Way back in 1965, I was a student at Yeshiva Kerem B’Yavne and was in Yerushalayim for Simchas Torah. Since they only keep one day in Israel, they had what was called “hakafot shniyot,” hakafos on the second day of Yom Tov – with a band and with people who traveled from all over. I remember that the place was very crowded, and the speaker, whoever he was, said over the microphone, “Next year we will have more room because we will celebrate in front of the Kotel Hama’aravi.” I remember thinking that this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard – except that he was right. Two years later, in 1967, the Jews did dance in front of the Western Wall!
In order to understand current events, we need to know how things got to be the way they are. Many people in the West (including many Jews) believe that the crux of the Arab-Israeli conflict has to do with the settlements on the West Bank. In truth, the conflict started way before that, although the settlements make a convenient scapegoat. It is also true, however, that the conquered territories in the West Bank, with their large Arab population, present an intractable political, spiritual, and demographic problem for the State of Israel. These are stories for another time. Here, I just want to share some snippets of the story of how the settlements were born. I will begin just prior to the Six Day War.*
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It was on heh Iyar, the 5th of Iyar, Yom Ha’atzmaut, 1967. At Mercaz Harav, the school that Hanan Porat attended, there was a seuda, a festive meal. The Rosh Hayeshiva, Harav Tzvi Yehudah Kook, z”l, began to speak, and his words were later considered prophetic by all who were there. Utterly out of character, and to the shock of his students, he began to shout, rocked by grief. He recalled his profound sadness 19 years earlier when Israel was partitioned. “They have divided my land,” he continued. “Yes, where is our Hebron? Have we forgotten it?! And where is our Shechem and our Jericho – will we forget them?”
He was talking about the events of May 13, 1948, the 4th of Iyar, when the Etzion Bloc (Gush Etzion) fell at the end of the War of Independence. In that final battle, 155 defenders, men and women, died. The survivors moved to houses on the edge of Jaffa, which had been abandoned by an Arab who fled. One of the children was Hanan Porat. Each year, on their common yahrtzeit, the survivors gathered on Mt. Herzl and traded stories of the lost kibbutzim. The children said, “Someday we will return,” as they looked far to the south at the Etz Haboded, the Lone Tree, the only remnant of their former homes. On May 14, 1967, (the yahrtzeit of their parents), such comments were regarded as nostalgia and wishful thinking.
Less than a month later, the Six Day War broke out. For yeshiva student and paratrooper Hanan Porat, a prophecy was coming true. When men from his unit sacked a kiosk in East Jerusalem, he took postcards depicting West Bank towns and mailed them to his yeshiva, Mercaz Harav. “You remember, gentlemen, Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah’s words: Shechem, Hebron.... Here they are before you.” At the yeshiva, the cards were posted prominently.
With the West Bank now in Israeli hands, Hanan Porat and other survivors wanted to rebuild their destroyed kibbutzim in the Etzion Bloc. The government of Levi Eshkol was still undecided at that point. They simply could not decide what to do, and there were opposing factions within the Mapai Party.
Around this time, someone knocked on the door of Porat’s dorm room in Mercaz Harav. His name was Moshe Levinger. An alumnus of Mercaz Harav, he, unlike Porat, did not want to wait for permission from the government. He found a handful of friends willing to move to Kfar Etzion without permission. Another member of the group was Zevulun Hammer, leader of the party’s Youth Guard. He wanted to rebel against the old men who were leading the Mizrachi, the National Religious Party, who were too moderate for the young firebrands.
Porat somehow arranged a meeting with Prime Minister Eshkol. There were no minutes of that meeting, and Eshkol’s words could be interpreted to mean permission or not, depending on what you wanted to hear. This is what Eshkol said: “Nu, kinderlach, you’d like to go up? Go ahead up.”
Porat said that Rosh Hashanah was coming and they wanted to daven there on the holiday.
Eshkol said, “Nu, kinderlach, if you want to daven, go daven.”
Porat tried to pin him down, “When we say to pray, we mean to return to this land, this home.”
Eshkol responded, “You use big words; I’ve said what I’ve said.” And at the next cabinet meeting, he did not put it to a vote; he simply announced that within two weeks, they would be entering the place. He justified it as an army outpost, which really was not even the case, but that is how he said it.
The decision to allow settlement of the Etzion Bloc was a nightmare for Abba Eban and other Israeli diplomats. This is the statement of the United States State Department after the decision was reported in the New York Times: “If accurately reported, the plans for establishment of permanent settlements would be inconsistent with the Israeli position – as we understand it – that they regard occupied territories...to be matters for negotiation. We have not been officially informed of any change in that policy.” This was meant to be a biting “rebuke” in diplomatic language. Israel had a hard time with double talk, saying that the Nachal settlers were there for temporary duty until the final status was decided and that the fact that they were children of the original settlers was a mere coincidence.
