Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel, 1967-2004
by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, Kinneret, Zmora Bitan and Dvir, 640 pages, NIS 98
Reuven Pedatzur – Ha'aretz "Adonei ha'aretz: hamitnachlim umidinat yisrael, 1967-2004"

The blurb on the back cover says, "`Lords of the Land' is an upsetting and infuriating book." This is certainly an apt description, but even more than this, it is a saddening book - saddening for those who care about the fate and future of Israeli democracy. The story of Jewish settlement in the territories is also the story of the slide of democracy down a slippery slope, and of the possibility that it might disappear altogether if it hits the bottom.


Poring over more than 600 pages, the reader learns that the occupation and the settlement enterprise that followed it have brought Israel dangerously close to that rock-bottom state. What began with euphoria in June 1967, when various parts of the homeland were "liberated" and we returned to "Anatot and Shilo," as Moshe Dayan so poetically put it, has evolved into a national disaster whose end no one knows. What began as "enlightened occupation" has become, in the wake of the settlement enterprise, an ugly, racist occupation. Its standard-bearers, the settlers, have become "lords of the land," crudely trampling not only on the basic human rights of their Palestinian neighbors but on the fundamental norms of Israeli democracy.

But to blame the situation in the territories since 1967 and the serious blow to democracy entirely on the settlers is an easy way out, not to mention a grievous error. As Zertal and Eldar point out, "the development of the settlements would not have been possible without the massive aid from various government agencies, the legal stamp of approval, and the warm, but also pragmatic relationship forged between the settlers and the top military brass." Indeed, every Israeli government that has come to power, every branch of the legal establishment, all branches of the Israeli army - all have helped the settlement enterprise in the territories to flourish. Some happily, others with mild protest, some closing an eye and adding a sly wink, others by defiantly ignoring gross violations of the law. No one is blameless.

It began with the Eshkol administration, which commenced the business of settlement after Israel's euphoric victory in the Six-Day War, and continued through the first term of Yitzhak Rabin, whose defense minister, Shimon Peres, cooperated with Gush Emunim and paved the way for the illegal squatting of the Sebastia settlers. In the days of Ehud Barak, building in the territories chalked up its steepest rise since Oslo. Ariel Sharon talked about painful concessions, but continued to expand those settlements closest to his heart, strengthening his cantonization plans and channeling colossal sums of money into existing settlements to lay the foundation for "new neighborhoods."

It is particularly saddening to see the contribution of the justice system - from the government's legal advisors to the military prosecutors, the office of the attorney general, the courts and the law professors - to rubber-stamping occupation and settlement. It is saddening to see its embrace of objectionable, anti-democratic norms, and its accepting attitude toward "the settlers' violations of the law and the absence of law enforcement." Again, no one gets off the hook - not judges like Uri Strussman, who sentenced Nissan Ishgoyev to six months' community service for firing into an alleyway where teenagers had been throwing stones, killing one of them. Not Ezra Hadaya, who imposed four months of community service on Pinhas Wallerstein for chasing teenagers, who were burning tires on the road, shooting one of them in the back and killing him. Not Ruth Orr, who acquitted Nahum Korman of causing the death of Hilmi Shusha by kicking him in the head, stepping on the boy's neck and pistol-whipping him. And not Ya'acov Bazak, who empathized with members of the Jewish underground, who murdered Islamic College students, planted bombs in the cars of West Bank mayors and planned to blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, potentially siccing the whole of the Muslim world on Israel. These "good people, fired by faith," touched his heart.

Judge Finkelman, who sat on the bench together with Bazak, described Yeshua Ben-Shushan, the brains behind the plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, as a Jewish hero. Most members of the group got off with light sentences and all of them - even those convicted of murder - were released from prison within a short time.

Erosion of norms

Even more infuriating than the rulings are the judges' reasons for handing them down. Judge Hadaya takes the cake with his astonishing explanation for not imposing a heavier penalty on Wallerstein. He was guided by the famous adage about not judging your fellow man until you are in his shoes. "With that statement the judge effectively undermined the whole act of bringing someone to trial," write Zertal and Eldar.

