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| Volume XIV, Summer 2007, Number 2 |
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BOOK REVIEW
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The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, by Gershom Gorenberg. Henry Holt and Company, 2006. 454 pages. $30.00, hardcover.
Michael Rubner,
Professor emeritus, International Relations, James Madison College, Michigan State University
On May 7, 2006, approximately 700 Israeli policemen, backed by 1,000 soldiers, dragged dozens of Jewish settlers out of a three-story, Palestinian-owned building in Hebron. The eviction of the squatters from the home near the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a shrine holy to Muslims and Jews, was ordered by Israel’s Supreme Court. It ended in a bloody confrontation in which 19 officers and seven settlers were injured (Naples Daily News, May 8, 2006, p. 14A). The violent clashes pitting Jew against Jew in Hebron constitute the latest chapter in a drama that began in the fateful weeks following Israel’s conquest of the Sinai, Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights in the aftermath of the June 1967 War. In The Accidental Empire, Gershom Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist and former associate editor of The Jerusalem Report, lays bare in painstaking, yet highly informative, detail the origins and evolution of Israel’s settlement enterprise in the conquered territories during the first decade of occupation.
Drawing on archival research, extensive interviews with scores of Israeli officials, and first-hand accounts of settlers in the West Bank and Golan Heights, Gorenberg notes that even prior to the 1967 War, at least some Israelis on both the religious Right and socialist Left had not reconciled themselves to the 1949 Armistice lines, longing instead for a Greater Israel that would encompass the entire West Bank. On the Left, leaders of the Ahdut Ha’avodah (Unity of Labor) party, most notably Yitzhak Tabenkin and Yigal Allon, envisioned a contiguous socialist state stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River on the east. On the Right, the survivors and their children from three Orthodox kibbutzim, collectively known as Gush Etzion (Etzion Bloc), gathered each year on Mt. Herzl, vowing to return to the settlements 10 miles south of Jerusalem that were destroyed and taken over by the Arabs in May 1948.
Israel’s swift and decisive victory over Egypt, Jordan and Syria in June 1967 made it possible for determined activists on both extremes of the political spectrum to translate such grandiose dreams into reality. However, the circumstances surrounding the eventual creation of settlements and the motivations that impelled Israeli Jews to strike roots beyond the so-called Green Line varied with respect to each of the territories that were captured in the June war. The overwhelming majority of those who settled in the West Bank during the first decade of occupation were Orthodox Jews, religious fundamentalists who, in the words of Amos Elon, were “obsessed with God’s promise to Abraham in the Bronze Age or with the messianic promise — or perhaps with both” (The New York Review of Books, June 22, 2006, p. 58). According to Gorenberg, the persistent deadlock within the government of national unity over the disposition of the West Bank enabled religious zealots to take matters into their own hands by staking claims to various tracts of land in what they referred to as Judea and Samaria.
The peculiar pattern of decision making surrounding Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank initially became evident a few weeks after the end of the war, when a group of religious activists sought permission from Prime Minister Levi Eshkol to resettle the Etzion Bloc. Personifying the paralysis within the government that resulted from the refusal of the doves to annex the conquered land, and the opposition of the more hawkish ministers to return to the pre-war armistice lines, Eshkol simply announced to the cabinet that a military outpost would be established in the Etzion Bloc and that the reclaimed area would be connected to Israel proper by a corridor. Within a few months, this and two adjacent military posts were transformed into civilian settlements on the sites of the original communes that fell in 1948.
In a similar vein, the impetus for the Jewish return to city of Hebron came from a group of religious activists, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who undertook an intensive lobbying campaign to reestablish a Jewish presence in a city inhabited by some 160,000 Palestinians. In response to such pressure, Labor Minister Yigal Allon submitted to the cabinet in mid-January 1968 a proposal for building a Jewish neighborhood near Hebron. With the government unwilling and unable to take action, Levinger and his zealot followers decided to take matters into their own hands, create “facts on the ground,” and present the government with a fait accompli.
