The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (27 page)

Eshkol had ruled for a year and a half after the war. The fruits of victory were an empire he had not sought, and a political realignment that left him wounded. He did not have a ready strategic or ideological meaning to assign to the conquests. Around him were men—from the poet Alterman and kibbutz ideologue Tabenkin with their grandiose visions of the Whole Land, to Allon, to the dovish Eliav—aflame with ideas. Eshkol listened to everyone, and listened to himself argue the advantages of land and the impossibility of ruling another people.

But it is not true that he was simply dragged by events, or that the settlement enterprise was imposed on him. He spearheaded the decisions to annex East Jerusalem and build Jewish neighborhoods there. By the fall of 1967, he fell back on his personal experience in settlement as a response to the new situation. He created facts on the ground, and sometimes imposed faits accomplis on ministers in order to do so.

Wanting to improve Israel’s defenses and worrying about demography, he essentially adopted the Allon Plan, without formal approval. Like Allon, he bent the logic to fit his feelings about Kfar Etzion and Hebron. In Admoni’s insider description, Eshkol virtually returned to his role as Settlement Department chief. A shortage of settlers, Admoni writes, slowed the effort, as did technical problems, but the lack of an articulated settlement policy was not an impediment.
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By Eshkol’s death, there were ten settlements in the Golan, three in the Jordan Rift, along with Kfar Etzion and the Hebron settlement south of Jerusalem, and plans to settle in the Rafiah area.
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The first Israeli neighborhood in East Jerusalem was reaching completion, and would be named for him.

By the time of Eshkol’s death, Israel had dropped its initial willingness to withdraw to the international borders with Syria and Egypt. Diplomacy had reached a deadlock. Within the land under Israeli rule, the Green Line had been erased from the map, and was being blurred in daily life. Israel was still engaged in a conflict with its neighbors, a conflict between states. Inadvertently, though, an older conflict between two ethnic groups inside one land had been brought back from history, and with it the pre-state tactic of settlement as a way of determining future boundaries.

What must be said for Eshkol is that his willingness to weigh every idea projected pragmatism and compromise. Though he used Allon’s approach, he treated it as the least-worst choice, not a new faith, and moved more slowly than Allon wished. Even with his body failing, Eshkol’s mind remained open. Shortly before his death, he sent a note to Abba Eban and Yisrael Galili. He had received a letter, he said, from someone suggesting that Israel, as if with a magic wand, was creating a Palestinian people, a new enemy. What, he asked, did they think of this?
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It was typical that he asked two people who could not bear each other, at nearly opposite poles of his party, for their views. Yet much as Eshkol debated himself, he saw the government’s indecision as a problem, not a long-term position. “We don’t know so clearly what we actually want,” was a complaint. His openness would be missed, and even his uncertainty.

BY COINCIDENCE
, the big gregarious man from Deganiah left the stage five weeks after the big gregarious man from Texas left power. One of Eshkol’s last acts was to send a letter to Lyndon Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon. Despite Eshkol’s mistrust of the new American president and Eban’s description of Nixon as picking appointees “even less impressive than himself,”
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the letter was perfectly pitched for Nixon and his key foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger.

