The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (9 page)

There were domestic considerations as well. Johnson had close ties to the American Jewish community.
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In April 1967, a paper on guaranteeing Jewish support for Johnson’s reelection by Washington lawyer David Ginsburg circulated among the foreign policy team. It noted that Richard Nixon had lost Jewish support as the Republican presidential candidate in 1960 because he was identified with “what most Jewish voters regarded as the Eisenhower-Dulles double-standard policy against Israel during the Suez crisis.”
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Once war erupted, Johnson had further reason to be concerned about Jewish support. A State Department spokesman, responding to Arab accusations that America was fighting on Israel’s side, declared that the United States was “neutral in thought, word and deed”—and provoked a storm of criticism from American Jews. Reporting to the boss, two Johnson aides said that Jewish leaders’ major fear was that Israel “may be forced to lose the peace—again (as in 1956).”
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In the week after the cease-fire, Bundy led intensive discussions aimed at a presidential policy statement by the time of the U.N. General Assembly debate on June 19. But any hope of building a peaceful Middle East had to compete with Vietnam’s gravitational pull on officials’ time, energy, and emotions. “From the end of the war on, the top levels of the U.S. government were exhausted” with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Saunders recalled years later, adding, “You will remember that we had another problem on the other side of the world.”
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There was also a dispute on whether the Israeli pullback had to be all the way to the prewar boundaries. The American line should be “let’s have peace,” Bundy said, in a call from U.N. headquarters to the White House on June 11, adding that he opposed State Department officers who wanted to stress the “territorial integrity” of all countries. That phrase, meant to protect Israel when Johnson used it before the war, now meant a full Israeli pullback. “Old boundaries cannot be restored,” Bundy asserted.
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In a White House meeting the following day, Johnson wondered, “How do we get out of this predicament?”

“We’re in a heck of a bind on territorial integrity,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara answered, hardly reassuringly.
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The opposite view came from Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who insisted that the armistice lines of 1949 would not endanger Israel if there were peace. “Israel’s keeping territory,” Rusk forecast, “would create a revanchism for the rest of the twentieth century.”
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The solution, at Bundy’s suggestion, was for Johnson to avoid proposing concrete solutions. Instead, the president would identify problems, and call on Israel and the Arabs to solve them.
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That fit advice from Ambassador Walworth Barbour in Tel Aviv: Let the Israelis struggle with seeking direct negotiations, lower their expectations, and then seek U.S. help.
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It also fit the lack of energy for a major American initiative. It evaded the need for precise positions, and for giving U.S. guarantees—which, to have value, would need approval from a skittish Senate.
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Drafting the speech took nearly a week. Bundy apparently framed the final version.
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The core was what became known as Johnson’s “Five Points”: the right of every nation in the region to live and be accepted by its neighbors; a solution for refugees; respect for maritime rights; ending the Mideast arms race; and maintaining the “independence and territorial integrity of all states.” Johnson’s speech quickly added to that last crucial point that it could be achieved only through peace. Instead of “fragile and violated truce lines,” he called for “recognized boundaries” and security arrangements. Troops must withdraw, but only with the realization of the other conditions. The main burden of peacemaking, he concluded, fell not on the U.N. or the United States, but on the sides to the conflict.

The result, on the crucial issue of territory, was finely tuned ambiguity. The United States had affirmed “territorial integrity,” which meant that no Israeli soldier should stand on land belonging to an Arab country. Yet if “truce lines” must be replaced with agreed upon borders, then until such an agreement was reached, it was entirely unclear what land belonged to whom. America left that for the Arabs and Israel to negotiate. It clearly expected that process to begin quickly, but did not commit itself to deep involvement.
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Johnson spoke to the TV cameras at a State Department educators’ conference, chosen for its convenient time on the morning of June 19, just before the U.N. General Assembly convened. At about the same time in Jerusalem, the Israeli cabinet adopted its decisions, which it kept secret even from military Chief of Staff Rabin. Foreign Minister Abba Eban, in New York for the U.N. gathering, received the proposals by cable and presented them to American officials, including Rusk and U.N. ambassador Arthur Goldberg. The Americans must have been relieved that Israel had chosen a “realistic” stance, as the diplomatic cables termed a readiness to pull back. Israel’s leaders had every reason to be relieved as well. While Johnson’s speech did not match Israel’s policy, it was a far cry from 1957. In fact, they may have felt like someone who sets a high price for his house, then kicks himself for not asking for more when he hears the first interested buyer say “Okay.”