In mid-April 1968, on the eve of Passover, Levinger and a group of some 100 of his guests moved into the Park Hotel in Hebron, which they had rented for a period of ten days. Refusing to leave the hotel after the end of the holiday, the squatters were visited and supported by various cabinet members, including Allon, Minister without Portfolio Menachem Begin, and Religious Affairs Minister Zorach Warhaftig. One month later, a ministerial committee authorized Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to move the self-proclaimed pioneers to other lodgings in the city. On May 19, 1968, Levinger and his entourage moved from the hotel to a former British fortress at the edge of the city, and, shortly thereafter, the ministerial panel decided to allow a Jewish neighborhood in the East side of Hebron and to permit the settlers to open businesses there. The Jewish presence in the city has grown since then to approximately 500 persons. It has been a constant source of friction between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government.
In marked contrast to the West Bank, the first settlers who were attracted to the Golan Heights were predominantly secular Israelis from the United Kibbutz movement, motivated by both an ideological commitment to communal farming and a determination to enhance the country’s strategic security. However, the process that culminated in the erection of settlements on the Golan was similar to the pattern that was evident in the West Bank. Without prior government authorization, activists took matters into their own hands and, following the pre-state ethos of the Zionist Left, created their own facts on the ground to gain permanent control over disputed land. Official approval of the fait accompli was engineered by political allies of the settlers within the cabinet as a last step.
Thus, approximately five weeks after the end of the June war and less than a month after the cabinet had formally decided to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for a full peace treaty, several Israeli settlers arrived on the Golan and established an agricultural “work camp.” Several weeks later, the cabinet approved Allon’s proposal for the already existing and additional civilian “work camps,” ostensibly to help maintain existing orchards on the Heights. Shortly thereafter, the ministers approved the construction of two quasi-military “outposts” at the northern and southern ends of the Heights. By mid-October 1967, these “outposts” had been transformed to civilian communes. By February 1968, 10 such communities had sprouted on the Golan, containing more than 800 Israelis. Officially ratifying the continuously growing Jewish presence on the Heights, Prime Minister Golda Meir, Eshkol’s successor, announced in February 1969 that the Golan would remain in Israeli hands. In essence, the bargaining chip was off the table.
Gorenberg notes that, if they were intended to serve as the country’s first line of defense, the Golan settlements in particular turned out to be Israel’s Maginot Line during the first hours of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Rapidly advancing Syrian tanks required the evacuation of women, children and eventually men from the Golan, as several communities were eventually overrun by enemy armored divisions. Consequently, “one more preconception, the faith in settlements as fortresses, evaporated. Instead, border kibbutzim were another burden on an army holding off collapse.”
According to Gorenberg, the impetus for settling the occupied territories was spurred not only by domestic political activists but also by reactions of government officials to real and anticipated threats from external sources. For example, when it approved on September 14, 1970, the establishment of two military outposts in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli cabinet was in all probability motivated by the fear that the American diplomatic initiative known as the Rogers Plan would result in U.S. pressure on Israel to give up the area again, as it did once before in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez War. In a similar vein, the cabinet decision in August 1974 to erect a settlement at Maaleh Adumim, on slopes leading up from Jericho to Jerusalem, coincided with the efforts of then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to broker an interim agreement with Jordan that would have entailed Israeli withdrawal from portions of the West Bank. Likewise, in late November 1975, following the passage of the resolution by the UN General Assembly declaring Zionism a form of racism, the cabinet approved, in an act of defiance, the construction of 30 additional settlements in the subsequent 18 months.