Preventing a new Mideast war, Eshkol’s letter said, depended on keeping Israel strong enough to deter the Arabs, but also on making sure the Soviet Union knew that to “encourage the Arab states [toward war]…would gravely prejudice its relationship with the United States.” The aim of Soviet diplomatic proposals was to “weaken and undermine Israel and thereby discredit America.” Peace with Egypt was unlikely because “Nasser is the slave of rigid anti-Israel ideologies and of Soviet global strategy.”
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In short, the Mideast was one corner of the Soviet-American arena and Cairo was a Soviet pawn. Just so, Nixon must have said. In his June 1967 visit to Israel, he had described the war in those terms. The secretive, suspicious man who had moved into the White House preferred to fit foreign affairs together into a grand pattern. Behind disparate events lay the same adversary. He and Kissinger shared the “general sense that internal or external power always flowed from the top,” writes William Bundy in his history of Nixon’s foreign policy. They focused on communism and underestimated nationalism. The Soviet Union could and did control its clients. The ultimate target of all policy was Moscow, to which the United States must demonstrate toughness, with which it must negotiate, to which it must deny victories.
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There were other people whom Nixon distrusted, though, including the bureaucrats of the State Department. Kissinger would recall Nixon’s initial assessment this way: They “had no loyalty to him; the Foreign Service had disdained him as vice president and ignored him the moment he was out of office,” comments demonstrating just how personal the political can be.
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Nixon and Kissinger would handle the big issues. William Rogers, Nixon’s secretary of state, a lawyer lacking foreign affairs experience, would get the rest. Then again, Nixon had to give something to Rogers, an old friend. “The areas he did not mind consigning were those where success seemed elusive…or those where the risks of domestic reaction were high. The Middle East met both of Nixon’s criteria,” writes Kissinger in his memoirs. Nixon also feared that Kissinger’s “Jewish origins” would bias him toward Israel, and wanted him to steer clear of the region.
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Giving Rogers responsibility for the Middle East meant demoting it, postponing it. That suited Kissinger, who put the Arab-Israeli problem in the category of conflicts where “the opposing positions are simply irreconcilable.” Besides, he preferred to wait on Middle East diplomatic efforts until “those who would benefit from it would be America’s friends, not Soviet clients.” If diplomacy stalled and Israel remained strong, eventually the Arabs would give up on Moscow and turn to Washington.
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This was a long step beyond the Bundy Doctrine: On the White House chessboard, letting Israel stay put was a gambit for hurting the Soviets. Kissinger’s writings make no mention of the possibility that on the ground, in the land held by Israel, conditions might change in the meantime.

GOLDA MEIR WAS
just short of seventy-one years old when she became prime minister of Israel. Born in czarist Russia, she spent her early years in Kiev in Ukraine and Pinsk in White Russia, in the brutal poverty typical of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Her childhood, according to her biographer Medzini, provided virtually no love or appreciation; constant family squabbling taught her to hate argument and seek compromises. Her memories included hiding in an upstairs room when rumors of a pogrom spread in Pinsk, an experience that scarred her with fear, and her older sister’s participation in an illegal Zionist group, which taught her the sanctity of secrecy.

Before she turned eight, her family left for America, part of a flood of Jewish emigration. As a teenager in Milwaukee, she joined a left-wing Zionist group. At the age of twenty-two, she became a much more nonconformist emigrant, an American Jew moving to Palestine, pulling along her non-Zionist, book-and theater-loving husband, Morris Meyerson. Soon after, they joined Merhaviah, a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley of northern Palestine.

Her political career was born when she represented the commune at a kibbutz movement convention at Deganiah, the first kibbutz. There she met Labor Zionist leaders including Levi Eshkol and David Remez, head of the recently founded Jewish labor union, the Histadrut, who became her patron and longtime lover, though that would later make him the jealous rival of Zalman Shazar, another prominent Labor Zionist. She eventually left both Merhaviah and Morris Meyerson as her movement career progressed. One of her early appointments, at Remez’s initiative, was as co-secretary of a Histadrut body, the Council of Women Workers. She was picked because the incumbent secretary was too assertive on women’s issues and, in Medzini’s description, “It was possible to depend on Golda to carry out party directives and not pose a threat or challenge to the leadership.”
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The Golda myth, in which she is both feminist and national Jewish mother, is a fiction. But she was an effective organizer and politician, who could be counted on to arbitrate disputes, represent the party or the Zionist movement, rally Diaspora Jews. She was known as a propagandist, not a strategist.
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With Eshkol’s death, Allon became head of a caretaker government that would serve only until a new prime minister could put together a coalition and win Knesset approval. By March 7, Labor’s central committee ratified Sapir’s machinations and chose Meir as the candidate. Only the old Rafi faction, led by Dayan and Shimon Peres, abstained in protest that Dayan had not been chosen. Four days later, she was officially assigned to form a government by the country’s symbolic, powerless head of state, her former lover, President Zalman Shazar. “Golda reached the summit when she was actually aged and tired…cautious, conservative and not open to new ideas, daring experiments in foreign or domestic policy,” writes Medzini. “Because of her age she tended more than ever to see things as black and white.”
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Chosen to preserve the party, she represented the end of a revolution, the apparatchik as leader.

Her initial coalition and cabinet, until the autumn elections, were the same as Eshkol’s. Nothing needed to change. No breakthroughs were needed or desired. The new government’s official guidelines said that until peace treaties were reached, Israel would stay put at the cease-fire lines “and strengthen its position.” Meir’s acceptance speech before the Knesset was written by Yisrael Galili, the secretive, maximalist Ahdut Ha’avodah minister who immediately became her chief adviser. “The government,” she declared, “will regard…the settlement…of our sons on the soil of the homeland as of vital importance for the country’s security and survival.”
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Stalemate was no longer tentative but intentional. It was time to dig in.

