The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (26 page)

Afterward he returned to Eshkol. There is a Palestinian nation, he told his father figure. It was a pragmatic evaluation, not an ideology but a report, followed by a recommendation for what to do. Eliav wanted a new job, building towns and industry for the Palestinian refugees, immediately, where they were, “before the residents of the territories begin to flood our fields and cities with cheap labor.” Eliav was an upbeat, technocratic rewrite of the bleak, dovish novelist Amos Oz.

Eshkol, tired and sick, sent him to talk to Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. Meir “looked at me with angry eyes: ‘What Palestinian people?…What are you talking about?’” Eliav recalled. Dayan was uninterested in Eliav’s plans for refugees, and when “tens of thousands of workers from the territories began arriving in Israel’s fields and on its construction scaffolds, I understood why,” Eliav would recall.

Eshkol appointed Eliav to be Allon’s deputy in the new ministry for immigration. The ministry was like the airstrips built by cargo cults in Pacific islands, in the faith that clearing the land would bring planes laden with gifts. If the bureaucracy were built, the great wave of Jews would arrive from the Soviet Union and America, fulfilling the tragically frustrated dreams of the 1930s and solving the demographic problem. In office conversations, Allon showed Eliav his maps of what he wanted to settle and annex—a strip of land along the Jordan, and a strip at Rafiah and another stretching to Sharm al-Sheikh. “Why do you need all those Danzigs?” Eliav asked him.

Finally, Eliav wrote his ideas in the party newspaper. Along with recognizing Palestinian peoplehood, he declared allegiance to the old pragmatic Mapai stance on land: Until June 1967, Israel insisted it was able to realize its goals within the armistice lines. To prove it had spoken truth, it now needed to declare it was holding “the territories”—meaning all of them—only until peace.

Eliav’s radicalism had limits. He believed Israel should keep East Jerusalem. His proposed Palestinian state was Jordan, including the East and West Banks; the Palestinians could decide whether they wanted to employ the king. He suggested that after peace, with Arab agreement, Jewish settlement “east and west of Jordan” might be possible, but those Jews would have to be Palestinian citizens, the mirror image of Israeli Arabs. The suggestion testifies to the hold that the settlement ethos had on him as well. He was not actually a radical; he was a prewar Mapai man.

Eliav had the articles printed as a pamphlet, mailed out to party leaders. He loved his ideas, and he was also a politician with ambition, and this was his calling card. His ambitions were probably helped by the fact that some who received the pamphlet—like Golda Meir—did not read it.
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FINANCE MINISTER SAPIR GOT TOGETHER
that winter with a young Israeli friend named Yossi Sarid in Manhattan. Sarid had spent a year as Mapai’s spokesman leading up to the 1965 election. He had been twenty-four at the time. Sapir, nearly sixty, the backroom man, had befriended the precocious spinmeister. After the election Sarid left for New York, to get a master’s degree in political science at the New School for Social Research. When Sapir came through town, Sarid met him at the barbershop of his Midtown hotel, where the older man stopped for a daily shave of his face and pate.

First Sapir checked to make sure that the barber did not know Hebrew. Then he told his news: Eshkol was a goner. He did not have much longer.

Sarid asked if an heir had been picked.

“Golda,” Sapir answered.

The young man was incredulous.
⁴⁴
This was a whole different course in politics. The contenders of whom everyone spoke were Dayan and Allon. If Mapai wanted to keep the leadership for itself there was Abba Eban, the most senior Mapai minister after Eshkol, or Sapir himself, master of the party-run economy, “an artist of numbers” and of patronage, with the little black notebook in his pocket in which he recorded every interesting figure he heard. Golda Meir was seventy years old, the ex-labor minister, ex-foreign minister, ex-party secretary, in short,
ex
. Nor had years of intrigues made her popular. “She was known in her party as ‘a woman of great loves and great hates.’ One couldn’t always notice the loves, but the hates were so strong she couldn’t hide them if she wanted to,” another politician said.
⁴⁵

Sapir, though, wanted to stop Dayan, the bandit prince who had rebeled against Mapai before the last election, then forced his way back in with the declared goal of taking over. Allon was likable, but if he were chosen, Dayan would leave Labor—and with his war charisma, probably defeat it in the next election, in the fall of 1969. Eban’s erudite urbanity aroused suspicion in the party. As for himself, Sapir simply did not want the prime minister’s responsibility for ultimate decisions.

