Sleepwalking through the settlements: part 2

From Peres to Rabin

Yaron (not his real name) served as an officer in the Israeli Civil Administration, the military body responsible for administering Yehuda and the Shomron, from before its official establishment in 1982 until his retirement decades later, and continues to consult in matters related to it. He has graciously agreed to help me write a brief history of the settlements from the Civil Administration’s perspective.

Initially, the settlements were established by the Labor government of the 1970s. After the war of 1967, there were various conflicting ideas about how to manage various parts of the liberated land. It is important to understand that the Labor movement had both a right and left wing, as well as other internal divisions. For instance, Yigal Allon believed that keeping the Jordan River Valley was key to security, and the main mountain ridge should be returned to Jordan in the framework of a peace settlement. Moshe Dayan believed the opposite-that the Jordan River Valley was strategically unimportant and should be used to make a peace deal, while the mountain ridge should be kept for strategic reasons.

Parts of Judea and Samaria had been owned by Jews prior to 1948, and had been managed by a Jordanian administrative body dedicated to the administration of enemy property. Gush Etzion, whose Jewish settlements had been destroyed in 1948, was re-established separately from the rest of the settlements.

From Labor’s perspective, there was no difference between the IDF and the settlements. Settlements were established in places with strategic significance, according to the security needs as determined by the military, and private Arab land was often confiscated as necessary for their establishment. This was the case in places like Beit El and Ariel, half of which sits on expropriated private Arab land. Ofra and most of the Jordan River Valley settlements were created during this period.

In 1977, Menachem Begin’s Likud came to power in a revolution and changed the framework of the settlements entirely. They said, “we are not here because of any kind of security requirement but because this is the Land of our forefathers, our eternal inheritance to which we have returned and which we shall never leave.” This had practical consequences: the military was no longer allowed to expropriate private Arab land to establish settlements on it for security purposes, since the purpose of settlements had officially been declared to be nationalistic rather than security-driven. In this way, Begin’s nationalistic rhetoric and intentions paradoxically crippled the settlement project in the long term.

At this point, the IDF, which was responsible for administering Judea and Samaria and providing services to its residents, undertook a massive mapping effort to determine the status of all of the land therein in accordance with the Ottoman land code. The maps thus created were later used as the basis for more settlement building.

In 1982 the Civil Administration came into being as the administrative body by which the IDF governed Judea and Samaria. The Administration was composed of military officers and civilians. The officers were divided between headquarters types, who made policy, and field types who implemented it. The headquarters guys were mostly from Tel Aviv and Haifa and so on, and their contact with the Arabs involved visiting them on holidays as guests, eating lamb with them and so forth, which gave them a view that skewed positive. Some of them, such as the JAG guys, were leftists to begin with, while others began on the right moved leftwards over time. This was partially driven by day to day contact with Arabs in positive contexts like helping them get medical care, and partially by witnessing poor treatment of Arabs by settlers in places like Hevron (the name of Avigdor Eskin comes up in this context).

Also in 1982 the real first Intifada broke out. This was a series of Arab riots and attacks prompted primarily by Israeli weakness and appeasement. It was put down by the IDF. An unintended outcome of this was the creation of Peace Now by leftist reservist soldiers who did not enjoy witnessing and participating in the suppression by force of the resistance efforts of an occupied people. They started out with a few hundred members and quickly grew to several thousand. Their significance was greater than what these numbers would suggest, because they became the unofficial representatives of a growing stream in the leftist establishment which had turned against the settlement movement. In this, the leftist establishment had been heavily inspired by the left flank of the Mafdal, the National Religious party, which advocated against the military occupation and settlement of Judea and Samaria and whose perspective was that “we do not want to be like the Nazis”. This was part of a recurring pattern of behavior-the Religious Zionists were also responsible for the change to the Law of Return which allowed non-Jews with a single Jewish grandparent to make “aliyah”, resulting in the current situation where only a minority of “olim” are actually Jews, with the result that today’s “aliyah” REDUCES the Jewish population of Israel in percentage terms.

From 1982 until Rabin’s election a decade later, the settlement movement continued in much the same direction. More settlements were built. The primary direction of development was along the mountain ridge running from Be’er Sheva to Afula; a chain of settlements was envisioned here, connected with roads and other infrastructure. These were initially planned as suburbs, with very little industry and a bit of agriculture of their own; the southern ones would be connected to Be’er Sheva, the central ones to Bet Shemesh and Jerusalem, the ones to their north to the larger Tel Aviv area and the northernmost ones to Afula and Haifa. The Israelis moving to these settlements at the time were primarily driven by ideological considerations. Some of these settlements were established to provide security to others, and in this sense, the abovementioned dichotomy between security and nationalism as opposed motivations for settlement is shown to be false.

At the same time a series of settlements close to the Green Line in the West such as Oranit were being developed. The residents of these were mostly drawn by the promise of cheap real estate close to the center. Since the government was encouraging settlement development, plots of land were free; this allowed settlers to build private homes for a quarter of what they would have cost 20 minutes west across the Green Line. They could thus realize the Israeli Dream, the “two V’s-a Volvo and a villa.”

As the second Intifada (popularly known as the first) broke out in 1987 with a series of Palestinian Arab riots and terror attacks, popular sentiment on the center left turned further against the settlements. The common wisdom was that the settlements were being subsidized by taxpayer money taken from the Israelis on the 1948 side of the Green Line, and that a deal needed to be made to keep the Arabs and Jews on “their” respective sides .

During this time, the government (led by Shamir and Peres) steered a double course. On the one hand it sought to allow Palestinian Arabs freedom of movement and employment across the Green Line, under the theory that this would give them something to lose and reduce terror (this failed). On the other, it slow-rolled concessions in the face of American pressure on behalf of the Arabs and against the settlements. This dishonest policy culminated in Shamir’s attendance of the Madrid Conference, following which he came up with a plan to grant the Palestinians autonomy.

With the coming of Rabin to power in 1992, everything and nothing changed.