Porat’s effort to revive Kfar Etzion, he headed for Jerusalem to suggest joining forces. As his first bit of assistance, he told Ben-Tzion Heineman, a Nehalim farmer who had become his disciple and who owned a truck, to show up at Porat’s door the next morning. “I’m here at Rabbi Levinger’s command,” Heineman said when he arrived, and volunteered to act as Porat’s driver.

For the next two months, Heineman chauffeured Porat around the country as he sought to build support.
¹⁹
Leaders of the religious kibbutz movement put them off; unlike the older generation of the United Kibbutz, they saw nothing pressing about settling occupied land. The group around Nathan Alterman, taking shape as the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel, was enthusiastic, but aging Tel Aviv poets could provide public relations help at most.

MOSKOVIC AND THREE
other middle-aged survivors of the Etzion Bloc got a few minutes with Levi Eshkol in mid-August. The transcript reveals the pendulum of Eshkol’s own feelings and the divisions between his guests. The prime minister asked about the availability of land for farming. When told it was limited, he answered, “At the moment it’s possible to establish only one settlement.”

Yet when Moskovic pressed for permission to “revive the place in whatever way possible,” Eshkol retreated. “The government is still up in the air on the matter. Soon we’ll decide what to do with the territories,” he said.

“It’s possible to annex the area without including any Arab communities,” a Kfar Etzion survivor offered. The suggestion presumed that Arab-populated areas must be given up. The Etzion Bloc would be linked by a tendril of land to Israel, rather than becoming a bridgehead for keeping the entire West Bank. Moskovic, who favored keeping everything, proposed “settling the place without much noise” to avoid international protests, a “creating facts” approach. One member of the delegation proposed sending a Nahal unit “to hold the spot.”

“The question,” Eshkol answered, “…is whether it’s worth holding it now and leaving afterward.” Putting a paramilitary settlement on the ground made sense only if Israel intended to keep the area, and that was undecided.
²⁰

For Moskovic, and for Porat when he heard of the meeting, it could only have been evidence that they were getting nowhere. They could not know that Eshkol’s notation on his experts’ recommendation for the West Bank’s future concerned kibbutzim lost in 1948, or that after meeting the delegation he raised the subject in the smoke-filled room of Mapai’s political committee. Moshe Dayan now favored settling in the Etzion area, Eshkol noted, though experts said no land was available—a technical objection, not a strategic one.

But Eshkol made no recommendation.
²¹
The prime minister was playing with ideas, worrying his way through them out loud, tentative and engaged. The same day he found time for a conversation with the French Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, telling him that “from Jordan we demand a security strip along the Jordan River,” trying out the taste of Allon’s map, reworked as a potential compromise with Hussein. “We have signs that King Hussein is willing to talk with us,” he said. “It’s said he’s waiting for the Arab summit to fail.”

What if the Arabs do not want to reach an agreement? Aron asked.

“Then we’ll stay put.”

And was he not worried about a rebellion in the West Bank?

“No. This isn’t Algeria,” Eshkol said, reading what would be on a Frenchman’s mind. “We can strangle terror in the occupied territories.”
²²

Though Eshkol was right that Hussein wanted talks, he nonetheless utterly misread the king. Hussein was the person most eager for a summit meeting of Arab leaders, which he hoped would recognize that, alas, there was no choice but negotiating with Israel. He hoped for permission to dicker for the return of half his kingdom, without fearing Arab intrigues to take away the other half. He won Nasser’s support for a conference, and the radical leaders of Syria and Algeria chose to stay away, more good news for the king.
²³

Eight Arab leaders gathered in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, and from Hussein’s perspective, the summit was close to a complete success. Nasser agreed to let him negotiate. The conservative oil monarchies pledged financial aid to Jordan and Egypt—leaving Nasser beholden to the kings he once hoped to sweep away in a tide of Arab nationalism. The summit’s closing resolution, on September 1, announced, “The Arab Heads of State have agreed to unite their political efforts at the international and diplomatic level to…ensure the withdrawal of the aggressive Israeli forces from the Arab lands…occupied since the aggression of June 5.”

Decoded as its authors intended, that meant that these Arab countries were aiming only at getting back the land lost in the last war, not at erasing Israel from the map, and that they would use diplomatic means, not tanks and troops, to accomplish their goal, even though that meant accepting some kind of non-belligerency with the Jews. And, yes, to show that they were not selling out Arab principles, the resolution added that the leaders would keep to a framework of “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it, and insistence on the rights of the Palestinian people in their own country.” One was supposed to understand that this allowed for indirect negotiations, for informal peace, for de facto recognition, all regarded as crucial concessions.
²⁴

It was a shining example of what Levi Eshkol had called “playing chess with oneself.” The leaders at Khartoum negotiated a formula for what Israel should accept, then coded it in bellicose rhetoric. But face-to-face negotiations, formal peace, and explicit Arab recognition were Israel’s conditions for a pullback. The reasoning was that only if an Arab leader could make the psychological shift and say, “We recognize you,” would it be safe to make concessions. In Israel, the “three no’s of Khartoum” were read as an Arab declaration of eternal hostility.