Instead he picked Meir, the last member of the state-founding generation in the Mapai leadership, who had worked with him and Eshkol to depose Ben-Gurion. Sapir knew she was a hawk, had been one all the way back to the 1930s when she opposed the Peel Commission proposal to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Though she now acknowledged the demographic problem, she lacked Sapir’s own horror that keeping the occupied territories would bring disaster on Israel. But because she was a hawk, Dayan and Allon would accept her. Sapir told Eban that Golda was sick, and would only rule for a year. In the fall he had visited her at a Swiss sanatorium and told her the job was hers.
⁴⁶
Sapir’s choice did not jibe with his beliefs or his fears for the country. Its logic was loyalty to the party and old comrades, and perhaps his own hesitation before the peak.

A photograph from mid-January 1969 shows Meir, with what might be a smile, on a dais next to Eshkol and the wildly white-bearded Yitzhak Tabenkin of the United Kibbutz and Mapam leader Ya’akov Hazan, whose left-wing party was signing an alliance with Labor. As “the Alignment,” they would run one electoral ticket and act as a partnership in parliament. The agreement was Meir’s baby. It brought all the old Labor Zionist parties together, ending the socialist schisms, and gave the alliance 63 seats in the 120-member Knesset, the first time an Israeli party ever had an absolute majority. It also completed the process of creating a ruling party that stood for every possible policy and no policy on the country’s most fateful issue, the future of the territories.
⁴⁷

“Eshkol will head the Labor Party list and
will continue as prime minister
,” the labor attaché at the American embassy wrote to Washington a few days later, underlining the last words as she passed on the intelligence she gained by having her old friend Golda over for dinner. “The tone of her remarks suggested that any other possibility was too ridiculous even to discuss.” Eshkol’s health was “perfectly okay,” she quoted Meir as saying, so the attaché concluded that his announced illnesses “are really diplomatic ones.” As for Meir herself, she said she did not want to run for Knesset again, “
but
she had no choice—the Party leadership insisted.” Asked about Israel’s image problems, Meir said she had decided “other people just didn’t like Jews except when they could pity them, and Israel must pursue her policies without constantly wanting to be ‘liked.’”
⁴⁸
That comment, at least, appears to have been her real feeling.

IT WAS CLOSE
to being the last decision Eshkol shepherded through. On January 26, the cabinet received a set of settlement proposals on the lines Allon was pushing—more outposts in the Jordan Rift and the Golan, and four in the Rafiah Plain of northeast Sinai. The discussion, notes historian Reuven Pedatzur, dealt not with peace and the future of the land, but with priorities: which places to settle first. Only the two dovish Mapam ministers tried, ritually and unsuccessfully, to block settlement in the Rift and the Rafiah Plain.

Dayan’s preference was for Rafiah. He emphatically pushed aside his usual romantic feelings for the Bedouin and their timeless agriculture. “I want to say that first off, we’ve got to get the Bedouin out of that area, to take a bulldozer and uproot the almond groves and then reach a deal on the price,” he said. Alluding to an outbreak of Palestinian attacks in the Gaza Strip, he added, “If we decide it’s for military purposes, we have to say, ‘We’re putting up a military position.’ We have to plow the ground, uproot the orchards, and help them find a place elsewhere…. I see the time as ripe for it, as long as there’s terror there, grenades being thrown and land mines planted, and the Bedouin are involved.”

Dayan’s idea was not ratified. The cabinet made Rafiah its third priority, and asked for staff opinions on how to settle in the area, given the Bedouin presence.

