My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (33 page)

Through the rectangular window of Etzion’s living room I can see Ba’al Hazor Mountain. Its summit is the tallest in Samaria: 1,010 meters. That’s why in the mid-1970s the Israeli Air Force chose it for the site of a highly advanced early warning station. As Etzion and I talk, I can see through his window the enormous, science-fiction-like metal spheres that scan and protect the skies of Israel. Beyond its strategic importance, the radar station has historical significance, too. It gave Etzion the excuse to gain a foothold in Samaria. In the winter of 1974, at the age of twenty-three, the slim, fair-skinned Etzion managed to become a subcontractor to the Jerusalem contractor who was building the secret station. Etzion’s mission was to put up the security fence surrounding the Ba’al Hazor installation. This is how the inventive zealot was able to assemble a small work squad of nationalistic young men who came daily to the mountain to erect the fence. This is why Etzion had reason to demand that a place be found for the fence workers to sleep. This is the way he managed to find a way into forbidden territory.

When Etzion talks, he is calm, concise, unsentimental. He is always careful not to claim too much credit for himself, not to brag. But when he tells me about his first days on the mountain, his eyes light up. And when I say that he must have felt God’s presence when he went up the mountain for the very first time, he does not contradict me. “You know I don’t like to talk,” he says. “I never liked talkers. I always said, ‘Go and do.’ But you are right. That winter we understood our role. Suddenly it was clear that the land of Israel was calling upon us and that God was calling upon us. A religious duty was thrust upon us. And that duty fueled our bodies and souls. It fueled my entire existence. Most of the time I dealt with the small details: I put gas in the Land Rover and loaded it with metal poles and rolls of barbed fence. But when the Land Rover was climbing Ba’al Hazor and the mountaintop came into view, I would talk to the heavens. And I would say, ‘We are here, we are doing all we can do, so please now do your part.’ Yes, I had a dialogue with God. I
was saying to God what the sons of Israel said when they brought their baskets of first fruits to the temple: ‘Here, we have done our share. Please do your share and bless your people, your Israel.’ ”

In the beginning of 1975, everything begins to come together. Yoel Bin Nun is tired of the raucous demonstrations that Gush Emunim held throughout the West Bank. Pinchas Wallerstein is looking for a pragmatic way to penetrate Samaria. Yehuda Etzion knows that the cover story of the work squad won’t hold for long. The three realize that it is time for a different kind of action, discreet and clever.

First Etzion wants to settle on the western saddle of Ba’al Hazor Mountain. He wants Ofra to be founded on the site where God showed Abraham the Land. But his more practical comrades convince him that his desire is futile. The only way to break into Samaria is to take over the deserted Jordanian military base of Ein Yabrud, to raid land that is not private property and that already has buildings to settle in. And the only way forward is to take action at once, before momentum is lost and the youth lose hope and the settlers’ movement disintegrates.

The operation is planned like a military offensive. Etzion’s work squad is to come down the mountain at the end of the workday and arrive at the deserted base below. Wallerstein’s group is to arrive from Jerusalem at the very same time. Simultaneously, Gush Emunim’s leader, Hanan Porat, is to contact the sympathetic defense minister, Shimon Peres, so that when the army discovers that the base has been invaded, he will put pressure on the army to look the other way, to accept this invasion. Between the cracks, Ofra will be founded and become a fact on the ground.

On Sunday, April 20, 1975, Wallerstein leads a small convoy of cars from the Gush Emunim office in Jerusalem to Samaria. In the late afternoon the work squad comes down Ba’al Hazor Mountain. By evening the two groups meet at the Ein Yabrud base and take it over. A few hours pass until the regional military commander arrives and instructs the trespassers to leave. Etzion and Wallerstein refuse. They claim that they are acting on behalf of the Ministry of Defense. While the two are taken to the army’s headquarters in Ramallah, Porat puts enormous pressure on Peres and three of his hawkish aides. Late that night, Peres
instructs the army not to assist the settlers but not to evacuate them, either. Etzion and Wallerstein immediately grasp the historic significance of these vague instructions. A bottle of wine is found and glasses are raised in the army’s headquarters. At midnight the two young leaders are driven back to Ein Yabrud in an army jeep, victorious. Determined, resourceful, and crafty, they have overpowered the government of Israel. In Ofra they have laid the foundation of the last colonial project of the twentieth century.

