by David Landau
But Begin, complicating the contradiction, did not annex the West Bank. This would have been the natural and logical consequence of his lifelong ideology. He solemnly renounced annexation when Dayan made that his condition for becoming foreign minister.2 Begin most likely would have forgone annexation anyway, with or without Dayan. To annex the occupied territories would have confirmed all the world’s worst fears of this onetime terrorist leader. It would have forfeited American support and turned Israel into a pariah. Begin’s decision not to annex was a clear signal that he sought legitimacy and acceptance in the international community.
But of course—another facet of the same contradiction—occupation and settlement precluded legitimacy and acceptance. This was doubly the case now that the prospect had opened of real peace with the Arab world. For Begin and Sharon, perversely, the opening to peace made it all the more urgent to sprinkle settlements all over the Palestinian territories. Sadat’s visit, Sharon blithely explained as though this were the obvious logic, “added immensely to the pressure to get the Samarian and Judean settlements established quickly.”
Compounding that perversity, President Jimmy Carter, who regarded the settlements as both illegal and an obstacle to peace, soft-pedaled his objections to them during this key period for fear of provoking Israel to backtrack on the peace with Egypt. The years between Camp David in 1978 and the final Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in April 1982 were the period of the most relentless and determined settlement building by Begin and Sharon.
Thus encouraged, Begin believed he could have it all: peace (with Egypt), peace and occupation (with the Palestinians), occupation and legitimacy (with the rest of the world).
To sustain these contradictions, Israel under Begin followed a policy of prevarication. Begin nurtured the quintessential inconsistency that informed his government’s words and deeds. All the ministers were complicit, but none more so than Sharon. Begin was the architect; Sharon was the master builder.
Happily for Sharon (and for the settlers), inconsistency and disingenuousness were the very attributes with which Sharon’s personality was bountifully endowed. This fortunate confluence enabled Sharon to achieve an ever-higher profile within the government.
His first sally into this realm of settlement building and prevarication, however, ended up a much-ridiculed fiasco. He argued that now that peace talks with Egypt were under way, Israel must build more settlements in northeastern Sinai (the Rafah Salientb) as fast as possible. He discussed his thinking with Dayan, who had been trying to get the Egyptians to agree to let the Israeli settlements in Sinai remain under Israeli rule. Sharon and Dayan talked vaguely about extending water pipes and other infrastructure from the existing settlements into as-yet-unsettled tracts. Begin gave his “enthusiastic consent.”3
On January 3, 1978, Sharon presented his plan to the cabinet, and Begin quickly called a vote. Within days word leaked out of the cabinet decision and of new earthmoving work in Sinai. Predictably, a storm erupted in Israel and around the world. This seemed the ultimate proof that Begin was negotiating in bad faith. Israel’s state radio made matters worse by reporting that Israel was in fact building twenty-three new settlements in the Rafah Salient. Begin immediately issued a denial, and at the next cabinet meeting he forcefully repeated it. There would be no new settlements, he declared, only an increase in the population of the existing ones.
Sharon saw red. By his own account, he lashed out at the prime minister.
“I did not come on January 3 just to get a decision for the protocol. I came to get it implemented. It seems strange to me that someone who was party to the decision thought I wouldn’t implement it … What should I do right now—give orders to dismantle the water drilling rigs, send back the tractors, stop the pipeline builders? Should I instruct them all to come back?”
“We heard your question,” Begin said. “You’ll get an answer!”4
The crisis was defused, and Sharon’s righteous posturing punctured, when the Israeli media began pointing out that the new settlements were not in fact settlements at all but rather just dummy facades, a couple of hastily erected water towers and a few uninhabited old buses. There was method in this piece of vintage Sharon madness, the media explained: once the “new settlements” were up, Israel would offer to take them down—in exchange for Egypt’s agreement to let the old (genuine) settlements remain. Begin and Dayan, and indeed the whole cabinet except for the defense minister, Ezer Weizman, had gone along with this silly charade. The media exposé, at any rate, lampooning the government’s transparent ruse, put paid to the “new settlements,” and the negotiations with Egypt reverted to haggling over the old ones.
The embarrassing episode is instructive because it points up the atmosphere of duplicity that attended settlement building under Begin. During the Mandate, new Jewish settlements sometimes went up overnight, behind the backs of the British authorities, as the pre-state Yishuv, through the kibbutz movements, staked out its territory. Gush Emunim, the religious-nationalist zealots, purported to revive that Zionist tradition and turned it against the Zionist state, giving the government and the army the runaround time and again as they mounted their clandestine drives to settle at their chosen sites. In Sharon’s comical, covert operation the government was caught duping its own ministers, dodging the Israeli press and public, misleading both the new partners in peace and the wider international community.
Sharon was single-minded from the outset about his intended role as master builder in Menachem Begin’s settlement-building government. On the morning after the election, having sent his groveling letter to Ehrlich (who was going to get the powerful Finance Ministry in the new cabinet), Sharon hosted at his Shlomzion campaign office the secretary of Gush Emunim, Zvi Slonim, and another prominent settlement leader, Hanan Porat. Together they pored over a future map of the West Bank. “It is incredible,” said Slonim, looking back in 2003, “how identical that map was to the map of Israel today.”5 Their map contained dozens of prospective settlements, dotted all over the West Bank. By 2003, indeed long before, virtually all of them had become reality.
