Philip Rubenstein
Over Our Bodies and Our Limbs: A Guide to Israel’s Settler Movement
Philip Rubenstein - Over Our Bodies and Our Limbs: A Guide to Israel’s Settler Movement
- Hello, everyone. We just had a false start, very exciting. So I was babbling away for about two minutes before we realised that nothing was being recorded and no one was being let in. So Hannah will have heard this, but let me start again for everyone else. But this session, as you know, is about a rather fraught subject, which is Israel and the settlement. It’s part of the Israel Series on Lockdown. And I wanted to start with quote from one of the better books on this subject. So I hope everyone can see this. Book is called “Lords of the Land.” It was published about 10 years ago, and its authors are Idith Zertala and Akiva Eldar. And the introduction has a paragraph that I just wanted to begin with. So I’m just going to start reading. “From a light plane flying over the West Bank, the view is beautiful, stretching from the lush green of Samaria in the north, southward toward Jerusalem, and over the yellowing Judean Hills that slope eastward down to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea. The landscape modulates from Tuscan green to stony grey to desert. It is from this height at least a land of few people and much scenery, small aggregates of life like interlinked clusters of grapes or beehives nestle in a valley or clamber upper hillside, strewn in clumps over wide empty spaces. White roads and shiny asphalt highways carved into the chalky rock, extend from one settled hive to another.” Well, it sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? And in the autumn of 1982, I found myself in this place for a period of nine months. I was 18 at the time and on a gap year between school and university. And I thought, “Well, wouldn’t this be an interesting place to go?” Because West Bank settlements always seemed to be in the news as they were at the time.
And also, quite frankly, because I didn’t know any better. It just so happened that I had a friend at the time who was studying at the Yeshiva in Beit El. So I knew that there would be at least one friendly face. Well, I arrived in the October of 1982, and I had, well, at best, let me call it rudimentary Hebrew. And I spent the next nine months of my life there. My Hebrew, I have to say, improved only marginally, but I was there learning, listening, and talking. So let me just show you, let me show you the place. Let’s just get this up, okay. Oops. We go all the way to the top. Right. So. So this is Beit El. So you can see it’s located in the hills, north of Jerusalem. The nearest Palestinian town is Al-Bireh and the nearest large Palestinian town is Ramallah, which you can see is around 10 kilometres to the south of Beit El. Now, Beit El these days is one of the larger developments in the West Bank. But Beit El, at the time, was still a young community. It had been founded only five years earlier by followers of Gush Emunim, and we’ll talk about them later. And there were maybe 100, 150 families in total, as well as 200 of us Yeshiva boys who came from Israel, United States, Australia, South Africa, France, and the UK. At the time, I shared a dorm with three other guys. And in the dorm next door to us, there was a member of Kach, which was the group that was founded by the right wing extremist rabbi, Meir Kahane. And this guy, he was a smiley chap. And the thing I remember most about him, to be honest, was when he showed us his assortment of semi-automatic weapons that he kept in his locker. If I take the people that I met over those nine months out of context, I can honestly say that I encountered nothing but kindness, friendship, camaraderie.
My fellow students and teachers were serious and studious, but most of them were also fun, warm, and incredibly patient and generous with their time with me. But of course, there was a context. And the Lebanon war had just concluded. Remember, this is late in 1982. And as a consequence, it was fresh in everyone’s minds. In the first lecture that I heard from our Yeshiva, whose name was Rabbi Zalman Melamed, we learned that the Lebanon war had been a Milkhemet mitzvah, just war. A war that Jews were commanded to partake in, a war that had to be fought in honour of God. He compared it to the battles that Joshua and the Israelites fought to claim the promised land. We also learned while I was there that the people who’d founded this settlement and others like it in the West Bank, they were the true pioneers of today, the chalutznikim. They saw themselves as the natural successors to the early pioneers who’d settled the land in the first and second aliyot. And finally, we learned that we were actually much, we were part of a much bigger picture. That in settling the whole of the biblical land of Israel, as far east as the West Bank of the River Jordan, we learned that we were hasting the process of redemption and the coming of Messiah. Now, we all know that the question of the settlements is highly contentious, and we all have our views and we all have opinions, and those opinions tend to be strong opinions. Should Israel stay or leave? Are the settlements a necessity for Israel’s security? For long-term, are they an obstacle?
