The Unmaking of Israel (13 page)

By mid-2010, despite Israel’s pullout from Gaza, the number of settlers had grown to 300,000. That is, during seventeen years in which Israel was officially committed to reaching a permanent agreement with the Palestinians, the settler population increased by over two and a half times. These are official Israeli figures, which do not include another 185,000 Israelis living in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem.

This increase is not a natural population explosion. Rather, it is driven by a deluge of government financing for the settlement project, which continues with no accurate accounting. A 2003 report on the Housing Ministry by Israel’s state comptroller complained, “The ministry’s budget does not make it possible to identify what portion . . . is allocated to Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District.” That is true of other ministries as well. The same year, a Finance Ministry spokesperson said, “We don’t have any way of making an estimation” of government outlays on settlement. It was an answer I’d learned to expect. In 1986, the first time I set out to investigate settlement costs, Yaacov Tsur, the absorption minister, told me he had asked the Finance Ministry, Central Bureau of Statistics, and Bank of Israel how much the government was spending on settlement, and “no one had any figures.” Even as a cabinet member, he found that the total outlay was “a bigger secret than the [Mordechai] Vanunu affair,” referring to the closed-door trial that year of an Israeli convicted of leaking information on Israel’s nuclear program.

The difference between the nuclear secrets and the settlement budget was that the latter could not be leaked; it had never been added up, and remains uncalculated to this day. Settlement outlays are scattered throughout the state budget. Many of the incentives were originally intended to help “national priority areas” inside Israel—mainly poor Jewish towns far from the country’s urban center. Later, settlements were quietly added to the list of priority areas. The perks for educators, for instance, were intended to attract qualified teachers to towns where they were in short supply. Settlements do not have that problem, but got the money anyway. Grants to investors building factories in settlement industrial parks are part of the same budget as subsidies designed to bring jobs to economically depressed areas inside Israel.

Municipal governments in settlements impose lower local taxes than towns inside Israel, and receive much more funding via the Interior Ministry—meaning that residents pay less and get better services. In most settlements, the Housing Ministry cuts the costs of homes by giving discounts on the already artificially low price of land, at the same time offering subsidized mortgages. Cheap land makes it possible to build a type of home unavailable inside the Green Line: a single-family house as small as 750 square feet, with the option to expand later. This means a young couple can buy a home in a settlement for the cost of renting in the city and feel secure in beginning a family. Later, when their income grows, the house grows too, making it easier to fulfill religious expectations to have a large family. The goal of settlement subsidies may not have been to boost fertility, but they have done that, too. Even “natural growth” in settlements enjoyed an unnatural cash stimulant.

If the ongoing occupation and settlement expansion have had a silver lining, it’s that they’ve helped spur other Israelis to create human rights and pro-democracy groups. Such organizations have regularly turned to the judicial system, especially to the High Court of Justice. Meanwhile, the court itself has taken a more activist role. Since the 1980s, it has gradually opened its doors to petitioners—including human rights groups—not directly harmed by the government actions they are challenging. The Supreme Court gained additional power through its interpretation of two “basic laws”—pieces of Israel’s still incomplete constitution—passed in 1992. One guaranteed “human dignity and freedom,” the other protected the right to pursue the livelihood of one’s choice. In a 1995 ruling that was the Israeli equivalent of
Marbury v. Madison
, the Supreme Court asserted its authority to declare normal legislation unconstitutional if it contradicted a basic law.

In 2006, the High Court of Justice ruled on a petition by three organizations defending the rights of Israeli Arab citizens. The petitioners argued that the list of national-priority areas for education discriminated against Arab communities inside Israel, violating the principle of equality. The court not only accepted the petition regarding education, it recommended that the government review all other benefits under the national-priority system. As of July 2010, the government was still allocating funds as if the country’s highest court had never spoken, and settlers were still receiving the largest benefits. That outcome, too, reveals Israel’s split personality in the post-Oslo years: On one hand, citizen activism and the Supreme Court’s 1995 constitutional revolution have taken the country further toward fulfilling the principles of liberal democracy. On the other, the government’s disregard for this and other court decisions undermines judicial review, a retreat from the precedent set by David Ben-Gurion’s response to the
Kol Ha’am
decision.

