The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (39 page)

In the meantime Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, in charge of lining up parties for a coalition, rejected bringing the Likud into the government. Instead the Alignment offered the National Religious Party a compromise: a commitment that before any decision to “retreat from Judea and Samaria,” new elections or a referendum would be held. The religious party accepted. Gush Emunim regarded that as close to failure—and then again, as an accomplishment of its lobbying efforts. That appears to be a piece of the truth. The Orthodox party’s dovish longtime leader, Haim Moshe Shapira, had died. Other leaders were drifting toward maximalism, particularly regarding the West Bank, with its biblical history. Gush Emunim’s activism likely served as a warning that the National Religious Party could lose its younger generation to the Likud. The election commitment was a means to avoid taking heat for concessions. But to the extent that Gush Emunim was responsible for the compromise, it had succeeded in handcuffing the ruling Alignment more effectively than it realized.

Prime Minister Meir’s greatest quandary was Dayan. As public fury grew, he announced he would not join the new government. Shimon Peres, loyal as a high school sidekick to the leader of the gang, said that without Dayan, he too would stay out. Dayan reminded his Rafi faction of the party that it could leave Labor and support the Likud—potentially putting Begin in power. Meir was at her breaking point. “I’ve sinned for the last forty-five years by allowing myself to paper things over,” she told Labor leaders. “Under pressure from comrades and myself, I thought something needed to get done in this country and that the comrades thought that by putting Golda in charge, they’ll overcome the internal conflicts. That’s all over. The trick of Golda the Paperhanger doesn’t help anymore.” When she finally presented her government to parliament on March 10, 1974, Dayan was again defense minister. Arie Eliav, dissident but still in the party, abstained rather than vote for her as prime minister.
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The inquiry commission, led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Shimon Agranat, released its report at the beginning of April. It put the brunt of the blame on Military Intelligence, but also held Chief of Staff Elazar responsible. The panel avoided dealing with “ministerial responsibility,” thereby freeing Dayan of culpability—and explicitly said Meir had behaved properly in the lead-up to war.

Elazar resigned, but the exoneration of Dayan only fed public anger. On April 10, 1974, Meir stood before a stormy session of the Labor Knesset delegation and said, “I resign…. I can’t bear this yoke any longer…. I’ve reached the end of the road.”
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With her resignation, the government officially fell. In practice, she would serve, along with Dayan, until a new prime minister could sew together a parliamentary majority.

Seven years before, cries from the street brought Dayan to the Defense Ministry, and he became the face of unexpected victory. Now the street wanted Dayan to go. This time he was responsible for readiness for war, and had failed.

Before the 1973 war, Dayan had proposed a pullback from the Suez Canal and creating a buffer zone to reduce tension with Egypt. Whether that plan could have prevented war is unknowable. But when Meir rejected the idea, Dayan did not fight for it.
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When he did threaten to split his party, it was over demands for building an Israeli city in the Sinai and for letting Israelis buy land for settlement.

For keeping the West Bank, he offered military justifications, but his ultimate reason was the tie to biblical land. Herein was another contradiction: He was passionately loyal to a collective past, but in his political behavior, loyalty mattered little. Part of his appeal, it has been suggested, is that he embodied individualism for a generation of Israelis tired of commitment to the group, the collective. His rival Allon later wrote that Dayan “symbolized the undermining of ethics and aesthetics in public life.” But Allon was a man of collectives, an aging revolutionary.
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After the war that discredited him, Dayan seemed to undergo his own revolution, taking a central role in negotiations with Egypt and Syria. High ground, good pilots, and more settlements, he realized, were not enough to provide safety. He was willing to improvise something else, at least regarding land that did not have biblical meaning for him.

Meir, who fell with Dayan, accurately described her political forte as papering over arguments. She had left Dayan to handle both the management of occupation and military preparedness, and Galili to build settlements. Reflexively, she repressed dissent and criticism as creating unnecessary conflict, and insisted decisions could be made later. Indecision meant that entrenchment in occupied territory continued. It continued even as she left the stage.