The U.S. passed the Israeli proposals on to Egypt and Syria through diplomatic channels, according to Eban, and within a few days both governments rejected them.
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The public behavior of both countries confirms Eban’s testimony. Shell-shocked and humiliated, they were not ready to make peace. But they missed a moment of opportunity to regain their land. After that, Israel’s price did rise. In the absence of decisions and diplomacy, “creating facts” took over.

THE FIRST U.S. POLITICIAN
to arrive in the accidental empire held no office except has-been and want-to-be. Former vice president Richard Nixon, the defeated Republican presidential candidate of 1960, landed in Tel Aviv on June 21, 1967, at the end of months of globe-trotting intended to establish him as a foreign policy authority for his comeback run for the presidency.

Eshkol’s expressed preference was to see Johnson reelected in 1968,
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but both protocol and prudence ensured that Nixon received VIP handling, including meetings with ministers and generals. First, though, came a tour of a hospital to see wounded Israeli and Arab soldiers. Nixon devoted two dozen scrawled words in his legal pad to that look at the price of war. Of the wounded Israelis, he recorded nothing. The Arabs were “poor” and “frightened,” he noted. What stood out for him was an Egyptian tank commander’s comment. “Russia is to blame,” Nixon recorded his words. “They furnished arms. We did the dying.”
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Nixon repeated that quotation in his summary of what he had learned in Israel about the Soviets—or rather, of what he heard that confirmed the picture that he had brought with him. At his press conference on arrival, Nixon labeled Nasser as the aggressor, then stressed the Soviet Union’s decisive role in arming and inciting the Arabs to fight. Israel should not withdraw, Nixon said—putting distance between himself and Eisenhower’s policy a decade before—until peace was reached. But that, he said, would require a U.S.-Soviet guarantee.
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Nixon presented virtually the same formula to the U.S. press on his return home.
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He had built his career as a cold warrior, a believer not only in confronting communism but in seeing conflicts around the world as the manifestations of a single Manichean struggle.

Beneath the chaos was seductive simplicity, the conceptual cleanness that can bewitch a person attracted to ideas. Even more than Walt Rostow, Nixon treated the Middle East as one corner of the Cold War chessboard, and the Egyptians and Syrians as knights and bishops moved by Moscow. Any real peace would require agreement with the Soviets, and that would be achieved only if the United States made sure its own rook—Israel—stood firm, without retreating. Nixon was partially correct; the war did fit into the U.S.-Soviet great game. But his calculus did not include the pieces themselves thinking, ignoring orders, or changing the shape of the board while one superpower waited for the other’s will to weaken.

BACK HOME
, Nixon received a packet of photographs of his trip from his Israeli Foreign Ministry escort officer, including one that showed him as “the first foreign dignitary” to land at “the airport of united Jerusalem”—presumably by helicopter from Tel Aviv.
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The escort’s effusive description contains an error: The city was officially unified four days after Nixon left, perhaps while the film was at the lab.