Citizen activists have also tried to determine how much money the government is devoting to settlement. In 2002, the Peace Now movement hired Dror Tzaban, formerly a top Finance Ministry official, to analyze the previous year’s state budget. Tzaban identified $430 million in extra outlays for settlers, beyond what the state would have spent on the same citizens if they had lived inside Israel. That came to $2,000 per person, in a country where the GDP per capita was about $17,000.

Tzaban stressed that this was only a piece of a much larger, unknown total. Many parts of the state budget contain no geographic breakdown, and spending on the settlements is included in the national total, as if they were inside Israel. Moreover, Tzaban explained, “The defense budget is a black box”; the breakdown is classified. In a 2008 study by Shlomo Swirski, director of the Adva Center, a social research institute, he described the settlements as “probably Israel’s single most costly civil—or rather, civil-military—project in the post-1967 era.” The word
probably
hints at a price not measurable in monetary terms. Financial transparency is essential to democratic debate. Yet the extent of the state’s spending on settlement is unknown to the Israeli public and its elected representatives.

One prayer at the Al-Asqa Mosque in Jerusalem is worth five hundred elsewhere, a leader of the Islamic Movement among Palestinian citizens of Israel told me in 1999. He was quoting, or slightly misquoting, a hadith, a tradition attributed to the prophet Muhammad. Events the next year suggest that a death at Al-Aqsa—also known as the Temple Mount—certainly has the impact of hundreds in another place. On September 28, 2000, Ariel Sharon, then leader of the right-wing opposition in the Knesset, made a highly publicized visit to the contested holy site. On the morrow, Friday prayers at the mosque erupted into violent demonstrations. Israeli police shot four Palestinians dead. The Second Intifada had been ignited.

However spontaneous its eruption, the underlying reasons for the Second Intifada appeared clear. After the failure at Camp David, many Palestinians despaired of achieving independence through diplomacy, and hoped to end the occupation through violence. Israel’s overwhelming military response had the effect of spraying lighter fluid from fire hoses. A decade later, over 1,000 Israelis had been killed—most of them civilians—and over 6,000 Palestinians. Yet filling the graveyards did not bring Palestinian independence.

Prima facie, Israel did make two significant concessions after Sharon succeeded Barak as prime minister in 2001. With suicide bombers shredding themselves and other human beings in Israeli cafés and buses inside the Green Line, Sharon acceded to public pressure to build a fence to keep terrorists from entering Israel from the West Bank. Like previous prime ministers, Sharon had heretofore resisted marking a de facto border between Israel and occupied territory. Had the fence been built on the most obvious route, the Green Line, it would have been a psychological breakthrough, the surfacing of repressed national memory. The project would also have avoided local and international legal challenges, and could have been built more cheaply and quickly than Sharon’s brainchild.

Sharon, however, adapted the fence to fit his strategy of fragmenting Palestinian territory with “fingers” of Israeli settlement. Working closely with an IDF strategic planner, Colonel Dany Tirza, Sharon designed a tortuous route that looped through the West Bank to put as many settlers as possible on the “Israeli” side of the fence. In the process, it trapped thousands of Palestinians in enclaves between the fence and the Green Line, caught tens of thousands in areas completely surrounded by the barrier, and left others separated from their farmlands.

In 2003, Tirza described the route as a “reference line” for an Israeli-Palestinian border. At a legal conference in 2005 Tzipi Livni—then justice minister in Sharon’s government—said the fence was “the future border of the state of Israel.” In fact, the fence route was no more workable as a border proposal than an M. C. Escher drawing would be as a blueprint. Meandering tentacles stretched deep into the West Bank, reaching almost to Nablus in one spot and most of the way from Jerusalem to Jericho in another. Along most of its route, the barrier was designed as a swath of barbed wire and sensors, with military patrol roads on each side—a confession written by bulldozers that the IDF would remain deployed on both sides of the fence.

