The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (4 page)

In 1944, when Porat was six months old, his family moved to Kfar Etzion, a newly established kibbutz in the rocky hills between Bethlehem and Hebron.
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Kfar
is Hebrew for village;
Etzion
means “tree of Zion,” a tribute to a Jewish farmer named Holzman—“timber man” in German—who had tried settling in the area earlier. He gave up when Palestine’s Arabs rebelled against the British, and the Zionist presence, in 1936. It was an inauspicious portent. Surrounded by Arab villages, the kibbutz was isolated from other Jews. Jerusalem lay ten miles to the north.

Kfar Etzion was an Orthodox kibbutz, adding religion to the mix of socialism and nationalism. In Europe, Zionism and Orthodoxy usually battled each other. Like other nationalist movements welling up in Eastern Europe, secular Zionism elevated homeland, language, and ethnic identity to serve as its supreme values.
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It regarded itself as the heir to Judaism, with the right to reinterpret the Bible, the Jewish past, and the Jews’ destiny. The Orthodox did not see reason for inheritance procedures; Judaism was quite alive. Most rabbis rejected the replacement of religious values with national ones and regarded mass return to the homeland before the arrival of the messiah as a rebellion against God. Socialist Zionists were the most dedicated opponents of the “opium of the people.”

But people are more complicated than ideological categories. Some of the Orthodox embraced Zionism as a practical solution to Jewish persecution; some found justification for socialism in the works of Moses rather than Marx. Still, religious Zionists were marginal everywhere, not doctrinaire enough for either the Orthodox or the Zionist mainstream.

Two more religious communes—Massu’ot Yitzhak and Ein Tzurim—were soon established near Kfar Etzion, in what became known as the Etzion Bloc. Moshe Moskovic, a founder of Massu’ot Yitzhak, explained that Orthodox Jews felt a special connection to the area, since “the real Land of Israel is between Hebron and Bethlehem,” cities of the Bible, of Abraham and King David. He offered another explanation as well, reflecting the old resentments on which Israeli politics is built: Ben-Gurion’s dominant Mapai party controlled land allocations and sent minority movements to the worst spots. The Etzion Bloc was not only dangerously placed, it lacked water and had poor soil.
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A fourth kibbutz in the area, Revadim, belonged to Hashomer Hatza’ir, the “Young Guard,” radical secular socialists who in those days revered Stalin, advocated a binational Jewish-Arab state, and were also outsiders.

In early 1948, as Palestine slid into Arab-Jewish violence, the Etzion Bloc went from isolated to besieged. Children and most women were evacuated to Jerusalem, itself besieged and battle-torn. Thirty-five Haganah fighters sent to reinforce the kibbutzim were killed on the way. Porat’s father ended up in Jerusalem, organizing convoys. Only one group of reinforcements got through. A landing strip sufficient for two-man Pipers was the last link to the outside. Moshe Moskovic, who had been abroad on movement business, returned to Tel Aviv in April 1948 and wrangled a place on a Piper flight. At the airfield, he was told that guns and ammunition—and matzah for Passover—would take his place in the airplane. As it was, the pilot had to remove the doors and tie himself to his seat with rope so he could carry the load.
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The matzah saved Moskovic. Soon after, the kibbutzim received orders to block the road from Hebron to keep Arab fighters from reaching Jerusalem. That sparked the last battle. On May 13, 1948, the fourth of Iyar, the Etzion Bloc fell to a combined onslaught of Arab Legion regulars and armed men of the surrounding villages shouting, “Dir Yassin.” In the final battle, 155 defenders died, men and women. The bloodshed was worst at Kfar Etzion, where villagers massacred almost all those who surrendered. Seventy-nine members of the kibbutz were killed. Bodies lay in the fields for a year and a half, until Transjordan allowed army rabbi Shlomo Goren to retrieve the corpses and bury them at Mount Herzl.
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Death was nothing unusual that year, and many more Arabs than Jews were torn from their homes. But the Etzion Bloc’s hopeless battle turned it into a symbol in Israel, especially for religious Zionists: It was proof that they had fought and bled as well as anyone.