Sharon led the settlement-building boom during Begin’s first government in his dual capacity as minister of agriculture and chairman of the ministerial settlement committee. Even though most of the new settlements in the territories were not agricultural, the Ministry of Agriculture naturally had budgets, contacts, and expertise at its disposal that were all helpful in planting new villages on virgin soil. The Ministry of Agriculture, moreover, had always worked closely with the settlement department of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) building kibbutzim and moshavim around the country. As part of the policy of obfuscation surrounding the West Bank settlement project, it was the WZO rather than the government itself that was tasked with much of the infrastructure work for the new settlements.
Lily, the boys, and eighty-year-old Vera gazed down with pride from the visitors’ gallery as Sharon took his oath of office in the Knesset. “I thought for a long moment about my father—an agronomist, a farmer, a pioneer in his field. I knew exactly how he would have felt had he been alive to see his son named minister of agriculture. And as I looked at my mother, I was sure she was thinking the same thing.”6
Three months after the government took office, Sharon had his comprehensive settlement plan ready for presentation to the cabinet and the Knesset. The key departure from the Allon Plan that had guided settlement policy during the Labor years was the new government’s determination to build on the hills of Samaria overlooking the heavily populated Israeli coastal plain. Sharon sketched out a chain of “urban, industrial settlements on the ridges” that, he claimed, would give Israel critical strategic depth and “keep the dominant terrain in our hands now and in the future so that it could never be used militarily by anyone else.” This meant expanding the old, cramped pre-1967 borderline eastward. But in addition, the new government would broaden the line of settlements that Labor had built flush along the Jordan River, buil
ding westward into the hills overlooking the Jordan.
So the West Bank was to be squeezed from both sides. It would also be crisscrossed with “several east-west roads along strategic axes, together with the settlements necessary to guard them.” And East Jerusalem, which the unity government had formally annexed to Israel immediately after the Six-Day War, would be ringed by “a horseshoe [of Jewish settlements] that would run about ten to fifteen kilometers outside of the center, from Gush Etzion and Efrat in the south to Ma’aleh Adumim in the east to Givat Ze’ev and Bethel in the north. If we could develop a greater Jerusalem along these lines that would eventually include a population of a million people or so, then the city would be secured into the future as the capital of the Jewish people.”7
Carved up and colonized, the Palestinian lands would thus be prevented from ever sustaining a unified, contiguous Palestinian political entity. Yet Sharon and Begin maintained that they did not intend to drive the Palestinians off their land and insisted that none of the settlement building was being done at the expense of the individual Palestinian farmer. For Begin particularly, this purportedly humane and law-abiding approach accorded with the pristine Revisionist doctrine whereby the Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Palestine could live dignified and prosperous lives under Jewish rule. Moreover, by not confiscating private Palestinian land for Jewish settlement building, Begin and Sharon believed they could keep on the right side of the Supreme Court, which exercised jurisdiction over the government’s activities in the occupied—or, as they were sanitarily called in official usage, the “administered”—territories. The settlements, Begin ruled, were to go up on state land, not on privately owned land.
In practice, this meant political duplicity dressed up as legalistic propriety. The government purported to protect the individual property rights of the Palestinians (though in practice these, too, were often infringed). But it ignored their collective right not to be occupied by another state.
There was an interesting ideological twist here. The previous Labor-led governments had expropriated private Palestinian lands on occasion to build settlements, justifying their action in court on security grounds. Begin believed in settlement not only on security grounds but on national grounds—on the grounds that it was the Jews’ right to settle everywhere in Eretz Yisrael. “We will approve settlements everywhere,” he ruled, “on condition that they are built on state land and no one, Arab or Jew, is deprived of his private land.”8
After spring and summer of 1978 had passed in desultory and increasingly frustrating negotiations between Israel and Egypt, President Carter decided on a bold gamble and invited Begin and Sadat with their teams to a secluded summit at the presidential retreat at Camp David in September. For two weeks Egyptians and Israelis wrestled with the substance of their decades-long conflict. Carter and his team served at once as referees, mediators, and demanding spectators, doggedly prodding the protagonists to overcome their deep-rooted inhibitions and make bold decisions that would change history.
Two draft agreements were hammered out. The “Framework for the Conclusion of a Peace Treaty Between Egypt and Israel” laid down the outlines for a bilateral accord between the two countries, with elaborate security arrangements in Sinai. The “Framework for Peace in the Middle East” provided the basis for an autonomy scheme for the Palestinians for “a transitional period” of five years. Both agreements would require further negotiation to flesh them out. The peace treaty was to be concluded within three months (it took six). The autonomy talks, everyone understood, would take longer.
The summit was kept remarkably leakproof, and despite massive media interest held at bay by frequent but vacuous briefings, the public was unaware of the substantial progress that had been made. The agreements were set to be signed at the White House in a ceremony that—if it took place—would surprise and electrify the world. But as the end of the summit approached, both agreements were still bogged down, mainly over the issue of settlements.
