The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, July 21, 2024

Byblos: Lords of the Land, The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007, the book by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, reminds us: From the day Hannan Porat planted a stake in Etzion Bloc in late September 1967 in the southern West Bank, the Israeli government never had control over what became the settlers, and the pattern set in motion: the settlers would set the stage, forcing the government to deal with the “facts on the ground.” Every settlement was illegal. Every settlement was accepted by one subterfuge or another. The military, especially Moshe Dayan, was all for it. Shimon Peres’s labor government was too weak to challenge the illegal settlements. His 14-point document in the wake of the war set the stage for the settlements to come. The return to Hebron, site of an Arab pogrom against Jews in 1929, when Jews were expelled after centuries of life there, set a pattern after the government allowed a group of Jews to celebrate Passover in Hebron after the 67 war. It was the template for an Israeli habit of setting up camp in the middle of heavily Palestinian areas. “Entire Arab neighborhoods in the heart of the town were abandoned as a result of the settlers’ harassments and the Israeli army’s idleness or cooperation.” This was the way to chronic expulsions of Arabs. Hebron became a “yeshiva industry” town. Gush Emunim was born, its overriding purpose to drive out Palestinians from the occupied territories. It did not recognize Palestinian lands from the start, calling the place Samaria and Judea. It began by settling in the heavily Palestinian area that became the Ofra settlement. Same happened at Sebastia. Those were the “soldiers of the messiah.” Another method: the settlers would be allowed to live in “military work camps,” evading the prohibition on Israeli civilians in occupied lands, only to be converted to settlers before long. It’s what the authors call the “laundering” of the phantom settlements into permanent settlements. Critics were immediately branded anti-Semites, as Haim Herzog, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, branded critics in 1975 when the settlement activity triggered UN resolutions calling zionism racism. He invoked Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, establishing a different kind of template used to this day. Rabin knew what Gush Emunim was all about. He called it “a cancer in the body of Israeli democracy,” to no avail. The mass of politicians and public were “blind to the new sort of messianic-political energies that had erupted in Israel’s public sphere.” From the start, Gush Emunim and its derivatives were never confronted. Settlers’ spread over the West Bank was set between 1967 and 1977, when even those who might have opposed it, including Rabin, caved. By April 17, 1977, as Menahem Begin’s future Likud government was gnawing at Labor’s eroding lead, it was Rabin himself who was approving the establishment of a new settlement next to the Quyadum military base, called Kedumim, now a settlement of 4,500 where 47.7 percent of the land was expropriated from private Palestinian landowners, according to Peace Now, and where Daniella Weiss, a Gush Emunite since 1967, still lives. She told the New Yorker in November 2023: “The borders of the homeland of the Jews are the Euphrates in the east and the Nile in the southwest.” So: Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon. “In Israel,” she says, “there’s a lot of support for settlements, and this is why there have been right-wing governments for so many years. The world, especially the United States, thinks there is an option for a Palestinian state, and, if we continue to build communities, then we block the option for a Palestinian state. We want to close the option for a Palestinian state, and the world wants to leave the option open. It’s a very simple thing to understand.” That template is not the result of right-wing governments. It was set in 1967 and has been a national consensus since. 

—P.T.

 

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In Moshe Sharett’s personal diaries there is an entry from May 1955 in which he quotes Moshe Dayan: We do not need a security pact with the U.S.A; such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8–10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn’t carry out if we were tied to a security pace are our vital lymph . . . They make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there.

–From Ilan Pappé’s The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of Gaza and the Occupied Territories (2017) .

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