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Last update - 18:29 05/03/2008 With a wink and a nod By Evan R. Goldstein Tags: Six-Day War, Akiva Eldar "Lords of the Land" by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar (translated from Hebrew by Vivian Eden) Nation Books; 531 pages; $29.95 Immediately following the Six-Day War, in June 1967, a contingent of Mossad agents fanned out across the West Bank to meet with members of the Palestinian elite. A few days earlier, the Israeli army had entered the area and occupied villages and towns. The agents were charged with taking the temperature of the Palestinian body politic and recommending what Israel should do with the territories that had fallen under its control. On June 14, they submitted their classified report to the head of Military Intelligence. It argued that an independent Palestinian state should be established as quickly as possible in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, "under the auspices" of the Israel Defense Forces and "in agreement with the Palestinian leadership." They suggested that the borders of the Palestinian state be based on the 1949 armistice lines that had served as the border until earlier that month, with some minor adjustments. "In order to enable an honorable agreement," the document continued, Israel should "take upon itself the initiative to solve the [refugee] problem once and for all" by organizing an international effort to resettle them in the new Palestinian state. It is not known whether prime minister Levi Eshkol was privy to those recommendations when he announced on June 19 that "as an interim stage, a military situation will remain in the West Bank." Advertisement Almost immediately, the terms of debate about the territories began to change. "Every clod of earth, every square cubit, every region and piece of land that belongs to the Lord's land - is it within our powers to relinquish even a single millimeter of them?" Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook famously asked in 1967. For him, and his legions of followers, the answer was an emphatic "no." By late September, Hanan Porat, then a young yeshiva student (later a settler leader and Knesset member), led a small convoy to the southern West Bank. That evening, construction began on the first settlement in the occupied territories: Kfar Etzion, the site of a Jewish community that had been overrun by Arab forces during a fierce battle in Israel's War of Independence two decades earlier. His provocative gambit was met with a wink and a nod from government officials, a disastrous precedent that would be repeated again and again in the coming decades. Around the same time, senior members of the government and influential public intellectuals began referring to the "liberation" of territories that were so profoundly a part of Israel's heritage. And before the year was out, the army had issued an order stating that "the term Judea and Samaria area will be identical for all purposes ... to the term West Bank area." Thus - subtly and gradually - the idea that the serendipitous result of the war was now irreversible began to enter the bloodstream of Israeli politics. The issue of the settlements migrated from the realm of the strictly political to the metaphysical; from the strategic to the religious; from the resolvable to the intractable. The lure of cheap housing At present, more than 275,000 Jews are entrenched in the West Bank. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, the settler population grew by 5.45 percent during the first half of 2007 - many of them lured by affordable housing rather than theology. As Israel prepares to celebrate its 60th birthday, it must confront the fact that two-thirds of its history has been spent as an occupying power. The cost - measured in terms of lives needlessly lost, damage to Palestinian human rights, wasted money and Israel's deeply tarnished global reputation - has been staggering. How did this happen? How did the cool pragmatism that guided Israel through the existential chaos of 1948 succumb to a catastrophic burst of messianic excitement following the Six-Day War? And is it too late to turn back the clock? In "Lords of the Land," Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar begin to provide some answers to those questions. The book, first published in Hebrew three years ago, is passionate and richly detailed, and a heroic feat of research and synthesis. Zertal, who teaches at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, and Eldar, a columnist for this newspaper, make plain what has long been suspected but rarely so explicitly and thoroughly substantiated: The settlement enterprise has been consistently aided and abetted by all the institutions of the Israeli state. "The expansion of the settlements would not have been possible without massive aid from various state institutions, without legal sanction and without the expedient and affective ties woven between the settlers and the military," they write. "The settlements flourished not only with the authorities' seal of approval but also with official encouragement and at the government?s initiative." Few prominent Israeli political figures from the 1970s and 80s - not Yigal Allon, Menachem Begin, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres or Golda Meir - escape from the pages of this book with their reputations intact. But it is Ariel Sharon, with his "pessimistic and