The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (48 page)

He drove his small Fiat past Ramallah, toward Sebastia. Gush Emunim’s tents had stood for a week. As a journalist, he could no longer ignore the story. In Nablus, he smelled the stink of burning tires. Rocks thrown by demonstrators lay on the road. Curiosity or a wrong turn took him toward Sebastia village. Soldiers said it was dangerous to drive onward. He got out and followed the squad. A crowd of female protesters in embroidered dresses stood beyond olive trees, for the moment not throwing rocks.
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Gouri turned and headed toward the encampment. Hundreds of people were still hiking in, through the orchards and vegetable fields of Arab farmers. The trampling upset him. So did the claim that the tent city itself was on unowned land. There is no unowned land around the train station, he wrote afterward, quoting a tough old expert who had been Ben-Gurion’s Arab affairs expert a generation before. “Land is life,” and every acre belonged to someone. The settlers “hadn’t bothered to think that someone else existed here.”
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At the station, he wandered about. The scene was jagged, did not fit together. In an Israel sick with materialism and status seeking, a post-revolutionary Israel, the fervent hundreds around Gouri reminded him of the barefoot youth movement idealists of another era. And yet they did not at all. This was a copy, a stage production, farce in place of tragedy. A man stood giving a political sermon to an entranced gathering of teenagers. The speaker quoted the words of Joseph from Genesis, “It is my brothers I seek,” as an injunction to seek all Jews, their support, their unity, and Gouri felt he was watching the country being torn in two, all the ground rules of politics shredded.
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People carried guns, playing the role of Jewish pioneers defending themselves in the days of Turkish and British rule; the man before the crowd defiantly attacked the “obtuse, idiotic government,” yet the soldiers “supposedly threatening evacuation were actually guarding the festive happening.” The idealists ignored the Arabs around them, and other Israelis who believed that “citizens must respect the laws of a young state…because otherwise this anarchist nation will demolish itself and its country,” he wrote.
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Gouri understood infatuation with the Whole Land, it was his young self; but he was middle-aged, and even if the state with its rules did not arouse passion, it was where he raised his children and he did not want it torn apart.

Just after two o’clock, a military helicopter set down next to the station.
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Word had come to expect it only half an hour before. Out stepped Defense Minister Shimon Peres and an adviser, along with two generals. Circles of men surrounded them, dancing, as if greeting the groom at an ecstatic wedding. The defense minister’s willingness to come, to talk, was a victory, after a week in which any contacts with top ministers had been through worried intermediaries. Organizer Benny Katzover, apparently not alone, thought the sympathetic defense minister was about to announce they could stay. The visitors entered the station with Gush Emunim’s leaders, including Hanan Porat, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and Katzover, and sat down around a table. Apparently it took a few minutes of formalities to get down to business. Then people outside heard voices turn to shouts.
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Peres’s visit did show how much he and Rabin and those around them wanted to avoid sending troops in. The defense minister was the one to come because the occupied territories were his bailiwick, but he did not choose his message on his own. As he explained two days afterward to party colleagues, four men—himself, Rabin, Galili, and Justice Minister Haim Zadok—had worked out the ultimatum.
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“If you don’t clear the area within one day, the government will evacuate you by force,” Peres told the activists. If they went voluntarily, he promised, the cabinet would hold a formal policy debate on settlement in the area within three months.
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Levinger burst out of the room to the expectant crowd. “This is expulsion of Jews. This is destruction,” he shouted. The words were charged with history and martyrdom. “Expulsion” called up the banishment of Jews from Spain in 1492; “destruction” meant the razing of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem—archetypical moments of Jewish suffering at gentile hands. “We must rend our garments!” Levinger cried, and ripped his shirt in mourning. Some in the crowd followed his example. People sat on the ground and began chanting Lamentations, the biblical dirge for Jerusalem destroyed. A military vehicle pulled up next to the station, ready to extricate Peres if need be.
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Inside the room, a tense discussion continued. At some point, Porat stepped outside, saw Gouri, and urged him to come in. Gouri was a renowned poet in a country where poets were celebrities, if not oracles, and was known as a maximalist; perhaps he would imagine a way out. Porat later described Gouri as having been sent by divine providence. Gouri would remember entering the room as “the worst mistake of my life.”
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Inside, Peres motioned to Gouri to sit down next to him. Peres, a pale man, had gone even paler, Gouri would remember. The defense minister repeated his demand that the settlers leave quietly. “Shimon, where will we go from here?” shouted Katzover. “This is the Land of Israel.”
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For the young thin man with the dark trimmed beard and overwhelming confidence, the choice was absolute: Sebastia station or exile.

At last, Gouri the journalist reached for the forbidden fruit hanging in front of him: He entered the conversation, became actor instead of observer. He warned Peres against the scars that a forced evacuation would leave, and told the settlers they had to accept the rule of law. Then he tossed out a proposal: Some members of the Elon Moreh group would move to a nearby army base, where they would wait for the cabinet to discuss their request to settle in the area. It was a recycled compromise, the same one that Rabin had approved offering the Elon Moreh group a year and a half before, during its first settlement bid. According to Gouri’s accounts, then and later, he hoped that by entering an agreement, Gush Emunim would be obligating itself to accept authority and rules.
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There is no evidence that his listeners regarded the idea as accepting such an obligation; it was simply an alternative to confrontation.

