The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (45 page)

Despite government policy, Peres acceded. Don’t help them, he told the officers awaiting his word, and don’t bother them.
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When the news reached Ein Yabrud that night, a bottle magically appeared, and people began to dance.
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There are variations on this telling: that the army originally let them stay just for the night, that contacts with Peres began the next day, that delicate negotiations lasted two days before Peres gave backhanded instructions that “the workers will not be prevented from lodging at the site.”
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The result is clear: With Peres’s consent, the “work camp” remained.

An unhappy Rabin asked Galili to look into the affair.
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At the end of April, Galili sent Rabin’s office a draft for what to tell Peres—that “the prime minister…reiterates that there is no cabinet decision to establish a settlement at Ba’al Hatzor,” but also that “the number of workers lodging at Ein Yabrud will not exceed twenty men and four women.”
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The note makes most sense as another of Galili’s compromises: Rabin would not have to risk confronting Peres and ordering the “workers” evicted. At the same time, Peres would be on notice that the camp was really, truly temporary.

As always with a Galili compromise, that leaves the enigma of what Galili himself wanted. Months later, he was still cautioning Peres’s settlement adviser, Netzer, that “he and the defense minister must take care, because I do not believe the cabinet will approve establishing a settlement at Ofrah.”
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When a dovish minister confronted Galili with evidence that Ofrah was not temporary lodging for twenty-four laborers, but a growing community, Galili wrote back, thanking him for “information of which I was not at all aware,” and then added that since the place had never formally been approved, it was outside his bailiwick.
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The unofficial minister of settlement only dealt with official settlements.

Galili, it seems, had negotiated a compromise with himself, between the passions of his youth and the caution of his maturity. The disciple of Yitzhak Tabenkin believed in settling the Whole Land—even if he resented the fact that only a movement not his own had the passionate cadres to do it. The sixty-four-year-old cabinet minister, who peppered his letters with the term “state authority” and who carefully orchestrated committee meetings to ensure political consensus on each new settlement, more or less stuck to the Allon Plan and would not accept open rebellion.
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He therefore agreed with himself that Ofrah was not really there. As long as the settlers did not publicly demand approval, as long as their challenge to government authority stayed low-key, he satisfied himself with warnings aimed at Peres not to flout the cabinet in which he served.

Galili’s suspicions that Peres was actively supporting Ofrah had a basis. Ofrah, according to settlement adviser Netzer, “fit our conception in the defense establishment—a work camp created a fact on the ground without closing options for the future.”
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Since the purpose of “creating facts” is to close options, this is a claim to have eaten a cake while leaving it untouched. Ofrah’s location fit Peres’s views on settlement. Labeling it as a temporary camp, only serving those working at putting up a fence, helped him reduce friction with others in the government.

At Ein Yabrud, the settlers heard neither of Galili’s acquiescence nor of his stipulation of “twenty men and four women.” People drifted in.
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At first, Yehudah and Hayah Etzion were the only couple. Despite her fear that they could be evicted any moment, he brought their refrigerator and furniture from the apartment in Jerusalem they had barely lived in. One of the other settlers had come alone but quickly brought his wife.
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Yoram Rasis-Tal returned home that Thursday. When his wife regained her voice, she shouted, “Is that you or a ghost?”

“Yes, it’s me,” he said.

