Grab more hills, expand the territory

by Henry Siegman

London Review of Books
10 April 2008

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth
of the Settlements, 1967-77

by Gershom Gorenberg Lords of the Land: The War over Israel’s
Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007

by Idith Zertal

The title of Gershom Gorenberg’s book is somewhat misleading in its
suggestion that the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and
Gaza was ‘accidental’. While Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist,
notes that no Israeli government ever made a formal decision about the
future of the West Bank, his account of the first decade of Israel’s
occupation leaves no doubt that the settlements were deliberately founded,
and were intended to create a permanent Israeli presence in as much of the
Occupied Territories as possible (indeed, the hope was for them to cover all
of the Occupied Territories, if the international community would allow it).
No Israeli government has ever supported the establishment of a Palestinian
state east of the 1949 armistice line that constituted the pre-1967 border.
At the very least, the settlements were designed to make a return to that
border impossible.

It is clear from Gorenberg’s account, and from Idith Zertal and Akiva
Eldar’s comprehensive survey of the settlement project, Lords of the Land,
that the issue dividing Israeli governments has not been the presence of
settlements in the West Bank. Shimon Peres of the Labour Party played a key
role in launching the settlement enterprise. Their differences have been
over what to do with the Palestinians whose lands were being confiscated.
Most have argued they should be granted home rule and Jordanian citizenship.
Over the years, some cabinet members – Rehavam Ze’evi, Rafael Eitan, Effi
Eitam and Avigdor Lieberman, for example – have openly advocated ‘transfer’,
a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. There has been general agreement that,
rather than adopt a formal position on the future status of the West Bank’s
residents and risk provoking international opposition, Israel should
continue to create ‘facts on the ground’ while remaining discreet about
their purpose. In time, it was thought, the world would come to accept the
Jordan River as Israel’s eastern border.

These books give the lie to the carefully cultivated narrative that has
sustained the occupation. According to that narrative, the government of
Israel offered peace to the Palestinians and to its Arab neighbours in the
aftermath of the war of 1967 if they would agree to recognise the Jewish
state. But at a meeting of the Arab League in Khartoum on 1 September 1967,
the Arab world responded with ‘the three “no”s of Khartoum’: no peace, no
recognition and no negotiations. This left Israel no choice but to continue
to occupy Palestinian lands. Had Palestinians not resorted to violence in
resisting the occupation, the story goes, they would have had a state of
their own a long time ago.

The story is a lie. Israel’s military and political leaders never had any
intention of returning the West Bank and Gaza to their Arab residents. The
cabinet’s offer to withdraw from Arab land was addressed specifically to
Egypt and Syria, not to Jordan or the Palestinians in the territories. The
cabinet’s formal resolution to return the Sinai and the Golan in June 1967
said nothing about the West Bank, and referred to Gaza as ‘fully within the
territory of the state of Israel’. With only a murmur of dissent, the
cabinet, led by Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, and the then prime minister,
Levi Eshkol, committed itself to policies that would allow only local forms
of autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, an arrangement they believed would in
time allow them to establish the Jordan River as not only Israel’s security
border but as its internationally recognised political border as well.

The decision to retain control of the territories was taken days after the
end of the 1967 war, and was not a response to Palestinian terrorism, or
even to Palestinian rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. Zertal and Eldar cite
a report by Mossad officials, prepared at the request of the IDF’s
intelligence division and presented to the IDF on 14 June 1967, which found
that ‘the vast majority of West Bank leaders, including the most extreme
among them, are prepared at this time to reach a permanent peace agreement’
on the basis of ‘an independent existence of Palestine’ without an army. The
report was marked top secret, and buried.

Security was the reason offered by Israel to justify the founding of the
settlements. But the overwhelming majority of them actually created new
security problems, if only because vast military and intelligence resources
had to be diverted to their defence. The settlements have also enraged the
Palestinians, whose land has been stolen to make room for them – this, too,
has done nothing to increase Israel’s security.

