The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (46 page)

By that time, Galili no longer had to contend with one particular critic of the Yamit plan. Pinhas Sapir, the former finance minister and Labor boss, had died in August at age sixty-eight, barely a year after he last passed up the chance to be prime minister.
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Sapir could serve as an icon for the political ineffectuality of Labor’s doves. Gruffly pragmatic, he believed in developing the State of Israel within its pre-1967 boundaries. “If we keep holding the territories,” he often warned, “in the end the territories will hold us.”

Yet once the decision was made to establish a settlement, Sapir believed in funding it properly, rather than using his power as Labor’s economic master to stall. His deference to generals, his unwillingness to take responsibility for matters of state, left policy in the occupied territories to the hawks. And like other doves, he had his list of “kosher” areas for settlement. To oppose settlement completely in the Labor Party of those days, his young friend Yossi Sarid would comment, was equivalent to “denying a principle of faith and removing oneself from the congregation.” The religious metaphor is appropriate: A sacrament can live long after its original purpose has vanished. Its very lack of practical meaning can deepen its sanctity as a sign of belonging to the community.
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Yet opposition existed. As settlement grew in northern Sinai, activists in the left-wing Mapam continued to fight for compensation for the expelled Bedouin. There was also a danger that more would be driven from their homes. Hundreds still lived along the coast, where fresh groundwater rose to the surface and fed crops. The plans for Yamit and its harbor posed a constant threat to them. Oded Lifshitz of Kibbutz Nir-Oz and Latif Dori, a Baghdad-born Jew who handled party contacts with Arabs, ran what they called “Rafiah Tours,” bringing Israelis to see what had been destroyed, and to counteract the public image of Bedouin as nomads with no homes to lose.

Once they brought Knesset member Meir Talmi, Mapam’s secretary-general, for over forty years a member of a farming commune in the Jezreel Valley. They found themselves on a hilltop in the area from which the Bedouin had been driven. On another hillock a few hundred meters away stood the tents of a Nahal outpost called Sukkot, designated to become a kibbutz. In the valley between the hills grew a Bedouin orchard of almonds and peaches. Despite the expulsion, the owners had informally been allowed to come and tend their trees—until now.

As Lifshitz and his companions watched, a bulldozer grunted below them, uprooting a row of trees, turning back, uprooting another row, leaving broken branches and sand scarred with tread marks, clearing ground for the kibbutz. Talmi, in his sixties, with deep wrinkles that at other times could emphasize a smile, stood and cried. The next day, he stayed in his room at his kibbutz, unable to go to work at party headquarters in Tel Aviv.

That added another name to the list of Knesset members who could be phoned late at night when word came that the Bedouin on the beach would be expelled, when army markings were found on houses designated for destruction. The next expulsion never happened. But it was a rearguard fight. At Sukkot, houses were built in place of tents.
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MAKING NOISE ABOUT
Yamit would indeed have been inconvenient in the fall of 1975—embarrassing both Israel and Egypt just as they implemented a new diplomatic agreement.