IN THE RAFIAH PLAIN
, two miles from the Mediterranean coast, concrete was poured for foundations. It was March 1974. Prefab houses and apartment buildings would be put on the foundations. The Galili Document was no longer official policy, but a settlement was emerging where the town of Yamit had been drawn on planners’ maps. Officially, it would be a small town serving the surrounding farm communities, to be called Avshalom Center, after the World War I Jewish spy who died in the area. On roads nearby, graffiti was painted, like repressed memory coming to the surface: “Have you murdered and also taken possession?” Handwriting appeared on the wall of a ruined Bedouin house: “It is good to die for Yamit”—a bitter, postwar twist on “It is good to die for our land,” the last words attributed to an early Zionist pioneer.
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Two hundred miles to the south, along the road from Israel to Sharm al-Sheikh, another settlement grew. It was named Di-Zahav, after an unknown spot where the Children of Israel camped after the Exodus, and after a Bedouin village called Dahab nearby on the coast. The first settlers, with ties to the Labor Party, had come in 1971, illegally, after Dayan told them, “I won’t give you permission, but if you settle, I won’t give instructions to remove you.” They made their living from tourists coming for sun, blue sea lapping the beach below stark gray mountains, and underwater jungles along the coral reefs. Now, after the war, the government was investing in houses for settlers and planning a hotel. The rule held: Every diplomatic action produced a settlement reaction. Postwar negotiations gave a sliver of Sinai back to Egypt and quickened creation of facts in the part of the peninsula that Israel intended to keep.
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THE RULING PARTY NEEDED
to choose a leader. For the first time in the history of Mapai and Labor, a vote would be held in the central committee. That was a sign not of openness but of disarray, the political equivalent of an old landed family coming undone. The war had shaken the House of Labor, and the house was already rotting. No longer could the elders choose an heir who would be acclaimed unanimously by the appropriate obedient delegates.

The obvious candidate was Pinhas Sapir, the old kingmaker. Shimon Peres decided to run in order to carry the standard of Dayan’s faction against Sapir—or so says an authorized biography of Peres, which follows the era’s accepted plot line that a person would only seek power selflessly, because others want him to.
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It is true, though, that Sapir represented both a party oligarchy and a dovish perspective that the Dayan camp despised.

Peres was fifty years old, part of a generation of aging
wunderkinder
who gained stunning responsibility barely into adulthood when the state was born and who then waited as deputies and almosts while the founders continued to run the country. He stood out among the prodigies because he was born abroad; his family came from Poland to Tel Aviv when he was ten. He tried very hard to fit in, and therefore did not. “Shimon’s desire to prove himself seemed to border on masochism,” his biographer says; the comment refers to his teenage efforts at physical labor, but applies equally to the rest of his career.
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Before a podium, Peres sometimes sounded like a man desperately trying to make his lines convincing.

He also stood out because he never served as an officer, the almost universal path upward of that generation, though he had devoted most of his career to defense. By age thirty, he was director-general of the Defense Ministry, where he became the unqualified admirer and supporter of Dayan, a man naked of all of Peres’s concern for being liked. Peres earned a reputation for big ideas and backhanded ways of achieving them. In the 1950s he sponsored the creation of Israel’s own military aircraft industry, and cultivated France as Israel’s source of arms and nuclear technology. In doing so he conducted a key foreign alliance out of the Defense Ministry, earning the enmity of Golda Meir, then the foreign minister. Siding with Ben-Gurion and Dayan in the great party split of 1965 completed his reputation for ambition and disloyalty among Mapai loyalists.
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The dovish Sapir again passed up leadership. “Between being prime minister and jumping from the tenth floor,” he told Yitzhak Rabin, “I’d rather jump.”
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Foreign Minister Abba Eban, the most prominent younger Mapai man, wanted to run, but Sapir told him he had no chance.
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Eban could have been elected by Diaspora Jews or foreign diplomats, not by his party colleagues. Though a dove, he endorsed Peres.