In early March 1975, Palestinian terrorists attack Tel Aviv’s Savoy Hotel, murdering eight guests. The UN does not condemn the attack, and the PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, sees his international standing grow stronger. In late March, Henry Kissinger’s attempt to reach an Egyptian-Israeli interim agreement fails. President Gerald Ford instructs his administration to reassess the United States’ relationship with Israel. The vital American-Israeli alliance is in crisis. At the very same time, America’s East Asian policy is in a state of collapse. On April 18, 1975, Phnom Penh is conquered by the Khmer Rouge. On April 20, 1975, the last Communist offensive on Laos is launched, and on April 30, 1975, South Vietnam falls. American helicopters rescue the last Americans from the rooftop of the American embassy in Saigon. In Israel there is a widespread feeling that the West might abandon it, too. Western weakness, internal weakness, and international isolation are almost palpable. Many Israelis fear that what happened in Saigon will happen in Tel Aviv, and that Israel’s fate will be similar to that of South Vietnam. No wonder there is an instinct to cling to Ofra. Not only raving right-wingers but many realistic centrists view Ofra as a symbolic response to the national and international slide toward the abyss. That is why many Israeli officials—senior and junior—secretly assist Ofra, and why leading public figures encourage Ofra and contribute to it. Within less than two years, a groundswell of support turns Ofra from a temporary encampment into a viable settlement.

Pinchas Wallerstein speaks like an entrepreneur when he describes Ofra’s early days. First they had to cover the broken windows of the Jordanian base’s buildings with sheets of plastic, he tells me, and improvise a kitchen, organize a mess hall, bring water tanks, and deploy chemical toilets. Then they had to pave a path in the rocky terrain and pitch tents, and divide the long military barracks into small family housing
units. Then they illegally drew water from the regional (Palestinian) water system and siphoned electricity from the regional (Palestinian) electric network. They dug a cesspit. They founded a field school, a metal workshop, a computer programming firm, and a small aircraft ladder factory. They brought in the first prefabricated houses. Then they got into night-long discussions about their vision for Ofra. Ofra wouldn’t be a kibbutz or moshav or a bedroom community, they decided. It would encourage private initiative and allow private property. Ofra would be Israel’s first community settlement.

Yehuda Etzion speaks about Ofra’s early days like a romantic ideologue. “The first principle of Ofra was that its residents would all work here,” he tells me. “The second principle was that no Arab would be permanently employed here. The third principle was that Ofra would have a strong agricultural foundation.” For Etzion, agriculture was the crux. He believed then, as he believes now, that there is no way to hold on to the land without working the land, that there is no way to return to the land without direct physical contact with it. That’s why he cleared the first plot of land with his bare hands and planted daffodils the very first summer and cherry trees the first autumn. As the settlement grew stronger, he dedicated himself to the cherry orchard, convinced he was doing what God wanted him to do.

Neither Wallerstein nor Etzion gives me a convincing answer regarding the Arabs. Did they not see the Arabs they had settled among? Yes, they did see them. Did they not know that all around Ofra were the Palestinian villages of Silwan, Mazraat, A-Sharkiya, Ein Yabrud, Beitin, and Taybeh? Yes, they did know that those villages existed. Did they not understand the inherent contradiction wedged between Jewish Ofra and the dense Palestinian population surrounding it? Yes, they did understand.

Wallerstein tells me that the Arabs of 1975 were not the Arabs of today. The villages were small, poor, and primitive. Their presence was much less evident. The villagers were not hostile or violent. They showed no signs of Palestinian nationalism. In the first years, the settlers of Ofra visited the villages and traded with the villagers frequently and did not feel that the local Arabs threatened them in any way. On the contrary, at that time the villages had a primal beauty that amplified the
biblical magic of the mountainous, historically charged region in which Ofra had planted itself. The Arab villagers did not seem to be a genuine obstacle.

