The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (31 page)

ON AUGUST
7,
THE
cease-fire took effect. Soon after, Yisrael Galili submitted a proposal to the cabinet for two more Nahal outposts in the Jordan Rift—and for establishing outposts, for the first time, in the Gaza Strip.

Diplomatic developments, Galili wrote, created the risk that the U.S. administration or the United Nations might now seek to prevent settlement efforts. “Any further delay could put us before unnecessary diplomatic difficulties,” Galili said. It was essential to work fast to stake Israel’s claim to the Strip, “to establish convincing facts.” As always, he called for stealth: “The preparations and dates of establishment will be subject to [military] censorship.”
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Galili, constant adviser behind the scenes, was now also the Meir government’s settlement boss, having taken Allon’s place as chair of the Settlement Committee.
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The change made sense technically—Allon had become education minister, a consuming task, while Galili was minister without portfolio. But the handoff also put settlement under the control of a man who resonated with Meir’s suspiciousness, secrecy, and obsession with unity.

Galili’s views on territory remained encrypted. It is possible that he himself lacked the key to the code. Did he believe in the Whole Land, or in Allon’s map? “Galili was suspected, overly so in my opinion, of not being at peace with the Allon Plan,” Allon later said, insisting that Galili kept zealously to the plan—but Allon liked to believe that people agreed with him.
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Galili’s closest adviser, like him a United Kibbutz man, argues that Galili accepted the plan but avoided saying so, so that Yitzhak Tabenkin, the white-haired master, would not leave his own kibbutz movement in protest.
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Yet Galili’s ambiguity would live on, even after Tabenkin died in 1971.

Galili’s proposal to settle in Gaza was not the first. The year before, as Palestinian attacks multiplied in the Strip, Brigadier General Gur, the commander in the area, asked at a General Staff meeting to examine setting up outposts. Afterward, Shlomo Gazit—Dayan’s viceroy in occupied territory—wrote to the cabinet secretary that the military favored establishing two outposts “because of the political meaning that such a step will have for residents of the Strip.”
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A Settlement Department listing of potential settlement sites in January 1970 includes two in the Strip—one outside Gaza city; another near the Strip’s southern end, next to the town of Dir al-Balah.
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Attending the Settlement Committee, Gazit admitted that the outposts had no tactical value. Indeed, he said, “From a security perspective, it’s a catastrophe to put those two settlements in the heart of the Strip.” But the step was needed, he argued, “to give an electric shock to the residents of the Strip.” In June, under Galili, the committee again weighed the idea. “The two settlements don’t come to solve a military problem, but almost to create one,” Gazit explained. The purpose was “political-psychological…. For three years we’ve asserted that Gaza won’t return to Egyptian rule. We’ve done practically nothing to back up those words.” Settlement was expected to shatter Palestinian hopes, helping “to create a local [Arab] element willing to be integrated into Israel.”

Gvati, the agriculture minister, said some top officers—such as Ariel Sharon, head of the army’s Southern Command—thought putting Nahal soldiers in the area would in fact be beneficial militarily. But General Sharon also believed that settlements would “wean the Arabs of the Gaza Strip from the illusion that we will eventually get out of there.”

Still, Gvati and settlement professionals thought the idea impractical. Little land was available, and no water. The meeting ended with only a decision to reexamine the options.
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The Rogers Initiative convinced Galili he had to act immediately. Now he faced the risk of real diplomacy, with pressure to stop settlement and to give up land. On September 13, the cabinet approved establishing two Nahal outposts in Gaza.
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The first would be Kfar Darom, outside Dir al-Balah. The choice of location and name was loaded. The original Kfar Darom, “village of the south,” had been a religious kibbutz established on the eve of Yom Kippur, 1946. It was an embodiment of the pre-state settlement ethos—one of eleven settlements established simultaneously in southern Palestine in a bid to ensure that the area would be included in a future Jewish state. The day after Israel declared its independence, the invading Egyptian army attacked the small commune. After a seige of nearly two months, the defenders escaped under cover of darkness. The commander of the Palmah brigade responsible for the area, Moshe Netzer, writes with pain in his memoirs of the decision to “shorten the lines” for lack of troops.
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Netzer, a kibbutz member, later became an activist in the Rafi party. In 1967, Dayan appointed him as the Defense Ministry official in charge of Nahal. Resettling Kfar Darom was “an idea that I personally raised, for sentimental reasons,” Netzer asserted afterward.
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As Allon put it, “Just as the Etzion Bloc people were crazy about going back to the Etzion Bloc…and the Beit Ha’aravah people dreamed of Beit Ha’aravah,” Netzer agitated for the right to return to the place he had lost. The new Kfar Darom, next to the old site, lacked strategic value, Allon argued.
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But the desire to erase the pain of youthful defeat won out. After cabinet approval, Netzer took just four weeks to set up the outpost, bringing some of the original defenders to the ceremony. Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip began on October 11, 1970, the day after Yom Kippur, virtually the anniversary of Kfar Darom’s original founding.
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Galili’s rush to settle in Gaza fit a pattern: Diplomatic initiatives spurred settlement. Faced with the prospect of negotiations and pressures that would set borders, Israeli governments would speed efforts to establish facts. Foreign diplomats, concerned with the outcome of talks, paid scant attention to what was happening in occupied territory. If the diplomatic push dragged out or died, the settlements remained as monuments to it.