Balancing haste and caution, Eshkol had already delayed action. He had overwhelming public support—one opinion poll showed over 90 percent of Israelis in favor of keeping East Jerusalem permanently.
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But at Eban’s urging, the prime minister kept a low profile on Jerusalem as the U.N. General Assembly convened. Eban wanted to maintain a united front with the United States against Soviet demands for an immediate pullback. A meeting in New York with Dean Rusk deepened his concern; the secretary of state warned that a misstep in handling the Holy City could spark “strong anti-Israel feeling” in the American public.
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The next week, Eshkol ran out of patience. Ironically, one reason was the U.N. debate, in which British foreign secretary George Brown spoke emotionally against any move by Israel to unify Jerusalem. Eshkol feared an international demand to maintain the status quo. Better to be criticized after the fact, he thought, than to do something Israel had been told in advance not to do.
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By the time the cabinet met on June 27, it had agreed on the method recommended by Justice Ministry experts for uniting the city. The Knesset would pass amendments to two existing laws. One would allow the cabinet to extend Israeli law and jurisdiction to “any part of the Land of Israel” by administrative decree. The second would allow the interior minister to order changes in city limits at his discretion. In practical terms, land under Israeli jurisdiction was part of the state, but neither law mentioned “Jerusalem” or “annexation.” The approach fit the hopes of cautious cabinet members to minimize the international reaction—while territorial maximalists believed it offered them an opening for further annexations in the future. At the same time, the Knesset would approve new legislation protecting freedom of access to the holy places of all religions and barring “anything likely to violate [believers’] feelings with regard to those places.” A Foreign Ministry cable to Israeli envoys abroad urged them to emphasize Israel’s protection of Christian and Muslim holy sites, and to play down the other two laws. Unification of the city should be described “not as annexation but as municipal fusion,” a practical necessity for meeting local needs.
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Another key decision dealt with the city’s new borders. Eshkol sought to include Rachel’s Tomb, a site at the northern edge of Bethlehem traditionally identified as the grave of the biblical matriarch, which aroused adoration from secular Zionists as well as from religious Jews.
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But the ministerial committee he appointed dropped that idea, in order to avoid taking part of another town that was sacred to Christians. The cabinet received two possible maps, both drawn by General Ze’evi. One extended the municipal limits—and therefore the State of Israel—much farther eastward than the other, to take in natural springs and guarantee the city’s water supply.

Allon favored the maximalist plan, but Dayan opposed it, arguing that it would cut access between the northern half of the West Bank and the southern half—all of which he still hoped to turn into a single autonomous region. Another, unspoken consideration may have been that it would divide and reduce the territory under military rule, his personal domain as defense minister. Beyond that, he was demonstrating what would soon be recognized as a law in the quantum physics of Israeli politics: Dayan could not occupy the same position as Allon. Allon’s stand usually proceeded from his grand conception, as a predictable instance of theory. In advance, Dayan’s view could be predicted only as “elsewhere.”

At the June 27 meeting, Dayan prevailed, and the cabinet approved the more limited map. Only months later did Eshkol discover that the matriarch’s tomb had been left out.
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But even the minimalist plan added over twenty-seven square miles to Israeli Jerusalem’s area, nearly tripling the size of the city. To the Israeli population of 200,000 it added 66,000 Arabs. The additional territory went far beyond the Jordanian city limits, adding open countryside yet avoiding Arab villages and neighborhoods.
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The expanded Jerusalem intentionally included room beyond the Green Line for major housing developments for Jews. The map testified against the term “municipal fusion.” The Foreign Ministry cable on unification, sent before the cabinet met, brought no joy to Eban or the other Israeli representatives at U.N. headquarters on the East River. They cabled back, urging a delay of a week, until after the expected end of the General Assembly session. At the start of its June 27 meeting, the cabinet leaned toward accepting that advice. Eshkol left the room and phoned Eban, telling the foreign minister that word of Israel’s plans had already leaked and that waiting would risk international pressure, citing the British foreign secretary’s speech. Eban dropped his objections. Two days later, he cabled Eshkol, with words suggesting a slightly quivering diplomatic upper lip. “I cease to comprehend developments,” Eban wrote, saying that on the phone, the prime minister had misled him to believe that the cabinet already overwhelmingly opposed postponement. Eshkol answered that the press was on to the story, public pressure was high, and “delay…would have made us a laughingstock.” Eban’s memoirs skip that exchange, instead suggesting dryly that “George Brown had more to do with Israeli unification of Jerusalem than he might have wished.”
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