The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (29 page)

A visit to Washington a month before the election appeared perfectly timed to show that she was successfully managing the country’s most critical foreign relationship.
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A cartoonist privy to U.S. administration discussions before the visit could have portrayed Nixon with Secretary of State Rogers and national security adviser Kissinger as imps perched on his shoulders, offering opposite advice. Rogers urged Nixon to tell Meir that “Israel’s stand-pat policy is detrimental to both U.S. and Israeli interests.” While asserting that “Israel is capable of maintaining the present military status quo for some years at least,” Rogers argued that ongoing conflict increased Soviet influence. He advised Nixon to tell Meir that the United States had always operated on the assumption that Israel did not want Egyptian territory and sought only to “correct anomalies” in the prewar lines with Jordan, but to warn her that Israel was projecting “an expansionist image” by establishing settlements.
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The phrasing continued the State Department approach of treating Israel’s explicit statements on territory merely as clumsy public relations. Kissinger, meanwhile, argued that “a continuing deadlock was in our interest…it would demonstrate Soviet impotence,” and show Egypt that it had to turn to the United States to achieve “progress.” In Kissinger’s account of the policy dispute with Rogers, settlements do not exist as an issue.
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Starkly anti-Soviet, Meir hit it off well with Nixon. Kissinger was swept away. In his memoirs, he lavishes praise on Meir, adding, “To me she acted as a benevolent aunt toward an especially favored nephew, so that even to admit the possibility of disagreement was a challenge to family hierarchy producing emotional outrage.”
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Nixon and Meir agreed to set up a back channel between them, via Kissinger and Ambassador Rabin, who were linked by a private phone line. Rogers and Eban were left out of the loop. Whatever the secretary of state said through normal channels, Kissinger could reassure Meir on the side.
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On October 28, elections were held not only for parliament but for local governments throughout the country. The Arabs of East Jerusalem could vote for city council but not the Knesset. At the time of unification they were granted the status of permanent residents of Israel but not citizenship. The reason, according to the Israeli journalist Uzi Benziman, is that a cabinet committee concluded that international law forbade imposing one country’s citizenship on another’s citizens.
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On this legal issue, the ministers chose to be cautious. The city’s Arabs were equal and not equal. Even their cars marked them as such: They carried Israeli license plates, but the numbers all began with the same three digits, for easy identification by security forces.
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But the government wanted them to vote in city elections, to legitimate annexation.

Before election day, deposed Jordanian officials and underground Palestinian groups urged a boycott. In response, writes Benziman, Israeli officials “spread the warning in East Jerusalem that without a stamp in their identity papers showing they had voted, East Jerusalem residents would not receive essential services.” Polling places were put near the Green Line, to be shared by Jews and Arabs, so that an Arab boycott would be less obvious. The Labor Party organized an operation to bus voters to the stations—which in the best tradition of Israeli machine politics, also helped ensure that they voted Labor. Seven thousand of 35,000 eligible voters—which for the first time in East Jerusalem, meant women as well as men—turned out, helping to reelect Kollek as mayor of the united city.
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The night before the election, Hebron settlers Chaim and Dina Simons stayed in Jerusalem. In the morning, heading to the east city to catch an Arab taxi back to Hebron, they watched the buses with Kollek’s name on the side carrying Arab voters to West Jerusalem. The Simonses were hurrying to vote at the polling station set up for the settlers in the military headquarters in Hebron.
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That ballot box marked another legal twist of occupation: By incremental bureaucratic decisions, settlers would retain the status of residents of Israel while living in land under military occupation, surrounded by people with no such rights.
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Fitting the same trend, an Israeli court was established in Quneitrah, in the Golan Heights.
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At first glance, the Labor-Mapam Alignment won the election. It remained the largest party, with fifty-six Knesset seats, next to twenty-six for Menachem Begin’s right-wing Gahal coalition. At second glance, the Alignment had lost over 10 percent of its parliamentary strength and its absolute majority.