The visitor to Kalyah did not actually enter the desert settlement, just drove past. Pulling up to the gate with diplomatic plates and asking the female soldier on guard duty to let him in might have been too bald a declaration that the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem was curious about Israeli settlement activity. That put the quiet American at a disadvantage to
Time
correspondent Marlin Levin, whose recently published story he had come to check.

Levin had driven in (after noting that the guard who met him was a “shapely, smiling, blue-eyed blonde wearing fatigues and armed with a rifle and transistor radio”), looked over the corn sprouts and irrigation pipes, and found out that the Nahal soldiers spent eight hours a day farming along with four or five more hours on military training and guard duty. The men got fieldwork and night guard shifts; women guarded by day, worked in the kitchen, and cared for the commune’s 450 ducks. While Kalyah was technically an army camp defending the frontier with Jordan and the highway from the river to Jerusalem, “No one would ever think of saluting; everyone is known and called by his or her first name,” he wrote, in February 1969.
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In the Kalyah dining hall, Levin had lunched with Dani, a twenty-seven-year-old expert on desert farming, whom he called “the most important man at Kalyah.” The agronomist complained good-naturedly about the high price of water from an Arab family’s spring, and talked about the road being paved along the Dead Sea shore southward to Ein Gedi, a kibbutz just inside the Green Line. Gaza refugees were hired for the roadwork, to give them jobs. Overpaying for water and labor, Levin explained, fit a policy intended to show local Arabs “that living with Israelis can be good for everyone.” Kalyah could do well on winter produce, Dani said; his challenge was how to farm in summer, when the heat hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

“If someone says we have taken land that does not belong to us, he is wrong. No one ever worked this land. No one ever lived here,” Dani said, explaining, “We need three things. The road, water and peace. The one we’re building. The second we’ll find. And if we have those two, the third will come in good time.” He was providing Cliff Notes for the 1969 edition of the settlement ethos: Settlers made worthless soil bloom; the land’s political status was so irrelevant as not to merit mentioning; settlements would actually push the Arabs to make peace.

Levin did not speak to the Gazans on the road crew but did mention that Arabs might not agree with Dani.
Time
’s introduction to his article explained that Kalyah was part of a string of fortified settlements that Israel intended to build along the Jordan, along with others in the Golan and Sinai, in line with the cabinet’s secret approval of Allon’s proposals. Somewhere in the American diplomatic hierarchy, the report provoked enough concern to send a consular officer down to the desert.

His report to Washington, after driving by, was all reassurance. Kalyah was hardly fortified, he wrote, and was too far from the river or the highway to guard either. As for the “string of fortified settlements,” he wrote, Israel had only built two settlements in the Rift, though it had announced plans for a third.
Time
, his report concluded, “presented a somewhat distorted picture of actuality.” Kalyah “has not made as much progress toward permanence as the article suggests.”
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In short, his superiors could ignore media exaggerations and relax. The comments show that the diplomat did not know of the existence of Argaman, the settlement midway up the Rift established in November, and did not want to imagine that more settlements might follow. Even while looking at a settlement, he preferred not to see it as altering the map, closing diplomatic possibilities. While pointing out that Kalyah was no fortress, he did not draw the conclusion that it was the foundation for a permanent, civilian community.

In one respect, though, he touched a truth. The process of creating facts was going slowly. Standing in the path of Allon’s dreams and the Settlement Department’s grandiose proposals were dry soil, empty wells, and a shortage of young people dedicated to the Labor Zionism of the 1930s.

At the State Department, Assistant Secretary Joseph Sisco was not as complacent. When Foreign Minister Abba Eban arrived in Washington in March 1969 for his first talks with the Nixon administration, Sisco drew up talking points for his new bosses, William Rogers and Under Secretary Elliot Richardson. Some of Israel’s actions, he said, “have conveyed the impression that Israel has already made up its mind to retain certain territories.” Sisco wanted Eban to hear from the Americans that Israel must not “present the world with accomplished facts.”
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Despite the change in administrations, the position at State remained that peace required a virtually complete Israeli pullback to the prewar lines. That said, Sisco’s language both stressed and played down the question of settlements. He expected Richardson to be the one to raise the issue with Eban, since Rogers would be discussing “the broad themes of our policy,” not details. Settlements merely “conveyed the impression” that Israel intended to stay put, as if that were an unintended implication Israel should be more careful to avoid—as if Israel in fact agreed with its patron on final borders.