According to Gouri, he asked Peres if the government would agree to the compromise; Peres turned the question to the Gush Emunim men. They, in turn, answered that they would consider the idea, if it came from the government.
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Close to four o’clock, Peres and his party left the station—the crowd now grim but letting him pass—and his helicopter rose into the dimming winter sky. The cabinet met late in the day. Peres reported that the settlers were unwilling to leave voluntarily, and that evacuation might mean spilled blood. He also described Gouri’s idea, but did not endorse it. Only the National Religious Party’s ministers backed the compromise, a hint that it was seen as giving in to Gush Emunim. Leftist ministers demanded strong action against the settlers.
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The cabinet did not quite decide. Its closing resolution affirmed that settlement was allowed only by government decision, authorized the use of the army if needed, and stated a preference to avoid “the distressing results involved in confrontation.”
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Rabin, by his own account, had made up his mind to send in troops, and called in the military chief of staff, Mordechai Gur. It will take 5,000 soldiers, and several days, Gur told the prime minister. Gur did not want this job. “The chief of staff did not bother to hide that he was not excited to carry out the action, and though he did not say so explicitly, my impression was that he would order the IDF to remove the settlers only against his own will,” Rabin wrote in his memoirs.
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Other accounts confirm Gur’s dissatisfaction, perhaps insubordination.
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“I choked with rage,” Rabin would write.

The rage makes sense. Gur was avoiding the order that Yitzhak Rabin had accepted and carried out twenty-seven years before on the beach at Tel Aviv during the
Altalena
affair: to establish that there was a state, that there was one government, even if establishing this fact required fighting other Jews. But choking was also part of the story. Rabin himself did not follow the example of Ben-Gurion; he did not order another officer in and give him the job. Here is the tragedy of Yitzhak Rabin: for the second time in his life he faced the
Altalena
test, and unlike the first time, he failed it.

HAIM GOURI
left Sebastia and drove through demonstration-torn Nablus and along the mountain ridge road south to Jerusalem in the dark, asking himself, “How did I get into this?” It was eight o’clock by the time he reached his apartment. His wife, Aliza, said, “What do you need this for?” He phoned Yisrael Galili, a friend since his Palmah days, someone with whom he could get together for a meal, though Galili was a dozen years older than he was. Gouri told him about Sebastia, the risk of bloodshed, the compromise proposal, Gush Emunim’s willingness to consider it.

“Who asked you to get involved?” Galili answered. He was angrier than Gouri had ever heard him.

“The ball is in your court,” Gouri said. He was very tired, had driven too far and been pulled in too many directions.

“You’ll see, they’ll trick you,” said Galili’s voice on the phone. The next day Gouri wrote that “to the best of my knowledge he supported a hard line against those gathered at the train station…and was far from supporting what I did.”
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Nonetheless, Galili said he would talk to his colleagues and get back to him.

Gouri drank coffee, and waited, and wrote an item for the next morning’s paper. Just as Gouri’s article describes Peres’s arrival in Sebastia, it stops abruptly, like a phone conversation interrupted by a knock on the door, with the words, “I am going back to Elon Moreh. Later I will know more details.”

Gouri had gotten a call from Galili, and then a messenger had arrived with a handwritten note from him, cautiously phrased. It summarized Gouri’s proposal to the settlers as “to evacuate voluntarily; to place thirty individuals in a military installation under military authority; to await a new discussion in the cabinet concerning settlement.” To that Galili added, “Such a proposal, if it comes
from them
, has a chance, but I have stressed: so far there is no such proposal from them.”
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With that, Gouri was to return to Sebastia. In his own files, Galili added to the text, “I stressed to Gouri that I have no proposals from the government.”
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The negotiating logic was that the government could not be turned down; it had offered nothing.

Gouri was not sure who had discussed the idea besides Galili and Rabin. At most, it appears, Justice Minister Zadok was also consulted. Peres had flown to the northern town of Nahariyah for a speaking engagement. Other ministers were surprised afterward to learn that a compromise was approved without the cabinet discussing it.
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Gouri got another call: Rabin said he must not return alone. The army would take him. Aliza said she was against the whole business, and that she would go with him. At a base north of the city, a jeep waited: A driver, another soldier riding shotgun, and Haim and Aliza Gouri rode north. The moon was down. Past Nablus, they turned down the dirt road next to the cypresses, tall silhouettes the shape of candle flames. It was 1:30
A.M
. The valley was full of campfires. People walked about, awake, anxious, and expectant. Most were Orthodox, a few were wrapped for warmth in the wool prayer shawls they had brought for morning prayer, but there were secular kibbutz members as well, supporters of the Whole Land, of Tabenkin’s old vision, the dream from
In Your Covenant
, which included neither a government nor Palestinians.

The settler leaders were waiting for Gouri. He handed them Galili’s note. Porat, Levinger, Katzover, Felix, and three others entered the train station to decide. Gouri and his wife waited outside, freezing.
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Inside, Levinger argued against compromise. The government had to declare, in principle, that it permitted settling in Samaria, that no area was out of bounds, he said. Porat said that in a showdown, the government would have no choice but to defeat them. The compromise would open the door to what they wanted, if they could amend it somewhat. “That’s weakness,” Levinger answered. He did not like weakness. Even so, before dawn they voted, five to two, for Porat’s position.
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They went out and told Gouri: We will accept, if we can speak first to Peres directly. Gouri passed the message via an army radio link and got an okay. Then he and Aliza got in the jeep. The settlers, he would always remember, had agreed with “gritted teeth.”

When he got home, he wrote again, overwhelmed, and then slept through the day. In the afternoon, he turned on the television. On the news was a scene from Sebastia: crowds dancing, Levinger and Porat carried on men’s shoulders, Porat with his trademark smile, too broad for his face, bottles being passed about. It made no sense, Gouri thought, he had thought the settler leaders “understood that they too must obeys the laws of the state” and wanted an honorable way out. Now, he saw, he had been tricked. “The compromise was not intended to prevent tragedy but to serve as a gambit in a struggle to which I am no partner.”
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THIS HAPPENED
while Gouri slept: In late morning, the foursome of Porat, Levinger, Katzover, and Felix sat down with Peres at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.
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