Before the summit, Begin had publicly and repeatedly pledged that he would not abandon the Israeli settlements in the Rafah Salient and the new township of Ophira, at Sharm el-Sheikh in the south. But Sadat remained adamant: he would not make peace without getting back every inch of Sinai. He was prepared for extensive demilitarization and limitation of forces zones, but he insisted that all the land, including the settlements, be returned to Egypt.
It was Sharon who persuaded Begin to relent. Abrasha Tamir, Sharon’s longtime comrade who was at Camp David as the defense minister Weizman’s military aide, arranged a phone call to Sycamore Ranch at Weizman and Dayan’s behest. The two of them were convinced there would be no deal without this concession. They thought Sharon, the champion of the settlements, could talk the prime minister into making it.9 Begin went back to Carter and said he was prepared to bring the issue to the Knesset. He would not make a recommendation one way or the other, he said. But both he and the Americans knew that there would be a substantial majority in the Knesset in favor of ceding the Sinai settlements.
Sinai, at the end of the day, was not Eretz Yisrael. It was not the biblical homeland, nor indeed was it modern-day Palestine as delineated in the British Mandate. Begin was breaking a political promise; he was not betraying an article of faith. But as the summit moved to its climax, he was squarely confronted with the contradiction at the heart of his peace policy. All the complexity—and the inherent artifice—in his statesmanship came to the surface. On the last night, with success or failure still hanging in the balance, Carter pressed Begin for a commitment to suspend settlement building in the West Bank and Gaza for the duration of the peace talks. Carter maintained ever since that meeting, which went on long past midnight, that he received from Begin an open-ended commitment not to build new settlements for the duration of the Palestinian autonomy negotiations. Begin insisted that he agreed only to a three-month freeze—the anticipated period of the Egyptian treaty negotiations.c
The ceremony went ahead. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski briefed journalists in Washington that night, giving the U.S. understanding of what had been agreed. Begin briefed Jewish leaders in New York the next day, giving his interpretation of the agreement.
The news from Camp David left Gush Emunim bitterly disillusioned with Begin. He had promised them before the summit that he would “pack up and come home” if pressured to cede the settlements. “I will not lead a government that agrees to uproot settlements,” he vowed. Sharon, too, with that phone call from Camp David, had seriously undermined his standing even among those settlers who were prepared to forget his preelection political meanderings.
Would the peace with Egypt now weaken the government’s commitment to settle Jews all over the West Bank? To ensure it didn’t, Emunim launched a provocative settlement venture two days after the summit, in the heart of Samaria. Encouraged by the aged rabbi Kook, yeshiva students, would-be settlers, and hundreds of supporters made their way to a barren hilltop near Nablus and proclaimed there the settlement of Elon Moreh.d
The site was unauthorized and the settlement consequently illegal. With Begin’s approval from the United States, the acting premier, Yigael Yadin (the leader of the Democratic Movement for Change), ordered the army to evict the settlers and their supporters by force. But as with Sebastia, one lost round didn’t mean the fight was over. In December, the Elon Moreh group set forth again. They pitched camp off the Nablus–Kalkilya road, where TV footage of runny-nosed children out in the wet and the cold soon had the intended effect, and the cabinet decided “in principle” to recognize the group and help them settle in Samaria.
Sharon immediately began searching for a site and alighted on a privately owned tract near the village of Rujaib. Yadin, Dayan, and Weizman all objected, but Emunim’s lobbying was stronger. By June the cabinet majority had approved the settlement, and the local military commander had signed an order sequestering the land “on security grounds.” Within hours, a triumphant procession of cars, trucks, tr
ailers, bulldozers, and the other paraphernalia of settlement was en route to the site, accompanied by Sharon and his comrade-in-arms from far-off days, Meir Har-Zion.
There was an apparent hiccup later in the year when the High Court of Justice upheld the pleas of seventeen Palestinian farmers and ordered the settlement dismantled. The case was closely followed and celebrated—briefly—in anti-occupation circles at home and abroad as proof of the Israeli justice system’s equity. “There are judges in Jerusalem,” Begin was famously reputed to have responded,10 purportedly reflecting his abiding respect for the rule of law.
The upshot was redoubled efforts by Begin and Sharon to encourage Emunim’s settlement energies but to channel them to sites on “state land.” “A large Jewish settlement will surely arise near Nablus,” Sharon told the Knesset on December 12, following the high-court ruling. “This is essential in terms of security, of policy, and of national interest.” The government would obey the Supreme Court ruling, but the settlement drive would continue.
He wished, Sharon said, that he could “explain to hundreds of thousands of our citizens the importance of our holding the high ground in Judea and Samaria.” He was confident that “the day will come, very soon,” when people would hear his message, “the truth of Eretz Yisrael,” unmediated by the biased media.11
The day did come soon. Within a year, and with elections on the horizon, Sharon set up We’re on the Map—the media dubbed it “Sharon Tours”—a program offering voters, almost for free, a picnic day touring Jewish settlements on the West Bank. The funding, he told a suspicious press, came from donors abroad, not from the taxpayer. It was all legal and didn’t violate the election financing rules.12