violent" character, who, more than anyone else, arouses Zertal and Eldar's sustained and unqualified scorn. In 1977, the Likud party emerged from the political wilderness and gained control of the Prime Minister's Office. Sharon, a notoriously strong-willed war hero, entered the new government as agriculture minister and chairman of the ministerial committee on settlement matters. He wasted no time embarking on an ambitious frenzy of construction aimed at dramatically altering the geographic, political, demographic, social, economic and security map of the State of Israel. Within months Sharon announced a plan to settle more than one million Jews in the West Bank within 20 years. Though he fell well short of that outlandish goal, by the end of Likud's second term, in August 1984, some 113 settlements had sprouted up throughout the West Bank. Sharon's "unconcealed intention," Zertal and Eldar write, "was to thwart the establishment of a viable Palestinian state that would have reasonable territorial contiguity." And in that, they ruefully admit, "Sharon's plan was indeed successful." Indulging the settlers In the most revealing ?(and depressing?) section of "Lords of the Land," Zertal and Eldar detail the role the Israeli legal establishment played in authorizing and legitimating the settlement enterprise. Judges and government lawyers intent on safeguarding Israeli dominion over the territories distorted and stretched the law to the breaking point. Most galling is the way in which the enforcement of law and order in the territories has been a charade. The police have consistently adopted a forgiving and indulgent approach toward the settlers. "The Jewish settlers behaved as though the territories were their own, and the Israeli law and justice system collaborated, both actively and passively," the authors write. In one telling anecdote they describe how the military commander in charge of the area around Hebron lamented to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 that "the army goes through all the procedures. We arrest a Jew. He goes to court and the judge releases him ... Justice is not exacted, and when justice is not exacted there is no deterrence." "Lords of the Land" is brimming with similarly damning anecdotes, the accretion of which gives the impression that the settlements are the primary cause of the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. But there is a danger in abstracting the problem of the settlements from its political context, which is that we become blind to other critical factors fueling the bloody stalemate - most notably Palestinian intransigence. That sober-minded June 1967 report prepared by the Mossad claimed that "the vast majority of West Bank leaders, including the most extreme among them, are prepared at this time to reach a permanent peace agreement." Perhaps. One can be both skeptical about the validity of that proposition and disturbed that it was not adequately tested at the time. So what is the future of the territories? For having written such a deeply pessimistic and at times angry book, Zertal and Eldar conclude with a surprising and appropriate dash of optimism, noting that "everything is possible." The origins of that optimism can be traced back to a Likud Knesset faction meeting in May 2003. It was there that Ariel Sharon famously declared that "the occupation cannot continue forever." He added that it was impossible "to continue to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation," and declared his intention to remove Jewish settlers from Gaza. There is good reason to believe - as Zertal and Eldar do - that Sharon's disengagement plan was aimed at strengthening Israel's claim to the West Bank and placing any final status negotiations with the Palestinians in what Sharon confidant and adviser Dov Weisglass called "formaldehyde." And over two years later, as rockets launched from a Hamas-ruled Gaza continue to rain down on Sderot, many argue - somewhat convincingly, I admit - that disengagement has been a failure. I disagree, for reasons that date back to the earliest days of the occupation. In 1967, disappointed by the Eshkol government's shortsighted acquiescence to the settlers' demands, one member of the cabinet remarked, "Israel now resembles an enormously powerful machine with a stuck gear-box." That gear box remained stuck for nearly four decades. As Zertal and Eldar make abundantly clear, that is in large part because the Israeli government never missed an opportunity to capitulate to the settlers' demands; to back down in the face of their tired pattern of civil (and sometimes not-so-civil) disobedience, aggressive political lobbying, fear mongering and use of grotesque Holocaust analogies. (Sharon was denounced by his former allies as a Nazi.) But the summer of 2005 was different. The creaky institutions of Israel's democracy managed, if only for one exhilarating moment, to exert its authority. The settlers were removed. The prophecies of civil war proved hollow. And Israel demonstrated that it can in fact liberate itself from the territories. Evan Goldstein is a staff editor at The Chronicle Review, the magazine of ideas published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Bookmark to del.icio.us   From Pyongyan with Love N. Korea's leader expresses hope for stronger ties with Syria Peres in Paris Pres. tells <i>Le Figaro</i> Israel won't act alone to halt Iran nuke program.

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