The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (7 page)

For yeshivah student and paratrooper Hanan Porat, a very specific prophecy was coming true. When men from his unit sacked a kiosk in East Jerusalem, Porat stole postcards of West Bank towns and mailed them to his yeshivah, Merkaz Harav. “You remember, gentlemen, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah’s words—Shekhem, Hebron…” he wrote. “Here they are before you.” At the yeshivah, the cards were posted prominently.
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Military advances were outpacing plans elsewhere as well. At the beginning of the West Bank offensive, Allon later recalled, Dayan sought only to “correct the line near Jenin to move the Jordanians out of artillery range.” Allon, who by his own description “still held to the idea of the Whole Land of Israel,” argued that with the same effort, the IDF could seize the entire West Bank.
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Dayan, it seems, was easy to convince; he described the West Bank as “part of the flesh and bones—indeed the very spirit—of the Land of Israel,” and instantly related each landmark to a biblical story.
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Initially, the cabinet approved conquering only the high ground that forms the West Bank’s spine, running south from Jenin, Nablus, and Ramallah through Jerusalem and on to Bethlehem and Hebron, but as the Jordanian army cracked, the IDF rolled forward all the way to the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, taking the entire West Bank.
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In Jerusalem, Haim Gouri’s radio squawked orders from the battalion chief to head north, to newly conquered Ramallah. Gouri found himself in a long convoy of jeeps and trucks. In the northern Jerusalem suburb of Shuafat, home of the city’s wealthy Arabs, white flags fluttered from the roofs of mansions. Stores along the high road gaped open, already looted. A new model Buick, bullet-perforated, stood before a stately two-story house, from whose grated window a face peeked, isolated testimony that the residents actually existed. And then on the road: a lone Arab woman, in her thirties, wearing a white head scarf and a black village dress embroidered with blue and crimson, “straight-backed and lovely and petrified,” Gouri wrote, “lips tight, watching,” as if posted there to remind the eternally conflicted poet that there were people in his beloved countryside.
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On the southern front, too, chaos shared command. Dayan had planned to stay out of the Gaza Strip, with its teeming refugee camps, but when Egyptian-sponsored Palestinian units opened fire on Israeli communities on the Gaza border, Chief of Staff Rabin ordered troops in. In the Sinai, field commanders ignored Dayan’s orders to stop twelve miles short of the Suez Canal, reaching the waterway as they chased the shattered Egyptian army—and a share of glory equal to those who had taken Jerusalem.
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But tank commander Kobi Rabinovich wrote from the canal’s bank that he had found horror there, rather than glory. “We turned this peninsula into a valley of slaughter, one big graveyard,” the kibbutz reservist told his girlfriend. “Unarmed men, captives with raised hands, were killed in violation of orders. In war you destroy weapons and those who hold them, but I’ve seen too many murders even to cry,” he said, begging her to believe that he had “remained a human being, unstained.”
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That letter was written on Saturday morning, June 10. By then, the war’s final unplanned campaign was under way on the northern front. Syria’s artillery had begun pounding Israeli border communities the first afternoon of the war, but Dayan did not want the burden of opening a third front and feared attacking the Soviet Union’s closest ally in the region. In the bomb shelters of kibbutzim along the border, though, members desperately wanted the IDF to push the Syrians back. They had an ally in General David (Dado) Elazar, an ex-Palmah man who headed the army’s Northern Command—and another in his friend and former commander, Yigal Allon. Allon’s own home, Kibbutz Ginnosar, looked across the Sea of Galilee at the Syrian heights. But beyond that, as he later explained, Allon harbored a dream of Israel redrawing the Mideast map by thrusting over fifty miles to the Syrian city of Suweida. Once there, it would help the Druse religious minority that dominated the area to secede from Syria and establish an Israeli-allied Druse republic, “constituting a buffer state between Syria, Jordan and Israel…. That was my obsession.”
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When representatives of the border kibbutzim contacted Allon, he arranged for them to meet Eshkol on June 9, drilled them on what to say, and joined the session himself. Convinced of the need to seize the border area (even if he was not swept up in Allon’s dream), Eshkol took the extraordinary step of bringing the kibbutz leaders to a meeting that night of his war cabinet. But Dayan spoke adamantly against attacking Syria, and the ministers postponed a decision.
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Yet early the next morning, ignoring the limits on his authority, the utterly erratic Dayan ordered General Elazar to invade Syria. Only after the troops were moving did Dayan inform Eshkol. For his part, Allon spoke directly to Elazar, urging him to rush forward. “I shouted at Dado, ‘Why don’t you grab the chain of hills?’” Allon would recount, referring to the approaches to the Syrian town of Quneitrah. “He said, ‘Listen, I’ve already grabbed more than they allowed me to.’”
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In the chain of command, all links were undone. Meanwhile, as the IDF broke Syrian defenses and rushed forward, Syrian civilians—except for the Druse minority—fled eastward.