Clearly, the judges permitted themselves to deliver such rulings because they know that Israeli society has made its peace with the gradual but continuous erosion of democratic norms, and with the state of affairs in the territories astutely described by law professor- politician Amnon Rubinstein. In the territories, observed Rubinstein, "there are Israeli citizens with full rights and non-citizen non-Israelis with non-rights."

Only against this backdrop can we understand the audacity of Plia Albeck, a senior lawyer in the attorney general's office. Coaching the Tel Aviv district attorney's office on how to respond to a Palestinian who sued for damages in October 1991 after his wife was shot to death by an Israeli Border Policeman, Albeck said: "The appellant only gained from his wife's death. When she was alive, he had to support her, but now he is freed from this obligation, so he has no claim."

But Albeck was not operating in a vacuum. Above her were ministers and legal advisers whom she represented and who had no problems with such an approach. Then-justice minister Dan Meridor reprimanded her, but she was not shown the door. During her heyday, which lasted more than a decade, she served under then-attorney generals Aharon Barak and Yitzhak Zamir.

Above all, however, the story of the settlement enterprise is Ariel Sharon's story. While there have been many partners in the campaign to settle beyond the Green Line, none have been as influential as Sharon. His influence can be traced back to the eviction of the Bedouin from the Rafiah Salient to make way for settlements when he headed the Israel Defense Forces Southern Command. It can be traced to his support of the Gush Emunim settlers who refused to leave Sebastia when he was an adviser to then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, and to his call in 1975 to disrupt the visit of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. "Settlements should be going up every day to prove to the Americans that the Rabin administration has no mandate from the people to withdraw from Judea and Samaria," he declared at the time.

And then, of course, there were the assorted positions he held in the Likud administrations, which placed him in charge of settlement activity in the territories. He worked tirelessly to establish settlements on every hilltop and to insure that no future agreement could be reached. As foreign minister in the Netanyahu government, after returning from the Wye talks, he urged the settlers to take control of the hilltops of the West Bank to prevent the land from being returned to the Palestinians. One could go on and on, because the settlement enterprise in the territories was created in the image of Ariel Sharon. "Sharon was its Herod."

`Shocking price tag'

But Sharon's influence has gone far beyond shaping the settlement map of the territories. He was responsible for the "shocking price tag" of the second intifada, triggered by his visit to the Temple Mount in late September 2000, and for the "shortsighted, impulsive planning of the route of the separation fence." Even the civil war now threatening the State of Israel is Sharon's baby.

Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, Sharon has been forced to undergo "a painful dialectic process" and to confront the outcome of his own actions. There is a price to pay for building settlements and being an occupier. The prime minister is reaping today what he has sowed for the last four decades. After calling upon soldiers not to obey orders to evacuate the Hawara settlers in 1974, he is now watching the harmful repercussions of military disobedience from the other side of the fence. After running roughshod over the laws of the state and refusing to bow to the decisions of the government, even one to which he belonged, he is now faced with copycat followers and proteges who are building illegal outposts on those same hilltops he urged his countrymen to settle.

The settlers, who once hailed Sharon as their hero, "now lump him together with the leaders of the Nazi regime, the heads of the Israeli left, Mussolini, Sabbatai Sevi and the Pied Piper of Hamelin." History is taking its sweet revenge. Sharon, who incited against every prime minister and contributed in no small measure to the volatile atmosphere on the eve of Rabin's assassination, is now looking at rabbis who have thrown caution to the wind and are issuing religious rulings that sanction violence specifically directed against him.

Zertal and Eldar meticulously document the growth of Gush Emunim, its historical and ideological roots, and the unique operational methods it has developed. Gush Emunim "is the most savvy and socially influential political movement since the establishment of the state," they write, as well as "the most dangerous." Indeed, Gush Emunim is a prime example of the ability of a small, well-organized group with an ideology embraced without question by its members to dictate the national, political and social agenda of an entire country.