Both books demonstrate in considerable detail that this was the conclusion
not only of external critics but of Israeli military and security experts as
well. Haim Bar-Lev, a former chief of staff, asserted before Israel’s
Supreme Court in 1979 that Jewish settlements in densely populated Arab
areas would make terror attacks easier, and that securing the settlements
would distract security forces ‘from essential missions’. Major General
Matityahu Peled rejected the security argument as ‘not made in good faith’,
and intended ‘for only one purpose: to give a justification for the seizure
of the land that cannot be justified in any other way’.

The most influential supporter of a vigorous settlement policy was Yigal
Allon, the legendary commander of Israel’s Palmach, an elite force
established before the founding of the state. ‘A peace treaty,’ he said at a
government meeting on 19 June 1967, ‘is the weakest guarantee of the future
of peace and the future of defence.’ Zertal and Eldar report that he warned
against returning even a single inch of the West Bank, and told the cabinet
that if he had to choose between ‘the wholeness of the land with all the
Arab population or giving up the West Bank, I am in favour of the wholeness
of the land with all the Arabs.’ Allon’s views, which shaped the strategic
thinking of Israel’s political and security elites for decades, were deeply
influenced by his mentor Yitzhak Tabenkin, one of the founders of the
Yishuv. Tabenkin believed that partition was a temporary state of affairs
and that the ‘wholeness’ of the land would eventually be achieved, whether
peacefully or through war.

Lords of the Land and The Accidental Empire reveal the massive scale of
Israel’s theft of Palestinian lands and the involvement of every part of
Israeli society in advancing the settlement enterprise in clear and
deliberate violation not only of international law but of Israel’s own laws.
Gorenberg reports that when asked by the foreign minister, Abba Eban, in
1967 about the legality of settlements, Theodor Meron, the foreign
ministry’s legal counsel, responded: ‘Civilian settlement in the
administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth
Geneva Convention.’ The prohibition, he stressed, is ‘categorical and is not
conditioned on the motives or purposes of the transfer, and is aimed at
preventing colonisation of conquered territory by citizens of the conquering
state’.

The settlements were carefully investigated in 2005 by a commission headed
by Talia Sasson, who was cynically appointed by Ariel Sharon to uncover the
illegal activities that he himself had orchestrated. Sasson found that the
settlements – illegal according to Israel’s own laws – were established with
the secret support of virtually every government ministry, the IDF and Shin
Bet. Feigning shock when Sasson presented her findings, Sharon and his
ministers promptly buried the report.

Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the
Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of
Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s
settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life
considerations, and are attracted by the heavy subsidies the government
supplies to the settlements. Some of these ‘non-ideological’ settlers are
secular Israelis, while others are members of ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities that are deeply ambivalent if not opposed to the Zionist
national enterprise. But the driving force behind the settlements is a small
religious-nationalist group, whose members are widely considered the most
savvy, well connected and effective political operators in Israel. Their
ideology combines an intense form of religious messianism with an extreme
nationalism that has far more in common with the religious and ethnocentric
nationalism of the Serbian Orthodox militias of Mladic and Karadzic than
with any Jewish values I am familiar with. That Sharon and some of his
settler friends were virtually the only politicians in the West (other than
Serbia’s Slavic supporters) who opposed military measures to prevent Serbian
ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo was not an accident.

The religious-nationalist leadership now seems to have lost much of its
authority with the far more radical younger generation born and bred in the
settlements. This new generation draws inspiration from the ‘hilltop youth’,
young people who responded to Sharon in October 1998 when, as foreign
minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, he called on settlers to ‘grab’
hilltops in the parts of the West Bank from which he and Netanyahu had
agreed to withdraw, as stipulated by the Oslo Accords. ‘Grab more hills,
expand the territory,’ Sharon urged on Israel Radio. ‘Everything that’s
grabbed will be in our hands. Everything we don’t grab will be in their
hands.’

The ‘hilltop youth’ reject the authority of the Jewish state and its
institutions. They run around in what they imagine to be biblical dress,
assaulting Palestinians, stealing and destroying their homes, crops and
orchards, occasionally beating them and every so often killing them.
Occasionally the IDF intervenes, but their efficacy is undermined by their
belief that their main job is to protect the settlers, not the population
under occupation.