The American reassessment of Mideast policy that spring had brought Ford and Kissinger back to where they began: conducting step-by-step talks aimed at interim agreements. Kissinger believed a comprehensive Middle East peace was out of reach, and made a “private pact” with himself that if the United States decided to dictate an agreement, “I would resign…. Two years ago, my colleagues and I had more or less imposed a settlement in Vietnam…. That settlement was now coming apart, and I had to manage the disaster. I would not be able to bear the responsibility for another such tragedy,” he wrote, “especially vis-à-vis an ally so closely linked with my family’s fate in the Holocaust.”
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By summer, he resumed work as intermediary. A compromise took form for Israel to pull out of the Sinai passes, which would become part of a U.N.-controlled buffer zone with separate Israeli, Egyptian, and American early-warning stations. Instead of promising “non-belligerence,” the agreement specified that “the parties…undertake not to resort to the threat or use of force or military blockade against each other.”
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In August, Kissinger held another shuttle to wrap up the deal. The protests that greeted him in Israel, spearheaded by Gush Emunim, were a festival of anarchic ferocity, remembered afterward by those who took part with the nostalgia reserved for utter release. A crowd surrounded Kissinger’s motorcade and tried to overturn the cars. Demonstrators lay down on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway. Sound trucks rolled through the capital at four in the morning, barking “Kissinger, go home!” The epithets shouted at rallies included “Jewboy” and “Kapo.” “Hitler spared you so you could finish the job,” read a placard that Kissinger recorded in his memoirs as “hurtful.” The Jewish secretary of state stood charged explicitly with being a turncoat, implicitly with being the caricatured Diaspora Jew, clever and lacking self-respect, that believers in national honor wanted to excise from family memory. “The violence,” Gush Emunim recruit Meir Harnoy wrote years later, “was very intense, close to nine on the Richter Scale of demonstrations.”
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Nonetheless, Israel and Egypt agreed on terms, initialing the Sinai II agreement on September 1. In Israel, even supporters greeted it more with exhaustion than joy. Viewed unemotionally, the accord committed Israel’s most powerful neighbor to a peaceful resolution of the conflict, and left Syria without a partner for renewed fighting. Even if Egypt wanted to break its commitment, it would be unable to launch another surprise attack. Emotionally, though, the agreement registered as defeat. Despite Kissinger’s proclaimed dislike of imposing terms, Sinai II was born of American pressure and payoffs, underlining Israel’s dependence on the United States.

Among the payoffs were an American commitment to new financial aid, and a promise not to negotiate with the PLO unless the organization recognized Israel. The U.S. memorandum of understanding with Israel also ruled out another interim agreement with Egypt, or with Jordan. The next stage would be full peace.
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Since Sadat’s requirement for peace was to receive the whole of Sinai and Israel’s was to keep part of it, Israel’s leaders regarded creating facts in the peninsula, and keeping quiet about them, as necessities.

The agreement had strange ramifications. Dropping the idea of an interim deal with Jordan can be read as an American promise to Rabin to forget the gambit favored by Allon. A final peace with Jordan was clearly beyond reach—if Hussein agreed to negotiate at all after the Rabat decision, he was not going to sign on to Israel keeping East Jerusalem and the Jordan Rift, which was Israel’s minimum. For Rabin, trying simply to keep his coalition together, deadlock was a relief: He would not be asked any time soon to give up West Bank land, and would not have to call elections.

But the government’s declared policy remained the “Jordanian option”: the solution to the Palestinian issue lay in a “Jordanian-Palestinian” state. The logic for its choice of where to establish settlements was Allon’s plan, which rested on giving up the most populated parts of the West Bank—to Jordan.

Without being able to claim he was pursuing that option, Rabin’s justification for settling in some parts of the West Bank but not others was government authority, the monopoly of democratically elected officials on setting national policy. The principle was correct. But for authority to appear legitimate, it needs a rationale beyond “because I said so.” Rabin had left himself without a rationale for his settlement policy. In the face of Gush Emunim’s public challenge, that made his political position even more fragile.

SINAI II
also did nothing to reduce Israel’s diplomatic isolation. Perhaps the opposite: As the talks took place, Arab hard-liners began pushing for Israel’s expulsion from the U.N. When that proposal failed to win support, a substitute was born.
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“The General Assembly…determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” proclaimed the resolution passed November 10. Seventy-two of the United Nations members voted in favor, thirty-five against, and thirty-two abstained.
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Third World diplomats attributed their vote both to pressure from Arab oil states and to “resentment against the Yankees” and colonialism, with Israel as proxy for the United States.
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The resolution gave its Arab sponsors the satisfaction of a rhetorical victory. It had effects, though, beyond what they expected or saw. In Israel, the vote completed the process of delegitimizing the United Nations. It amplified anger at another General Assembly decision that day, calling for a PLO role in all Mideast diplomatic efforts, and further isolated the Israeli minority looking for a way to reach accommodation with the Palestinians.
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It strengthened the right’s argument that “the world is against us,” and that both pride and pragmatism therefore required rejecting outside criticism.