For the small circle of cabinet ministers and diplomats who knew of Israel’s June 19 offer to pull back to the international border for peace or of the contacts with Hussein, the resolution was a public rejection of secret offers.
²⁵
A U.S. diplomat explained to Washington that Israeli analysts believed that the summit had decided on a two-stage strategy. The Arabs would first “make marginal political concessions to get their land back. At the same time, military preparations continue for a future second stage—war against Israel.”
²⁶

On an airborne tour of the northern Sinai with Dayan and the Settlement Department’s Yehiel Admoni just after the Arab conference, Eshkol told journalists, “If Khartoum is the declared position, then our answer is, ‘We stay here.’”
²⁷
Politically, it made little sense to press for a decision on what Israel would keep or give up in the West Bank. Why strain the fragile ruling coalition when there was no Arab partner anyway?
²⁸

For Eshkol, Khartoum was the tipping point. Allon was asking him about Kfar Etzion, as was the religious affairs minister, Zorach Warhaftig of the National Religious Party, who felt a sentimental tie to a place where friends of his had died in 1948.
²⁹
They had a receptive audience. The settlement ethos, in the words of Eshkol’s official biographers, “had been the cornerstone of his worldview and public career for 53 years.”
³⁰
On the Sinai trip, he looked over the Egyptian experimental farm at Al-Arish and the abandoned fishing boats at Bardawil Lagoon on the northern coast. “Eshkol, in his vision of settlement, imagined Jewish farmers and fishermen making the desert blossom and pulling fish from the sea,” Admoni wrote of the outing.
³¹
Settlement Department chief Ra’anan Weitz gave Eshkol a plan for the Jordan Rift that called for building thirty farming settlements and a town that together would have a population of 32,000 Israelis within a decade.
³²

In the cabinet on September 10, Eshkol mentioned the delegation of Etzion Bloc survivors. Justice Minister Shapira warned of the legal problems of settling in occupied territory. “We could do it,” he said, “but we should know that we will be violating not only the Geneva conventions but also the [army] General Staff’s standing orders.” Not liking that legal opinion, it appears, Eshkol sought another from Theodor Meron.

HANAN PORAT
was not privy to such discussions. The children of Kfar Etzion were not educated in the anarchistic leanings of Yitzhak Tabenkin; they wanted permission to start a settlement.
³³
Levinger, on the other hand, was compelled by the idea of defying the government, as was his follower Heineman. “I don’t expect them to give you approval,” Heineman told Porat on one of their road trips. “Just get up and do it.”
³⁴

Without telling his childhood friends, Porat pursued a second track. Levinger found a handful of people willing to move to the Kfar Etzion site without permission, including old yeshivah friends from Merkaz Harav, some already in their thirties, with families, men more suited for the study hall than the cowsheds. They did not actually “want so much personally” to live at Kfar Etzion, Levinger later said. “We wanted it to be there.” At Nehalim, they began gathering equipment—beds, tents, a water pump. Also in on the plan, in Porat’s telling, was an aspiring National Religious Party politician named Zevulun Hammer, the leader of the party’s Young Guard.
³⁵
Hammer’s group was ready for rebellion against the party’s moderate leaders. Seizing the standard of the Whole Land of Israel fit their postwar mood. It also conveniently satisfied their need to set themselves apart from the party’s old men, and for a religious stand on a central national issue.
³⁶

In early September, Levinger met in Tel Aviv with intellectuals from the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel. Among them was Aharon Amir, a most unlikely partner for a rabbi. From his youth, Amir had belonged to the radical secular right. His fascist leanings extended to asking to be accepted for officer’s training at a military academy in Mussolini’s Italy in 1940.
³⁷
Afterward he joined a circle of a few dozen writers who believed in creating a “Hebrew” nation, both new and ancient: It would return to Canaanite roots, before the Hebrews were corrupted with Judaism. Amir could not bear the Israel created in 1948, little and Jewish; he wrote around the time of independence of a vast Hebrew land, from the Mediterranean to Basra on the Persian Gulf, inhabited by a “mixture of bloods and a confusion of races,” all Hebraicized. It was a wildly romantic nationalism, a vision of conquest and glory cooked up in Tel Aviv cafés.
³⁸
If there was anyone less like Amir than Levinger it was Porat, part of the pious wing of a movement that preferred starting settlements to making statements and that regarded café dwellers as effete, rather like Diaspora Jews.