IN THE MIDST
of the fighting, the first proposals were born for the aftermath. At Military Intelligence’s research department, Colonel Shlomo Gazit and his staff completed a document that called for a near-complete Israeli pullback to the prewar lines in return for full, formal peace agreements. Gazit’s paper also proposed establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The paper was sent to Dayan, Rabin, and other top military figures on June 9. None responded.
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The same day, two Israeli officers met in Ramallah with Aziz Shehadeh—an Arab refugee from Jaffa who was a prominent lawyer and opponent of King Hussein’s regime. Shehadeh quickly formulated his own proposal for a Palestinian state that would sign a peace agreement with Israel and passed it on to the Israelis—and also got no response. Shehadeh’s sixteen-year-old son, Raja, raised on memories of the lost paradise of pre-1948 Arab Jaffa, with its beach and nightlife and affluence and scent of orange groves, typed the document for him. But what stuck in the teenager’s memory that week was the shock of defeat, and his first sight on a Ramallah street of an Israeli soldier, barely older than himself, chest hair showing from his half-unbuttoned shirt, carrying a long rifle, someone “who had trained as a soldier and fought a war against us and won. And what had I been doing? A few marching exercises…. I felt more ashamed than I had ever felt in my life,” he wrote years later, touching an issue beyond the reach of his father’s paper. “But worse…I felt my manhood compromised.”
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On that day as well, Allon shocked two of his old Palmah brigade commanders with his own gestating ideas. Allon picked up the two men, members of northern kibbutzim, for a jeep trip into the Syrian heights, following the advancing Israeli troops. Beforehand, by Allon’s testimony, he had already toured the West Bank by helicopter and jeep, and what he saw defied his expectations: Though some of the residents were fleeing across the Jordan, “most were staying put…which hadn’t happened in 1948.” He saw that annexing the entire West Bank—as he and his party had long advocated—would shift the balance of Jews and Arabs in Israel and make it a binational state. He needed a compromise between old commitment and new facts.

So on the road into the heights, when one of his old comrades turned to him and said, “Nu, Yigal, the Whole Land of Israel at last!” Allon answered, “Right. But I have second thoughts about implementing that.” Then he began describing a plan for holding much of the West Bank, what he saw as strategically essential, while giving up the mountain ridge where most of the Arabs lived. For Allon’s friends, this was heresy from the prophet, at the very moment of fulfillment.
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ON SATURDAY, JUNE
10, as nightfall approached, the fighting guttered out in response to a United Nations call for a cease-fire. Quneitrah, now a ghost town, fell that day.

It was less than a week since Israelis had feared a new Holocaust. Measured by the original goal of defense, Israel’s victory was complete. The armies that had loomed on its borders were in ruins. Measured in tactical terms—battles won, land gained—the Israeli success was stunning, as was the Arab humiliation. It was in those terms that Israelis, Arabs, and the watching world responded.

Yet during the war, “friction” and appetite overwhelmed strategic plans. Accidentally, Israel had acquired an empire. It was a shirt-pocket empire, to be sure, less than 3 percent the size of France’s recently relinquished Algerian lands or Belgium’s former holdings in the Congo. But the territory conquered, 26,000 square miles, was still more than three times the size of Israel itself on June 4, 1967. With 2.7 million citizens, most of them Jews, Israel occupied land that was home to an estimated 1.1 million Arab noncitizens.
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Now, after the fact, the purpose of conquest would have to be defined. A meaning needed to be found.