But the ministers did approve settlement in all three areas. The decision did not use the term “Allon Plan.” But Allon was already speaking of government actions in the occupied territories as implementing the “operative part” of his program, and later described the January 26 decision in the same way. So did press leaks at the time. The decision passed, Allon said, because hard-liners such as Menachem Begin backed settlement even if they wanted to keep more land than he did. In this case, Allon’s spin appears close to accurate. The cabinet was not moving as quickly as he wanted, but it was approving settlements that staked a claim to the areas he said should remain Israeli.
⁴⁹

Eshkol had never passed a cabinet resolution on the West Bank’s future. But he had presented the Allon Plan to King Hussein as a peace proposal. His message to the United States via his aide was that it was his government’s most forthcoming offer. Now he had won approval for it as a settlement map. It was the closest thing to a policy that the postwar government had produced.

Perhaps that is why Eshkol virtually described Allon’s map, without mentioning his name, when
Newsweek
journalists Arnaud de Borchgrave and Michael Elkins spent two hours in his office interviewing him on February 3. Israel would have to control Sharm al-Sheikh, and would never give up the Golan or Jerusalem, he said. “We don’t want any part of the settled area of the West Bank—Nablus, Jenin and so on…our army shall be stationed only on the strip” along the Jordan.
⁵⁰

An hour after the interview, Eshkol had a heart attack. A week later, when the interview appeared and was quoted in Hebrew papers, he was at home, restricted to bed. Abroad, his words sounded intransigent. In Washington, the National Security Council’s Harold Saunders wrote to his new boss, national security adviser Henry Kissinger, that Eshkol was “naturally taking a hard line publicly”—an optimistic evaluation allowing that the prime minister might be more flexible in real negotiations.
⁵¹
At home, a storm broke over Eshkol’s declaration that Israel would give up part of the West Bank. Menachem Begin’s Gahal alliance threatened to quit the unity government, and another right-wing party submitted a motion of no confidence. An hour before the Knesset convened the next day, Allon phoned
Newsweek
’s Elkins. He explained that Eshkol had assigned him to deny the story publicly and had asked that he call the newsman in advance to apologize. “He is too embarrassed to call you himself,” Allon said. “He hopes you’ll understand.” In the Knesset, Allon said the offending sentence was not in the text of the interview that the magazine sent the prime minister’s office for approval. Perhaps it was the reporters’ impression from background comments.
⁵²

Allon’s job that day was a peculiar indignity: He had to deny, in Eshkol’s name, that the prime minister had endorsed his cherished plan as Israel’s position. To have a government, Eshkol could not have a position.

Eshkol did not leave his house. According to Meron Medzini’s scholarly Hebrew biography of Meir, “Friends recounted that…he muttered to himself in juicy Yiddish about the
klafte
[bitch] that was sitting waiting for him to die.”
⁵³
He said he wanted to be buried at Deganiah Bet, his kibbutz. He was a settlement man; he wanted to go home.

YEHIEL ADMONI
of the Settlement Department and Agriculture Minister Haim Gvati left Jerusalem early in the morning, driving east, downhill into the desert. By eight o’clock they were walking through the fields at Kalyah, the Nahal settlement near the northern tip of the Dead Sea—a few acres planted in corn and winter tomatoes, and stretches of soil still too salty to grow anything unless washed with copious, expensive quantities of water. In the midst of business talk, someone brought word: Eshkol was dead of a heart attack. Gvati rushed back to Jerusalem, to the prime minister’s house. It was February 26, 1969.
⁵⁴

Arie Eliav was sitting in Pinhas Sapir’s office in Tel Aviv when they heard. They also drove up to the capital. At the residence, each new arrival ascended to the second floor, looked at Eshkol, and came down to the living room, which filled with dozens of people engaged in whispered argument—one more debate, but without Eshkol there to argue both sides—on whether to bury him at the national cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem or at his kibbutz on the shore of Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee. Golda Meir arrived, paid her respects to the deceased, came downstairs, sat on a couch, and lit a cigarette. And then everyone—Allon, Dayan, Sapir, Begin—began sitting on either side of her, explaining the issue. She was the arbiter. “This is the prime minister,” Eliav thought. The funeral, Meir ruled, would be in Jerusalem.
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