The Unmaking of Israel (8 page)

Against the celebration of conquest stood sobering concerns. America had committed itself before the war to the “territorial integrity” of all Middle Eastern countries, and wanted Israel to cooperate in a diplomatic solution. If the Arab countries were sufficiently eager to get their land back, they might sign peace treaties with Israel in return for a withdrawal.

Most important was the problem of Israel’s own character. In 1967, Israel had a population of 2.7 million people, of whom 400,000 were Arabs. Annexing the West Bank and Gaza would add another 1.1 million Arabs, and the Arab birth rate was higher. If Israel remained a democracy, how long would it be a Jewish state?

Eshkol’s government did reach a quick consensus to annex East Jerusalem. The city’s emotional resonance overwhelmed other concerns. The area added to the state was much larger than the Jordanian municipality of Jerusalem. Among other things, it took in the former sites of Atarot and Neveh Ya’akov, Jewish farming villages north of the city that had fallen in 1948. Arabs in the annexed land were granted the status of permanent residents of Israel, but not citizenship. According to the Israeli journalist Uzi Benziman, a cabinet committee concluded that international law forbade imposing one country’s citizenship on another’s citizens. Concern for international law was selective. It prevented annexing East Jerusalem’s residents to the Israeli electorate; it did not prevent annexing the land.

A week after the war, on June 19, 1967, the cabinet also agreed on a message to Washington that Israel would offer Egypt and Syria “a full peace treaty on the basis of the international border and Israel’s security needs.” That suggested a nearly complete withdrawal. By October 1968, however, the government disavowed that offer, insisting that Israel must retain a strip of the Sinai to protect the straits.

As for the West Bank, the government failed to set any policy. Eshkol was fond of saying that in the war, “we got a lovely dowry. The trouble is that with the dowry comes the bride.” Politicians quickly proposed ways to keep the dowry without the bride.

In the June 1967 cabinet debate, Dayan argued for “self-government [by] the residents of the West Bank, with Israel responsible for defense and foreign policy.” The residents, he stressed, “will not be citizens of Israel.” Yigal Allon’s proposal eventually became best known publicly. The Allon Plan called for annexing the lightly populated lowlands along the Jordan River, which Allon saw as vital for defense. Hebron and Bethlehem might also be annexed. North of Jerusalem, the heavily populated mountain ridge and its western slopes would be an enclave under “self-rule” or even a Palestinian state. Later Allon decided that the enclave should be given to Jordan. In any case, Israel would keep much of the land and few of the people.

Others suggested holding the land and figuring out later what to do about the people. “For the interim, military government will continue, along with a search for a constructive solution,” Galili proposed in the June cabinet meeting. Menachem Begin agreed. In the end, the government decided not to decide. In practical terms, that was the same as accepting Galili and Begin’s position.

One did not need prophecy to know this would be disastrous. Clear-sightedness was enough. In the cabinet debate, justice minister Ya’akov Shimshon Shapira warned that were Dayan’s ideas adopted, “every progressive person will rise against us and say . . . ‘They want to turn the West Bank . . . into an Israeli colony.’ ” The only acceptable way to keep the West Bank was to annex it, in which case Jews would eventually become a minority. Annexation, Shapira argued, meant that “we’re done with the Zionist enterprise.” In the public arena, philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel tried to maintain its rule over another people, “the corruption characteristic of every colonial regime will also prevail in the State of Israel.”

In 1968 Mapai, Ahdut Ha’avodah, and Dayan’s Rafi party merged to form the Labor Party. Only in 1972 did Labor’s governing secretariat get around to discussing the future of the occupied terrritories. Veteran finance minister Pinhas Sapir told fellow members that expecting West Bank Arabs to accept an improved living standard without equal rights would put Israel in a class with “countries whose names I don’t even want to say in the same breath.” That debate, too, ended without policy decisions. Labor leaders were more interested in avoiding a split in the party than in reaching a coherent position.