The survivors of Kfar Etzion moved to houses on the edge of Jaffa abandoned by Arabs who were now refugees someplace else—some, perhaps, living on the ruins of Massu’ot Yitzhak, where Arab refugees from the Jaffa area built a village.
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Hanan Porat spent five years in a kibbutz with many women and few men, in which most of his friends shared the same anniversary for their fathers’ deaths, the same day designated as the nation’s Memorial Day. There was no line between personal and political; their tragedy belonged to the nation. The psychology of survival and guilt suggests that the sacrifice of the parents loomed as a demanding, unattainable standard, and that the boy who actually had a father would want all the more to show his mettle. Finally the commune unraveled, the families moved on, but the children still met regularly. They were raised on a constant diet of loss and longing for a place they knew mostly through photographs and secondhand memories of adult survivors. At gatherings for teens, parents told long stories of daily life in their lost Eden. The teens spun dreams of starting a new kibbutz together.
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Every year the survivors gathered on Mount Herzl. At a reception after the ceremony, those old enough to remember the lost kibbutzim traded memories, and someone would say wistfully, “Maybe we’ll return someday.” On May 14, 1967, such comments were regarded, as usual, as nostalgia and wishful thinking.
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INDEPENDENCE DAY
would begin at sunset, like all Jewish festivals. Porat invited some friends from the Etzion clan to join him that night for the celebration at the yeshivah, or Talmudic academy, where he studied. Without meaning to, he was inviting them to be extras in an eerie historical drama.
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Yeshivah study is an ideal in Orthodox Judaism, but in 1967 nearly all of Israel’s yeshivot kept their distance from Zionism. Merkaz Harav, Porat’s school, was the exception.
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Its late founder, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, had not exactly made peace with Zionism. Rather, he had audaciously transformed it into theology, absorbing the secular rebellion back into religion.

Born in what is today Latvia, Kook received a traditional rabbinic education in Talmud and religious law, to which he added a brew of Jewish mysticism and European philosophy. One influence on Kook was the sixteenth-century kabbalist Yitzhak Luria, who portrayed the cosmos as spiraling upward, through a process of destruction and renewal, toward perfection. Another was Johann Gottfried von Herder, the German thinker who virtually invented ethnic nationalism—the idea that every person belongs to a
Volk
, a nation defined by culture and language, with a unique role in history. For Kook, the Jews’ role was to be the vessel that brings the “divine idea” into the world. The world’s redemption depended on the Jews living in the Land of Israel, and therefore the return of Jews to their homeland was an expression of God’s will. Secular Zionism was thus a stage in God’s plan, which in turn made the secular Zionist pioneers “good sinners,” “principled evildoers,” and “the lights of chaos.” They would awaken religious Jews to act for the sake of the nation, while the believers would spur them to return to faith.
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Kook was honored by religious Zionists, often quoted, rarely studied in depth.
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After his death in 1935, the leadership of his yeshivah fell to his sole son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook. Though the son lacked the breadth and the brilliance of his father, by the 1960s he had a circle of young disciples. One of the followers was Hanan Porat, who found that his private dream of returning to Kfar Etzion fit into a greater vision of the nation “returning to the expanses of the Land of Israel”—the personal and national merging again.

On the night of May 14, several hundred students, alumni, rabbis, and other guests sat down for a festive meal in the Merkaz Harav dining hall. Tzvi Yehudah Kook began his holiday sermon. Utterly out of character, and to the shock of his students, he began to shout, rocked by grief. Nineteen years earlier, he recalled, when the news came that the United Nations had voted to partition the land and create a Jewish state, “the entire nation flowed into the streets to celebrate together. I could not go out and join in the joy.” Instead, he said, quoting Lamentations, “‘I sat alone and kept silence, because He had laid it upon me,’ and in those first hours I could not accept what had been done, the terrible tidings, that the verse had been fulfilled, ‘They have divided my land’!
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“Yes, where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it?! And where is our Shekhem?” he roared, using the biblical name for Nablus. “And our Jericho—will we forget them? And the far side of the Jordan—it is ours, every clod of soil…every region and bit of earth belonging to the Lord’s land. Is it in our hands to give up even a millimeter?

“In that state, my entire body shaking, entirely wounded and cut to pieces, I could not celebrate.”
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Kook’s students would remember his speech as prophecy. Read carefully, however, his words contain no predictions, just pain: The land is torn, and the rabbi identifies so sharply with the land that he feels his own body torn. Much as the thought would offend his disciples, his experience echoes that of Christian stigmatics who experience Jesus’ wounds—particularly since for Kook, possessing the land was the key to redemption.

