The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (49 page)

The meeting yielded a rephrased agreement, in Peres’s handwriting. It said the settlers would leave Sebastia. Thirty families from the Elon Moreh group would move to a military base in the area, where “they will enjoy freedom of movement and the army will provide employment, with no commitment that the base will become a settlement.” Within “two-three months,” the government would debate settlement policy.
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Despite the words “no commitment,” Peres’s version made significant new concessions. It replaced the original “thirty individuals” with thirty families. The promise of jobs fit Peres’s policy of using military employment to boost settlement. Instead of a group awaiting a decision, there would be a community with livelihoods. The promise of a cabinet debate implied at least a possibility of a change in policy, fitting Peres’s own goals. Before the meeting’s end, Peres left the room to call Rabin for his agreement.
¹²⁹
Perhaps Rabin had fallen victim to bait and switch: Having agreed to compromise, knowing the army was not with him, he could not now oppose a more costly deal than he had accepted the night before. Or perhaps the differences are irrelevant: The experience of Hebron and Ofrah showed that any “temporary” presence was likely to become permanent.

On the way back to Sebastia, the Gush Emunim men discussed how to present the agreement: as a necessity to avoid a showdown, or as victory. They decided on victory. The crowd was told it had won. The celebrating began, Porat and Levinger and other leaders were lifted onto shoulders, Levinger waving an Israeli flag above hundreds of men wearing skullcaps, who danced in circles that turned into a crushing, ecstatic mass.
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The news photos provided a large part of what Levinger wanted: proof to the country that the government was weak, the movement strong, the old policy overthrown.

RABIN SENT
a memo to cabinet members on the deal. Peres had consulted him on everything, he wrote, and “the policy of the government has been upheld while avoiding a confrontation we did not want.”
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He, too, wanted to claim victory, but had less success.

At the demand of Sarid and other doves, the Knesset delegation of the Labor-Mapam Alignment convened. Backbenchers and ministers assailed the agreement. Among the critics was Yigal Allon, who demanded to know how the army failed to stop the settlers before they reached Sebastia.

“With instructions from the defense minister there should have been no difficulty—” Allon said, and Peres tried to interrupt, and Allon shouted, “Let me speak! You won’t keep me from speaking…. I won’t be silent any more!” Then he insisted there should be no settlement “in areas on which we might have to compromise.” His plan was being violated, he had not been consulted, and he blamed Peres. That may have been easier than blaming Porat, to whom Allon had once explained how things were done in the Palmah, or blaming Levinger, his client in settling at Hebron.

Rabin spoke last. If the delegation asked to change the compromise, he said, he would resign. He had been pushed into a decision, and now he had to stand behind it.
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THE WALL HAD FALLEN.
The foundations had indeed been weak. In facing Gush Emunim, Rabin’s greatest problem was not the number of people gathered at Sebastia. It was the weakness of the case he could present—to the army, but more important to the country as a whole—to explain the painful need for confrontation.

He could not point to the Green Line on the map as the limit of Israeli sovereignty, nor argue that settlement in occupied land violated international law. He could not argue that settlement had become an obsolete means of showing patriotism, nor that it would entrench Israeli rule over people denied democratic rights considered basic within Israel itself. He could not point to another kind of border, between legal and illegal, and insist that breaking the law for political purposes was no longer allowable. At Merom Golan, Hebron, Keshet, and Ofrah, the government had condoned the old ethic of illegalism, as it had in the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter and in the expulsion of the Bedouin from the Rafiah Plain. Insisting now on the rule of law looked like hypocrisy. In his memoirs, Rabin labeled Gush Emunim “a cancer in the body of Jewish democracy,” but it was a secondary malignancy.
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The cancer had been metastasizing for some time.

Nor could Rabin point to the government’s clear policy on the future of the West Bank, because in the interests of holding together a party and a coalition, Israeli governments had evaded deciding on such a policy since June 1967. As a party, Labor could not decide on what “territorial compromise” and “defensible borders” meant without risking a split, and the ruling coalition was even more fragile than the party.

Without a case that he could cogently, sorrowfully present before the Knesset, or before television cameras, Rabin stepped back from the brink, and the precedence of political dedication over the rule of law won public victory.