Are they legal or are they illegal? And the language we use to talk about the settlements, of course, is also highly charged. Is it the West Bank? Is that the right term? If we say Judea and Samaria, what do we mean by that? They occupy territories. Are they liberated territories? Are they just the territories? And the wall, is it a wall or it a security wall, or is it a fence or a barrier? And every term, every piece of terminology is charged. So all I can say today is that my aim is to present the history as neutrally as I possibly can. And my intention is to avoid stating any opinion because my opinions are no more valid or useful than anyone else’s in this discussion. May I also say that I’m bound to get something wrong or miss out something important or say something that’s going to irritate some of you. So let me apologise now for any slip and let me ask for your forgiveness in advance. By all means, say what you want in the chat, but this is a polarising subject. So can we please, everyone, let’s make sure we keep the discussion civil and respectful. Here’s what’s to come in the next hour. We’re going to start with an overview and some facts and statistics, and then we’ll look at the origins and history of the movement, beginning in 67 and some of the key personalities. And I’m going to focus most of this around the first 20 years because that’s when all the foundations of what we have today are laid. And finally, we look very briefly towards the end of where we are today and what the future might hold. So that’s what we’re going to be doing in the next hour or so. So let’s start with settlements 101. Settlements, what are they? Well, they’re Israeli civilian communities, overwhelmingly inhabited by Jews in territories that were acquired by Israel in the 1967 6-day war that are not under Israeli sovereignty.
And while, again, when we say Israeli settlements, while they previously existed in the Sinai Peninsula and in the Gaza Strip prior to Israel’s withdrawal from those territories, 1982, of course, was the Sinai, 2005 was Gaza. Today, the term is largely used to refer to Israeli communities in the West Bank, in Judea and Samaria. The first thing to say, it is the strategic use of settlements. Secure and control territory is nothing new in history. Plenty of people have done it before Israel. The Romans did it, crusaders did it. The Habsburgs did it against the Ottomans. The Chinese did it in Manchuria. And, of course, the British did it East of Suez. So let’s take a look at the map and just see what it is that we’re actually talking about. And you’ll be familiar with the terms Judea and Samaria that are often used to describe the West Bank. In Hebrew, it’s Y'hudah and Shomron. Very broadly speaking, Judea is the area that’s the southern part of the West Bank. So you can see it. It’s over here. It’s all down here. So it covers the Etzion Bloc, which is over here. And it goes down to Hebron and through the Jerusalem, Hebron mountains. And, as I say, it includes places like Gush Etzion, it includes Efrat, and it includes Hebron and its neighbour over here, Kiryat Arba. And Samaria is everything to the north of Jerusalem, and it goes right up to Jenin right up here. So it’s this area here. Actually, Judea is larger than Samaria. It’s the larger of the two regions. But Samaria, Shomron is the greener of the two areas. There’s more greenery, so it’s better for farming.
There are higher levels of rainfall, and there’s more continuous soil cover up in Samaria. The length and breadth of the area may surprise you. The length of the whole region is 130 kilometres and the average width is 40 kilometres. Now, let me just translate that for us oldies, right? That’s 80 miles up and down and 25 miles on average across. So we are not talking about a particularly large area here. Who is it? Who lives here? So let’s do some West Banking numbers, right? So these numbers are all approximates and they’re based on different sources. So these aren’t going to be exact, and there’s probably, in some cases, they may be one or two years out of date. So they’re roughly right, okay? So there are approximately 450,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. So that excludes the Jewish population of East Jerusalem. And we also have to add in, of course, the population of the Golan Heights if you want to be inclusive. And within the Golan, there’s something like 25,000 Jewish settlers. Of these, let’s call it almost half a million, 60,000 are American-born. So that’s a mere 15%. And again, this might be surprising because most of the spokespeople we tend to see on TV and many of the names we hear are often associated with American-born Jews. It’s only 15% of the entire West Bank Jewish population. There are 140 legal settlements, and we’ll come onto what that means in a moment that are in the West Bank. And it’s estimated that somewhere between 20 and 30,000 settlers are living in the West Bank in illegal outposts, which are dotted around the region. So let’s just pause for a moment on this question of legality. Many of you will have seen the judgement of the International Courts of Justice last week.
The ICJ made a ruling that all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal and should be dismantled. And there was no surprise to that judgement . It’s entirely consistent with previous rulings and it’s entirely consistent with what most of the international community thinks. So are the settlements lawful or are they not? And let me give you a good Jewish answer. No. And yes, most international institutions and most countries around the world have declared the settlements to be in violation of international law. However, successive Israeli governments have deemed them lawful so long as they comply with Israel’s civil law, which means that they need to be built on state land, they need to have official permits from the government, and the settlement has to be established by a Knesset resolution. Any settlement that doesn’t meet these criteria, they’re deemed illegal. Right. That sounds clear-cut except that it’s not so clear-cut because Israel’s own Supreme Court, on a number of occasions and in a number of rulings, has declared that the settlements are illegal under international law. And this is one of the many, many beefs that the right wing parties have with the Supreme Court.
