Supported by Labor and Likud Alike, Israeli Occupation Still Major Obstacle to Peace

By Allan C. Brownfeld

There can be little doubt that the major stumbling block to achieving a Middle East peace settlement is Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This occupation has been embraced not only by both Labor and Likud, but most enthusiastically by religious fundamentalists—Jews in Israel, and Christians in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Needless to say, there are other stumbling blocks to peace as well, including desperate Islamic extremists who continue to reject the idea of any Jewish state in the Middle East. Ironically, Israel’s continuing occupation has only encouraged and strengthened these forces.

The history of the occupation since Israel’s victory in the 1967 war is instructive. Following that victory, even then-moderate Zionists ambitiously embraced the idea of a greater Land of Israel, including the newly acquired territories. At that time such prominent literary figures as Haim Gouri and Moshe Shamir signed the manifesto of the Land of Israel Movement. Its credo was that the territories of the biblical Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, newly won from Jordan, should never be relinquished. They joined religious and right-wing leaders in a newfound alliance forged in an atmosphere of euphoric triumph.

In a highly publicized manifesto, the 72 intellectuals who founded the Land of Israel Movement declared: “The Israeli army’s victory in the Six-Day War located the people and the state within a new and fateful period. The whole Land of Israel is now in the hands of the Jewish people. Just as we are not allowed to give up the State of Israel, so we are ordered to keep what we received there from the army’s hands: the Land of Israel.” The “order,” these thinkers made clear, came from God.

“Jews spoke exultantly of the victory as a ‘miracle,’” wrote author Milton Viorst. “They had long used the term to describe the recapture and purification of the Temple after the Maccabee triumph over the Seleucids in biblical times. It was also the term Jews used to represent their messianic expectations. Religious Zionism’s rabbis, historically modest in their messianic expectations, were the lustiest in proclaiming sacred meaning. The victory, they said, meant the messianic process was reaching fruition, even if the Messiah himself was absent. National borders that went beyond those of ancient Israel were, to them, proof of the Messiah’s hand. Mainstream Zionists, meanwhile, having long tried to curb the Jewish appetite for territory, lost control.”

“Every Israeli government since 1967 has participated in the settlement enterprise.”

Poet Haim Gouri now recalls that he signed the Land of Israel Movement manifesto “but with a lot of doubts in my heart. I was split in half between a sensual, metaphysical love for the land of our forefathers, and pain.”

Gouri’s ambivalence is widespread. Declared the Nov. 18, 2002 Jerusalem Report, “It reflects national inability to decide about the future of the territories won in 1967—an abiding inability that will immensely complicate any Israeli withdrawal from the territories. And most especially, it reflects the split personality of…(the) Labor movement, caught for 35 years between calculations that demanded a firm stand against unfettered settlement-building, an emotional connection with the land and outside pressure from the settler lobby that let the settlement enterprise go forward.”

In 1967, Moshe Dayan, Israel’s thoroughly secular minister of defense, shared the religious exhilaration of the fundamentalists. “We have returned to all that is holy in our land,” he declared. “We have returned never to part again.”

On the eve of Passover in 1968, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, a militant advocate of permanent Israeli control of all territories occupied in 1967, registered a group of 10 families in the Park Hotel, a small Arab-owned establishment in Hebron. Their ostensible purpose was to celebrate the religious holiday. In fact, their goal was political, and they became the leading edge of the great wave of Jewish settlement.

Although at the time the Israeli government still banned Jewish settlement, Levenger violated no law in visiting Hebron. When Passover ended, however, he announced his refusal to leave and his readiness to defy civil law. He explained that he was settling in Hebron in response to God’s decree of Jewish sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel. The Israeli government gave in, as it would repeatedly under both Labor and Likud governments, and the settlement of the occupied territories began.

Levenger was given the right not only to settle in Hebron, but to establish a yeshiva there. His supporters were authorized to carry arms. Before long, the government announced construction of a new Jewish town on the heights above Hebron, calling it Kiryat Arba. It soon became home to 5,000 settlers, many of them zealots. Levenger carried a machine gun around Hebron, and regularly broke Arab windows and overturned vegetable carts. When he killed an Arab shopkeeper in a fit of anger, he was tried, convicted, and given a prison sentence of five months. On the day it began, in May 1990, a crowd of settlers cheered him to the prison gates.

Likud Comes to Power

When Likud came to power in 1977, the Jewish population of the West Bank was only 4,500. By 1990, population in the territories surpassed 100,000. Many of the players remain the same. As foreign minister in 1998, Ariel Sharon called on the settlers to “grab the hilltops” following the Wye Plantation talks, where then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to limit settlement expansion to “natural growth.”

Today, over 200,000 Israelis are living in more than 150 established settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. While soldiers occasionally have been deployed to evacuate illegal hilltop outposts like the Gilad Farm near Nablus, radical settler rabbis are urging troops to refuse orders to evict settlers.

“In fact,” according to The Jerusalem Report, “every Israeli government since 1967, whether led by Labor or Likud, has participated, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, in the settlement enterprise. And while the ideological and strategic goals of Israel’s left and right may have radically differed on paper over the years, the facts on the ground have always blurred the lines—even after the 1993 Oslo accords ostensibly opened the way for the delineation of Israel’s eastern border.”

While the groundwork for settlements may have been laid by Labor-led governments, it was with Likud’s victory in 1977 that the settlement enterprise escalated. The Likud strategy was not to hold the territories as a bargaining chip for negotiations, but rather to ensure that Israel would keep them indefinitely.

One of the lone voices in the Labor establishment openly opposing settlement in the occupied territories after 1967 was that of Arieh Eliav. The veteran politician and diplomat, who had been in charge of vast settlement projects in pre-1967 Israel, surveyed the territories for six months in the aftermath of the 1967 war. He became convinced that the Palestinians should be treated as an incipient nation. A protégé of Golda Meir, Eliav became secretary-general of the Labor Party in 1970.