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Why did Eshkol leave the door open like that? He was part of the older generation of secular Zionists, who, despite their socialism and hostility to religion, had a yearning, deep down, to redeem Eretz Yisrael. It is part of the Jewish psyche. The irony is that, though the old kibbutzniks and socialists yearned to renew the settlement dreams of their own youth, the ones who actually did it were not their grandchildren but the religious Zionists of Mercaz Harav and their allies. Asked by the Mapai newspaper, Davar, about demands to settle Hebron, Eshkol replied, “If there are those who suggest creating a settlement in Hebron without dispossessing anyone, I don’t see a sin in that.”
Shortly after he said that, Passover arrived. That day, the Park Hotel in Hebron was filled with guests. They said they had come to celebrate the Passover Seder. Levinger was a different sort than Porat. He basically lied to General Uzi Narkiss, head of the Central Command. He was given permission to stay for the Seder night only and then to leave as soon as the first day was over. Rabbi Haim Drukman, Head of Yeshiva Or Etzion, came to conduct the Seder.
After the first day of Yom Tov, many of those who came to show solidarity left. The group that remained were young, mostly in their twenties – several families and more singles, many of them yeshiva students. They had the silent support of the former generals, now cabinet ministers Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon to stay. On Monday morning, Allon went down to visit them. He said, “It is inconceivable that Jews would be barred from settling once more in this holy city.”
On his way back, Allon stopped at Kfar Etzion to talk to Hanan Porat. “They’re in danger, you have to give them guns,” he said. Porat replied, “That is not so simple, the guns were given to us for guard duty and we signed for them personally.”
Allon stared at Hanan Porat,the young man from Bnai Akiva and said, “In the time of the Palmach we knew to do things like this,” and he made a hand motion that signified pushing something underneath something else.” Porat understood and sent the guns.
Later, the Cabinet agreed to build a settlement next to Hebron, Kiryat Arba.
I want to take a moment to explain what the Palmach was. It was a pre-state army composed mostly of members of the left-wing kibbutz movement, United Kibbutz, whose leader was a father figure, an ideologue, and a secular equivalent of a chasidic rebbe, Yitzchak Tabenkin. Raised Orthodox in Warsaw, he gave up his faith and became a student of Karl Marx and Haim Nachman Bialik. He considered kibbutzim to be “communist settlements.” Actually, he was closer to anarchism than socialism. In Tabenkin’s eyes, the borders in the Middle East had no meaning; they were the imposition of European imperialists. Tabenkin insisted on the complete homeland as the basis for a socialist state of the Jewish people. He considered the Arabs living in the land to be individuals with no national rights.
Tabenkin’s talmid Yigal Allon was commander of the Palmach and became a general in the Israeli army when the Palmach was abolished by David Ben Gurion. His chief of operations, another Palmach man, was the young Yitzchak Rabin. They were territorial maximalists.
Isn’t it ironic that these secular Israelis, members of the Achdut Ha’avoda party, to the left of Mapai, were the ideological partners of Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook, who came to the “whole land of Israel” from a totally different belief system? Allon was now foreign minister of Israel under Eshkol and was able to help the religious Zionists who were actually fulfilling Achdut HaAvodah’s ideology.
Moshe Dayan had originally opposed settlements in the Jordan Rift Valley, near the river, but he changed his mind. Once it was clear that no peace treaty with Jordan was possible, he decided that Israel would keep the whole Land of Israel permanently. Dayan wanted settlements to dismember the territorial contiguity and enable regional interconnections between local Arab and Israeli communities. Dayan wanted to create conditions where the Arabs would be bound to the Israeli economy. He also wanted to raise the Arabs’ standard of living so that they would want to remain under Israeli control forever because they were so much better off. Dayan was defense minister.
After Eshkol died, Golda Meir became prime minister. She relied greatly on Yisrael Galili, who was an Achdut Ha’avoda man, while she was Mapai to her core. Yet he was someone she trusted, so that he had much greater influence than his official title, head of the “settlement committee.” He was the man who could give permission to build, and the main machlokes (dispute) during those years was not whether to build settlements but where. The government had the Allon Plan, which specified building in certain strategic locations, and this sometimes conflicted with the plans of the religious Zionist settlers. Nevertheless, settlement building continued from 1967 to 1973, although a relatively small number of Jews relocated to the former Arab territories. One reason the pace was slow was that most Israelis were not interested in leaving the comforts of the cities for isolated outposts surrounded by hostile Arabs.