Meir had led a retreat. Labor was entering the rigor mortis that precedes rather than follows a political movement’s death. It won votes through patronage and old loyalties, not by presenting a vision. Kissinger’s comment about Meir’s attitude toward disagreement described Labor under her rule, except that its members were children, not nephews. New ideas signified disloyalty, if not matricide. “The policy for which there was least tolerance of criticism,” comments the political scientist Myron Aronoff, was the assumption “that retention of the territories…would guarantee the nation’s security from another war for at least a decade.”
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Nostalgia made it unthinkable to question the value of settlement. Meir’s Labor was powerful and decaying.

Meir again chose to include Gahal in her coalition, giving Begin’s rightist party six of the twenty-three cabinet posts. Dayan obtained reinforcements with the promotion of his loyalist Shimon Peres to the cabinet.
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Another perennial coalition partner, the National Religious Party, was moving rightward. Its Young Guard had gained enough power to get its leader, thirty-three-year-old Zevulun Hammer, into the Knesset. While Labor suffered disaffection of the younger generation, the National Religious Party’s aging, moderate leaders faced militant young people determined to show that nothing was off-limits for Orthodox Jews, that religion could set national policy. Their policy of choice was the Whole Land.
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Just as the new government was installed in December 1969, Meir faced what looked like a crisis with the United States. The appearance was misleading. Listening to the advice of one imp, Nixon gave Rogers permission to announce an outline for an Egypt-Israel accord. In a speech outlining what became known as the Rogers Plan, the secretary of state called for Israeli withdrawal to the international boundary as part of a formal peace agreement.
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That was followed by a proposal for a Jordanian-Israeli agreement in which Rogers said the new border would “approximate” the prewar armistice line.
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Listening to the other imp, Nixon used another back channel—Leonard Garment, his adviser on Jewish affairs—to alert Meir that he did not intend to push the proposals.
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Though the Rogers Plan signified nothing, Meir was politically obligated to respond with sound and fury. A statement by the freshly installed cabinet asserted that the U.S. proposals would be construed by Arab rulers “as an attempt to appease them,” and declared, “Israel will not be sacrificed [to] any Power policy.”
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Egypt’s Nasser also rejected the American proposals, and the Soviet Union followed suit. Only King Hussein was reportedly positive.
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From then, Kissinger’s approach dominated Nixon’s Mideast policy: The United States could comfortably sit tight until the Arab states were ready to switch sides in the Cold War. Like Meir, Kissinger believed that “Israel was too strong to succumb to Arab military pressure,” and that time was on his side.
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Hubris was in control.

THE SUCCESSION
successfully navigated, Pinhas Sapir returned to the Finance Ministry. The deputy immigration minister, Arie Eliav, decided to do something considered almost barbaric: he openly ran for the vacant position of Labor secretary-general. Custom required that publicly “a party man wants nothing…but then the ‘comrades’ come and demand forcefully that he accept the ‘party’s will’ and against his will he serves as minister or ambassador,” in Eliav’s description. But chutzpah paid off. In January 1970, he was chosen for the very post that Meir had used as a stepping-stone to the premiership.

Then he got a call from Marlin Levin, the
Time
correspondent, who remembered Eliav’s radically dovish pamphlet of over a year earlier. Levin wanted an interview with the new party secretary. Besides Jerusalem, Eliav told Levin, “we should not annex any more territories.” He repeated his call for recognizing the Palestinian national movement—a view, Levin wrote in his article, “in direct contradiction with that of Mrs. Meir, who is on record as saying that there is no such thing as…a Palestinian nation.” The article was entitled “The Lion’s Roar,” playing on Eliav’s first name—“Arie” means “lion” in Hebrew.