Superpower relations stood at the center of the new administration’s visible strategy for solving the Arab-Israeli problem. With Nixon’s go-ahead, State was to engage in two-way talks with the Soviet Union and four-party talks that included Britain and France. The goal was a peace proposal, not an imposed solution. But the assumption was that the various client states would have a hard time refusing such a proposal. The effort gained urgency when Egypt’s Nasser declared in March that the cease-fire was over and launched what became known as the War of Attrition: artillery barrages across the Suez Canal, intended to show Israel that holding the Sinai was too costly. The fighting quickly escalated into air battles. But Nixon did not expect the talks to go anywhere, and Kissinger was happy to have them fail, lest the Soviets get credit for wringing concessions from Israel.
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The operating assumption was also false: Clients were not puppets. Nasser, the nationalist, did not operate on a Soviet remote control. And even if Washington put aside the “impression” created by settlements, it still had the new prime minister’s explicit statements that Israel intended to keep land.

“
LINES THAT EXISTED
before the fifth of June can never again be the boundaries of Israel,” Golda Meir said, at a foreign press briefing on taking office. Though Israel sought signed treaties, she assumed they meant little—“Wars usually break out among countries that have peace agreements”—so new borders would have to eliminate any Arab military advantages. The Golan and Sharm al-Sheikh would remain Israeli. She refused to specify territorial goals in the West Bank. Israel would do “everything that is possible” for “the inhabitants”—Meir would never say Palestinians—who might find that “it is not so terrible to live together with us.” If the Arabs chose to negotiate, the Israeli government would decide its position.
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“I rebel against someone saying there’s no peace because we haven’t decided on our map,” she said afterward at a lunch for Hebrew journalists. The dispute with the Arabs was “over the very fact that we’re alive, and it doesn’t matter what territory we live in.” On the other hand, she rejected annexing occupied land, “because I want a Jewish state…without me having to count the Jewish and non-Jewish population every morning, for fear the figures have changed…. A very dear friend told me that in that case, I’m not a Zionist. Well, I have an opinion of myself, which isn’t always so good, but on the fact that I’m a good Zionist…you can’t change my opinion.”
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The music was insecurity: People wanted Jews dead, she did not think much of herself, she needed to stand up against more powerful views. The lyrics said the ideal choice was no choice. Concessions would endanger Israel, yet annexation meant an end to the Jewish state. Unstated was that defining territorial goals would fracture the party, whose unity was her achievement. The Arabs of the occupied territory would therefore have to accept Israeli rule, without citizenship.

That view put her close to Dayan. Indeed, Dayan and Yisrael Galili quickly became her chief confidants, especially on security. They were members of the real governing body, “Golda’s kitchen,” which actually met in her living room, usually on Saturday night, to decide what would be decided at Sunday morning’s cabinet meeting. In one account, the other fixed members were Yigal Allon and Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, the group’s sole Mapai moderate. In Shapira’s telling, only Dayan and Galili were regulars. Either way, the kitchen was dominated by leaders of Labor’s smaller, hawkish factions, Rafi and Ahdut Ha’avodah. The three central figures—Meir herself, Dayan, and Galili—were profoundly pessimistic about peace, an emotional stance that preceded and shaped analysis. They regarded Israel’s new territorial depth as the best means to convince the Arabs they could not win a full-scale war, and so should not try.

Besides military experience, Dayan possessed political power: He could split the party again, run against it, form a government with the right. Galili shared Meir’s suspicions and bent for secrecy, and as an added benefit, her distaste for the erudite Eban.
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The view from the kitchen window was of a foreboding world. The key policy cooked up there was to sit tight, protected by the captured land.

But that did not mean sitting still. Settlement would continue, staking Israel’s claim to pieces of occupied land. It followed Allon’s map, whether because Meir personally agreed with his logic or because anything past his lines would split her government and her party. Settlement represented the real decision. Yet in the eyes of Labor settlement advocates, the effort moved all too slowly. And unnoticed by them, fertilized by their own actions, the seed of a new, radical settlement movement was growing.