Eliav’s downfall came when, out of 81 votes on the Galili Document, a position paper formulated by Yisrael Galili that laid out Labor’s plans for settlement, he alone voted in opposition. Eliav views the document as a “watershed” in settlement policy, and says the occupied territories were not annexed in 1967 mainly out of fear of international reaction.

Even Yitzhak Rabin, the only Israeli prime minister to have declared a total settlement freeze, capitulated to his finance minister, Avraham Shochat, and his housing minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer. They persuaded him to allow the continuation of building that had been started and to go ahead with contracts that had been signed. Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak not only proceeded with settlement-building, notes Dror Etkes, who directs Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, but initiated more housing starts in the settlements than his predecessor, Binyamin Netanyahu. “Barak was the biggest builder since Shamir,” says Etkes.

Joseph Alpher, a strategic consultant and former Mossad member, author of the 1994 Alpher Plan for a final Israeli-Palestinian accord, describes Israel’s settlement policy as: “Mindless. There was never any serious contemplation of where this could lead. One product of three and a half decades of mindlessness is that Israel’s leadership still doesn’t seem to grasp the enormity of what Israel is heading for in the coming decades. Removal of the settlements should by now be an urgent national priority.”

More and more Israelis and Jews elsewhere in the world are beginning to speak out on the essential contradiction between the occupation and a lasting peace settlement.

Yehuda Ben-Meir, a once-prominent member of the National Religious Party who rose to become deputy foreign minister before quitting the party, states that the pro-settler right wing has “no answer” as to what to do with the three million Palestinians who now live in the West Bank and Gaza. Currently a member of the dovish Meimad, Ben-Meir states that, “Those who are honest talk of transfer.” Others who try to juggle demographic realities with democratic values speak of controlling the land and having the Palestinians vote in Jordan. To Ben-Meir, those are “fantastic” solutions that don’t confront reality. “Why Jordan?” he asks. “Why not Qatar or Australia? The Jordanians don’t want it.” No taxation without representation is the ABC of democracy, he argues, adding that the alternative is apartheid.

Gershom Gorenberg, author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, points out that, “Today’s Israel, within its pre-67 boundaries, is a democracy, albeit imperfect…The territories are a separate universe. There, Israeli settlers live under Israeli law. They vote for the Knesset. If they engage in terror, as a few have, their homes are not demolished. They travel the roads freely…Palestinians wait at checkpoints to move from a village to a neighboring town. Basic resources benefit 200,000 settlers at the expense of 3 million Palestinians. According to a recent report by the B’Tselem human rights group, over 40 percent of all West Bank land is controlled by settlements. By the decision of our democratically chosen government, we’ve created the opposite of democracy—but in a limited area, beyond our borders. We’re making a mistake…Painful as it will be, we can leave that separate universe, and return to ourselves.”

Painful Questions

Current Israeli government policy, Gorenberg argues, “is taking us in the opposite direction…Terror encourages us to evade the painful question of our future, which can be phrased like this: Is Israel roughly reenacting the last chapter of France’s experience with Algeria, or South Africa’s experiment with apartheid?...The difference between the models is this: France in the ‘50s was a Western democracy at home…But though it insisted Algeria was part of the French homeland, that was a delusion…When the revolution came, the rebels stained their cause with terror. Nonetheless, France finally came to its senses and left—and saved its democracy and future by doing so. In South Africa, there was no border between democracy and colony. The state itself served a minority by oppressing the majority. The attempt to create ‘independent’ black states in fragmented enclaves fooled no one. When revolution came, it brought a new, majority-rule regime to the entire land.”

The problem for Israelis, Gorenberg concludes, is “how to fight terror while finding the quickest way to leave our Algeria behind.”

On the occasion of the Jewish High Holy Days, Jessica Montell, executive director of B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, declared, “Sadly I must conclude that we—the State of Israel—have much for which to repent this year. In the last year alone, more than 900 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, the vast majority of them civilians. Hundreds of families have had their homes demolished. Israel’s increasingly severe restrictions on Palestinian movement have more than tripled the number of families living below the poverty level and disrupted all aspects of daily life. More than 20 people have died following delays in reaching medical treatment. This is not to say that the Palestinians have not also transgressed. The suicide bombings against Israeli civilians are perhaps the most horrific and blatant violation against human dignity, justified by no suffering or grievance…That being said, Israel cannot manipulate our legitimate security concerns…as a blanket justification for everything it is doing in the territories. Sadly, I fear that this is often the case.”

In Montell’s view, “While Israel needs support during this time of great difficulty, it needs the support of real friends. Friends who honestly point out our failings…Friends who will say that, while it may not be the miracle cure, justice is certainly a crucial component of making this coming year more peaceful than the last.”

Not only is the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza an impediment to any movement toward peace but it is also, in the opinion of many, a violation of traditional Jewish values.

Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi, told The Guardian of London that he regarded “the current situation as nothing less than tragic. It is forcing Israel into postures that are incompatible in the long run with our deepest ideals.”

Rabbi Sacks revealed that after Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, he was “convinced that Israel had to give back all the newly gained land for the sake of peace.” In his new book, The Dignity of Difference, Rabbi Sacks says of the Israeli-Palestine conflict that the solution is two states, “roughly coinciding with existing centers of population, an agreement about Jerusalem and holy sites so that each has access to places important to them, joint supervision of shared resources such as water and an international accord about the future of displaced refugees.”

Little progress will be made until Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. and elsewhere come to realize that Israel cannot, at the same time, occupy the West Bank and Gaza and also have peace.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.