“I was sure the children wouldn’t have a father!” she answered, but she agreed to leave them with the grandparents and come with him to spend the Sabbath in the former Jordanian base, which now had a sign labeling it “Ofrah Work Camp.” Despite his description of her as a Tel Aviv princess, despite sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a room from which goat excrement had just been removed and using an improvised outhouse, when Rasis-Tal said, “So?” on Saturday night, she answered, “So when do we move?” It helped, he would recall, that an Orthodox kibbutz donated fifty Sabbath meals.
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Ofrah grew on the kindness of fellow travelers, among them some of Peres’s staffers. With the defense minister’s knowledge and support, Netzer writes, “we helped the ‘camp’ in various ways.”
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One form of help was a permit that Peres’s settlement adviser provided for wives and children to reside at Ofrah.
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Besides the fence project, the settlers had the job of making the camp livable. One concrete shell had four rooms around a larger hall. A family got each room, with a blanket over the opening in place of a door. An outdoor faucet was the sole source of water. Out of necessity, not ideology, the settlers ate in a communal dining hall. It took three weeks to install the first toilets. As rumors spread of the place’s existence, volunteers showed up to work; supportive contractors donated supplies. Hanan Porat stayed for a month to help and supervise. The Gush Emunim leader was the old man at age thirty-one, the counselor at a summer camp for barely-grown-ups. Early each morning before work, in his voice of constant warm spiritual wonder, he taught a class in “The Voice of the Turtledove,” the esoteric text explaining the role of human efforts in the oncoming messianic redemption. After that, one could go on to fence-building or to cleaning rooms with bare-dirt floors, or whitewashing or putting in windows, with a foundation of faith that the labor had cosmic implications—even if everyone still wondered if they would be able to stay. The mood was a mix of apprehension and euphoria.
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Around the end of May, a Gush Emunim newsletter told supporters of Ofrah’s existence. Eight families and eighteen singles were living in Ofrah, it reported, with thirty-five more families interested in coming. Since the initial permission to stay, it said, “we intentionally have not held additional…contacts” aimed at official approval, since “precisely because of the decisive political…importance of the site in the midst of Arab villages…and controlling the Ramallah-Jericho road, the current government is not yet capable of officially recognizing the settlement.”
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Knesset Member Yossi Sarid drove into Ofrah one day in early June with a reporter. Someone alerted Yehudah Etzion, at work on the fence project on the mountain, who rushed back to find Labor’s dovish gadfly sitting on the wide steps of a building, brashly holding forth, “What chutzpah…! We’ll make sure nothing remains!”
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Sarid was overconfident. Answering questions in the Knesset, Peres described Ofrah as temporary housing for army employees—and at the same time, as part of the effort to keep the Jerusalem area Jewish. Arabs were building more houses around the city, he argued, so Jews needed to do the same. Each new house, in Peres’s portrayal, was a position claimed, as two nationalities competed. The Knesset debate was pure chaos, with opposition rightists defending Peres, Sarid blasting him, hecklers shouting nonstop. “I don’t believe you!” roared the dovish dissident Arie Eliav—who at last had left Labor for the wilderness of tiny feuding left-wing factions—at the defense minister.
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Neither, for that matter, did Yehiel Admoni of the Settlement Department believe Peres. Ofrah was outside any plan for widening Jerusalem, he would note.
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If Ofrah were part of greater Jerusalem, then so was Ramallah and much of the West Bank’s Palestinian population. As Gush Emunim writers justly asserted, the settlement shredded the Allon Plan.
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Not only did it lie in the midst of Palestinian villages, it stood in the way of Allon’s proposed corridor from Jericho to the northern West Bank.

Rachel Yana’it Ben-Tzvi, the wizened pioneer who had visited Ba’al Hatzor with Hanan Porat, had been right. Labor could be defeated with its own methods, drawn from the pre-state struggle that, for the party’s leaders, still glowed with heroism and lost youth—claiming land one fait accompli at a time, without public declarations. It helped that many of those leaders had divided souls, and had a much easier time praising the ideal of settlement than explaining their reasoning for keeping some areas out of bounds. It helped that the ruling party was fractured, its hold on power fragile, its leaders feuding.

Still, Ofrah was only a partial victory for Gush Emunim. Its activists wanted a change of policy, publicly acknowledged—so they could establish more settlements, and also because they regarded Labor’s restrictions as a mark of national shame, of “wavering faith in the redemption,” as Porat said that summer in a movement journal. The correct response to the “question of whether or not to give up Judea and Samaria,” he said, depended on a “proper attitude toward the question of the honor of the Jewish nation.”
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The romantic nationalist’s pursuit of glory, in that formulation, became another religious obligation.