Ally to foe

The people of Gush Emunim divide the world into two: those who agree with what they are doing and support them, and everyone else. Anyone who deviates from their path, even a former hero, becomes a target of "their cold and calculated hatred." This is what happened to Shimon Peres, for example, who came to the aid of the settlers of Sebastia and helped them make the move to Kadum. From the moment he changed his tune and began to talk about the need for compromise in the territories, he became a bitter enemy. Suddenly, he is "totally alienated from the Jewish people .... This insensitive Polish Jew dares to desecrate the memory of the millions murdered by the Nazis .... He is a Jew who does not feel at home in Israel, a man without a homeland, a godless man" (quoted from an article by Nadia and Ruth Matar in The Jewish Press). Even Menachem Begin, who declared when he came to power that "there will be many more Alon Morehs," did not escape the wrath of Gush Emunim. "When he stopped fulfilling their dream, they turned on him without sentiment or regret." Overnight, he went from ally to foe.

Special ignominy is reserved for the rabbis of Gush Emunim. These rabbis, who receive their salaries from the state, have no qualms about opposing it and everything that Israeli democracy represents. Their rulings based on halakha (traditional Jewish law), their inflammatory rhetoric against the institutions of the state, the racism inherent in their philosophy - all these play a crucial role in legitimizing the disorderly conduct of the settlers and their mockery of the law. Yigal Amir made it clear that he would not have murdered the prime minister if there were no religious rulings to back him up. Until today, none of these rabbis have been brought to justice and they continue to spread incitement, freely and without hindrance.

"No one has been brought to account, publicly or otherwise, for his involvement in the settlement enterprise," write Zertal and Eldar. "Apart from Israeli society growing less democratic, less humane, less rational, and at the same time, poorer and more ridden with hatred and controversy ... the majority of Israelis continue to lead their lives without interruption, while the settlements gradually take over the country and ruin the lives of the Palestinians."

And that is, ultimately, the message of this book. While untenable things are happening in the territories and the occupation is destroying every bright spot in Israeli democracy, life inside the Green Line goes on "without interruption." Therefore, above and beyond all those who have contributed, actively or by default, to the development of this monster known as settlement, a place of honor goes to the indifference of Israeli society.

"Lords of the Land" seeks to shake up this indifference, and therein lies its importance

Destined To Clash: Zionism and the Settlements

Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel, 1967-2004
By Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar
Kinneret, Zmora-Bitan Dvir Publishing House

Many studies exist detailing one aspect or another of the story of Israel's settlement of its occupied territories. None, however, in Hebrew or in any other language, has tried to tell the full story. "Lords of the Land," by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, is the first attempt to give a more-or-less full account. This in itself is a fact worth pondering, because such settlement was by far the most important political story in Israel in the past four decades. Why then, only now?

Part of the answer lies in the nature of the story itself: It all took place in a shady, gray area of politics, law, economy and ideology, the contours of which were never clear. Settlement was always a semi-legal, semi-clandestine operation.

Consider, for example, one incident at the movement's beginning, told in detail in the first section of the book: In the spring of 1968, less than a year after Israel acquired new territories in the lightning victory of the Six-Day War, a group of young men, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, approached the military administration of the occupied territory with a modest request. They asked to celebrate the Passover Seder in Hebron, the newly occupied city of our biblical forefathers and foremothers.

Armed with a military permit signed by commander of the Eastern front General Uzi Narkis, they arrived in the ancient town on the night of April 12, and rented rooms in the Park Hotel. It later turned out that they neglected to keep their promise to leave the city when the holiday was over. The government had already rejected plans, submitted by Minister Igal Alon, hero of the War of Independence, to create a Jewish neighborhood in Hebron. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was not happy with the whole Seder affair, but he failed to grasp the full meaning of this little bridgehead, and he did not put his foot down. Alon, on the other hand, sympathized and paid the settlers a ministerial visit. Other ministers followed. Through teary eyes, and a cloud of melodramatic rhetoric about the return of Jews to the sites of the Bible, combined with nostalgia for the pioneering beginnings of secular labor Zionism, political vision was blurred.

Eshkol wavered, but did not stop his subordinates. His minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, another war hero, came up with a compromise: to move the group temporarily to the military administration's building, until a permanent solution could be found. The settlers took this to be a kind of official recognition. They were already busy creating an improvised school for their children (inside the Park Hotel), followed by a yeshiva.