Etzion, on the other hand, knew better than that. He spoke Arabic, had spent long hours with Arabs, and had bought Arab land. He even had some sympathy for traditional Arab ways. He appreciated the fact that unlike secular urban Jews, rural Arabs were one with the land. I sense that Etzion knew from the outset that there would be a war to the death between Ofra and the villages, and that he believed that at the end of the war, the villages would vanish. The historically minded national religious leader never forgot Ein Harod. He was convinced that what would save Ofra was some sort of future cataclysm that was bound to come and to achieve in the West Bank what the cataclysm of 1948 had achieved in the Valley of Harod.

And yet, when I listen to Wallerstein and Etzion, I realize that they did not have a well-defined doctrine regarding the Arabs. When they came to settle in Samaria, they were more ignorant than evil. They saw Israel’s 1970s weakness and realized that the Israeli crisis was not only political but spiritual. They felt obliged to deal with the crisis, but the solution they came up with was absurd and completely ignored the demographic reality on the ground. Wallerstein and Etzion did not realize this because they did not think through the consequences of their actions. They were young and rebellious and they were part of a juvenile movement that enjoyed breaking a taboo, crossing a line, and challenging the establishment. But they never knew where they were really headed. They never realized what sort of mess they were about to create. They established Ofra without comprehending its repercussions.

Pinchas Wallerstein is Ofra’s secretary general for four years. He leads the way in expanding it from the abandoned Jordanian base into the privately owned Palestinian fields surrounding it. He doubles its population. He builds a kindergarten, a school, a minimarket, a post office, and a synagogue. He sees to it that Ofra gets a bus line and a telephone line. He initiates and plans Ofra’s first fifty-house neighborhood. In 1977, after the right-wing Likud Party comes to power, he coaxes Menachem
Begin’s cabinet into recognizing Ofra as a legitimate and legal settlement. As a result of that recognition, the once piratelike outpost receives generous support from all branches of government: housing, health, welfare, education, and defense. Within less than five years, the unlawful stronghold becomes a solid and viable settlement. Ofra is home to settler movement gatherings, to the settlers’ weekly magazine, and to the settlers’ political organs. The mother of all settlements is now the capital of all settlements. It is the icon of the settler movement and the settlement phenomena.

But Pinchas Wallerstein wants more. Ofra is not enough. Like others in the Gush Emunim leadership, he watches in pain in 1979 as Israel’s right-wing government hands over the Sinai desert to Egypt in exchange for peace. He sees that the process of contraction is gaining momentum and might soon reach the West Bank. Although Ofra is a success, it does not stop the landslide its founders had planned to stop. That’s why Wallerstein thinks it is essential to take over vast territories of the West Bank. He seeks to prevent an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement by establishing dozens of Ofras. And he does. In 1979 Wallerstein is nominated head of the regional council of the Binyamin District. He paves roads, builds industrial parks, establishes Jewish communities. Energetic, creative, and shrewd, he gets successive Israeli governments to endorse and advance the Gush Emunim dream. In his twenty-eight years in office he establishes forty settlements, enlarging the settler population under his jurisdiction from one thousand to forty-three thousand. Simultaneously, he plays a leading role in the settlers’ Yesha Council, which compels Israeli governments to build and support 140 settlements and dozens of illegal outposts throughout the West Bank. He helps bring hundreds of thousands of settlers to the occupied territories. After succeeding in Ofra, Wallerstein realizes that there are no limits. There is no power in post-1973 Israel that can stop him. That’s how Wallerstein is able to build one Ofra after another. One Ofra, ten Ofras, a hundred Ofras. Along with his friends and comrades he institutionalizes the Gush Emunim revolution. He creates a new demographic-political reality that redefines Israel and changes the course of Zionism.

Yehuda Etzion also wants more. For four years, he works in his
cherry orchard. To this day he remembers with delight the screech of the chains of the tractor that broke the land of Ofra for the very first time. He brings the cherry plants from the Valley of Jezreel and lays out the orchard with pegs and white ropes. He recalls digging the holes for the trees, watering the holes. The first section of the orchard is sour cherry, the second section is Japanese plum, the third is sweet cherry. Then he plants another orchard, twenty miles away, of peaches, nectarines, and grapes. Four years after the initial planting the first harvest arrives. He recounts to me the exhilaration he feels when the decorated wagon drives into Ofra carrying its first fruits.