The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (47 page)

Nightfall caught another 1,500 young people on hillsides outside the Palestinian village of Ramin. A woman named Hannah Levy from an Orthodox farm village, identified by a reporter only as “mother of one,” dozed in exhaustion. When she opened her eyes, she saw hundreds of Hanukkah candles dotting the darkness. Cold rain began to pour down, soaking through clothes and sleeping bags. At Monday’s first gray light, the march of the drenched pushed on to the muddy field before the train station. Most quickly left, on buses provided by the army or hitchhiking with Arab drivers. The crowd shrank. The army did not seize the chance to evacuate the remaining few hundred. As evening approached, a fresh wave of Gush Emunim supporters began arriving.
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“The defense minister’s instructions to the IDF to stop the settlers on their way were given halfheartedly or carried out negligently,” Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his memoirs, giving an explanation for how Gush Emunim’s throngs got past the army: Peres’s perfidy.
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For his part, Peres argues in his memoirs—after attacking Rabin’s appointment of Sharon as his adviser—“During the Sebastia standoff…someone set up a pseudo-military headquarters in Tel Aviv, from which he transmitted advice and guidance to the settlers on how to dodge the army patrols…. Clearly, the man who did this was in possession of firsthand and fully updated information.”
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Both accusations are plausible, though as often the case in human affairs the most likely explanation is not conspiracy but incompetence: The army did not have a defensive line separating Israel from the West Bank, and despite Gush Emunim’s repeated settlement efforts had not created means for keeping Israelis out of occupied territory. Rabin’s and Peres’s accusations do, however, testify to the pathology of distrust that paralyzed their government.

The army did know how to evacuate settlers. No one—Rabin, Peres, or the full cabinet—gave orders to do so. The political opening was turning out to be even wider than Gush Emunim expected. On Sunday, as the settlement bid began, the U.N. Security Council voted to invite the PLO to a full debate on the Middle East. The United States declined to veto the resolution.
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Each diplomatic setback abroad made the government more queasy about confronting domestic rivals who spoke in the name of patriotism. Ideologically, Gush Emunim regarded Labor’s brand of secular Jewish nationalism as obsolete. The Faithful aimed not at a Jewish state achieving normal status among other nation-states in the practical business of history, but at redemption from history. Rhetorically, though, the radical movement used the slogans and symbols of its secular opponents—the appeal to Zionism, the act of settling. Labor’s leaders failed to articulate an answer. By the third day of the settlement bid, government sources were telling reporters that the evacuation would take place only after Hanukkah vacation ended, or after the Jewish leaders’ conference—either way, not until the following week. News reports of soldiers evacuating settlers would be embarrassing in the midst of a gathering dedicated to Jewish solidarity.
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THE SETTLEMENT COMMITTEE
met on December 2. Galili’s plan for quickly establishing thirty settlements in government-approved areas was no longer on the agenda. “Little by little,” Settlement Department official Admoni records, “the enthusiasm [had] died out,” for lack of funds and willing settlers. Galili scaled back his proposals to approving four new outposts in the Golan Heights, and asking the Jewish leaders from abroad to approve a resolution backing settlement. “I was shocked,” Admoni writes, that in Galili’s resolution he “refused to state how many settlements he proposed to set up or make any other concrete commitment…. The declaration was toothless, lacking any practical value.”
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THE FIRST TWO
dozen families moved into their rooms at Ma’aleh Adumim east of Jerusalem that Hanukkah week. The timing was an encouraging coincidence for Gush Emunim: It was getting somewhere.
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At Ofrah, meanwhile, Yehudah Etzion reported in the settlement newsletter that “after 2,000 years of exile we have renewed Jewish agriculture in the mountains north of Jerusalem”—a plot of less than a quarter acre had been planted in narcissus bulbs. Another ten acres, he said, were being readied for an orchard, though the Agriculture Ministry refused to extend the aid it usually gave new settlements.
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Other state agencies were more forthcoming. A letter arrived from Peres’s settlement adviser, informing Ofrah’s secretariat that “Ofrah Camp…has been recognized by the defense minister…for purposes of the home guard,” meaning that the army would treat the place like any other settlement, eligible for army supplies to defend itself, even if it still lacked government approval to exist. Ofrah, said the letter, could also hook up to the local electricity grid, and the Defense Ministry would pay for floodlights around the settlement.
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The decisions may have been made before anyone showed up at Sebastia that week. But it was a reminder of Peres’s sentiments.