When the issue was brought up in Cabinet again, rather than deciding on creating a Jewish settlement, the government first decided not to evacuate those already there. By and by, a settlement sprang up. A fact on the ground. The army mobilized to protect it. And since it was there already, by September of the same year, a government that never intended to settle any of the territories approved construction of a Jewish neighborhood in the city. This would become a pattern: Facts on the ground are created, army and bureaucracy follow, and finally the government grants retroactive approval.

Surprisingly, the pattern did not change all that much under the Likud governments, which, since 1977, encouraged settlements positively and increased their number greatly. There are a few reasons that the operation remained in the shadows: The government itself preferred to leave much of it semi-covert. Sure, there were some pompous cornerstone ceremonies, but the bulk of activity had to keep a low profile. According to international law, an occupying power is barred from settling its citizens on occupied territories, and even Israel's greatest allies — the United States, primarily — frowned on it. Unwilling to go so far as to annex the territories, even the most hawkish governments helped enlarge the rift between de facto and de jure.

Secondly, the ambitions of the settlers always greatly exceeded even those of the most sympathetic governments. So in the increasingly wild West Bank, ambiguity kept surrounding everything, and nobody called anything by its proper name. "Lords of the Land" describes in great detail how land grabs were disguised as military zone restrictions; how new settlements were disguised at first as "neighborhoods" of existing ones; how legal terms were twisted and devoid of meaning, creating double standards and lax enforcement; how government funds were diverted in clandestine, roundabout ways; how bureaucratic hierarchies grew strange humps to bypass regular procedures, and so forth.

From the early days of Hebron to the creation of the city of Ariel, from little government concessions made to small groups up to the crisscrossing of the whole territory with "security roads" for Jews only — what was really going on largely eluded the public eye. The story is a truly amazing one: A small group of zealots, a mere 2% of Israel's population, managed to exploit the nation's inability to decide the fate of the territories to an extraordinary extent. With various degrees of sympathy and antipathy from different governments, they were able to drag a whole country into a state it never really debated, let alone decided on. This small group, driven by an unflinching confidence that they represent nothing short of God's true will, and with some allies in parliament and government, spearheaded, nurtured, protected and maintained the effort that culminated in almost a quarter of a million Jews now living in the territories. They nearly managed to turn the occupation — with three-and-a-half-million Arab inhabitants — into permanent annexation.

But they fell short of that point, and the timeframe of "Lords of the Land" runs right up to the point at which this seems clear: Ariel Sharon's introduction of the disengagement plan last year. Since the book came out, Israel's government has approved the plan, along with a wall, or fence, closer than ever to the Green Line (Israel's 1967 international border). The wall, as everyone in Israel understands, is bound to become a future border. It now seems for the first time that the story of settlement is drawing to a close. And this might be a second reason that such a book had to wait so long: It is from this point in time that a full story — with a beginning, a middle and something like an end — can be told.

The attempt to tell it is an ambitious undertaking, and the book produced by historian Idith Zertal and journalist Akiva Eldar is a massive 640-page volume. (Hebrew is more concise than English. A literal English translation would amount to something like 900 pages.) But the book isn't exactly a single narrative. It is divided into sections dealing with the different aspects of settlement: It opens with a chronicle, a straight political narrative of settlement activity and government actions. It then moves to a fairly well documented side of the story, the theology and ideology of Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), which was the driving force behind the whole effort. Then come more specialized aspects: the settlers' culture, the relations with the military, the legal side and, finally, back to politics, the recent Sharon administration. The economic aspect, as the authors readily acknowledge, is sadly missing and would have to wait for further research.

The division into sections might not have been a wise decision. Rather than offering a straightforward chronology, the book jumps back and forth in time to cover the same years, often the same events, from different angles. Zertal and Eldar would have done better to integrate them into one narrative. After all, the different pieces belong together: The relations with the army are indispensable for understanding the legal aspect, the legal entwined with government actions, ideology and theology with public debate and the democratic process, and so on. Despite its enormous value in detailed documentation, the work is edited haphazardly, so much so that readers might sometimes feel that the whole archive is being dumped upon them.