“
I WOULD SPEAK
to the Arabs in Hebron in Hebrew. They wanted our business and they made jolly sure they would not lose it by not knowing Hebrew,” writes Hebron settler Chaim Simons in a memoir of settler life in the West Bank city’s military headquarters. Who spoke whose language set status: landlord and tolerated occupant. “I myself would not learn Arabic at all. Hebrew is the language of Eretz Yisrael,” the Land of Israel. His ignorance occasionally caused problems. Once he did a favor for an Arab, who responded “
shukran.
” Simons wondered why the man was calling him a liar,
shakran
in Hebrew. Later he learned that
shukran
meant “thanks.” At the military headquarters, the settlers managed to get a single phone line from the local provider. When the bill showed up in Arabic, they sent it back with a note that they did not know the language. “Soon after, we duly received it in Hebrew,” Simons reports.
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Simons had grown up in London. At twenty-four, in the summer of 1966, with a fresh doctorate in chemistry, he moved to Israel to teach at Bar-Ilan University, an Orthodox institution that was the pride of religious Zionism, proof that faith and modernity could fruitfully coexist and that religious Jews could match secularists at academic pursuits. In June 1968, at a Movement for the Whole Land of Israel conference, he heard Moshe Levinger speak. Ironically, the rabbi was the poster boy of that secular movement: By helping him settle in Hebron, it had created a fact, rather than simply producing florid articles. Levinger hooked Simons. By summer’s end, the young Englishman moved to Hebron and became a student at the yeshivah that officially justified the settlement’s existence.
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Simons’s personal cause was the Tomb of the Patriarchs. He founded a movement—a bank account, a post-office box, a rubber stamp—for “restoration of Jewish rights” at the holy site. He bombarded newspapers with letters, handed out leaflets to Jewish visitors. A chance to assert ownership of the shrine came in March 1969, on the holiday of Purim, which celebrates—with the help of costumes, copious liquor, and hilarity—the biblical Queen Esther’s victory over the evil minister Haman in ancient Persia. On Purim morning the settlers headed for the Tomb for the required reading aloud of the Book of Esther. The same morning, Simons writes, a group of Arabs brought a coffin, following a Muslim custom of bringing bodies to Ibrahim’s mosque before burial elsewhere. The mourners “wanted to carry it through the place we were praying. We were not prepared to tolerate such interference,” he writes. The settlers “formed a long line…and started singing Purim songs, and thus prevented them from carrying their dead bodies in our place of prayer.”
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Soldiers on guard duty, watching carnival confront funeral, were “in a difficult situation,” Simons concedes; they asked the settlers not to sing so loudly.

The soldiers were again caught in the middle on Israeli Independence Day. At morning services, Simons draped a “very large flag” over the stone cenotaph believed to mark Isaac’s tomb in the building’s main hall, and a string of small flags on a barrier separating Jews and Muslims. The military governor arrived and removed the flags. When Levinger heard, he told his followers to put up another flag. They sneaked one past soldiers at the entrance, and when the service ended, began dancing with it. A bizarre game of capture-the-flag began in the ancient hall, with Border Police chasing settlers to snatch the piece of cloth. A military government spokesman defensively explained afterward to Israeli reporters that the tomb “served…as a place for prayers alone.” The settlers wrote to cabinet ministers, demanding that a Jewish director be appointed for the building, since it actually belonged to the Jews.
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The army and the settlers were like a couple that fights in public and goes home together. In the courtyard of the military headquarters, two three-story prefab apartment blocks were completed, six apartments each, along with two small dormitory buildings for single yeshivah students. In May 1969, settlers moved into the new space. The community expanded; yeshivah students married; couples took over dorm rooms, washed their dishes in lavatory sinks. A couple moved into the room that served as the settlement’s office. Levinger matched Simons up with a single British woman who had been there from the original Passover incursion, and they soon announced their engagement. The army converted the British stables into a study hall for the yeshivah. Levinger taught, as did Eliezer Waldman. The yeshivah was an unofficial branch of Merkaz Harav, but without the main street of secular Jerusalem and its bookstores and coffee shops outside its doors, without nearby synagogues where Orthodox historians and philosophers and government officials prayed on workday mornings before their secular pursuits. Simons’s journey from Bar-Ilan University to Hebron was a pilgrim’s progress to an isolated, radical Judaism, further than its members imagined from Israel or from the Eastern European philosophical ferment that produced the elder Rabbi Kook with his alloy of kabbalah and modernity. The yeshivah manufactured a plethora of jobs to justify settlers’ presence, Simons records: teachers, secretaries, clerks, kitchen staff, babysitters, and schoolteachers. Within the military compound, the second generation of Hebron settlers quickly increased.
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