BEFORE THE TRAIN STATION
, next to the army’s tents, the settlers erected their own tent encampment. The rabbi who headed Bnei Akiva’s high school yeshivot drove in, with an official pass that got him through roadblocks, and brought a Torah scroll. Hundreds of young men danced around him in circles, singing, hands on one another’s shoulders, as he installed the scroll in a structure the settlers had managed to put up and dedicate as the synagogue of Elon Moreh. Naomi Shemer—the secular songwriter who had composed “Jerusalem of Gold”—showed up too, bearing boxes of jelly doughnuts, the standard Israeli Hanukkah treat, and handed them out by the hundreds. When a truck carrying parts for a prefab shed got stopped at a roadblock, hundreds of supporters hiked from the train station and carried the pieces back, putting it up next to others smuggled in earlier. The main path in front of the tents was dedicated as Zionism Avenue, and the tents got street addresses. A shed was dedicated as a yeshivah study hall. An icy wind blew through the encampment but no one stayed inside. A shop opened, selling cigarettes, batteries, and postcards. Business did not slow after midnight. No one seemed to sleep. The place “resembles a town in the Wild West,” said a reporter, looking at the tents below the tall cypresses and pines. Rabbi Moshe Levinger’s disciple Ben-Tzion Heinemann, “the camp commander” according to the press, walked about with an AK-47 slung on his shoulder. Army buses waited behind the tents. Rumors spread: The evacuation order would come once the conference ended; there would be no evacuation; the cabinet would approve the settlement as an answer to the Security Council.
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The more people came, the more the stage set of a town grew, the more it seemed
real
this time.

A Knesset debate that week may have fed the settlers’ hopes. Peres, as the minister responsible for the occupied territories, got the task of explaining the government’s stand. Peres explained that the government itself was busy building settlements, that it had just approved new ones in the Golan and had more coming. But settlers had to obey the law, and he advised those at Sebastia to leave voluntarily. He did not explain, as a parliamentary reporter wrote in pointed bewilderment, what would happen if they refused his advice. “I did not come today to propose solutions,” he stated. A Likud Knesset member, defending illegal settlement, recalled that Kibbutz Hanita had been established on the Lebanese border in 1938 in defiance of British authorities. The logic either equated Israel’s government with the foreign ruler, or suggested that once Jews had their own state, they should be more tolerant of lawbreaking. A legislator from the dovish Mapam party called for uniting behind settlement within the Green Line; the pro–Gush Emunim Knesset member Yehudah Ben-Meir shouted sarcastically, “Let’s unite behind a Palestinian state, as you’d have it.”
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Ben-Meir’s response paralleled Gush Emunim’s statements that “removal of settlers by the IDF will only serve the PLO.”
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In fact, the PLO had unintentionally aided the young, uncompromising nationalists of Gush Emunim, who returned the favor to the uncompromising nationalists of the Palestinian side.

The PLO was trying to establish itself as a popular force within the West Bank, superseding the older, conservative, often pro-Jordanian leaders. The Rabat decision helped, as did U.N. decisions recognizing the PLO: The world appeared to be pushing Israel to end the occupation. For young people in particular, the PLO seemed to be the best means of achieving that end. For West Bank high school students of 1975, Jordanian rule was a childhood memory, stamped “irrelevant” at Rabat. Even so, igniting anything that looked like mass protest proved difficult. The U.N. resolutions of November 1975 finally provided a spark, setting off school strikes, violent demonstrations—mostly by teenagers—and commercial strikes. The Sebastia settlement bid made the flame burn hotter and longer.
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It may be that PLO organizers were paying more attention to settlement than in the past because they were now concerned with the West Bank in particular, as distinct from the whole of Palestine: It mattered now if Jews moved across the Green Line. But the real difference between Sebastia and previous settlement activity is that the Gush Emunim bid was terribly public: advertised, televised, next to the West Bank’s biggest city. Only in Hebron had settlement been nearly as obvious before.