Despite the principle of Israeli politics that all members of the cabinet are collectively responsible for government actions, neither Shapira nor Sapir resigned. So they shared responsibility for an act of immense symbolism taken by Allon in October 1967. Allon was minister of labor. His ministry included the Survey Department, which produced virtually all the country’s maps. Henceforth, Allon instructed the department chief, the only boundaries of Israel on maps would be the June cease-fire lines. “The mandatory borders and the armistice lines”—the prewar boundaries—“will not be printed.”

Note this well: the mandatory border and the Green Line were the closest thing Israel had to an internationally recognized border. Except in annexed East Jerusalem, they still delineated the territory in which Israel itself said that its laws and sovereignty applied. Yet Allon’s memo removed from the map one of the defining characteristics of a modern state and especially of a democracy—its borders. In official Hebrew, meanwhile, places got new names. The West Bank was known henceforth by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, Judea being the southern half, Samaria the northern half.

The future of the occupied territories was already the single most important political issue in Israel, but maps no longer showed where occupied territory began. Bored schoolchildren staring at the map on the classroom wall would not learn the shape of their own country. Tel Aviv and Hebron would appear to be part of the same entity. Nearly forty years later, a study conducted among students at Hebrew University, Israel’s top academic institution, found that only 37 percent could draw the approximate line between Israel and the West Bank. They had grown up in a country that treated its border the way Victorians treated sex. The border shaped society, but portraying it was simply not done.

While the change in maps was symbolic, settlements would physically blur the country’s border. Before describing how that happened, I should dispose of several myths. The standard Israeli telling is that settlement in the occupied territories began with religious extremists imposing their will on pragmatic Labor leaders. That story is mistaken. Nor did the secular right, led by Menachem Begin, play any measurable role in starting the settlement process—though Begin escalated it once he took power in 1977.

Abroad, defenders of Israeli policy sometimes describe settlements as mere bargaining chips, intended to last only till Arabs agreed to make peace. This is pure fiction. On the other hand, Israel’s critics cite settlement as proof of a deliberate Israeli policy of conquest and colonization. As we’ve seen, though, the conquest was unplanned, and the government could not articulate a clear policy in its wake.

What actually happened is this: the policy vacuum allowed a cultural disposition to take control. Settlement was a Zionist value, especially a Labor Zionist value. Now there was new land to settle. Time had rolled backward; partition had never happened. Pioneers could again set borders for the Jewish state before negotiations began. They would act like members of a movement again—but a movement with the power of a state behind it.

The initiative to start settling came mainly from Labor politicians, officials, and activists. At first, religious Zionists were junior partners. Labor governments approved new settlements on a piecemeal basis. The map of what they expected Israel to keep was drawn one fact at a time. The spread of settlements roughly fit the Allon Plan. Cabinet ministers who wanted Israel to keep a maximum amount of territory were satisfied to see new settlements; those opposed to permanent rule over the Palestinians could live with settlements in lightly populated areas. Labor governments never formally approved the Allon Plan or any other coherent strategy. But indecision allowed pro-settlement ministers—led by Allon, Galili, Dayan, and Dayan’s successor as defense minister, Shimon Peres—to pursue creeping expansion. Tension between Labor and Orthodox activists began in earnest only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the religious settlers feared that the government might return a piece of the West Bank to Jordan.

By the time Begin came to power as head of the Likud, an alliance of the right, the internal Israeli argument was over
where
to settle, not
whether
to. Labor had provided legitimacy for settlement and a solid start. Begin, however, did not share Labor’s hesitations or its nostalgia for rural, socialist communities. His belief that Israel must rule the Whole Land of Israel had not changed since his underground days. The Likud built large suburbs and small exurban bedroom communities, offering massive subsidies to attract settlers. As head of the Ministerial Settlement Committee, Ariel Sharon took a major role in drawing the map of new settlement, aimed at driving wedges between Palestinian towns and preventing the emergence of a contiguous Palestinian state. “The intent was for there to be facts before any peace negotations . . . with the idea that wherever we were living [the territory would remain ours]. Just like in the War of Independence, when most of the places where Jews lived ended up on the Jewish side,” explained attorney Plia Albeck, head of the Civil Division of the State Attorney’s Office, who attended every meeting of the committee under Sharon.