And read carefully, that memory was only an introduction to his real point: After his shock, Kook said, he accepted that “this is the Lord’s doing, it is beyond our understanding.”
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Despite the division of the land, the State of Israel represented the “beginning of redemption” and was “the state that prophets foresaw” when they spoke of the End of Days. In the end, Kook’s argument was not with the secular Zionists who had accepted partition, but with the ultra-Orthodox Jews who failed to recognize the state’s sanctity and the need to thank God on Independence Day.

Even the annual military parade—to take place the next day in Jerusalem—was a religious event, he said. “All of the weapons…all are holy,” he proclaimed, because the state had fulfilled a divine commandment to conquer the land, and the military was the means. Hanging in that argument, perhaps, is an implication that the army must yet complete the work. But Kook did not call on it to do so. Rather, he referred in past and present tense to what had already been done, proof that the state was fulfilling its mission.

The speech contains two parts: a reasoned defense of his political theology and a cry of longing for the land beyond the armistice lines. The cry was what inspired awe and made his listeners into a fellowship sharing illumination. Only in light of events that began that night, Porat and others would insist, could they grasp what the rabbi had vouchsafed them.

CHIEF OF STAFF
Yitzhak Rabin passed the first report to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that evening. They and several other Israeli leaders had gathered with their wives at the Prime Minister’s Office, which overlooked the stadium where the official Independence Day celebrations would begin with a dress review of troops. It was time to enjoy the ceremonial side of leadership, another chance for Eshkol to show off his wife, Miriam, thirty-four years his junior—except that Rabin had word of Egyptian troop movements through Cairo toward the Suez Canal.

By that time, in Washington, national security adviser Walt Rostow’s morning staff meeting had already discussed Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser’s decision to mobilize his army. While Rabin’s source was the teletyped bulletins of news agencies, Rostow had more direct information: thousands of Egyptian soldiers were marching past the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Rostow knew that the day before the Syrian Foreign Ministry had told its ambassadors of “the probability of a large Israeli offensive” against Syria. Only later did he learn that the Soviet Union was the source of the false warning. After the morning meeting a National Security Council staffer, Harold Saunders, suggested to the State Department that it inform Nasser that Israeli forces were not massing on the border. State declined; the United States would have looked foolish if Israel did launch a quick raid.
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That evening and the next day, more reports followed. Egyptian troops were pouring into the Sinai Peninsula, the desert staging ground for any attack on Israel. Publicly, Eshkol and Rabin maintained form, attending the military parade. When it ended, Colonel Gazit of Military Intelligence drove straight from Jerusalem to army headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he convened his research staff in late afternoon. For hours they tried to decipher Nasser’s motives, predict his next movements.

Close to midnight, Gazit got in his car to head home. On the radio was the finale of the last Independence Day event, the Israel Song Festival in Jerusalem. As a special treat, at the invitation of Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, popular songwriter Naomi Shemer had composed a new song in honor of the city, “Jerusalem of Gold.” “The melody and the words captured my heart,” Gazit later wrote. “From that moment, the IDF parade, the first research discussion and Naomi Shemer’s prophetic song were for me the first act of the Six-Day War.”
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Virtually the whole country would feel that way about Shemer’s song, yet like Kook’s speech, it intimates nothing of the future. Wildly mournful, suffused with romantic imagery borrowed from classical Jewish sources, “Jerusalem of Gold” is a ballad of two star-crossed lovers: the Jews and Jerusalem’s Old City. The phrase “Jerusalem of gold” is an ancient Hebrew term for the tiara worn by a rich man’s bride—hinting at the Talmud’s romantic tale of a rabbi who married in poverty, lived for years apart from his wife to study Torah, and at last rewarded her faithfulness with the golden adornment.
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The chorus’s words, “To all your songs / I am a harp,” are taken from a lament for Jerusalem by the twelfth-century Hebrew poet Rabbi Yehudah Halevi, known both for his love poetry and hymns, who in turn was reweaving the biblical lament, “By the rivers of Babylon,” in which the exiled Judeans “hanged up our harps” rather than sing songs of Zion in a strange land.
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