But the book's deeper flaw lies elsewhere: It fails to articulate what its own pages so clearly add up to, the bottom line that explains why Israel's government and Israel's electorate finally rejected the project of settlement. This is what recent years have brought into sharp focus: that Zionism and settlement are ideological opposites.

Zionism is about one territory on this earth where Jews could be a majority, and exercise the right to self-determination. Settlement, on the other hand, is about redeeming the land of our forefathers, as part of the larger plan of religious salvation. Zionism is about a democratic nation state; settlement leads to a binational state with a ruling Jewish minority. For Zionism, a Jewish democracy is the end; for settlers, the Jewish state is but a means to redemption.

The two could avoid facing their rivalry in a cloud of war smoke, or in the effort to combat terrorism or in high rhetoric about what they really share — a belief in the need for a Jewish state. But their ultimate values were destined to clash. The Arab population of the occupied territories is fast approaching 4 million. Along with Israel's 1 million Arab citizens within the Green Line, Israel would have an Arab majority by 2010. As the meaning of these numbers became clear, the "demographic question" came to the fore: Birth rates in the territories far exceed both those of Jews and those of Arab citizens within the Green Line. Jewish collective self-determination is now at serious risk.

So push has come to shove. And at this crossroad, even a radical hawk like Sharon, being a Zionist, would not give up the Jewish democracy in exchange for "redeemed" territory. The messianic settlers, on the other hand, cling to the territories, even as it is fast becoming clear that staying there means Jews will soon be a minority in their own land. In the settlers' view, disengagement is unthinkable: The secular state has turned against religious redemption through liberation of the Holy Land; the means have turned against the ends.

For the settlers, the state was never more than a means, which, in retrospect, makes the whole story much easier to understand. They had no qualms about subverting the democratic process with "facts on the ground," because, as the founding rabbi of the movement, Zvi Yehuda ha-Cohen Kook, put it, settlements are part of "God's politics... and no earthly politics could counter it." Now that the means negate the end, some settlers have no qualms even about abandoning the means: Some of their rabbis have repeatedly called religious soldiers to refuse orders of evacuation. Lately some settler polemicists and spiritual leaders have even begun to lament the very choice of means. Some now deem the original alliance with secular Zionism a mistake.

The clash between the two worldviews — Zionism and messianic settlement — was written on the wall, and despite the failure of "Lords of the Land" to articulate it, it leaps at the reader from every page. This is perhaps the final and most important reason that such a book had to wait so long. At this point in time, the inner meaning of the whole struggle becomes clear: It is the drama of Zionism fighting for its life against its most effective, most subversive adversary — the messianic cult of land redeemers.

Despite some loose talk about it, Israel is not on the brink of civil war. Though some might take up arms, the settlers are too small a minority, and most of them will give up their messianic hopes and then gradually, grudgingly, submit to the state. The alternative is just too bleak for most. Diehard believers are dangerous, but they are too few to pose a serious military threat. If they turn against the army, they will lose the remnants of sympathy that many Israelis still harbor for them. But short of civil war, the ideological confrontation is of the same kind that the United States experienced in its most monumental struggle to define itself. America could deny the fundamental opposition between slavery and democracy for so many years, but not forever. The two worldviews were destined to clash, and they finally did. So were settlement and occupation destined to clash with Zionism.

Redemption of territory now stands in stark contrast to what is inscribed in Israel's Declaration of Independence: Zionism's moral basis in the "natural right" of all peoples to self-determination. It's an either-or juncture. If we cling to "redeemed" land, we will have to give up the Jewish majority on which the Zionist vision rests. It's apartheid with the territories, or democracy without them. With Ariel Sharon, the great patron of settlement for many years, thrust by events into the unlikely role of a kind of Abraham Lincoln, this struggle over the very soul of the Jewish state is unfurling right before our eyes.

*Gadi Taub is the author of "A Dispirited Rebellion: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture." He teaches communications and public policy at the Hebrew University.