Israel and the settlements
Israel’s conquest in 1967 of the West Bank, or ‘Judea and Samaria’ as Israel referred to it, marked a fundamental turning point in the evolution of Zionism. The 1947 UN plan and the 1949 armistice lines had provided Zionism with territory in which to achieve its political goals—the main one being statehood. But these borders had not included the ancient lands of Israel. Throughout, and prior to, the mandate period, Jewish settlement had been attracted mostly to the economic opportunities offered by the plains and valleys of mandate Palestine. The religious sites of the central mountainous range remained densely populated by the indigenous Arab population and so were not included in the UN plans for a Jewish state. As David Ben Gurion argued at the first meeting of the Israeli Knesset, a Jewish state that incorporated the West Bank could not be democratic because of its large Arab population. However, other Zionist leaders never accepted the 1947 partition, while others viewed it solely in terms of a stepping stone for further expansion. Those who perceived the conquests of 1967 as the final restoration of the lands of Israel, and portrayed their cause as the fulfilment of Jewish destiny, were bolstered by the support of hard-line leaders, often referred to as ‘hawks’, who argued after 1967 for the incorporation of the West Bank and Gaza into the Jewish state for security reasons. They asserted, for example, that the Jordan Valley was Israel’s only defensible border. In this highly charged debate over Israel’s boundaries, the hawks were opposed by the ‘doves’, who continued to place more emphasis on implementing a land-for-peace deal envisaged by Resolution 242. They supported, for example, a territorial negotiation with King Husayn of Jordan. This conflict was also taken up by extra-parliamentary movements such as Peace Now and Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful). Whereas Peace Now emerged as a secular movement that supported territorial compromise, Gush Emunim was a religious millenarian movement whose goal was to secure an indissoluble degree of Israeli control over the occupied territories. It saw its task as one of establishing irreversible facts on the ground that would make future negotiations difficult if not impossible. Accordingly, the movement founded new Jewish settlements deep in the West Bank, both on relatively uninhabited hilltops and in dense population centres.
In the years immediately following the 1967 war, those agitating for withdrawal and negotiation were very much on the defensive. They found it especially difficult to press their case: Israel’s geopolitical position seemed invincible, and the belligerence shown by Arab leaders at Khartoum hardened the case against any compromise. It was an environment in which the messianic nationalist vision could only grow stronger. The transformation in attitudes towards the need to assert Biblical rights was sharpest in the case of Arab cities such as Hebron—where a few hundred Jewish settlers needed to be protected by at least as many soldiers—and Jerusalem. Before 1967, Zionist leaders could imagine a Jewish state without Jerusalem. After 1967, Israelis agreed unanimously on the need to control the whole city. As shown in Illustration 11, the Green Line which had separated Jordanian East Jerusalem from Israeli West Jerusalem was discarded and the jurisdiction of the Israeli municipality was extended to include East Jerusalem. Within the old city, the medieval Mughrabi quarter was demolished to make room for an open space in front of the Western Wall; on the outskirts, municipal boundaries were expanded in order to extend Israeli jurisdiction over the lands of neighbouring Arab villages. A systematic settlement policy resulted in the construction of a ring of Jewish suburbs encircling Jerusalem. Yet, although a 1980 Knesset resolution declared Jerusalem the eternal capital of Israel, the peoples of East and West Jerusalem enjoyed little contact. Israel’s annexation was not recognized by the international community and Palestinians themselves saw East Jerusalem as the future capital of their own independent state.
11. Jerusalem since 1967
With gradual, if at first hesitant, acquiescence from the government, and spurred by increasing support of a public nostalgia for the ethic and operations of early Zionist pioneers, thousands of Israelis established mobile home settlements in the West Bank and Gaza during the decade after 1967. The Labour-led government in Israel at the time voiced support for the exchange of land for peace but nonetheless invested significantly in settlement infrastructure in the occupied territories. Settlement activity increased dramatically after the 1977 elections and the Likud victory over the Labour Party. After decades of political pre-eminence, Labour Zionism’s electoral defeat was in large part attributed to its failure to provide a clear ideological response to the question of the legitimacy of the settlement project. The growing disenchantment with the Labour Party can also be attributed to the emerging political involvement of the Mizrahi population, which felt increasingly alienated by the policies of the Labour Party’s Ashkenazi elite. Mizrahi groups formed the backbone of support for the victory of Menachem Begin and the Likud Party in the 1977 elections. Begin was committed to increased settlement building as a way to ensure that future governments would be forced to retain control over the territories, and he introduced a number of government subsidies that would broaden the territories’ appeal beyond the religious settler movement. Many settlements built along the Green Line were designed to appeal to commuters from Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem. For Begin, Israel’s signing of the 1979 peace accords with Egypt was both the beginning and the end of a land-for-peace accord.
