The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (30 page)

The significance was only partly apparent at the time. After the decision became public, news reports said that Finance Minister Sapir and other cabinet moderates had opposed the step, arguing that it closed negotiating options. Meir and Dayan had reportedly supported Allon’s position. In Hebron, pamphlets called on Arab residents to protest “Zionist expansion,” and the army imposed a curfew.
⁵⁶
Yet the move also demonstrated how petty political fights can blur monumental decisions. Allon wanted the Hebron project assigned to the new Settlement Coordinating Committee he headed, which was to direct government and Jewish Agency efforts.
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The housing minister, Zeev Sherf, insisted he get responsibility. Town-building was his ministry’s job. Sherf was known as a moderate, but was more interested in protecting his turf than in the impact of settling at Hebron.
⁵⁸
As Allon once said, an Israeli government was more a “federation of ministers” than a single regime.
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As the settlement enterprise progressed, even known doves could be recruited when a project gave their ministries more responsibility.

Announcing the decision in the Knesset, Allon also boasted of twenty-two settlements already established in occupied territory and another eight in the pipeline, not to mention the housing developments in East Jerusalem. Yet to mollify moderates, he denied any decision had been made about the Hebron region’s political future.
⁶⁰
Meir continued to declare that territory and borders were irrelevant, a distraction from the cause of conflict with Arab states. “They say we must be dead,” she said on the American television program
60 Minutes
, “and we are a very ruthless people, and we say that we want to be alive. Between life and death I don’t know a compromise.”
⁶¹

Allon’s claim that “Upper Hebron” served Israeli security needs could not convince those most familiar with settlement and sympathetic to his positions. “Settlement in Hebron is in my view an example showing that Allon deviated from his original plan,” the Settlement Department’s Admoni later wrote.
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“Practically nothing was left of the strategic conception underlying the Allon Plan,” Shlomo Gazit, the officer in charge of government activities in occupied territory, would later assert.
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Despite Allon’s strategic rationalizations, the driving force was the desire to claim a place that conjured memories of ancient glory and recent martyrdom, the very stuff of nationalism, including secular Zionism.

To accomplish his goal, though, he used Levinger’s group, which belonged to a very different Zionism, in which Allon does not appear to have taken much interest. It was a different fabric from the prewar religious Zionism of Bnei Akiva, the National Religious Party, and Bar-Ilan University, which tried to let Orthodoxy and Zionism get along, to show that an Orthodox Jew could be
as good as:
as secular pioneers, politicians, or professors. Secular Israel was fine with such religious Zionists
as long as
its army was kosher, its businesses closed on the Sabbath, it had a chief rabbi and a religious party in government.

Levinger was at the moment the most public, abrasive, and radical representative of those, mostly young, who were done with
as good as, as long as.
The new school brought together the theology of the rabbis Kook, the apparent confirmation their beliefs received in the war, the resentments of young religious Zionists, their desire for heroism in secular Israeli terms, and their conflicting desire to show religious greatness. It created a new, nationalist religion that, like many radical religious innovations, claimed to be a return to old-time faith.
⁶⁴
It turned sovereignty and settling conquered land into sacred commandments, and into part of the drama leading to redemption. Secular Zionists were not models for religious ones; they were incomplete, flawed. In 1970 it was not apparent that Allon was helping to build a community that sought to cast him on the ash heap of history.

IN CONTRAST TO LEVINGER’S
group, Rabbi Yehudah Amital’s Har Etzion yeshivah was not provocative. Still at Kfar Etzion, it was an intimate institution, the kind of post-family family, complete with charismatic father-scholar, that embraces young people freshly away from home. The students did not produce news stories about settlers vying with soldiers. Quietly, they simply served as soldiers. The seminary began producing a newsletter for those on active duty. Amital answered soldiers’ questions about how to keep Jewish law under military conditions. One asked about the prohibition on eating before morning prayers, a rule difficult to keep when one’s schedule was set by commanders. The rabbi cited sources saying the ban applied to eating for pleasure, not for necessity. But first he gave his own reasoning: “In my opinion…there is no doubt that military training is a religious obligation in our day.” A person engaged in one sacred duty can be more lenient about others, and serving in Israel’s army was sacred.
⁶⁵