IN DRIVING RAIN
, on a field of mud, the tents were folded. It was Tuesday, December 9, 1975. The books in the study hall were packed. Hundreds of supporters drove away, some after nine nights in the valley before the train station. At two in the afternoon, the last settlers left in a procession of vehicles, headed for Camp Kaddum, just east of Nablus, where “they will begin their way as an independent settlement,” a sympathetic reporter wrote. Gush Emunim would establish more settlements, Levinger told journalists. At Kaddum, the gate was shut. No one had informed the camp commander. While they waited for word to arrive, the settlers got out and began, once more, to sing and dance; bottles and glasses appeared, people shouted, “
Lehaim
”—“To life.” The gate opened, and they entered.
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Next to Camp Kaddum, bulldozers clawed a hillside, cutting out space for thirty mobile homes. A new road would loop to the compound, so the civilian residents could reach their homes without stopping at the gate of the military base, Defense Minister Peres promised when he visited the Elon Moreh settlers. The new mobile homes would join a dozen trailers already in the base, allowing more families to move in, a Gush Emunim newsletter said, the original limit of thirty families forgotten.
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At Bir Zeit College outside Ramallah on an early March day, Israeli soldiers broke up a demonstration by the college’s Palestinian students. A foreign correspondent arrived after the noise and fury and inventoried the debris. In the men’s dormitory, he saw “shattered windows, mirrors, picture frames and bookcases, overturned beds and, on one floor, dried blood.” An army spokesman said that students had showered the soldiers with stones, and that they may have broken up the dorm themselves to manipulate media coverage.
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Across the West Bank, through the winter and spring of 1976, confrontations flared and smoldered out and caught flame again. One cause of protests was the settlers’ presence at the base near Nablus, coupled with escalating antagonism between the Jews of Kiryat Arba—now home to nearly 1,500 Israeli settlers—and the Arabs of Hebron. West Bank municipal elections, set by Peres for April in hopes of showing how Israel encouraged self-rule, instead forced aging Arab mayors seeking reelection to talk like young nationalists—though real nationalists would defeat them anyway. For days in late March, Ramallah was under twenty-four-hour military curfew. The town of Abu Dis, just east of Jerusalem, seethed after troops shot a ten-year-old boy during a protest and he died of his wounds.
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In Hebron, by one Israeli press account, the troubles began when Palestinian high school students demonstrated against conservative Mayor Muhammad Ali al-Jabari, and Kiryat Arba settlers decided to restore order, using clubs and chains. The mayor’s son, clearly not one of the protesters, was dragged from his car by settlers and badly beaten. In the most provocative incident, settlers stopped the leading cleric of the conservative Muslim town and forced him at gunpoint to remove stones with which young demonstrators blocked a road.
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As usual, Hebron’s contested holy site—the Tomb of the Patriarchs, or Ibrahimi Mosque—was a flash point. On the carnival holiday of Purim, Palestinians greeted settlers on their way to celebrate at the tomb-mosque with a rain of rocks. Moshe Levinger, rabbi and moving spirit of Kiryat Arba, was interviewed on Israel’s evening TV news, watched by virtually the whole country. He stressed hierarchy. Rather than avoiding Hebron, he said, settlers should go there armed, and if need be, respond to stones with gunfire. “We want to live with the Arabs in peace and friendship, but we have put them in their place,” Levinger said. “There won’t be demonstrations.”
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On March 23 at Camp Kaddum, families began moving into the new mobile homes.
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That day, it happened, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, William Scranton, addressed an emergency Security Council meeting on Israel’s occupation. “Clearly…substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including in East Jerusalem, is illegal” under the Fourth Geneva Convention, he declared, and “the presence of these settlements is seen by my government as an obstacle to the success of the negotiations for a just and final peace.”
⁷

American diplomats had been saying as much to Israeli officials since they first noticed that the original settlements were civilian communities, not military outposts.
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But Scranton’s condemnation was particularly public, the wording—
illegal, obstacle
—unusually sharp, and the venue one where Israel felt terribly vulnerable, especially with a PLO representative present. Nearly nine years after the 1967 war, Washington had moved from dealing with settlement as a technical issue for midlevel diplomats to openly declaring Israeli behavior an obstacle to American goals.