David Shulman, a distinguished academic, peace activist and a member of
Ta’ayush, an organisation of Israeli Palestinians and Jews promoting
coexistence, wrote about the hilltop youth in his recent book Dark Hope:
Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine.[*] ‘Like any society,’ he writes,
Israel

has violent sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four
decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven,
complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise.
Here, in places like Chavat Maon, Itamar, Tapuach and Hebron, they have, in
effect, unfettered freedom to terrorise the local Palestinian population; to
attack, shoot, injure, sometimes kill – all in the name of the alleged
sanctity of the land and of the Jews’ exclusive right to it.

Even otherwise law-abiding Israelis see the hilltop youth as latter-day
halutzim, the Zionist pioneers who cleared malarial swamps and built the
kibbutzim.

As a result of Sharon’s dismantling of Jewish settlements in Gaza in 2005,
many young people in the religious-nationalist camp have become further
radicalised and alienated from the settler leadership. They saw the
withdrawal as a bitter and unforgivable betrayal, and found fault with their
own leaders for their failure to prevent it. They could not accept Sharon’s
argument that the removal of the Gaza settlements was unavoidable if Israel
was to hold onto Palestinian land in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.
That was the deal Bush agreed to in a letter he handed Sharon at Camp David
in 2004: in return for withdrawal, Bush stated his administration’s position
that ‘in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing
major Israeli population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the
outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to
the armistice lines of 1949.’

In a recent editorial, Ha’aretz accused not only the settlers but all of
religious Zionism of having ‘positioned itself as a movement that denies the
sovereignty of the state’:

As long as the state serves the goals of the settlements, they support it.
But the moment a contrary decision is made – on territorial withdrawals or
evacuation of outposts – this camp allows itself to break the law . . . This
is not the passing caprice of a few teens, but the metamorphosis of an
entire camp from a centre of constructive activity to a centre of
subversion.

Similar criticisms have even been expressed by members of the
religious-nationalist camp. The rabbi of Moshav Nov, Yigal Ariel, recently
published a book called Leshem Shamayim (‘For the Sake of Heaven’), which
condemns the movement for its hostility to the ‘basic rule of law’. He
accuses the settlers of becoming ‘delusional and irrational’, in danger of
‘being swept into a dark abyss of their own making’.

Lords of the Land lets no one off the hook. But in a society in which
security is a central concern, the military inevitably plays an unusually
powerful role in shaping the values of the young men and women who serve in
it for two to three years or more. Its pervasive influence poses by far the
greatest danger to Israel’s future: to its survival as a democratic state
and to the Jewish values the state was intended to embody.

Since 1967, the IDF has transformed itself into the army of the settlers, to
which abused Palestinians cannot turn for protection. The settler
leadership’s close ties with government power-brokers mean that they can
make or break the careers of the IDF’s most senior officers. The most
chilling part of Zertal and Eldar’s story is their description of how the
settler leaders intimidate IDF commanders and make them fall into line. The
most decorated soldier in the history of the IDF, Ehud Barak, Israel’s
former prime minister and currently the minister of defence in Olmert’s
government, had to eat his words after settler leaders walked out during a
speech he made when he was the head of the IDF’s Central Command in May 1987
because he used the word ‘occupation’ to describe Israel’s presence in the
West Bank. They returned to their seats only after he agreed to repeat his
talk without using that word.

While the IDF, with the help of Shin Bet, is somehow able to locate almost
every potential Palestinian terrorist in the West Bank and seems to be aware
of their most intimate conversations, they don’t often appear able to locate
Jewish settlers who have attacked innocent Palestinians, destroyed their
homes and farms, or murdered them. Most settlers’ crimes remain unsolved, as
do crimes committed by IDF soldiers. The military justice system rarely
fails to find extenuating circumstances for IDF abuses. And the few Israelis
who are found guilty receive ridiculously lenient sentences. Meanwhile, more
than ten thousand Palestinians, including women and teenagers, languish in
Israeli jails, many without having been indicted or tried for specific
crimes.