Merkaz Harav graduates Hanan Porat and Yoel Bin-Nun, young teachers certain of coming redemption, contributed theological commentary. Bin-Nun glossed the verse in Deuteronomy warning Israelites against conquering Canaan and then saying in their hearts, “My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.”
⁶⁶
Actually, Bin-Nun argued, that thought was not necessarily negative. It was good to take pride in strength, remembering, of course, that ultimately it came from God; good to emulate King David, the Israelite—or Israeli—ideal of strength, who prayed to “pursue my enemies and overtake them.”
⁶⁷
Having inserted the nationalist ideal of military glory into the heart of Judaism, Bin-Nun added that the kings after David were weaker, presaging the faintheartedness of the present day, but “the kingdom of Israel will rise again to the messianic heights, speedily and in our days.”
⁶⁸
Porat examined the Book of Esther, asking why it mentioned neither God nor the Land of Israel. It made no sense for a scriptural work to lack those two pillars. The book, he concluded, demonstrated how God worked secretly in history; its verses hinted at “the stages of redemption that lie ahead of us.”
⁶⁹
Every sacred text, opened to any page, shouted the same message for those with ears to hear: As signified by the state’s existence and conquests, history was accelerating toward its glorious conclusion.

A mood—of expectation and defiance, of being called, of understanding what others were too deliberately blind to see—was spreading, in high school yeshivot and in the Bnei Akiva youth movement, among young rabbis and novice politicos, unevenly and unmeasurable, barely planting a thought in one mind, seizing another. It was the embryo of a rebellion.

Binyamin Hanani, a seventeen-year-old student at the Or Etzion high school yeshivah, earnestly wrote to a girl, quoting the verse from the Song of Songs that describes a lover outside his beloved’s house, “Behold, he standeth behind the wall.” The verse referred to God, he said, in line with the Orthodox reading of the sensual book as an allegory of divine love. “There’s no other generation that has felt Him so clearly just behind the wall,” he wrote, adding that the verse could refer to the Western Wall, liberated in the war. As for those who asked how the war could be a miracle, since that meant God had performed miracles via irreligious Jews, he found the answer in a recent book,
The Great Era
, which argued, “At a time when the Jews are in danger—God performs miracles for them even through evildoers.”
⁷⁰

The Great Era
was making the rounds. Written by Menachem Kasher, a respected encyclopedist of rabbinic literature, it set out to prove that the current era fulfilled all signs predicted for the messiah’s coming. Those who refused to recognize that God had performed miracles during the 1967 war, Kasher argued, were denying faith. Kasher admitted that through history, most rabbis avoided speaking of the End, but he had gathered lost texts. One,
The Voice of the Turtledove,
printed for the first time in Kasher’s volume, was by a student of the most renowned Talmudic scholar of Eastern Europe, known as the Vilna Gaon, and claimed to present the eighteenth-century master’s doctrine. It proclaimed the beginning of the first stage of the last days, when God would work through human events to return the Jews to their land. For close to two hundred years, Kasher said, the manuscript was kept in the author’s family.
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Kasher was demonstrating what happens when messianic fervor seizes a religious community: Old texts gain radical new meaning, prophecies are matched with events, and esoteric ideas, previously considered too dangerous for the masses, become public, available to every neophyte.

Another tract of the time was
The Spark of the Light of the Messiah
, a collection of notes by Merkaz Harav students from lessons of Rabbi David Cohen, a close companion of the original Rabbi Kook who had survived him by decades. Cohen asserted that World War I had broken out on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. A traditional dialectic said the messiah would be born that day, the darkest moment heralding dawn. Cohen was bending history—in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war four days before the anniversary—in order to anoint the Great War as a first act of deliverance, since it brought the British conquest of the Land of Israel. Cohen’s next sentence described the conquest of Jerusalem in 1967, when his son-in-law, army chief rabbi Shlomo Goren, blew the shofar at the Western Wall. The fact that secular Israelis had come to the Wall, cried for joy, kissed the stones, was itself a sign of redemption, he argued.
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That fit another standard symptom of a messianic outbreak: Mass enthusiasm serves as proof that dawn is breaking, for only if something is true could so many believe.
⁷³