Whether settlements were established for reasons of conviction or convenience, they were all heavily protected by a military occupation that imposed heavy burdens on the Palestinian inhabitants. Israel severely restricted economic life in the occupied territories: for example, agricultural land was expropriated for Israeli settlements and military installations and irrigation farming suffered from the refusal of army officers to permit the digging of wells. Meanwhile, subsidized Israeli agricultural products were sold widely in the occupied territories. The Palestinian economy became increasingly subject and subordinate to the needs of the growing Israeli economy. Palestinian farm labourers left home to work in Israel or even found work constructing Jewish settlements, while those with the appropriate skills sought employment in the oil-rich Gulf countries.
Palestinians
As noted above, the fighting that ended in 1949 erased Palestine from the map and destroyed Palestinian society. Over 700,000 Palestinians became refugees. Barred from returning to their villages, most of which were soon bulldozed by Israel, Palestinian refugees were dispersed among surrounding Arab countries, with a high proportion going to the West Bank and Gaza. However, new form was given to Palestinian nationalist identity by their common insistence on their right to return. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) played an important role in providing services, especially in education. Set up in 1949 to provide relief services, UNRWA gradually took on more responsibility in the fields of education and health. But the fact that the refugees’ livelihood was basically dependent upon the goodwill of distinct host states resulted also in Palestinian political and social fragmentation. For example, in Lebanon—where some 150,000 Palestinian refugees threatened to upset the delicate population balance on which the governmental system of proportional communal representation was based—more Palestinian Christians were absorbed into Lebanese society than Palestinian Muslims. Proportionately, the Gaza Strip admitted the largest number of refugees: its 80,000 inhabitants, who in 1948 came under Egypt’s military administration, absorbed 200,000 refugees. Only Jordan conferred citizenship upon the refugees: for King Abdullah, gaining control over the important Muslim shrines of Jerusalem’s Old City and bolstering his regional importance fully justified the annexation of the newly carved-out West Bank, refugee camps and all. West Bank resources and manpower tended to promote the development of the East Bank.
In 1964, the creation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) gave Palestinians a new focus of political identity. Its charter called for a Palestinian Arab state on all the whole of mandate Palestine, describing it as an ‘indivisible territorial
unit’ and declaring the establishment of Israel ‘illegal and null and void’. When the PLO was formed at the first Arab summit, many prominent Palestinians participated but they became highly suspicious of the organization’s evident subordination to Egyptian President Nasser. The organization’s effectiveness as a national institution was further curtailed by the opposition of Jordan’s King Husayn, who viewed it as a threat to his claim of sovereignty over the West Bank and its inhabitants. Meanwhile, other Palestinian groups were also organizing themselves with the aim of taking control of their own struggle against Israel. The most important of these groups was Fatah (Arabic for ‘conquest’), founded in Kuwait in 1959 and led by Yasir Arafat.
Arafat’s ability to move the PLO beyond the tutelage of Arab states and take control of the organization as a whole came as a direct result of their defeat in June 1967. The war seriously weakened the hold of Arab states on Palestinian activity, and hurt the legitimacy of the previous PLO leadership. In March 1968, Fatah launched guerrilla operations against the West Bank from bases in Jordanian villages. After an Israeli reprisal attack on the village of Karamah met fierce resistance by the guerrillas, who were supported by the Jordanian army, the battle of Karamah (the name means ‘honour’ or ‘dignity’ in Arabic) became a symbol of heroic resistance. Fatah’s popularity then soared, inspiring a rapid influx of volunteers, donations, and armaments. Wearing his black-and-white chequered keffiyeh (head cloth), Arafat became the public face of the Palestinian guerrilla movement. In 1969 he was elected chairman of the PLO (a position he held until his death in 2004). In 1974, at the Arab summit held in Rabat, the PLO received recognition as the sole representative of the Palestinians. And later that year, Arafat addressed the UN general assembly and the PLO was granted observer status.
Adopting the tone of contemporary radical anti-colonial movements, the 1968 Palestine Charter placed special emphasis on armed struggle as a strategy and not just a tactic and thus as the only way to bring about the liberation of Palestine. It rejected Zionism’s claims on any part of Palestine, acknowledging Judaism only as a religion, not a nationality. The organization’s embrace of armed struggle contributed to mobilizing Palestinians and attracted international attention to their plight. But the PLO was an umbrella organization and Fatah’s role, though dominant, was not uncontested. Given Palestinian dispersal, Arafat preferred to try to bring all factions, some of which had very different agendas, under a big tent rather than place a premium on discipline and obedience. His persistent failure to oppose the more violent approaches embraced by smaller militant groups (such as the terrorist operation against Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and the 1985 hijacking of an Italian passenger ship, the Achille Lauro, during which a Jewish American tourist was murdered) tended to undermine the legitimacy of the Palestinian movement and solidify the image of Palestinians as terrorists on the world stage. It also brought the organization into conflict with neighbouring host countries such as Jordan and Lebanon. The relationship between Arab governments and Palestinian nationalism was an ever-shifting one: generally, the regimes’ rhetoric espousing the liberation of Palestine was backed up by limited support or a desire to control the movement for their own purposes.
