The Unmaking of Israel (7 page)

In a dissertation harshly describing the military government, American historian Shira Nomi Robinson speaks of the “paradoxical reality” of Palestinian Arabs who remained in Israel and became both “citizens of a liberal nation-state and subjects of a colonial administration.” In my view, the word
colonial
has become a blunt instrument. Used too widely, it obscures the particular tragedies of history. But it is essential to stress that in Israel’s first years, Arabs were not only subjects of the military government. They were also citizens. The fact that they could vote did not mean they enjoyed anything resembling equality, but it created a slow dynamic for change. In 1950, Robinson notes, foreign minister Moshe Sharett reluctantly agreed to a family reunification program that allowed several thousand Palestinian refugees to return—in part because “he hoped to draw Arab support away from the Communists toward the ruling Mapai party.”

More significant, Mapai’s major political rivals—from Mapam on the left to Herut on the right—opposed the military government because the ruling party exploited it to get Arab votes. The other parties wanted a level playing field. Ben-Gurion, the strongest advocate of military government, resigned in 1963. Three years later, at the end of 1966, the military government was abolished. This change did not bring equality or a shared civic identity. It did not end expropriation of Arab-owned land or official discrimination. Yet it was a significant step toward greater democracy.

In the meantime, Israel had not become a “people’s democracy.” Mapam and Ahdut Ha’avodah had recovered from their romance with the Soviet Union. Even the Communist Party had split over loyalty to Moscow. On the right, Herut’s last flirt with violent opposition had been in 1952, when the Knesset debated accepting reparations from West Germany for the Holocaust and Menachem Begin threatened to resume an underground struggle against the government. By 1966, with that episode long past, Herut had found respectability in an alliance with the moderate right-wing Liberal Party. Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levi Eshkol, was a conciliator. The most common criticism against him was not that he was an autocrat, but that he was indecisive. A generation of Israeli-educated Arab intellectuals was about to come of age, their Palestinian nationalism shaped by the classic Zionist poems of Haim Nahman Bialik and Shaul Tchernichovsky they had learned in school.

The Israeli republic was maturing. Today that is difficult to remember. The process of coming apart was about to begin.

Chapter III
The Capital of Lawlessness

“No building permits or exemptions from building permits have been issued for the structures in the settlement of Ofrah,” says the fax. At the top is the coat of arms of the Civil Administration, the branch of the IDF that governs the West Bank. Dated August 12, 2007, it is a response to a human rights researcher’s freedom-of-information request. The five bland bureaucratic sentences on the page are a confession of complete official disregard for the law.

At the time, Ofrah had over 2,700 residents and over 500 buildings. The fax also states that the relevant Israeli authorities have never approved a town plan for Ofrah or defined its municipal area. Those are legal preconditions for issuing building permits in an Israeli settlement. The fax does not explain why those conditions have never been met. However, an army database on settlements known as the Spiegel Report, leaked in 2009, does give the reason: most of Ofrah was built “with no legal basis” on land privately owned by Palestinians. The state never acted to stop the trespassing.

Ofrah lies north of the Palestinian city of Ramallah on the mountainous spine of the West Bank. Just past the entrance gate is a boarding school for Orthodox girls, a clinic belonging to Israel’s biggest HMO, and a park where a tiny wooden bridge arches over irrigation-fed rushes. On the side streets are two-story houses faced in white stone and topped by red tile roofs. Big pines tower over the homes. Flower boxes line stone walkways. A wooden wagon wheel leans against a home in artificial rusticity.

Ofrah is the most establishment of settlements. It was the first bridgehead of Gush Emunim, the “Believers’ Bloc”—the movement of the religious right that became synonymous with the settlement effort. Its founders invented a members-only form of community that served as the model for dozens of other settlements. Its prominent residents include Yisrael Harel, founder of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza; Pinchas Wallerstein, for decades the head of the municipal authority for settlements north of Jerusalem; and Moti Sklar, director-general of the Israeli equivalent of the BBC, the Israel Broadcasting Authority.

