The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (32 page)

THE CEASE-FIRE HELD
. Despite Galili’s fears, the pressure to negotiate faded. It was, Admoni commented, a “routine year” for settlement. A landscape of wide fields, young orchards, and new homes was emerging in the Golan Heights, he noted proudly. At Merom Golan, the settlers were preparing to move out of the Quneitrah officers’ quarters to a permanent site two and a half miles westward. Elsewhere, too, the map of settled areas grew. A cooperative farming village was established on the southern Sinai coast between Eilat and Sharm al-Sheikh. At Sharm al-Sheikh itself was already the start of a town, Ofirah.
¹⁰⁶
They indeed “conveyed the impression” that Israel intended to keep land.

In the barren hills above the Jordan Rift, along the road from Nablus to the river, another moshav was set up. It was a statement that settlement would not merely describe a line along the river, but mark off the whole rectangle that Allon wanted to keep. A familiar problem faced planners: finding people who wanted to call the place home. The heat was not as furious as at the Rift floor, but the isolation seemed even greater. At last a small moshav organization claimed the spot and ran newspaper ads—an individualist approach suggesting the bankruptcy of the ideological movements. Twenty singles and two families, strangers to one another, signed up to build a cooperative village.
¹⁰⁷
“The lack of available manpower for settlement in the territories,” Admoni says in his memoirs, “continued to disturb us the entire time.”
¹⁰⁸

In the Rafiah Plain, on land seized in 1969, another farming cooperative began, with the generic name of Sadot, “fields.” To find settlers—so officials told the story, with the variations typical of legends about a mysterious man who appears to solve a problem—a kibbutz member traveled the country, searching out young people who had left communes but still wanted to farm.
¹⁰⁹
Nearby, at Diklah, the original settlement in the area, civilian settlers took the place of Nahal soldiers, in a modest ceremony intended to evade publicity.
¹¹⁰
Nahal was still being used to stake out new points, but the pretense that settlements were temporary military bases was history.

Officially, Admoni’s Settlement Department was not actually working in the occupied territories any more, for fear of endangering the taxexempt status of donations to the Jewish Agency in the United States. Instead, a new “Settlement Division” of the World Zionist Organization would handle the job, using government money. In fact, the Division was a shell that contracted all services from the Jewish Agency. When Admoni or any of his staff worked over the Green Line, they were officially employed by the Settlement Division. The change kept the U.S. Jewish philanthropies clear of the occupied territories. On the ground, the same people continued the same efforts.
¹¹¹

The first apartments in the Jewish neighborhood next to Hebron were ready in September. Settlers from the Hebron military headquarters moved in immediately. “It was advisable to create facts without any delay whatsoever,” Chaim Simons explained, since the “left-wing government” might spring “unpleasant surprises.”
¹¹²
The Jewish neighborhood was named Kiryat Arba, a synonym for Hebron from the Book of Genesis, as if to make the place instantly ancient. By the end of the year, settlers were demanding that the “left-wing government” build at least two hundred more units.
¹¹³

The Hebron settlers preferred to see themselves as rebels, but for the moment that was largely posturing. Hanan Porat, the believer in settlement as the path to redemption, would remember it as a quiet time. Even if the government did not know where it was going, the direction satisfied advocates of the Whole Land. “There was confidence in the leadership,” he recalled. “There was a feeling things would grow. We didn’t have a feeling of urgency.”
¹¹⁴
Time was on their side.

Petitioner No. 1—Suleiman Hussein Udah Abu Hilu, the sheikh, or leader, of a tribe of Bedouin in what Israel called the Rafiah Plain of northeast Sinai—drove eastward to the city of Khan Yunis, at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, to speak to the district commander, a lieutenant colonel named Nissim Kazaz. According to Abu Hilu’s deposition to Israel’s Supreme Court, Kazaz said he had no idea what was happening, but would check with headquarters.

The sheikh returned to his community and found soldiers engaged in knocking over tents. His deposition continues:

Again, Abu Hilu drove from his home, near the settlement of Sadot, to Khan Yunis. This time Kazaz said, “The order has come from the government to expel all the Bedouin.” According to the sheikh, he begged Kazaz to prevent “the expulsion of thousands of farmers, with their old people, women and children, from their soil.” Kazaz, says the deposition, “swore by his life and the life of his children” that he could do nothing. In his own signed statement, while confirming much of the sheikh’s account, Kazaz curiously chose to dispute this particular point: He did not, he told the court, swear by his life and his children’s lives.