Gorenberg argues that high-level officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations were distracted by the Vietnam War and hence paid little attention to Israel’s creeping annexation of the territories. Although mid-level State Department diplomats did privately warn Israeli officials that the settlements were an obstacle to attaining a just and lasting peace, it was not until March 23, 1976, that William Scranton, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, publicly declared in the Security Council that “substantial resettlement of the Israeli civilian population in occupied territories, including in East Jerusalem, is illegal.” However, the unprecedented verbal rebuke was not matched by punitive action. On the contrary, deeming it "unbalanced," the United States vetoed a resolution that condemned Israel’s settlement activity. Instead of leaving the erroneous impression that the United States merely acquiesced in Israel’s settlement enterprise, Gorenberg should have noted explicitly that American largesse in the decades following the June 1967 War considerably facilitated the construction of Jewish communities in the occupied territories.
Among the many intriguing revelations strewn throughout the book, two in particular stand out. First, it is apparent that top Israeli government officials were made aware very early on that the construction of civilian settlements in the territories violated international law. On September 14, 1967, Theodor Meron, the legal counsel in the Foreign Ministry and one of Israel’s most distinguished legal experts, concluded in a memorandum to Foreign Minister Abba Eban that "civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention." Gorenberg suggests that Prime Minister Eshkol, Defense Minister Dayan, and Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira were all informed about Meron’s legal opinion. Eshkol sought to wiggle around the prohibition of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into the area it occupies, by deliberately describing the initial Israeli outposts in the West Bank and Golan Heights as military camps or bases. In fact, all of these settlements were very shortly thereafter populated entirely by civilians.
Second, we learn that Shimon Peres, currently Israel’s dovish elder statesman, was a staunch advocate of settlements during his tenure as defense minister in the Meir and first Rabin administrations. In July 1974, Peres promised religious activists from Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) that he would try to secure cabinet approval for establishment of a new settlement, Elon Moreh, in an area northeast of Nablus on the West Bank. When the activists moved into the area in defiance of a government ban, Peres refused to level charges against them. In April 1975, when Gush activists set up a so-called “work camp” in the vicinity of a former Jordanian army base northeast of Ramallah, Peres opposed removing the squatters. A month later, Peres justified the exclusive presence of civilians in what became the settlement of Ofrah as a temporary housing area for army employees. It took approximately two additional decades for Peres to realize that the ever-expanding Israeli presence in the West Bank was a major, if not the major, obstacle to attaining a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Overall, Gorenberg has produced a very illuminating and insightful historical account of Israel’s incremental colonization of the territories during the first decade of occupation. Yet this otherwise outstanding work suffers from several shortcomings, not the least of which is the conspicuous absence of the Palestinians as the victims of the occupation. With the exception of a brief description of the demolition of houses and uprooting of orchards to make room for Jewish settlements in the Rafah Plain in northeast Sinai, Gorenberg says almost nothing about the destructive impact of the settlements on the daily lives of ordinary Palestinians throughout the territories. The author’s account also leaves the erroneous impression that Israel’s colonization took place primarily on public lands in relatively uninhabited areas. In fact, an Israeli government report that was recently leaked to Peace Now, an Israeli organization that advocates a Palestinian state alongside Israel, indicates that 39 percent of the land on which Jewish settlements had been built was privately owned by Palestinians (The New York Times, November 21, 2006, p. 1). Coincidentally, the same report notes that the settlement of Ofrah, which receives a good deal of attention in the book, was constructed on land that was almost entirely owned by Palestinians.
Some of the glaring omissions in The Accidental Empire are clearly due to the limited temporal scope of the book. Gorenberg’s account ends with the May 1977 election that brought Menachem Begin’s Likud into power. At that time, the territories encompassed about 80 settlements with approximately 11,000 residents. It is estimated that today about one-quarter of a million Israelis live in 125 officially sanctioned settlements in the West Bank. Close to another 200,000 Jews reside in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem, and about 16,000 remain in 32 settlements on the Golan. Not surprisingly, none of the many effects of this colonization process — whether on the Palestinians, the Israeli polity and economy, or the peace negotiations — could be captured and analyzed in a saga that unfortunately ends much too early. One can only hope that the gifted author of The Accidental Empire will follow this path-breaking study with an equally illuminating sequel.
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