Yisrael Galili convened the Settlement Committee to discuss a “fitting response” to the U.N. decision. The obvious, reflexive reaction was to affirm faith in Zionism, using means hallowed by tradition. All plans for new settlements should be speeded up, Galili proposed. That meant establishing another thirty settlements within the next year and a half, most of which would be in occupied territory—within areas set by the government, he stressed. He was not suggesting that the “camp” that “the defense minister approved” at Ofrah become a permanent settlement.

Most of the panel’s members were swept up in the mood, though Moshe Kol—like the kid in the back seat asking his friend yet again about the speed limit—wondered aloud why some of the existing settlements seemed depressingly short of people. Galili’s proposal was ratified, along with a suggestion that several new settlements should be established in early December during the Jewish Solidarity Conference that Rabin had announced, a gathering of Diaspora leaders in Jerusalem to show support for Israel and rejection of the U.N. resolution.
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Galili was not alone in thinking of settlement as an answer. On the morning of November 25, 150 men, women, and children set out for the Sebastia train station. For months, Gush Emunim had put off a new settlement bid for reasons of “timing and public atmosphere,” as one of its own accounts explained the delay. Illegal settlement efforts and violent demonstrations galvanized the movement’s base but risked alienating the wider public, perhaps even giving the Rabin government some needed support. But a movement that is not visible becomes irrelevant, and despite all the noise Gush Emunim had made, it lacked a public victory. Its young supporters’ excitement could evaporate. The General Assembly decision offered a moment when public sympathy could rise, when elected officials might find it harder to say no. The opening was so irresistible that for the first time, the movement’s leaders took the chance of acting in winter, the Mediterranean season of wind, storm, and rain.

The new Sebastia “operation,” activists told a reporter, was intended to “take the government’s pulse.” The government’s pulse, and reflexes, appeared healthy. As usual, army roadblocks stopped some of the participants. Those who reached Sebastia began cleaning the station and put up signs declaring, “The proper answer to the U.N. and all Israel-haters is settling in all parts of the Whole Land of Israel.” Within a few hours, soldiers arrived and perfunctorily removed them, which required chasing down thirty or so who ran into the hills.
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That was the rehearsal.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER
29, was the start of the eight-day holiday of Hanukkah. Schools would be closed, teenagers free and bored. In hundreds of synagogues, fliers announced the next day’s Gush Emunim event. Action was needed, the text explained, because the “organizations of murderers” trying to destroy Israel sought to reach it “via the areas still empty of Jewish settlement…being kept for them as an ‘option’”—implying that the Rabin government was about to turn the West Bank and Sinai over to the PLO, lending a hand to the phased strategy. “Remember! We are following the path, rich in deeds, of the fathers of the Zionist movement,” it declared. Under that came instructions to bring “especially warm clothes…long underwear…toilet paper…high spirits and love of the land.” Friday’s papers, Israel’s fat weekend editions, had carried ads announcing the settlement bid.
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The goal this time was not secrecy, but bringing masses. It would be a set-piece confrontation.

On Sunday morning, thousands gathered at the meeting points. Some, perhaps most, turned back at army roadblocks. The main group of supporters drove out of Netanyah, a coastal town at Israel’s narrow waist. Ten miles to the east they entered occupied territory. Stopped by soldiers, they parked on the outskirts of the Palestinian town of Tul Karm, and began hiking up through the foothills, a long undulating line, half Scout outing, half protest march. The winter sun shone, the hills were green, and no soldiers appeared to stop the hikers. A high school girl told a reporter afterward of the joy of walking with “the entire Jewish people”—the familiar illusion of a mass happening, when “many” appears to be “everyone,” when it becomes impossible to believe that anyone reasonable is not here.

Conflicting reports indicate that a few dozen or few hundred people reached the Sebastia train station that afternoon, on foot or driving back roads that inexplicably remained open. They found a company of soldiers already camped there, tents pitched, the Israeli flag and the standard of the Armored Corps waving.