Though the U.S. afterward vetoed as “unbalanced” a resolution condemning settlement, and the Ford administration soon smoothed its rhetoric on Israel for the U.S. election campaign, the American dressing down left Israeli officials nervous.
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Foreign Minister Yigal Allon blamed the Sebastia controversy. As long as Israel created facts quietly, he said in a meeting of Galili’s Settlement Committee, the United States said nothing. Now, “the Americans…don’t miss a chance to express their opposition.”
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In the cabinet he urged quicker settlement in the areas “where we want to settle,” meaning those marked on his map. “Silence and resoluteness are our assets,” he said.
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The words fit Allon’s Palmah days: He cast the United States as a half-sympathetic Mandatory ruler who could tolerate Jewish settlement as long as it did not cause public embarrassment. With stealth, settlers could redraw the borders of a future Jewish state—though the state existed and Allon served as its foreign minister.

At the same time, Allon was writing a story about the present: Labor settlement, discreetly carried out, was pragmatic and internationally tolerated. Gush Emunim settlement was demonstrative, uncontrolled, and damaging. That presentation was half-true.

Gush Emunim’s settlement efforts did draw international attention, and the Faithful saw government attempts to get along with the United States as shameful. “The true struggle is against Ford and Kissinger, while the Israeli government stands with its hands tied…. The government is simply not sovereign,” wrote Yoel Bin-Nun, who had graduated from writing on redemption in Har Etzion’s yeshivah newsletter to serving as one of Gush Emunim’s main ideologues. By using pre-state methods, Gush Emunim was defying not Israel’s government, but America’s, Bin-Nun wrote in a movement magazine that spring. Defiance, in his description, was the essence of independence.
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Moreover, the United States had chastised Israel because of a series of events that could be traced back to Sebastia. The high-profile settlement bid fueled Palestinian protests, which sparked Israel’s attempts at suppression, which led to the Security Council debate.

But Kiryat Arba, Allon’s own project, also stoked the protests. And Palestinian anger over settlements tapped a deeper frustration with Israeli rule, which no longer felt temporary and was not invisible. The pressure of occupation and the PLO’s proselytizing were changing young people, teaching them the hot, exciting rhetoric of Palestinian nationalism. Sebastia seized Palestinian and American attention in a way that Galili’s secretive activities did not. But it was not the only reason for dissatisfaction with settlement or occupation.

As for the PLO, its success came at a high price. For the first time, it swept young crowds to the streets in occupied territory—the premonition of rebellion, if not rebellion itself. But it could do so in part because November’s U.N. resolutions against Israel had brought the settlers to Sebastia and Kaddum. After Palestinian protests guttered out that spring, a new wave of settlement would continue, tying Israel more tightly to occupied territory.

An ethnic struggle burned in the West Bank, and stories were being created about it. Gush Emunim’s memory would not include the role it played in rallying Palestinian nationalism; the PLO’s memory would not preserve the organization’s part in the settlers’ success. Allon, avatar of government settlement efforts, described himself as an unhappy spectator, erasing his own role in the drama.

THE CABINET
debate on Israel’s settlement policy was scheduled at last for early May—five months after the compromise with Gush Emunim, rather than the “two or three” promised in that agreement. By late April, 150 civilians were living in Camp Kaddum—twenty-eight families plus forty singles.
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The Defense Ministry—according to Peres’s settlement aide, Moshe Netzer—had “made the camp suitable for the group to inhabit, and helped its members refit buildings for public use. Soon there was a synagogue, a dining hall, and classrooms…. All this was done on the instructions of and with the blessing of the defense minister.”
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A visiting reporter found workmen laying water and sewer lines for the mobile homes.
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Small children played tag among army jeeps. The place was not quite solid yet, but it was coming into focus. The Interior Ministry approved settler organizer Menachem Felix’s request for a change of address in his identity papers to “Elon Moreh—Camp Kaddum.”
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Other government agencies were less cooperative. The Education Ministry ignored letters asking to accredit and assist the settlers’ school.
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Without a policy, each official did what was right in his eyes.

Defense Minister Peres, interviewed in Labor’s daily newspaper, said if settlement was permissible, it should be allowed everywhere: “I don’t understand why it’s okay to settle in the [Jordan] Rift and not in the Samaria mountains…. I don’t understand why settling in the Golan Heights is considered something left wing and settling at Ofrah next to Jerusalem is a right-wing act.”
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The comments were barbs aimed at Rabin and Allon, and aligned Peres with the National Religious Party and Gush Emunim.