As night fell, searchlights lit up a warren of buildings next to the Western Wall. The Jewish Sabbath was ending. In the north, on the Syrian front, the cease-fire was at last taking hold. In Jerusalem’s Old City, the work of demolishing the Mughrabi Quarter was beginning.

A public lavatory that leaned up against the Wall came down first, by one version of events that night. A group of twenty or so gray-haired Jerusalem contractors, available because they were overage even for the Israeli military reserves, knocked it down with sledgehammers. Teddy Kollek, the Israeli mayor of West Jerusalem, who had no official jurisdiction in the east city, had recruited them to create a wide plaza in front of the Wall. The work went slowly, the army brought bulldozers, and the contractors proceeded to level the rest of the neighborhood, home to 135 Arab families. (By another account, army engineers operated the bulldozers.) When Colonel Shlomo Lahat, the military governor of East Jerusalem, showed up in the morning, he found most of the contractors drunk “on wine and joy.”

The families were given a few minutes to leave their homes. By one telling, based largely on testimony from Lieutenant Colonel Ya’akov Salman, the deputy military governor, who commanded the operation, the hapless residents initially refused to leave. Salman ordered an Engineering Corps officer to begin the demolition. A bulldozer struck a house, which collapsed on its inhabitants. Medics rushed to treat the wounded, and residents poured out of the remaining buildings to waiting buses, which took them to abandoned homes elsewhere in East Jerusalem.

“The order to evacuate the neighborhood was one of the hardest in my life,” Salman later said. “When you order, ‘Fire!’ [in battle], you’re an automaton. Here you had to give an order knowing you are likely to hurt innocent people.” A semiconscious old woman, Hajja Rasmia Tabaki, was pulled from one half-destroyed house and died in the course of the night.

One reason for multiple versions of what happened is that participants sought to avoid creating a paper trail. Ironically, that allowed key figures to make conflicting claims to what they regarded as credit for the operation.

One claimant is Lahat, who had been the deputy head of the Armored Corps until shortly before the war. German-born, impeccably groomed, Lahat stood out as a stickler for discipline among his relaxed fellow officers. In South America on a fund-raising tour for Israel when the fighting began, Lahat rushed to New York, boarded a flight with Israeli officers headed home, and reported for duty at the command center in Tel Aviv at 4
A.M
. on June 7. “Where have you been?” Moshe Dayan greeted him. “We’re about to conquer Jerusalem, and I need a tough military governor.” The defense minister feared Israelis would take revenge on Arabs for the brutal fighting of 1948, and wanted “someone prepared to shoot Jews if need be.”

After the conquest, in a meeting that included Dayan, Lahat, Mayor Kollek, and Central Command chief Narkiss, the decision was made to keep East Jerusalem closed off until the Jewish holiday of Shavuot the following week, when Israelis would be allowed to visit the Western Wall. In Lahat’s telling, he pointed out that when crowds crushed into the constrained courtyard at the holy site, “we’ll have more losses than in the war,” and suggested widening the open area. Dayan, he says, approved.

Kollek, in his memoirs, says it was his idea: “Do it now; it may be impossible later, and it
must
be done.” He, too, says Dayan agreed. At a city council session in the midst of the war, Kollek called for officially uniting East and West Jerusalem. In a meeting with Prime Minister Eshkol, he laid out an $80 million reconstruction plan for Jerusalem, including settling Jews in the Old City. But he did not wait for formal declarations to act. East Jerusalem was hooked to the west city’s water pipes; Kollek’s officials saw to burial of Arab corpses, and the mayor found contractors to erase a neighborhood.

Salman, a forty-year-old lieutenant colonel in the reserves, had also flown back from America hoping to fight. A battlefield commander in 1948 known for his daring, in civilian life he had become a deputy director-general at the Finance Ministry, one of the army of managers who wore their curly hair combed back and their white shirts open at the collar, the lack of a tie indicating membership in the socialist ruling class. In his telling, he was the one who pointed out the courtyard’s limits to Dayan. The defense minister made it clear that it was up to Salman to solve the problem, and quickly.