The contrast with the courts’ treatment of settlers is striking. Pinchas
Wallerstein, one of the most prominent settler leaders, fired at an Arab
youth whom he saw burning a tyre on the road. The boy, whom he shot in the
back, died. Wallerstein was sentenced to perform public service. The judge,
Ezra Hadaiya, quoted the rabbinic admonition that ‘one should not judge
one’s fellow until one is in his place.’ In 1982, a settler, Nissan
Ishegoyev, fired his Uzi machine-gun into an alley from which Palestinian
children were throwing stones, and killed a 13-year-old boy. His punishment
was three months’ public service. Between 1988 and 1992, the violent deaths
of 48 Palestinians were recorded in the Occupied Territories. In only 12 of
these cases were indictments filed against the Israeli suspects; of these,
only one resulted in a murder conviction; another ended in a conviction for
manslaughter, and six resulted in convictions for causing death through
negligence. The defendant who was convicted of murder, for which the maximum
punishment is 20 years in prison, was sentenced to three years.

The belief that people who spend some of their most impressionable years in
the IDF will return from their service with their democratic, humanitarian
and egalitarian sensibilities intact is the absurd myth underlying the IDF’s
conceit that it is the most moral army in the world. Equally absurd is the
notion that Israel has a model justice system in which Palestinians can get
fair treatment. Israelis concerned about the double standards of their
justice system have taken comfort in the enlightened rulings of Israel’s
Supreme Court. But these can no longer be counted on. Recently, in an
interim decision, the Supreme Court accepted for the first time the idea of
separate roads for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories; the Association
for Civil Rights in Israel sees the arrangement as marking the onset of
legal apartheid.

What makes the situation particularly frightening is that the senior leaders
of the IDF are increasingly settlers in the religious-nationalist camp. Many
of them are under the sway of settler rabbis, who, like their jihadi
counterparts, provide religious rulings – fatwas, in effect – inciting their
followers even to murder Israeli prime ministers if they cross the settlers’
red lines. The extent of this change in the IDF was described by Steven
Erlanger in the New York Times last December. Colonel Aharon Haliva, the
commander of Israel’s officer training school, told Erlanger that more than
a third of the volunteers in combat units now come from the religious
settler youth. ‘You don’t find them in Tel Aviv, but all over the hills of
Judea and Samaria,’ Haliva said. ‘They are the pioneers of today.’ Their
influence on their charges is profound. ‘In two months I’ll command 20
soldiers,’ one of them said to Erlanger, ‘and from them there will be maybe
two officers, and that’s another forty soldiers, and another forty families
. . . First commanders matter. The way I hold my weapon – it’s the way my
first commander held it.’

Haggai Alon, a senior official in the Ministry of Defence in Olmert’s
government when the ministry was headed by Amir Peretz, recently charged the
IDF with furthering the settlers’ agenda. Alon told Ha’aretz that the IDF
ignores the Supreme Court’s instructions about the path of the so-called
security fence, and is instead ‘setting a route that will not enable the
establishment of a Palestinian state’. Alon noted that when in 2005 James
Wolfensohn negotiated an agreement signed by Israel and the Palestinian
Authority, which was intended to ease restrictions on Palestinians
travelling in the Occupied Territories, the IDF eased them for the settlers
instead; for Palestinians, the number of checkpoints doubled. According to
Alon, the IDF is ‘carrying out an apartheid policy’ that is emptying Hebron
of Arabs and Judaising (his term) the Jordan Valley, while co-operating
openly with the settlers in an attempt to make a two-state solution
impossible.

The claim that it is only Palestinian violence and rejectionism that
compelled Israel to remain in the territories is a fabrication. As I argued
in the LRB (16 August 2007), the assiduously promoted story of Israel’s
pursuit of peace and its search for a Palestinian ‘partner for peace’ was
fashioned to buy time to establish ‘facts on the ground’: settlements that
would so completely shatter the territorial and demographic contiguity and
integrity of Palestinian land and life as to make the establishment of a
Palestinian state impossible. In this, Israel’s leaders have succeeded so
well that Olmert, who claims finally to have realised that without a
two-state solution Israel will become an apartheid entity that cannot
survive, has not been able to implement even the smallest of the changes he
promised in Annapolis. The expansion of the settlements and of a Jews-only
highway system in the West Bank continues without interruption. The price
that Israel and Jews everywhere – not to speak of the Palestinian people –
may yet have to pay for this ‘success’ is painful to contemplate.


Henry Siegman is director of the US/Middle East Project and a research
professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme at SOAS. He was a
senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006.