Yitzhak Rabin became Sapir’s candidate. Rabin, fifty-two years old, also belonged to the waiting prodigies. At twenty-six, during the war of independence, he was deputy commander of the Palmah under Allon, the man who had taught him to be a soldier. Rabin was known for knowing all details, for analysis and reaching decisions. But he was shy, distant, outside the camaraderie that was the Palmah’s essence.
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Allon could not teach him charisma. Unlike Allon, he was not purged from the army, even though it was assumed his sympathies lay with Allon’s Ahdut Ha’avodah party. At age forty-one, he became military chief of staff, serving in that post during the victory of 1967.

After leaving the army, Rabin spent five years in Washington, serving as Meir’s conduit to Kissinger and Nixon. She had known him since his birth; she had worked with his mother, a pre-state socialist activist known as Red Rosa.
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Social issues were not part of Rabin’s own lexicon. He returned to Israel in the spring of 1973 having added statecraft to his military résumé, but with no experience in domestic politics. Not getting a job immediately served him well: He was not stained by the war.

Rabin’s past contained an incident of surpassing symbolism. In June 1948, a ship called the
Altalena
arrived off the coast of newly independent Israel, bearing arms for the Irgun Tzva’i Le’umi, the rightist underground led by Menachem Begin. The Irgun represented the “separatists” who had broken with the Zionist leadership. With independence, Begin agreed to merge his fighters into the new Israeli army, as separate battalions. Now he wanted to keep the weapons for Irgun units. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion regarded that as a bid to maintain a separate military, and ordered the weapons seized, the ship’s commanders arrested. At the first spot where the ship reached shore, the army commander failed to carry out the orders. Afterward the
Altalena
ran ashore on the Tel Aviv beach, and another army commander evaded the task of confronting the Irgun. Allon got orders for the Palmah to do the job. Rabin, who happened to be at Palmah headquarters, took command of the battle on the beach. The ship was sunk; eighteen men died, most from the Irgun; the army patrolled Tel Aviv streets; and the Irgun never got its separate battalions. The
Altalena
crisis can properly be seen as the moment Israel actually became a state, when a single government overcame the chaos that threatens an emerging nation. Rabin’s readiness to confront other Jews had been crucial.
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A mystery of Rabin’s candidacy is why he seized the opportunity to succeed Meir, and Allon did not. Now Allon would become understudy to his protégé. In Rabin’s account, one reason he ran was to stop Peres.
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That comes in Rabin’s bitter 1979 autobiography, colored by the experiences that followed, which pictures Peres as the root of all his failures.

The central committee voted on April 22. Rabin won, barely, by 298 to 254. In Rabin’s telling, he wanted to make Allon his defense minister, but knew that the only way to avoid a walkout by the Dayan faction was to give the post to Peres. “I would yet pay the full price” for that appointment, Rabin writes.
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Allon would therefore be foreign minister, under a prime minister who knew armies and world relations but nothing of brokering a political deal or creating a consensus. Rabin was the first former general to serve as prime minister, after a trauma that cracked faith in generals. He knew the country had not elected him, which weakened him. Call it war damage.

“
FROM YOM KIPPUR
our tanks were our home, and none could say when we would return to our own homes,” yeshivah student and soldier Chaim Sabbato wrote of the winter and spring of 1974. His unit camped in the enclave pointing toward Damascus that Israel had taken the October before. “Some of our fellowship had left behind young wives, and not only had heaven not helped them fulfill the Torah’s command, ‘He shall be free for his house one year, and shall give joy to his wife,’ but because of the Adversary, they were not granted even a month of joy. Some left pregnant wives, others left infants who missed them. Businessmen—their businesses collapsed, and students of Torah were far from the study hall.”
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War still smoldered, as if waiting for a gust of wind to goad it into flames. Syrian shells rained on the enclave and the Golan. Prisoners had not been exchanged. Men were still dying.