Evan R. Goldstein: What happened to the pragmatism that marked early Israeli leaders?
[Evan Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle Review, the magazine of ideas published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. ]
Immediately following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, a contingent of Mossad agents fanned out across the West Bank to meet with members of the Palestinian elite. A few days earlier, the Israeli army had entered the area and occupied villages and towns. The agents were charged with taking the temperature of the Palestinian body politic and recommending what Israel should do with the territories that had fallen under its control.
On June 14, they submitted their classified report to the head of Military Intelligence. It argued that an independent Palestinian state should be established as quickly as possible in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, "under the auspices" of the Israel Defense Forces and "in agreement with the Palestinian leadership." They suggested that the borders of the Palestinian state be based on the 1949 armistice lines that had served as the border until earlier that month, with some minor adjustments. "In order to enable an honorable agreement," the document continued, Israel should "take upon itself the initiative to solve the [refugee] problem once and for all" by organizing an international effort to resettle them in the new Palestinian state. It is not known whether prime minister Levi Eshkol was privy to those recommendations when he announced on June 19 that "as an interim stage, a military situation will remain in the West Bank."
Almost immediately, the terms of debate about the territories began to change. "Every clod of earth, every square cubit, every region and piece of land that belongs to the Lord's land - is it within our powers to relinquish even a single millimeter of them?" Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook famously asked in 1967. For him, and his legions of followers, the answer was an emphatic "no."
By late September, Hanan Porat, then a young yeshiva student (later a settler leader and Knesset member), led a small convoy to the southern West Bank. That evening, construction began on the first settlement in the occupied territories: Kfar Etzion, the site of a Jewish community that had been overrun by Arab forces during a fierce battle in Israel's War of Independence two decades earlier. His provocative gambit was met with a wink and a nod from government officials, a disastrous precedent that would be repeated again and again in the coming decades. Around the same time, senior members of the government and influential public intellectuals began referring to the "liberation" of territories that were so profoundly a part of Israel's heritage. And before the year was out, the army had issued an order stating that "the term Judea and Samaria area will be identical for all purposes ... to the term West Bank area." Thus - subtly and gradually - the idea that the serendipitous result of the war was now irreversible began to enter the bloodstream of Israeli politics. The issue of the settlements migrated from the realm of the strictly political to the metaphysical; from the strategic to the religious; from the resolvable to the intractable.
The lure of cheap housing
At present, more than 275,000 Jews are entrenched in the West Bank. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population grew by 5.45 percent during the first half of 2007 - many of them lured by affordable housing rather than theology. As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday, it must confront the fact that two-thirds of its history has been spent as an occupying power. The cost - measured in terms of lives needlessly lost, damage to Palestinian human rights, wasted money and Israel's deeply tarnished global reputation - has been staggering. How did this happen? How did the cool pragmatism that guided Israel through the existential chaos of 1948 succumb to a catastrophic burst of messianic excitement following the Six-Day War? And is it too late to turn back the clock?
In "Lords of the Land," Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar begin to provide some answers to those questions. The book, first published in Hebrew three years ago, is passionate and richly detailed, and a heroic feat of research and synthesis. Zertal, who teaches at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, and Eldar, a columnist for this newspaper, make plain what has long been suspected but rarely so explicitly and thoroughly substantiated: The settlement enterprise has been consistently aided and abetted by all the institutions of the Israeli state....
Read entire article at Haaretz
Immediately following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, a contingent of Mossad agents fanned out across the West Bank to meet with members of the Palestinian elite. A few days earlier, the Israeli army had entered the area and occupied villages and towns. The agents were charged with taking the temperature of the Palestinian body politic and recommending what Israel should do with the territories that had fallen under its control.
On June 14, they submitted their classified report to the head of Military Intelligence. It argued that an independent Palestinian state should be established as quickly as possible in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, "under the auspices" of the Israel Defense Forces and "in agreement with the Palestinian leadership." They suggested that the borders of the Palestinian state be based on the 1949 armistice lines that had served as the border until earlier that month, with some minor adjustments. "In order to enable an honorable agreement," the document continued, Israel should "take upon itself the initiative to solve the [refugee] problem once and for all" by organizing an international effort to resettle them in the new Palestinian state. It is not known whether prime minister Levi Eshkol was privy to those recommendations when he announced on June 19 that "as an interim stage, a military situation will remain in the West Bank."
Almost immediately, the terms of debate about the territories began to change. "Every clod of earth, every square cubit, every region and piece of land that belongs to the Lord's land - is it within our powers to relinquish even a single millimeter of them?" Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook famously asked in 1967. For him, and his legions of followers, the answer was an emphatic "no."
By late September, Hanan Porat, then a young yeshiva student (later a settler leader and Knesset member), led a small convoy to the southern West Bank. That evening, construction began on the first settlement in the occupied territories: Kfar Etzion, the site of a Jewish community that had been overrun by Arab forces during a fierce battle in Israel's War of Independence two decades earlier. His provocative gambit was met with a wink and a nod from government officials, a disastrous precedent that would be repeated again and again in the coming decades. Around the same time, senior members of the government and influential public intellectuals began referring to the "liberation" of territories that were so profoundly a part of Israel's heritage. And before the year was out, the army had issued an order stating that "the term Judea and Samaria area will be identical for all purposes ... to the term West Bank area." Thus - subtly and gradually - the idea that the serendipitous result of the war was now irreversible began to enter the bloodstream of Israeli politics. The issue of the settlements migrated from the realm of the strictly political to the metaphysical; from the strategic to the religious; from the resolvable to the intractable.
The lure of cheap housing
At present, more than 275,000 Jews are entrenched in the West Bank. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population grew by 5.45 percent during the first half of 2007 - many of them lured by affordable housing rather than theology. As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday, it must confront the fact that two-thirds of its history has been spent as an occupying power. The cost - measured in terms of lives needlessly lost, damage to Palestinian human rights, wasted money and Israel's deeply tarnished global reputation - has been staggering. How did this happen? How did the cool pragmatism that guided Israel through the existential chaos of 1948 succumb to a catastrophic burst of messianic excitement following the Six-Day War? And is it too late to turn back the clock?
In "Lords of the Land," Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar begin to provide some answers to those questions. The book, first published in Hebrew three years ago, is passionate and richly detailed, and a heroic feat of research and synthesis. Zertal, who teaches at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, and Eldar, a columnist for this newspaper, make plain what has long been suspected but rarely so explicitly and thoroughly substantiated: The settlement enterprise has been consistently aided and abetted by all the institutions of the Israeli state....