In particular, the relationship between the PLO and Jordan, where Palestinians established bases from which to organize guerrilla armed struggle against Israel, was volatile from the outset. It ended in disaster in 1970 when the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a component of the PLO which was determined to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy, staged multiple hijackings of international airline flights. King Husayn declared war on the PLO after accusing it of creating ‘a state within a state’, and killed 3,000 Palestinians in the process. Expelled from Jordan, most PLO guerrillas regrouped in Lebanon, where Arafat soon established a number of social and economic organizations and indeed relocated the entire PLO infrastructure there.
But its presence in Lebanon increasingly threatened the country’s delicate political and demographic balance. When civil war broke out in 1975, Lebanon’s Christian leaders were particularly concerned about the challenge the Palestinian ‘state within a state’ posed to their political dominance. They sought help from Israeli leaders who were equally concerned about the presence of PLO guerrillas on their northern border. In 1982, an assassination attempt on Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom provided the Israeli government with a pretext to invade Lebanon and expel the PLO from its power base in Beirut. In June, Israeli troops pushed up the coastline. They moved deep into Lebanon, occupying the south and then laying siege to the capital. As Beirut came under heavy bombardment, the PLO faced pressure from most Lebanese political parties to leave. In August thousands of Palestinian fighters were forced to evacuate, and the PLO leadership along with many fighters withdrew to Tunisia, Syria, and further afield. The following month, Lebanese Christian militiamen entered the now unarmed Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and, with the help of the protective presence and night-time flares provided by the surrounding Israeli army, slaughtered thousands, including women and children.
The costs of the war for Lebanon were staggering, and the regional repercussions of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon were also profound. Politically, an important new force emerged in south Lebanon. The predominantly Shi’ite Muslim community had initially welcomed an end to PLO armed operations, which had made the area a dangerous place in which to live. But Shi’ite resentment of Israel intensified as an Israeli occupation in the south took root. Israel had hoped that the expansion of a ‘security zone’ stretching 5 to 25 kilometres inside Lebanon would offer Israel a protective buffer. Instead, it quickly replaced one foe with another. On Israel’s northern frontier, the fight against occupation was now led by the newly established Shi’ite militias Amal and, later, Hizbullah (Party of God). In the struggle for control over their land, Amal and Hizbullah launched violent guerrilla campaigns assisted by Syria and Iran. Israel finally withdrew fifteen years later.
Reverberations of the Lebanon war were also strongly felt in Israel’s domestic politics. The invasion left Israelis deeply divided. As news of the atrocities dominated the headlines, protests against Israel’s role in the Lebanon war mounted, and Prime Minister Menachem Begin faced increasing pressure to form a commission of inquiry to investigate the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The commission called for the dismissal of Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, while public pressure increased on Begin to resign, which he did the following year.
For Palestinians, the fallout from the Lebanon war was also profound. In exile in Tunisia, the PLO leadership now looked out upon a very different political landscape. With very little to show for eighteen years of armed struggle, the focus gradually shifted to the pursuit of diplomatic initiatives. A new strategy developed, involving recognition of the existence of the Israeli state and envisaging a redefinition of a state of Palestine based on the West Bank and Gaza, and not on the whole of the post-First World War mandate territory. However, shifts in international relations at this time, in particular the end of the Cold War, threatened to lessen dramatically the PLO’s significance as well as its cause. Confined to Tunis, the PLO’s central leadership drifted, until thrown a lifeline by the 1987 uprising against the Israeli occupation, known as the intifada.
Conclusion
The 1967 Arab–Israeli war opened new possibilities for a settlement to the ongoing conflict. In control of major territorial assets, Israel now had something to trade for peace with neighbouring states. However, at the same time as Israel increased its leverage in negotiations, powerful interests emerged within it that militated against a return of the occupied territories and favoured an expanded ‘Greater Israel’. Control over the West Bank and Gaza fuelled the messianic belief that war had fulfilled Jewish destiny. Jewish settlers mobilized support by drawing upon a certain nostalgia for early Zionist settlement work. This time, however, the pioneers were implementing the Zionist dream in the hills of Judea and Samari
a. Settlements were strategically located to deliberately thwart any effort to implement the land-for-peace model mandated by Resolution 242. They thus reopened the problematic question of where exactly Israel’s borders lay, and a new challenge emerged: how to maintain a democratic Jewish state while also annexing a large and growing Arab population.
By 1987, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza had spent twenty years under an unbearable occupation. With their Tunisian central leadership powerless, a younger generation took matters into their own hands. The spark was a road accident at the main junction between Israel and the Gaza Strip that caused four Palestinian deaths. Their funerals ignited protests, and within days the occupied territories were engulfed in demonstrations that mobilized all Palestinians, including women and children. Both the Israeli and the PLO leaderships were surprised by the spontaneous uprising, and both had to craft their responses quickly. Israel resorted to brute force, but this only fuelled more resistance. Enervated by the inability of Israel’s military might to quell the disturbances, increasing numbers of Israelis turned against the occupation and what they saw as its corrupting impact. The PLO leaders, on the other hand, felt empowered by the grass-roots rebellion and confidently sought to translate the momentum of the resistance into diplomatic achievement. In 1988, the PLO affirmed Resolution 242, recognized the Israeli state, and called for a peaceful settlement between Israel and a Palestinian state located in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It would be another defining moment in the evolution of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.
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