One small example of the route’s effect on Palestinian lives is the village of Azzun Atma, on the western edge of the West Bank. The barrier twists through the foothills to separate the Palestinian community from settlements on either side of it. Azzun Atma is completely enclosed, with one road out to the rest of the West Bank. In January 2008, the secretary of the village council, Abdulkarim Ayoub Ahmed, confirmed reports that women often left the village near the end of pregnancy to avoid the risk of going into labor at night, when the IDF gate on that road was unmanned and shut. A few weeks before, one woman had given birth in her car at the closed gate.

Rather than redividing Israel from occupied territory, the fence entangled Israel more deeply in the West Bank. Like the checkpoints that proliferated during the uprising, like prohibitions on Palestinians using the same roads as Israelis, the fence was presented publicly as protecting Israel from terror, but was designed in large part to secure the settlements.

Sharon’s announcement in February 2004 that he would withdraw the IDF from the Gaza Strip and evacuate Israeli settlements there appeared to be a much larger concession, and more out of character. Sharon, though, regarded “disengagement” as a tactical move, a shortening of the lines to protect his forces. The idea was born after the Bush administration issued its 2003 Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution. One of Sharon’s closest advisers, Dov Weisglas, described disengagement as “providing the proper quantity of formaldehyde” to embalm the American proposal “so that there won’t be a diplomatic process with the Palestinians.” Israel would maintain external control of access to the Gaza Strip. By removing 9,000 Gaza settlers, along with 600 residents of four tiny, isolated communities in the northern West Bank, Sharon intended to protect the settlement project as a whole. The evacuation was set for August 2005.

The Israeli religious right took Sharon’s decision as a betrayal worse than Rabin’s. Sharon had been the Orthodox settlement movement’s closest secular ally for thirty years. Worse, the disengagement plan hinted at the failure of what believers had convinced themselves were divine promises. The answer was denial. The country’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, announced that the edict would be canceled by the eve of Passover in April 2005, vanishing like the last crumbs of leavened bread that religious Jews burn before the holiday. The holiday passed; Sharon failed to repent. In June, speaking before thousands of opponents of “uprooting and expulsion” who gathered at the Gaza settlement of Neveh Dekalim, Eliahu again played prophet, proclaiming, “It will not be.” Many Gaza settlers were farmers who wanted to show their faith by planting crops weeks before the pullout date. Since banks would not give them the usual loans that farmers need, activists organized the Believe and Plant Fund, which collected money from thousands of supporters—as loans, to be repaid when the crops were harvested.

Along with demonstrations of faith came political protest. Since the council of Gaza settlements had an orange flag, its supporters distributed orange ribbons. At one stage, the “orange camp” tried to convince Israelis to wear orange six-pointed stars, modeled on the yellow stars that Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. The tactic equated leaving Gaza to being shipped to the east in boxcars, and the Israeli government to Nazis.

In late July 2005, 40,000 demonstrators gathered at Kfar Maimon, an Orthodox moshav near the Gaza Strip, planning to march to the Gaza settlements to prevent the evacuation. Thousands of police and soldiers stood in their way. On the third day of the standoff, the column of protesters tried to march out of the moshav, with Wallerstein, Hanan Porat, and other graying settlement leaders at the front of the line and angry teens behind them. When the police commander refused to let them through, the middle-aged leaders decided against a hand-to-hand fight and ended the march.

For that moment, loyalty to the state that they regarded as sacred won out over sacred soil. The leaders deserve credit for avoiding bloodshed. Nonetheless, the choice they made was, in religious terms, between one form of idolatry and another. They treated the state, “at most something of instrumental political value,” as being “something of ultimate value,” to borrow terms from philosopher Avishai Margalit. Their younger opponents treated a piece of the Land of Israel—also something of instrumental value for achieving political and religious goals—as possessing ultimate value.

Afterward—after fire did not descend from heaven to prevent withdrawal; after hundreds of young infiltrators managed to enter the Gaza Strip, barricade themselves in the synagogue of the Kfar Darom settlement, and fight police with stakes and steel rods before being dragged away; after the last disbelieving settlers were evacuated—after all this, the name “Kfar Maimon” became a code word. Among some veteran settlement leaders, it stood for doubt, self-castigation, failure. Among the young, the most radical rabbis, the unbending ideologues, it meant “sell-out.”