Ofrah is also the embodiment of lawlessness. Like other Israeli settlements in occupied territory, it was built in violation of international law. It was established in 1975 without government permission, with the express goal of undermining the foreign policy of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin—but with the help of Rabin’s defense minister and rival, Shimon Peres. Its founder, Yehudah Etzion, was a leader of the Jewish terror underground that carried out attacks on Palestinians in the early 1980s. The first proposal for building private homes at Ofrah notes a minor complication: “the strange act of building without permission of the owner of the land,” which the settlers mistakenly believed to be the government of Israel. Ofrah epitomizes casual disregard for property rights and for the land-use laws of Israel’s military government in occupied territory. Yet like other settlements, it has benefited from the authorities’ support. One piece of that support is a legal system that mocks equality before the law, applying entirely separate rules to Israeli settlers and Palestinians in the same territory. Ofrah, the quintessential Israeli settlement in occupied territory, is where the state of Israel unthinkingly attacks its own foundations.

Behind this behavior lie both Israel’s particular history and a universal human trait. The trait is best described by geographer Jared Diamond in his book
Collapse
, on the causes of ecological disasters that shatter societies. “The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions,” writes Diamond, “are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.” The lessons of a heroic past, applied under new conditions, can lead to catastrophe.

Diamond gives numerous examples. Medieval Norse colonists in Greenland were initially sustained by their Norwegian way of life, including cattle raising and Christianity. Clinging to that lifestyle, they built extravagant churches, depleted their soil, ravaged their forests, failed to learn from the Inuit how to exploit local sources of food, and eventually starved to death. In modern times, Diamond writes, “Communist China’s determination not to repeat the errors of capitalism led it to scorn environmental concerns as just one more capitalist error.” White pioneers succeeded in settling Montana through a commitment to individual self-sufficiency; maintaining that commitment has stood in the way of modern Montanans’ accepting government planning to solve the environmental crisis caused by mining, logging, and ranching.

In Israel, the ideal of settling the land best demonstrates Diamond’s postulate at work. From the start of Zionism in the late nineteenth century, Jewish immigrants were intent on transforming themselves from the “scrawny” urban Jews of European stereotype into muscular farmers. Moreover, in the struggle between the Jews and Arabs for one territory, each piece of land acquired and settled by Jews was an additional stake in the whole of the land.

In the next stage, settlement became a means toward socialism, as Zionist pioneers established kibbutzim, farming communes on Jewish National Fund land. The early communes turned physical work into a secular sacrament. Their members were the elite of Labor Zionism, the Zionism of the left, which saw itself as the secular replacement for Judaism. “Only by making labor . . . our national ideal shall we . . . mend the rent between ourselves and Nature,” wrote A. D. Gordon, the Tolstoyan prophet of Deganyah, the first kibbutz.

After World War I, immigrants inspired by the Russian Revolution came with a vision of turning all of Jewish Palestine into a single commune. The United Kibbutz movement, born of this dream, aimed at creating large kibbutzim, often at the edge of towns, as an example to the rest of Jewish society. But the strategy changed after the Peel Commission report of 1937. The commission’s map for partition delineated the proposed Jewish state according to where Jews had already settled. The plan was shelved. But afterward new settlements were spread widely, in order to prevent division of the land or at least to make sure that as much as possible ended up in the Jewish share. Settlement would quietly establish facts and set borders. Each new farming community was a tent stake marking the national homestead. The Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department coordinated the entire effort. Meanwhile, a second tier of labor settlements developed—cooperative villages, or moshavim, where members sold their produce together but had family fields and houses.

During World War II, with the formation of the Palmah as a kibbutz-based guerrilla force, rural settlements took on one more role, as the foundation of a Jewish military. In the 1948 war, kibbutzim often served as frontline fortresses.

With independence and the end of the war, settlement had in fact been a source of Zionism’s “greatest triumph over adversity.” Jews had achieved self-determination. Yet rather than being seen as a means to that end, settling the land had metamorphosed into a sacred value.