The night before the cabinet met, demonstrators marched through downtown Tel Aviv, carrying signs such as “The Law Comes Before Kaddum.” The left-wing Mapam party called the protest, aimed at the government in which it served. Party organizer Latif Dori expected “a couple thousand” people, a bit more than he had managed to bring out four years earlier to protest the expulsion of the Sinai Bedouin. Instead, he watched with disbelief as between 15,000 and 30,000 strode behind the party’s Knesset members. Sebastia had also awakened Israeli opposition to settlement—at least in the West Bank—as never before.

Most of the protesters came from Mapam’s kibbutzim and youth movement. While the party rejected West Bank settlement, it was divided on settling in the Rafiah Plain of Sinai. After sharp debate, it had just approved establishing a kibbutz in the Golan. Dori, a city activist in a kibbutz-dominated party, commented later that many members resented Gush Emunim’s claim to the mantle of Zionist pioneering; they felt that the Faithful were “entering our Western Wall,” the sacrament of settling the land.
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A distinction was emerging. Hebrew has two words for settling—a simple one for daily speech; and another, with a formal, biblical tinge, which literally means to take possession of an inheritance. Gush Emunim, following the Hebron settlers, made heavy use of “inheriting.” Now the formal term was increasingly used in wider society to refer only to what Gush Emunim did. It called up a man wearing a crocheted skullcap, a woman wearing a long skirt tailored to Orthodox modesty. The simpler word could be reserved for settlement that fit the Israeli consensus—for building kibbutzim in the Jezreel Valley before independence, for instance, or within Israel afterward. It carried a scent of plowed fields and chickenhouses, and a distant echo of Palmah melodies. But there was an ambiguity: The simple word could also be used for government-backed settlements in the Golan Heights, the Jordan Rift, and Sinai. A supporter of the Allon Plan could reject “inheriting.” Public opposition after Sebastia focused on Gush Emunim’s very visible efforts. Ironically, it helped place earlier settlement activity at the blurred edge of perception, barely seen if not forgotten altogether.

The crucial cabinet meeting, on the other hand, opened with the Settlement Department’s Yehiel Admoni reporting that a total of sixty-nine settlements had been built in occupied territory since June 1967.
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The Golan Heights had twenty-five, including the new town of Katzrin, and had become Israel’s chief source of beef. There were seventeen settlements in the Jordan Rift and along the Dead Sea Coast, five more south of Jerusalem, fifteen including Yamit in the Gaza Strip and northeast Sinai, and the rest scattered elsewhere. Admoni’s figures included Ma’aleh Adumim on the red slopes east of Jerusalem as a settlement. They did not include Ofrah or Kaddum. Nor did they include the new neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, officially part of the capital.

There were plans, he said, for building a town in the Etzion area south of Jerusalem, to be called Efratah, a biblical synonym for Bethlehem, and for expanding a clump of settlements in the southern Gaza Strip. Admoni listed 6,500 Israelis as living in rural settlements. A partial figure, this left out the towns—including Kiryat Arba, the largest single settlement—and soldiers at Nahal outposts.
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Even if no new settlements were started, existing ones would grow. Housing Minister Ofer said nearly as many homes were under construction as had already been completed.
²²

The debate that followed on settlement—in fact, a full-dress debate on the future of the occupied territories—showed that since 1967, the only consensus that had emerged within the small class eligible to sit around the cabinet table was that one must approve settling someplace in occupied land to be taken seriously. A Mapam minister, for instance, stressed that his party supported settlement in the Golan, as preamble to rejecting further settlement in the West Bank. “Settling in all parts of the Land of Israel is saying no to territorial compromise,” he asserted, to which Peres impatiently interjected, “I’m against territorial compromise without peace, and I don’t see peace”—meaning he saw no reason to restrict settlement anywhere.
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Galili, the settlement czar, was in a bind. On one hand, he sought to maintain his own freedom of action. In the past, he said, the government had decided only where settlement would take place, not where it would not. Henceforth, too, the cabinet should not “make decisions that exclude regions from settlement.” That would allow him to seek agreement on each new site, unencumbered by explicit rules. He could show fealty to the ideas of his comrade, Allon, and also stretch the Allon Plan’s limits. Perhaps, too, the white-haired maximalist, the longtime defender of United Kibbutz’s Ideological Foundation, could live with limitations only if he did not have to state them loudly, did not have to declare the romance with the Whole Land to be over. To that end, Galili asked his colleagues to refrain, again, from a sharp stand on Israel’s future map.