And each stage in the process further eroded the rule of law, among other basic principles of democracy.

The first settlement in occupied territory was a kibbutz established in the Golan Heights in mid-July 1967, less than a month after the government told Washington it was willing to retreat from the heights. The organizers were members of Galilee kibbutzim, disciples of the United Kibbutz movement’s octogenarian ideologue, Yitzhak Tabenkin. They wanted the Golan to stay in Israeli hands to keep Syrian artillery from returning to the area. Tabenkin’s view that the Golan was part of the Whole Land of Israel also influenced them. So did the chance to act like pre-state pioneers and stake a claim to the land through direct action.

Though settling in the Golan defied the government policy at that moment, the new kibbutz received top-level support. Civilians needed military permits to enter the Golan. General Elazar, head of the IDF’s Northern Command, issued them to the settlers, again exceeding his authority. He also allowed them to stay in an abandoned Syrian army base, and sent soldiers to guard them. The Jewish Agency Settlement Department provided supplies, funneling the help through the Upper Galilee Regional Council—a kind of county government—to hide its actions. Labor Minister Allon funded the settlement—by fraudulently diverting money from a budget for creating jobs for the unemployed.

(As a pre-state administration, the Jewish Agency should have been dissolved in 1948. Instead, it kept operating as a quasi-governmental body. Unlike the state, it could accept donations from American Jews. Soon after the war, the job of handling rural settlement activity in the occupied territories was transferred to a newly established Settlement Division in the World Zionist Organization for fear of endangering the tax-exempt status of donations to the Jewish Agency in the United States. The Settlement Division received its budget from the Israeli government.)

The Golan settlement set several precedents. Individuals sought to set foreign and defense policy, preempting the government. Some of those individuals played two roles: they starred as high government officials, and as rebels. As in pre-state days, the cause took precedence over the law. Yet the government was no longer a foreign regime; the laws were no longer decreed by outsiders. As rebels, they were defying the state they had created.

Allon exemplified this contradiction. The following spring, he encouraged a group of Orthodox activists, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, to settle in Hebron without government permission, then quickly paid them a ministerial visit. While returning to Jerusalem, he stopped at the previously established West Bank settlement of Kfar Etzion, where he suggested to Hanan Porat, the central figure in the community, that he lend guns to the Hebron settlers. Porat answered that Kfar Etzion members had received their guns from the IDF, and signed for them personally.

“In the time of the Palmah, we knew to do things like this,” Allon said, meaning outside the law. Porat sent the guns. Neither he nor Porat noticed that the era of an underground rebel army was past.

When Porat, Levinger, and other religious activists formed Gush Emunim in 1974, they followed the example of the secular Golan settlers: they saw themselves as heirs of pre-state Zionist pioneers, shaping the future borders of the Jewish state. Yet the Jewish state existed, and they were violating its laws. They, too, had help from the highest levels of government—particularly from Defense Minister Peres, the most prominent advocate in Labor for settling throughout the West Bank.

Ofrah’s founders—led by Yehudah Etzion—moved into an abandoned Jordanian army base next to the Palestinian village of Ein Yabrud in April 1975. They claimed they were creating a temporary “work camp,” a place to spend their nights, while subcontracting to build a fence around a new Israeli base. Though Yitzhak Rabin’s government favored settlement, it barred settling on the mountain ridge north of Jerusalem. Legally, establishing a new settlement required the approval of a ministerial committee. But Peres secured Rabin’s permission for the original twenty-four “workers” to “lodge” at the abandoned base, on the strict condition that the number did not increase and that the camp did not become a settlement. Peres’s office files—kept classified until 2007—show he received regular reports that more settlers were moving in with their children and refurbishing the Jordanian buildings. In December 1975, Peres approved connecting the “work camp” to the Israeli electricity grid. Like Allon, Peres was happy playing two roles—a minister sworn to uphold the country’s laws, and a rebel ignoring them in the name of the obsolete value of settlement.