Nonetheless, it was about to become irrelevant as a practical program. True, in the historical moment after statehood, new kibbutzim were quickly set up along the armistice lines. The Settlement Department, headed by Levi Eshkol, filled whole new regions with moshavim. But the country now had an army for its defense. Its borders were the result of war and of negotiations conducted by a sovereign government. Government policy would determine the extent that Israel would be or cease to be socialist. Most Jews wanted to live in cities, and academic education would serve as a more certain path to success than muscle in a modernizing economy. Only ten new kibbutzim and moshavim were set up between 1961 and the first half of 1967.

Rural settlement had served the Zionist revolution, but the revolution was over. The Six-Day War of June 1967 pulled the settlement ideal from the grave and gave it an unnatural new life.

“The war in ’67 was forced on us as a surprise. The victory was a much greater surprise,” Sini Azaryahu told me in 2003. Azaryahu was eighty-seven years old, one of the last remaining witnesses to military decision-making in Israel’s early years. In 1967 he served as bureau chief to Yisrael Galili, then officially a minister without portfolio in Levi Eshkol’s government, unofficially Eshkol’s closest adviser on defense policy. Each day Galili received the same military reports as the prime minister. Azaryahu evaluated them. “Because the victory was so total, no one believes . . . that the government of Israel thought the war would be a disaster,” Azaryahu told me.

Azaryahu’s insider telling is backed up by historian Avi Shlaim, a scholar not known for deference to the accepted Israeli narrative. “Of all the Arab-Israeli wars, the June 1967 war was the only one that neither side wanted,” writes Shlaim. In early 1967, Israeli military intelligence reports showed that despite Egypt’s anti-Israel rhetoric, the leading Arab country was unprepared for battle. Israel did not expect that its border clashes with Syria would spur Egypt to send its army into the Sinai Peninsula and close the Straits of Tiran, blockading Israel’s Red Sea port at Eilat. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser intended to “impress Arab opinion”; instead he inflamed public pressure for war. Israel’s original battle plan, essentially defensive, aimed at seizing part of the Sinai to trade it for reopening the straits. Conquests were not the objective, Shlaim writes.

When Israel launched its preemptive attack on Egypt on June 5, the government expected a one-front war. But war unleashes chaos. Defense minister Moshe Dayan ordered his generals to stop twelve miles short of the Suez Canal, but when the Egyptian army collapsed, Israeli armor rolled to the waterway. Israel’s offensive against Jordan began only after Jordanian artillery bombarded Israeli cities and bases. The objectives grew from seizing corners of the West Bank, to taking everything up to the mountain ridge, to conquering the entire West Bank. Dayan talked the cabinet out of attacking Syria. He then changed his mind, exceeded his authority, and ordered an invasion. In the midst of the fighting, northern front commander General David Elazar told Yigal Allon, now a cabinet minister, that he too had exceeded his orders, sending his troops farther forward than he was supposed to. In six days, Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Years later, Azaryahu described the resulting political dilemma. “We had no goals for the war . . . and therefore no one knew what to do with the gains of the war.” War had not been an extension of policy. The empire was an accident. A policy had to be invented after the fact.

The government of national unity set up on the war’s eve was unfit to do that. It included everyone from Mapam on the left to Menachem Begin on the right. Galili and Allon represented Ahdut Ha’avodah, the socialist party with visions of the Whole Land of Israel. Within the prime minister’s Mapai party were people representing almost every view on the future of the conquered land. It was a government of national confusion.

The paralysis went deeper than disagreements between parties. The national mood—to be precise, the mood of the Jewish majority—mixed prewar dread and postwar hubris. This did not foster calm judgment.

Proponents of keeping the land argued from security and history. The Sinai would protect Israel from Egypt, they asserted. The West Bank gave Israel strategic depth; keeping the Golan would prevent Syrian artillery from using the heights to bombard Israeli communities. As for history, Jerusalem’s Old City and its holy sites, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount, were part of the spoils. So were Hebron, Bethlehem, and a host of other places whose biblical past intoxicated secular Jews along with Orthodox ones.