Citing the wartime scene at the Western Wall as evidence that secularists would find their way home—and that their Zionism was actually God’s work—was a standard in the culture of Orthodox resurgence. It pops up in another piece of youthful writing, by Daniel Orlik, a high school yeshivah student who would continue on to Amital’s Har Etzion. In his school newspaper, Orlik blasted foreign influences on Israeli youth, plans to bring the musical
Hair
to Israel, the Marxism of Mapam’s Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement. Look back in Jewish history, he suggested, and you will find the Maccabees “putting a man dressed in strange clothes to death by the sword…. That is a Hellenist…and for that he has been punished.” The sign of light was that even soldiers from Hashomer Hatza’ir had prayed at the Wall. Faith could blossom again.
⁷⁴
Orthodoxy could overcome secularism.

The rebellion of the Orthodox youth was gestating in schools and youth movement clubhouses around the country. But the
hesder
yeshivot that mixed study and army duty had a special role, helping to create the elite cadres who served together and absorbed an intensely ideological education. At Har Etzion and at Yeshivat Hakotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, they could also regard themselves as pioneers, like other Nahal soldiers.

In June 1970, Alon Shvut, the settlement built for Har Etzion yeshivah, was established.
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The name meant “the oak of return,” referring to a lone tree that had been visible from Israeli territory before the war. Yigal Allon would claim that the name was chosen, “through no fault of mine” to honor him.
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In pushing for its establishment, Allon had made another crucial contribution to a new settlement culture. Alon Shvut’s settlers, those who did not work at the yeshivah, would commute to Jerusalem. The hills were green, at least in winter, and the Arab towns passed on the way to work were part of the scenery. New residents would need approval from an acceptance committee.
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It would be a small community of like-minded people, like a kibbutz, but without the demands of a communal economy or physical labor. One could live in a homogeneous religious suburb, with state support, and take pride in being a pioneer. Eventually, that new model would be far more successful than the communes and cooperatives that Labor still sought to build.

DESPITE THE NAME
, it was hard to regard the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel as a low-level conflict in the first half of 1970. At the year’s start, the Israeli government decided to answer the Egyptian artillery barrages on the Suez Canal with bombing raids deep into Egypt. Yitzhak Rabin, the ambassador in Washington, pushed the move. Foreign Minister Eban, who opposed it, says Rabin claimed that “some people in Washington” were sympathetic. Given Rabin’s back channel, that was a hint at Kissinger, and probably Nixon.
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Nasser flew to Moscow and got help: antiaircraft missiles and Soviet personnel to operate them. By spring, Soviet pilots were flying patrols over Cairo. By June, over ten thousand Soviet military advisers, missile crewmen, and pilots were in Egypt.
⁷⁹
If Nixon and Kissinger approved the escalation, the result fulfilled their view of the Mideast as a place where superpowers boxed.

At the same time, the groups making up the Palestine Liberation Organization continued their attacks from Jordan and challenged Hussein’s pro-Western regime. A Palestinian insurgency was also gaining strength in Gaza. Attacks on Israelis became more common, and the Palestinian organizations were gaining control of refugee camps.

By June 1970, the fighting between Egypt and Israel was dangerous enough to demand U.S. attention. Nixon let Rogers put forward a cease-fire proposal, much more limited than his previous try. The Rogers Initiative, or “Rogers II,” called for a three-month cease-fire and negotiations based on Security Council Resolution 242.
⁸⁰
Meir, rejecting the plan, told the Knesset that Rogers II would allow Egypt to recover and attack again.
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But after both Egypt and Jordan accepted the proposal, Israel acceded to U.S. pressure. At the end of July, the cabinet approved the cease-fire—and publicly agreed to the “framework of…Resolution 242,”
⁸²
which meant a willingness to give up at least part of the 1967 conquests. In response, Menachem Begin led his rightist Gahal alliance out of the government. Even so, Meir retained power; her fear of splintering her party, and her belief that Israel was safer staying put than making concessions, prevented any noticeable change in direction.
⁸³