The Yom Kippur War changed the situation dramatically. The settlers lost patience with the slow pace allowed by the Labor government. A group that became well known, Gush Emunim, the Bloc of the Faithful, was anxious to defy the government and wanted a struggle. The group sent letters to Prime Minister Rabin and Defense Minister Peres on their third day in office. They announced their intent to defy government policy and “take the first practical step” to establish a settlement on their own; they were letting the government know that they did not want to be stopped by the army on the way.
On June 5, 1974, two dozen or so vehicles carried 100 would-be settlers and supporters, men, women, and children, tents, books, kitchen gear, a library of religious books, and even a seesaw and slide for a playground. They drove right through the Arab city of Nablus-Shechem to establish Elon Moreh. Rabbi Tzvi Yehudah Kook, wearing his long rabbinical coat and black hat, came in the June sun. Also present were Ariel Sharon, a powerful ally and member of the right-wing Likud party, as well as another Likud Knesset member, Geulah Cohen, the former radio voice of Lehi, the Stern Gang underground in the pre-State days. (Though he was not there, the settlers believed that Shimon Peres was on their side.) The dignitaries planted saplings.
To be clear, Gush Emunim had made a radical synthesis, in which believers absorbed a modern political ideology and converted it into principles of religious faith. Their meetings with Labor politicians did not win them official sanction. Political rebels like Sharon and Cohen told them that they were “doing the most important thing for Zionism” and promised them help.
In order to understand what happened and why, I want to quote entire paragraphs from the book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg.
“The Yom Kippur War,” writes Gorenberg, “had interrupted their efforts. Afterward, their patience vanished. The interim agreements made members of the group ‘feel the ground quaking beneath us.’ Everyone knew that King Hussein was standing in line to negotiate next. Labor’s small, hard-fought concessions made it the party of weakness in the eyes of the Whole Land of Israel advocates, for whom weakness was a cardinal sin. For some in the group, the Yom Kippur War posed an ideological demand. ‘When the Jewish people doesn’t perform its task, it receives blows to chastise it, and to return us to the correct path.’ believed Yehudah Etzion, who possessed a particular confidence concerning G-d’s intent for history. The war was not a retreat in redemption, he was sure, but rather was punishment of Israel for not marching forward.”
This theological imperative, that Israel had initially lost the Yom Kippur War because they had not been zealous enough in settling the whole land, caused the Elon Moreh group to talk about a wildcat settlement, a fait accompli that the government would have to accept.
Hanan Porat did not agree with the group on this point. He felt that acting illegally should be the last option, not the first. Likud leader Menachem Begin, with whom the group consulted, also opposed the wildcat attempt. Sharon was in favor. Benny Katzover and Menachem Felix, the leaders of the group, decided to consult their rabbi, Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook. Kook spoke to Begin, who told him that the attempt could cause civil war. (he Altalena affair still weighed heavily on Begin.) The Rabbi told them no. They returned again to their Rabbi, and again he was not in agreement; he told them to consult with Rabbi Shlomo Goren, now Chief Rabbi of Israel. But Goren, despite his militant messianism, also rejected confrontation.
I quote from the book: “Soon after, the two organizers showed up again at Kook’s Jerusalem home. ‘We’re going to do it,’ they informed him. This is not how yeshiva students speak to their rabbi. Chaos was creeping into the world.
“‘What do you want from me?’ he demanded.
“‘Your blessing.’
“The old man smiled – so Katzover would remember – and blessed them. Sharon, famous for his love of maps, chose the spot for them. In building an instant settlement, they were reenacting the story every Israeli schoolchild learned of pre-state pioneers braving Arab and British antagonism, but this time the antagonism came from the state that was expected to protect them. The date was set for June 4.”
The night before, Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook called them and told them to hold off for 24 hours. Hanan Porat was behind this. He had gone to the Rabbi and told him that it was a horrible idea to defy the government. Hanan suggested that the Rabbi meet with Defense Minister Peres. Shimon Peres was, of course, very busy at the start of the new government, but he also had derech eretz (respect) for the Rav. I quote again a whole paragraph from the book. This stuff is really amazing:
“On June 4, therefore, Peres sandwiched in a meeting at the Rabbi’s home into his first full day in office. According to press reports, he told Kook he ‘identified with goals of the group’s members but he did not have the power to approve their settlement. Attempting to convince Peres ended Kook’s own ambivalence. He reportedly told the Defense Minister that the settlement bid involved a religious obligation that one must die rather than disobey, yahoreig ve’al ya’avor and announced that he would take part.
“That is why Rav Tzvi Yehudah came the next day to the groundbreaking for Elon Moreh.