Eliav was not sure Meir had read his own articles, but he knew she read
Time
. The issue containing the interview took three days to reach Israel. He knew it had come, because his secretary told him Golda was on the phone. “‘Would you like to have a cup of tea with me?’ she asked, with cold courtesy,” Eliav later wrote. She invited him for five that afternoon, in her kitchen, the inner sanctum of power. When he knocked on her door, the prime minister answered herself, and sat him at the kitchen table while she fixed him tea and herself coffee and she sliced a cake. “On the table lay the
corpus delicti
, a copy of
Time
open to ‘The Lion’s Roar,’ with several key sentences underlined in blazing red,” Eliav writes. She served the drinks, lit one of her seventy daily cigarettes, and asked in a teacherly tone if he had read the article. Certainly, he said.

“And I assume you will deny several sentences in it?”

“Why deny? I think Levin did excellent work.”

She read a sentence aloud to make sure.

“Yes, Golda,” Eliav said. “He quoted me word for word.”

So why, she asked, had she been unaware of his views?

“I really couldn’t say,” he answered. He had published the same things in
Davar
—the party paper!—and had mailed her a pamphlet, with a personal dedication.

“Really…. I can’t remember getting it. Maybe the mail…” said the prime minister. Silence filled the kitchen. “So those are really your views?” she finally said.

“Those are my views.”

“Nu, okay…. Another cup of tea?”

“No thank you,” Eliav said.

“Maybe some more cake?”

“No thank you. The cake was very tasty.”

Again, silence.

At last she proposed taking the matter to the party central committee.

Fine, he said.

Her eyes stared into his. “I intend to say to the central committee,” she said, “that they have an old stupid prime minister chosen by the party and the nation and a young, smart party secretary-general just chosen by the central committee, and I’ll ask if they want to stay with a young smart secretary-general or an old stupid prime minister.”

Fine, he said, convene the central committee. He did not intend to change his views or burn his articles. “I know my views are a minority position in the party, and that I’m bound by the majority position,” he added. His agenda was building the party—conducting internal elections, holding a party congress. “So I suggest we agree to disagree, and work together as long as we can,” he said.

“Fine. We’ll agree to disagree.”

They shook hands and he left. Two weeks after taking office, he had passed the pinnacle of his power in Labor. When Meir had been secretary-general, she was a regular, vocal member of the political committee, the small body that Eshkol used to cook up the most important decisions on foreign policy and national security. For discussion of those issues, Eliav was never invited again to Golda’s kitchen.
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YIGAL ALLON
, on the other hand, had evidence of his influence. In early February, the secretive cabinet committee on national security approved his proposal to build 250 housing units for Hebron’s settlers. Professionals would get to work immediately on planning “Upper Hebron,” the working name for the Jewish town right next to the Arab city.
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The move capped Allon’s push for settlement at Hebron. His efforts within the government were the essential complement to the Hebron settlers’ provocative lobbying from without. At one stage, Benny Katzover would later recount, Rabbi Moshe Levinger asked him to go through the office files and make a list of everyone “who ever approached us.”

“Approached about what?” Katzover asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Levinger said.

Katzover made a list of 110 names. Two days later, he opened a newspaper and, in his words, “passed out.” The names appeared in an advertisement listing 110 families who “demanded from the government to settle in Hebron.” Katzover shouted at Levinger: Some of the people had made donations or written letters of support, some had asked to join the settlement, but certainly had never given permission to use their names. “It’ll work out,” Levinger answered. The post soon brought letters of protest from some whose names had been used—and a wave of requests to join the settlement in the West Bank city. A month later, Levinger asked for the new names. The next ad listed 250 families. As Katzover saw it, the number of housing units in the government decision was taken directly from the advertisement.
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The Hebron decision was a milestone: The government was fully legitimizing Levinger’s wildcat settlement in Hebron. It was establishing a settlement in the midst of a heavily populated Arab area. For the first time, it was creating an urban settlement, and one close enough to the Israeli cities of Jerusalem and Beersheba for residents to commute, so that “pioneering” would not require turning barren land into fields. About 140 settlers were living at the Hebron military headquarters—fifty families and some singles.
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“Upper Hebron,” funded by the government, would eventually draw thousands of Israelis into occupied territory.