When General Narkiss came to see the work on Sunday morning, June 11, he commented to Salman, “Yankele, the Wall has vanished.” That was a trick of perspective. Before, visitors to the courtyard had to gaze upward to see the top of the stones. Now, seen at eye-level across a field of rubble, the Wall no longer pushed a person’s gaze heavenward. But when Eshkol phoned the general to ask why and where houses were being demolished, Narkiss feigned ignorance, promising to “look into it.” Afterward, he got orders to investigate who was responsible. Salman received a call from Dayan. “I don’t need to tell you who’s out to get me in the government and how much joy it will bring them if everything leads to me,” the defense minister said. Salman, aware he could face legal trouble for violating the Fourth Geneva Convention on rule of occupied territory, had armed himself in advance with documents from East Jerusalem City Hall showing that the Mughrabi Quarter suffered from poor sanitary conditions and that the Arab municipality eventually wanted it evacuated. But the investigation led nowhere. When Shavuot came on June 14, an estimated 200,000 Israelis visited the Western Wall.
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The razing of the Mughrabi Quarter took place in a twilight time, between war and the first formal government discussions of postwar policy. It fit a wartime pattern: actions of great consequence, taken by Dayan or those beneath him, without authorization, improvised to fit the moment’s demands as they saw them, borne on euphoria. Yet in this case, no battle had been fought. The military exploited its rule of occupied territory, to the clear benefit of Israeli citizens over the occupied population.

The bulldozers set a precedent. Top officers and officials joined with private citizens, acting not in line with government policy but in order to set it. The dusty plaza carved out before the Wall stated ownership over the Old City. The action fit the pre-state strategy of the Zionist left, which believed in speaking softly and “creating facts”: using faits accomplis to determine the political future of disputed land. It fit as well what Israeli political scientist Ehud Sprinzak described as an ethic of “illegalism” rooted in the pre-state conflict between Zionists and foreign rulers: Laws were a weapon used against Jews, and breaking the law for the sake of ideals was proof of true dedication.
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Israel’s early years saw a painful passage, as rebels became leaders, from the old underground values toward the new authority of the state, of democratic decisions, and of the rule of law. Now, though, officials were defying the laws of the country they served, in the name of their duty to that country. In the process, they marked out the occupied land as a reserve belonging to a different time, before 1948—except that now Jews would play the role both of government and rebels. Before ministers sat down at the cabinet table, a paradigm had been created.

OTHER WALLS
, too, were falling the morning after the war. “On way to Old City, I noted workmen with heavy equipment removing concrete baffles on side street adjoining Fast Hotel,” the American consul-general in Jerusalem, Evan Wilson, cabled Washington, referring to the downtown alleyways that dead-ended in fortifications at the Green Line. Wilson, an old Mideast hand, was pleased: No longer would he have to detour through an inconvenient border crossing to get between his offices in East and West Jerusalem—run as a single consulate because the United States did not recognize Israeli or Jordanian claims, but only the 1947 U.N. designation of Jerusalem as an international city. Wilson was less happy to hear from a staffer that earth-moving gear was rolling into town from the Qalandiya airport to the north—equipment apparently left by American contractors working at the Jordanian airfield until war broke out. The spoils, it appeared, included a Caterpillar tractor he had seen at work, an inadvertent U.S. contribution to creating facts.
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While the tractors worked, the cabinet convened for its first discussion of the new realities. Regarding the newly conquered land, Eshkol was even more passionately conflicted than usual. At a Mapai meeting during the war, he expressed “great desire” to keep the Gaza Strip, “perhaps because of Samson and Delilah,” but more so because it would remove the strategic danger of an “Egyptian finger” stuck into Israel. In the next breath he described the Strip as “a rose with lots of thorns,” because of its large Arab population. “Who has counted the dust of Ishmael?” he said, playing ironically on a biblical verse about Israelite numbers.
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Including the West Bank as well as Gaza, Israel had just gained over a million Arabs, and while the Jewish birthrate was low, the Arab rate was high. Yet he implied he also wanted to keep the West Bank. “We’ll have to devote some thought to the question of how we’ll live in this land without giving up what we’ve conquered and how we’ll live with that number of non-Jews,” Eshkol said.
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With that, the prime minister succinctly introduced both sides of the debate that would henceforth define Israeli politics—but offered no solutions.