Soldiers arrived, followed by generals, who tried to convince the settlers to leave voluntarily. The army did not know how to cope with a hundred civilians camped in a field. The generals called Prime Minister Rabin and passed the phone to Ariel Sharon, who suggested a compromise. The settlers were willing to agree to move temporarily to a nearby army base and await a cabinet decision. Rabin agreed. But Rav Tzvi Yehudah did not agree. He told them that ‘It is forbidden to leave,” and he turned to the officers and said, ‘Bring our the machine guns,’ as if he were standing on the Altalena.
“Night fell. The soldiers began to drag the settlers to awaiting buses, men who kicked, pushed, and shouted. Sharon was seized by intense fury. When he saw a soldier trying to lift Yehudah Etzion, the powerful ex-general Sharon flung him away. A captain said to Sharon, ‘Arik, when you gave the order to cross the canal during the war, I knew it was suicide, but I went anyway because it was an order. Now you tell me to disobey our commanders’ orders?’
“‘This is an immoral order, and you have to disobey that kind of order,’ Sharon responded.”
Eventually, when all the men were dragged onto the buses, Rav Tzvi Yehudah agreed to board one of the buses.
There are stories galore about the founding of various settlements. Elon Moreh was eventually allowed to be built in another location. The Likud government of Menachem Begin was very pro-settlement, but basically, all they did was continue what had begun under Labor governments. Settlements grew from small enclaves into cities and no longer were they mainly agricultural; many were bedroom communities in which both religious and secular people bought homes because it was much cheaper beyond the “green line” of pre-1967 Israel.
Here is a very important quote from the book: “The triumph of 1967 turned messianism into mainstream belief among religious Zionists, particularly young ones. Paradoxically,
the shock of 1973 gave birth to Gush Emunim, an organized movement dedicated to overcoming doubt through feverish action. Initially, the religious settlers received support from Laborites, especially Allon. Later, politicians of the right lent a hand to their rebellion.
I will not go into the profound disappointment in religious Zionist circles when their patron and main supporter, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided in 2004 to forcibly remove the settlements of Gush Katif, just as he had removed the Sinai city of Yamit after the peace treaty with Egypt under Begin. By 2005, there were 250,000 Israelis living in recognized settlements in the West Bank, another 180,000 in East Jerusalem (like Ramot Eshkol), and 16,000 in the Golan. However, numbers cannot describe how the landscape has changed. One example: Yisrael Galili originally agreed to Maaleh Adumim as a “work camp.” Now, it is a city of 31,000 people.
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When Israel won the Six Day War, Prime Minister Eshkol compared it to a groom who is offered a bride with a large dowry. After examining the situation, he says that he likes the dowry, but he doesn’t want to marry the bride. He meant that Israel wants the land but doesn’t know what to do with the Arabs who live on that land. As we have seen, the land gained in that war is part of Eretz Yisrael, and we believe Hashem gave it to us. But, since 1967, we haven’t figured out how to have both the land and the Arabs. If they are given citizenship, Israel will cease to be a Jewish state. If they are expelled, as many countries have done to unwanted populations time and again in recent as well as ancient history, the world will not let Israel get away with it. If they are kept in limbo, Israel will be considered an apartheid pariah state by many of the nations of the world. If you have a solution, send it to Prime Minister Netanyahu. I certainly have no idea how this saga will end.
We see from this article that holding on to the whole land was not an exclusively religious Zionist idea. Tabenkin was about as irreligious as you can get, and he also believed that the whole land should belong to the Jews by right. Eshkol and Golda both wanted to keep it all, as did Begin. None of them recognized the existence of a “Palestinian nationality.” Since then, Israeli governments have paid lip service to the idea of “two states for two peoples.” Some believe it, and others just say it to keep the United States off their backs.
I close with an old joke, not a happy one but a true one: In the Old Country, Jews were subservient to the landowner. Once a year, the Jew had to appear before the nobleman and pay his rent. One time, the drunken Polish nobleman said to the Jew, “You Jews are clever; I want you to teach my dog to speak.” The horrified Jew answered that he did not have the ability to teach a canine to speak Polish. The sheigitz (pardon me) took out his gun and said, “If you don’t teach him to talk, I will shoot you.” At that point the Jew said, “Give me a year, and I will teach him to talk.” The landowner agreed. When he got home and told his wife what had happened, she said, “You can’t teach a dog to talk; why did you agree to do that?” Her husband answered, “A lot can happen in a year. The goy can die, the dog can die, I could die. Meanwhile, he didn’t shoot me.”
That is how I see the problem and I don’t have a better solution than that poor Jew in medieval Poland.
* Much of the information in this article is gleaned from the book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg.