A group of a hundred Gush Emunim reinforcements in a bus and cars, taking back roads to dodge army roadblocks on the way to Sebastia, drove through the small Palestinian town of Anabta, and hit a different kind of roadblock: stones spread across the pavement. They stopped, and rocks started raining on them, hurled by boys standing on rooftops. The leader of the Gush Emunim party, an Ofrah settler, got out of his car and and fired a few bursts from his AK-47 into the air. The boys scattered. The gun was of a kind only available from the army, apparently one of those issued to settlers for self-defense. When soldiers showed up and asked the group bound for Sebastia to refrain from gunfire, a newspaper reported, “the settlers demanded to remove the [army] roadblocks” so they could drive freely to the settlement.
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In Nablus, students at the town’s three high schools skipped class to demonstrate and run from troops. Teenagers from the Palestinian village of Sebastia gathered in the village square and tried to march to the train station a mile and a half away. Soldiers stopped them, preventing a melee at the illegal encampment.
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Even Mazuz al-Masri, the conservative mayor of Nablus, who had run for the office in a 1972 election only under Israeli pressure,
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went to the military governor to protest against the settlement. Don’t worry, he was promised, the army would remove the settlers as soon as Hanukkah was over.
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AT THE STONE TRAIN STATION
in the mountains, on the railway line to nowhere or to redemption, and at the apartment in Netanyah serving as Gush Emunim’s rear headquarters—where typewriters clacked madly, spitting press statements, where phones rang and doors burst open with people coming and going—fear of what waited after the weekend mixed with adrenalinated hope: The troops would come; if they had not come yet, they were not coming; if they came, this time they would not succeed.
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The Sebastia controversy already divided the nation; the government, as usual, appeared too split to act.
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Gush Emunim ran newspaper ads calling for reinforcements, listing meeting places for a Saturday-night journey to Sebastia.
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A press release that sought to deter the government from confrontation declared, “We will defend our settlement as a man defends his home!” The precise means were left unstated.
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A number estimated, or overestimated, by organizers as 3,000 spent the Sabbath in the tent city. Ariel Sharon showed up unannounced on Friday night and “shut himself up with the settler leaders for a long meeting in the ‘command bunker’” in the station. No one would comment afterward on the discussion. Whether Sharon was advising the prime minister or the settlers, or both, was a mystery, perhaps even to the participants.
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The head of the army’s Central Command, General Yonah Efrat, who would be in charge of any evacuation, brought his family, said the Sabbath blessing over wine, and ate food from the communal kitchen.
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On Saturday night, a thousand people gathered in Netanyah for the trip to Sebastia. Naomi Shemer and ex-commando Meir Har-Tzion led the procession. Before setting out, Shemer read out lyrics to a new song, about strange, beautiful people she had met who sang, “The Land of Israel belongs to the People of Israel,” meaning to Jews and no one else, and that ended, “Strange people, let my portion be with you.”
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The army let them drive to Sebastia village and walk only the last mile and a half.

HAIM GOURI
drove out of Jerusalem on Sunday morning, heading north through the Arab suburbs where he had seen white sheets of surrender hanging from shuttered windows eight and a half years before, when he led his platoon this way in June 1967. He remembered the woman he had seen on the road, in her black embroidered village dress, “the stunned ambassador of a different nation hiding behind the stone walls and watching through the cracks in fear and astonishment and shame and eternal enmity and helpless fury….” It was the same land, with its tall cypresses on the ridges undulating like Jews at prayer, with the “sky bright above the biblical landscape, the stone fences, the minarets of the mosques.”
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By December 1975, by his account, he had painfully accepted “Yigal’s plan” as the only political possibility, though his heart belonged to the Whole Land.
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Driving, he thought of Nathan Alterman, the secular poet who had said that “anyone who gives up Samaria will have to change the prayer book, because the history of nations has never heard of a nation giving up its homeland.”
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Gouri also saw the land through the translucent parchment of an ancient book, but he saw the minaret and the Arab woman as well. Sometimes, he wrote that week in an article about his journey, reasons of state required “unfair compromise.”