But Eshkol did know that he wanted to annex East Jerusalem and reunite the city. Before the cabinet session, he began lining up support among ministers, who shared his fear that Israel would very soon face international—most important, American—demands to pull back to the June 4 lines. Opposition to Israeli rule of the Old City would be particularly strong because of its Christian and Muslim holy places. Eshkol’s answer was to act quickly, to make the east city part of Israel before anyone said not to—that is, to create a fact.

In the cabinet debate, several ministers objected. Two represented Mapam, the political party of the Hashomer Hatza’ir movement, at the left edge of Zionism. The party had given up advocating a binational state after Israel’s establishment, and later ended its support for Moscow. But it remained determinedly dovish, and its leaders worried that annexation would block chances for peace. Education Minister Zalman Aran of Eshkol’s own Mapai party reminded his colleagues that in 1956, Ben-Gurion had proclaimed that Israel would never retreat from Sinai, only to fold under U.S. pressure. “I’m concerned about a Knesset decision that ‘we won’t budge’ and then there will be pressure and we’ll give in,” Aran warned. “A Knesset declaration annexing Jerusalem followed by a withdrawal will be a disaster.”
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The majority, though, agreed with Eshkol and argued only over the method. Rightist leader Menachem Begin, who loved grand rhetoric, wanted a law proclaiming all of Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital. He objected to “annexation” as implying that Israel was taking land to which it did not have rights. The National Religious Party’s leader, Haim Moshe Shapira, on the other hand, suggested avoiding any legislation, which would attract world attention. As interior minister, responsible for local government, he would simply decree a change in Jerusalem’s city limits.
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The idea contained a contradiction: The very point of annexation was to tell the world that even if Israel had to retreat elsewhere, it would not give up East Jerusalem. Shapira proposed a ringing statement, issued in a whisper.

That fit the contradictory desires of most of his colleagues. The cabinet assigned a committee of its members, headed by the justice minister, to engineer the precise legal device for enlarging the city. Dayan, a panel member, turned over the job of drawing the new city limits to the army’s deputy operations chief, General Rehavam Ze’evi, a flamboyant warrior whose thin face and eyeglasses had earned him the incongruous nickname “Gandhi.” Though the impetus was the historic Jewish tie to the walled Old City and uniting the two halves of Jerusalem, no one considered annexing only the area within the walls, or the slightly larger territory within the Jordanian city limits.

Dayan’s guidelines to Ze’evi called for taking the Qalandiya airfield and reclaiming real estate that Jews had owned before statehood. That included Neveh Ya’akov and Atarot, Jewish farming communities to the city’s north, whose residents had fled during the 1948 fighting. As one Israeli researcher notes, there was an “almost mystical attraction to redeeming Jewish-owned land.”
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Victory brought with it not only the right but even the obligation of return. Ze’evi was also told to include Mount Scopus, strategic ridges, sites with Jewish historical significance, and land for future urban development—and as far as possible to avoid adding Arab suburbs and villages.
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Decisions about the contested city would be first political and military, and only afterward—if at all—a matter of urban planning.

Ze’evi worked hastily. Like others in the army’s general staff and in the cabinet, he was also haunted by the Sinai war of 1956. Most drew the opposite lesson from Zalman Aran; by preemptive annexation, they believed, Israel could hold at least some land this time.
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And if it had to pull back from the rest, it would insist on much more in return than American or U.N. assurances.

“There are constant references and comparisons to 1956,” wrote White House special counsel Harry McPherson, in a cable from Tel Aviv. McPherson, a thirty-eight-year-old Texan jack-of-all-policy-trades for President Johnson, had arrived in Israel hours before the fighting began, and sent a detailed report just hours after it ended. “The Israelis do not intend to repeat the same scenario—to withdraw within their boundaries with only paper guarantees that fall apart at the touch of Arab hands,” he warned. “We would have to push them back by military force, in my opinion, to accomplish a repeat of 1956; the cut-off of aid would not do it.”