By now, the tents and their inhabitants were gone. Part of the tribe, however, lived in concrete houses, including the sheikh. Their turn came the next dawn, when soldiers again appeared. The soldiers who entered Abu Hilu’s house, his deposition states, “beat one of the wives of Petitioner No. 1; his children were likewise beaten,” as were other tribes-people. All fled, leaving their possessions and food behind, to the north, outside the area being cleared by the troops. In the sheikh’s account, it was more than a week before they were allowed to reenter the area to remove their household goods—only to find that everything was buried beneath the broken concrete.
¹

No one knows exactly how many men, women, and children were driven from the Rafiah Plain in early 1972. In later court statements, the army put the population of the nine tribes expelled from an area of about eighteen square miles stretching south from the Mediterranean coast at 4,950. According to the tribes’ sheikhs, 20,000 people were forced from their homes and land.
²

The army would defend removing the Bedouin and fencing in the Rafiah Plain as an essential step for security, a means of cutting off smuggling routes to the Gaza Strip and stopping terror attacks. Yet General Ariel Sharon, head of the Southern Command, would also be censured for “exceeding authority” by ordering the expulsion—indicating that it was a rogue operation. Whether Sharon was in fact acting on instructions or hints from Defense Minister Moshe Dayan remains an open, perhaps unanswerable, question.

There is no question, though, that the land was used for Jewish settlement, whose most extravagant expression was aggressively promoted by Dayan. Settling northeastern Sinai, in turn, was a key piece of Dayan’s push to tie occupied territory permanently to Israel. The land would protect Israel but not be annexed; the residents would accept Israeli rule because their living standard would rise—except when their land was needed for settlement.

AT FIRST, VERY
few Israelis knew what was taking place in the Rafiah Plain. Nothing appeared in the press. The story emerged because the society was militarized, with the army continuing to call most men, well into middle age, for weeks of reserve duty every year.

Some reservists came home from duty in the Sinai to communes belonging to the left-wing Mapam party in the corner of southern Israel that faced the Gaza Strip on one side and the Sinai on another. It was classic kibbutz landscape, barely rolling countryside of fields and orchards farmed by people who grew up in youth movements dedicated to socialism and return to the soil and who aspired to be the patriotic elite, ready to live in dangerous borderlands. For those at the Mapam kibbutzim, the vision also included a utopian hope of Jewish-Arab solidarity. Now soldiers returned to the communal dining halls with rumors that the Bedouin were being driven out, houses demolished, wells destroyed, orchards uprooted, and the land fenced.

Activists went out to check the rumors, and returned with testimony and photographs.
³
In one picture, a man from Abu Hilu’s tribe, wearing a long black Bedouin gown and a head scarf, stands next to a shattered structure—a concrete ceiling lying askew on hunks of gray rubble joined by the metal rods that once reinforced a house. Another photo shows the concrete cover of a well with a square metal door, lying on the sand.
⁴
The concrete and the photographic black-and-white were modern; the destroyed well, as an icon of one tribe driving out another, was as ancient as stories from Genesis, schoolbook myths for the Hebrew reader, of Philistines stopping up Abraham’s and Isaac’s wells.

Not only the public was in the dark. In mid-February, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Israel asked to see Shlomo Gazit, Dayan’s viceroy in the territories, now a brigadier general. The ICRC was getting complaints of population transfer, he said, asking why Israel was forcing the Bedouin out. Gazit was stunned. “I had to put on a poker face,” he would recount. “I couldn’t tell him that I had no idea.” Neither, in Gazit’s telling, did David Elazar, the conqueror of the Golan who was now the IDF chief of staff. The next day Elazar flew by helicopter to the Rafiah Plain to see for himself, then appointed an inquiry commission to examine what Sharon had done.
⁵

The activists at the Mapam communes had no doubt that the purpose of expulsion was to use the land for Jewish settlement. Yisrael Galili, the government’s settlement czar, was lobbying Mapam to take part in settling the Gaza Strip and the Rafiah Plain. Even before the Rafiah rumors, opposition was strong in the kibbutzim close to Gaza.
⁶
One key activist was Oded Lifshitz of Kibbutz Nir Oz, a wiry thirty-one-year-old with a mustache, sixties-style muttonchops, and a farmer’s muscular hands. Lifshitz was the dissident as loyal son: His mother had left Ahdut Ha’avodah in the 1950s in rejection of the party’s then-theoretical claim to the Whole Land of Israel.
⁷
At the end of February 1972, Lifshitz and some comrades at Nir Oz sent a mimeographed letter to the secretaries of other Mapam kibbutzim, describing the destroyed huts of the Bedouin, and “plans…that speak of a Jewish port city in the Rafiah area” and more farming communities. “Such faits accomplis,” it said, “will cause difficulties for any future efforts to reach peace.”
⁸

At the time, a high-level team in the Defense Ministry was indeed quietly developing plans for a city with a deep-water port in northeastern Sinai, close to the Gaza Strip.
⁹
Planning cities was not the Defense Ministry’s bailiwick. It later became clear that the grandiose project had Dayan’s passionate backing.