RABIN DECIDED
that June to add a new adviser to his staff: Ariel Sharon. After a year as a Likud Knesset member, Sharon had quit parliament, sick of “smiling and talking and backslapping,” as he put it.
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Like many a general, like the prime minister, he had discovered that civilian politics was a difficult profession. His new appointment looked doubly strange: Not only had Sharon constantly, loudly criticized Rabin’s government, Rabin was now making made him an adviser on defense affairs, a field the prime minister obviously knew well.
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But old generals in politics often want the company of other men missing the weight of a gun on the shoulder, and Rabin and Sharon belonged to the same “clan,” in Haim Gouri’s words, a clique of old military friends whose personal ties preceded politics.
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And—as Peres and many others saw it—by appointing a defense adviser, Rabin was proclaiming he had no confidence in his defense minister. “The move was designed to oust me,” Peres told another Labor politician.
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More likely, it was a sign of Rabin’s frustration that he could not get rid of Peres. The feud was now very open.

“
LARGELY DISCONNECTED
” from the headlines of illegal settlement bids, Yehiel Admoni writes, the official settlement bureaucracy “got on with routine activity.”
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Gush Emunim succeeded in making settlement more controversial than ever before, and also diverted attention from the progress of government-backed building.

Keshet, the Gush Emunim–linked settlement that began in Quneitrah, got approval from Galili’s Settlement Committee for a permanent site near the Golan Heights frontier. Galili, cautious, had wanted to put it farther back from the line, to leave a bit of land to give the Syrians in any new accord. But he folded under pressure from “militant members of the Golan kibbutzim.”
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In the Heights, the alliance held between the original socialist settlers and the later Orthodox ones.

On the red rock slopes east of Jerusalem, the first prospective residents of Ma’aleh Adumim were granted keys at a September ceremony.
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Their prefab concrete apartments—listed as 410 square feet, or perhaps 250, depending on which Gush Emunim complaint one reads—were not ready yet.
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Officially, the settlement was still a “temporary laborers’ camp” for the industrial park being built.
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“Ma’aleh Adumim wasn’t built by Gush Emunim. It was my initiative. It was part of my plan,” Yigal Allon insisted afterward, perturbed by the public’s impression that the settlement was imposed on the government from without. The militant movement “adopted it and did damage to the status of that settlement,” Allon complained.
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At the town of Avshalom Center on the north Sinai coast, 350 apartments were nearly ready, a Housing Ministry official reported to Galili’s Settlement Committee in May 1975. The first settlers were ready to move in—a handful of immigrant families from the United States and the Soviet Union. When Galili suggested building another 500 homes, a dovish minister named Moshe Kol objected. The cabinet decided on a small town, he said, “not a city!” The objection got lost in the talk. The committee officially noted that the place’s name would revert to Yamit—as per Moshe Dayan’s original proposal—and that the Housing Ministry had already built the infrastructure for 1,000 families. With that, Admoni notes, Galili provided a stamp of approval, after the fact, for construction that exceeded the cabinet’s original limit.
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In October, building at Yamit was back on the committee’s agenda. Demand was high for the first batch of houses—not surprising for a town near the Mediterranean beach, with government-subsidized loans for buyers. Housing Minister Avraham Ofer, generally known as an outspoken dove, wanted to build the next 1,000. Wait, said the hapless Kol, wondering if Dayan’s original idea of dredging a port was also on the agenda. Construction had to fit official decisions, he insisted. “I don’t want to see private arrangements on this matter, like what the defense minister did with the work camp at Ofrah,” he said.

Kol was outnumbered by colleagues who wanted to build, and to avoid bringing attention to the project with public debate. The Housing Ministry needed no further approval to build the next stage, Galili said, summing up the discussion. “Making a racket will only do us damage,” he said. “The idea of Yamit was born as a city of a quarter million people.” It was a typical Galili maneuver, Admoni comments. What looked like an innocent summation reinstated the idea that Israel was building a metropolis in the Sinai.
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