THE ROGERS INITIATIVE
provided another, more overt proof of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Hussein’s assent to a cease-fire meant stopping PLO attacks against Israel from his country. The existing tensions between the king and the PLO exploded into civil war. Palestinian groups seized control of pieces of Jordan. On September 17, Hussein ordered his army to crush the rebellion. Syrian tanks rolled across the border to support the Palestinians.
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The United States saw an Arab ally on the verge of falling to a Soviet client. Israel faced the danger of Arab radicals ruling the East Bank. By coincidence, Meir was in Washington, leaving Allon as acting prime minister. Kissinger contacted Ambassador Rabin, asking that Israel launch air attacks against the Syrian forces, and approving use of ground forces if needed.
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According to Allon, even before he heard from Washington, he ordered that tanks be moved—by daylight, as visibly as possible, for deterrent value—from southern Israel to a potential launching point in the north. Israeli warplanes flew reconaissance missions over the Syrians.
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The threat was enough: A strengthened Hussein attacked, Syria withdrew, and the Palestinians caved in, asking for peace.

Seen from Washington, the crisis vindicated the Cold War picture of the Mideast and Kissinger’s view of Israel as a strategic ally. The evaluation was not changed by Nasser’s sudden death from a heart attack in late September, and his replacement by the little-known Anwar al-Sadat. The United States could keep Israel strong and wait for Egypt to come knocking for help.
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New diplomatic paths led to dead ends. Allon held another secret meeting with Hussein in the fall. In Allon’s account, he suggested as an interim arrangement that Israel institute autonomy in the West Bank, run from Amman via pro-Jordanian local Arabs. In an arrangement explicitly short of full peace, Hussein could live with the Allon Plan lines, while asserting his influence and reducing the PLO’s. The proposal was strictly Allon’s own, without the advance backing he had received from Eshkol. In his telling, “in a short time, I received a positive answer” from Hussein. Meir convened several ministers—Dayan, Galili, a few others—to rule on the idea. “Everyone was against!” Allon would recount. “It could be that Golda and Dayan and the others were afraid it would hasten discussion of the future of the territories.” Allon faulted himself for not putting up a fight, but fights and discussion guttered out quickly in Meir’s presence.
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In February 1971, U.N. Mideast emissary Gunnar Jarring made one more effort to bring peace between Egypt and Israel, asking each country for “parallel and simultaneous commitments”: Egypt would agree to recognition of Israel and to full peace; Israel would agree to pull back to the international border, with arrangements guaranteeing free passage in the Suez Canal and Straits of Tiran. Sadat, who had made regaining the Sinai his paramount goal, agreed, while adding conditions including Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. Israel’s answer, as proposed by Galili, welcomed Egypt’s openness to peace but stated, “Israel will not withdraw to the pre-June 5, 1967, lines.”
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Jarring’s mission collapsed. So did a last effort by Rogers and Sisco to arrange an interim agreement that would include an Israeli pullback from the Suez Canal. The idea had originally come from Dayan, who saw it as a way to preserve the cease-fire while holding most of the Sinai. It was adopted by Sadat, who viewed it as the first step toward a full Israeli withdrawal.
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Meir was steadfastly opposed: Any diplomatic approach leading to a full pullback was unacceptable, even if the proffered payoff was full peace. Israel was strong enough to deter attack, and could wait for a better offer.

“Anyone who proposes Israeli agreement to opening the canal as an instrument for total Israeli withdrawal from Sinai and Gaza should not be surprised by Israel’s absolute rejection,” Meir explained, at the opening of the Labor Party congress in April. “We have a cease-fire. Let’s hope it continues. But if not—have no fear.” She warned Sadat that attacking “is not worth it, really not worth it for you. We say that when we see the IDF, the human material, the equipment, the efficiency, talent, ability, and dedication…”
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The congress was the grand spectacle of a ruling party. Guests came from around the world. Delegates sang Israel’s national anthem and “The Internationale,” the hymn of socialist revolution. Galili and Dayan gave speeches as hawkish as Meir’s. Finance Minister Sapir, the dove, said nothing of foreign policy. Eliav, the party secretary-general, duty-bound to neutrality, later described his own speech as “lukewarm and insipid,” hiding his “maelstrom of frustration and fury.” The morning after the congress, he sat bleary in the party headquarters and wrote his resignation. To his colleagues, he explained that he wanted to write a book. They concluded, he knew, that he was a “strange man.” Certainly, he was a stranger at Golda’s party.
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WHEN RAJA SHEHADEH LEFT RAMALLAH
to study in Beirut, he could not take the overland route through Jordan and Syria. His father was the best-known advocate of breaking ties with Amman and establishing a West Bank Palestinian state next to Israel, and he might be in danger in Jordan. The alternative was flying to Cyprus, then on to Lebanon.

He and some friends and his mother took a taxi to the Israeli airport near Tel Aviv. At the entrance, a soldier ordered them to open their bags for a security inspection. Young Palestinian men were automatic suspects. They had the everyday response of innocent suspects: discomfort, humiliation, anger, fury. The soldier was thorough. When she came across Shehadeh’s electric razor, she ordered him to take it apart. The request would not have been remarkable for her, certainly not personal. Normal objects hide murderous ones. He broke down the razor, held out the parts in his hand, and hurled them at her. “Bitch,” he said in Arabic, thinking it was under his breath. The word, a mere sound in English, still carried all its contempt in Arabic. He was arrested for insulting a soldier. His mother went with him to the police station, and slowly wore him down to apologizing so he could fly away.
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In Shehadeh’s understated, poetic memoirs, a razor is always shorthand for being a grown man, for the respect due a man. A woman wearing a soldier’s uniform could tell him to take his razor apart. The meaning of the confrontation would be understood by any African-American man ever called “boy.” For the woman getting through another day of army service searching suitcases, his response could only prove the unreasonableness of people like him, allowed to use an Israeli airport, to live their lives with small adjustments for security.