The kibbutz activists related to the Strip and northeastern Sinai as one region, as was common at the time. Their concerns could only grow with news reports on March 1 that another Nahal outpost had been established in the Strip, between the city of Gaza and the massive refugee camps of Al-Bureij and Nusseirat. The clump of fifteen tents, with its well-lighted perimeter fence, was called Netzarim.
¹⁰

Placing the tiny outpost in the most densely populated stretch of occupied territory was deliberate. The army and Defense Ministry argued that it would “close off the spread of the city southward, cutting Gaza off from the southern [half of the] Strip,” and help the army keep watch on the area.
¹¹
A press report noted that it fit a “military-political” design to “send Jewish fingers from the Western Negev through the Strip to the sea.”
¹²

The “fingers” concept belonged to Ariel Sharon. For a year, Sharon had been conducting a campaign to catch, kill, or drive out the hundreds of Palestinian militants operating in the Strip and to retake control of the refugee camps. The offensive included intensive patrols, undercover units, and reliance on bulldozers: to unearth bunkers, to rip down hedges around orchards that provided cover, to destroy houses in refugee camps, creating roads that could be patrolled more easily. “Behind every commander’s jeep,” Sharon later declared, “I wanted to see a bulldozer.”

In Sharon’s autobiography, he recounts standing on a dune with cabinet ministers, explaining that along with military measures to control the Strip, he wanted “fingers” of settlement separating its cities, chopping the region in four. Another “finger” would thrust through the edge of Sinai, helping create “a Jewish buffer zone between Gaza and Sinai to cut off the flow of weapons” and divide the two regions in case the rest of Sinai was ever returned to Egypt.
¹³
By Sharon’s account, it is worth noting, the Gaza campaign was virtually over, the militants defeated, by the time the Bedouin were expelled and Netzarim was set up.
¹⁴
But breaking up occupied territory and dividing the population fit Sharon’s long-term strategic view, which was also a political view of the area’s future. The purpose was to shatter the territorial contiguity of the Arab population, in the conviction that doing so would ease permanent Israeli control.
¹⁵
The son of a Labor Zionist cooperative farm village, Sharon adopted the idea of settlements holding the land to fit his own military conception.

On an evening in early March, three hundred people from Mapam communes in southern Israel packed Nir Oz’s wooden dining hall. Moshe Epstein, a Nir Oz man, described recent events in northeastern Sinai. The army “drew lines on the map of the area and a bulldozer goes through, ignoring any natural or unnatural obstacle, and cuts a path several dozen meters wide,” he said. “Fields, orchards, huts where Bedouin live and cisterns—nothing stops it…. In one section the bulldozer clearing the earth for the fence came to the cistern of a Bedouin family. The operator…figured, like the others working in the place, that it wouldn’t be terrible if he made a small detour so he wouldn’t destroy the cistern…. Two days later a high-ranking IDF officer came to the spot and gave the order to put up the fence and immediately cover the cistern.” The crowd adopted a resolution demanding that Mapam fight “dispossession…and settlement” in the land past the old border.
¹⁶
Newspaper coverage of the gathering, followed by more stories in the following days quoting Lifshitz, Epstein, and others, finally put the expulsion in the public eye. Military censorship broke down.
¹⁷
Elazar announced his inquiry commission, as if freshly appointed.
¹⁸

A subtler, social censorship remained: The people who lived in occupied territory—the ones who in this case were expelled from their homes—did not have a voice. In Israel’s public debate, not to mention secret policy discussions, people spoke of “the residents,” “Arabs of the Land of Israel,” or even heretically of “Palestinian Arabs.” They argued about the impact of “the population,” which was often a dangerous feature of the landscape in minimalists’ eyes and a harmless or enchanting one for maximalists. The debate, however, was not
with
“the population.” The Rafiah affair broke when kibbutz activists, Israelis, spoke out about the Bedouin.

“In mid-March,” Abu Hilu’s deposition noted, “the petitioners, their families, and their tribes were permitted to resume cultivating their fields, but their presence…was allowed only in daytime, from 6
A.M
. to 5
P.M
.” With nightfall, they had to return to their temporary encampments beyond the fence.

Meanwhile, perhaps jogged by the controversy, army commanders noticed—according to a military attorney’s later court statement—that “the area closed and seized for military purposes in 1969…was only part of the area…evacuated…at the beginning of 1972.” That is, by the military’s own legal standards, there was no basis for the expulsion. Five days after the Nir Oz gathering, the local commander issued a decree officially taking over the land from which the Bedouin had been driven, and stating that any actions already taken there “will be seen as if done for the purposes of this order and according to it.”
¹⁹

Yisrael Galili was aghast at the controversy. Public attention was his nightmare. According to Yehiel Admoni of the Settlement Department, Galili had known nothing of the expulsion. He had expected to negotiate quietly with the Bedouin for the land, paying them in cash or alternative real estate. His effort to recruit Mapam to help settle the area was in ruins. For the first time, settlement in occupied territory—old-fashioned Labor settlement, by farmers, plowing one new field at a time—was under wide attack, by people who could themselves appear in inspirational films on the glory of pioneering.
²⁰