So let’s have a look now at the bottom row. So back to the stats, we’ve got some interesting numbers here and some interesting percentages. So you can see that there are 2.2 million Arabs estimated in the West Bank compared to the 450,000 Jews. So what that means in percentages is that 80% of the population of the West Bank is Arab and 20% is Jewish. So the ratio of Jews to Arabs is fairly low. Even lower is the ratio of all Israelis to those who are living in the West Bank. Only 5% of those living in the West Bank, sorry, those living in the West Bank, Jews in the West Bank constitute only 5% the entire Israeli population. And this is, of course, completely disproportionate when you think about the columns of newspaper space and TV space that the settlement issue takes up. And the final number here is that figure of $950. That is the subsidy that is paid on average per person to a settler by the government. Now, when I say paid, it’s not direct. One of the reasons why life in many settlements is relatively pleasant is that double, the public money is invested in schools, in housing, and in public amenities at the settlement communities than it is for mainland Israeli communities. So governments in Israel have been consistently providing financial as well as political support for the settlement project. So who are the people who are in the West Bank? Who were the settlers themselves and what is it that they go there for? I’m sorry to have another chart, but this one is simple and it’s quite revealing. The stereotype, the one that we’re used to seeing on our TV screens is the gun-toting religious extremist, white shirt, beard, crocheted skull cap, the kippah sruga, and sits it flying in the wind. But that’s very far from the whole picture.
And this is a chart that shows who’s who in the Jewish settler population of the West Bank. What this says is that only a third of Jews in the West Bank are primarily motivated by religious ideology. So that lighter blue line that you can see with the squares running through it, that’s the line of Jews who’ve gone to live in the West Bank primarily for ideological reasons. Another third have been drawn to the region mainly by the opportunity to improve their quality of life. Living in places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem has become prohibitively expensive. And so for these people, the opportunity to live somewhere where there’s relatively cheap housing, where you can afford a big house, where you’ve got open spaces, you’ve got room to breathe, is very attractive. And the final third of which is the dark blue line, the one with the Xs going up it, this is the fastest growing, third, fourth, and this is the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox. And they’ve also moved here, quality of life reasons. As areas like Mea She'arim in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak have become overcrowded and utterly unaffordable for these big Haredi families, they’ve moved to the West Bank for a better life. So in other words, 2/3 of the Jewish settlers who are out there have not moved primarily for ideological purposes. It may be that some of their views are aligned with the ideology of those in Gush Emunim, but it’s not what motivated them to actually move there. To underline the point, here are some interesting images.
So at the top on the left, we have the University of Ariel. Yes, Ariel as a university, Ariel is a city in the north in Samaria. And there are some 15,000 students there, including some Arabs, a minority of Arabs who study a diversity of subjects. Next to it, we have the beautiful Gush Etzion Winery, which is down in the south of the Etzion Bloc. And then at the bottom on the left is an image from the Haredi town of Beitar Illit, incredibly fast growing town. This is in, also in the Etzion Bloc. And this has a population today of around 60,000 people. And finally, there’s a town which has a mixed religious population, which is Ma'ale Adumim, which is where some of my cousins live. And that has a population of around 40,000 people. So just to underline the point, many people move here for lifestyle reasons. That’s what draws them to the West Bank rather than ideological reasons, which isn’t to say that they’re not sympathetic. Here’s a selection of settlers from the Etzion Bloc, and we’re talking about why they moved.
Like a very good educational system.
It is a very nice country club.
We want to be able to have a bigger place.
It’s a great place to raise kids.
This is a beautiful view and it’s our beautiful land and I love looking at it all the time.
We were looking for a Jerusalem suburb that we could afford that was a manageable commute.
Close to Jerusalem.
Extremely close to Jerusalem.
The quality of life is so much better. It has nothing to do with politics.
Having a little bit more quiet. Most people here work in the city, and you come back here at night, you come back here in the afternoon and it’s just relaxing.
So, I mean, this is part of a promotional film, so I’m not suggesting it’s a full reality. But what this is suggesting is that after almost 60 years, the settlement enterprise has become a fixture of Israeli society. And you know, you don’t need to be an ideal to live here. So let’s start from the beginning, 1948. Israel wins the War of Independence and the ceasefire line is drawn in greening. This is the Green Line as it’s become known. And the Green Line is not a border. The Green Line is a ceasefire line. It’s a demarcation line with the state of Israel on one side and Jordan on the other. Jordan had taken control of all the territory to the east of the Green Line, which they named the West Bank. I’m sorry for the confusion because it’s the land west of the Jordan River. And this fragile ceasefire remains until 1967 when Israel has to fight another war with its Arab neighbours. Israel was never planning to take over the land in this war. But in six days of fighting, it blows right past the Green Line and it seizes swathes of land including the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights. And suddenly, Israel, after the war, has a quandary. “What do we do with the West Bank and the 1 million Arabs who live there? Do we make it part of Israel? Do we return it to the enemy or do we let the people live there and have their own state? And of course, all of these options have their pros and cons. So this becomes a major debate in Israeli politics, and the arguments go back and forth. These questions hover over the labour governments of the day, and they never really resolved over the next 10 years. And yet, in this first decade of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and remember, this is a labour government for 10 years, from 1967 to 1977, there are 30 settlements that are established, most of them in the Jordan Valley and around Jerusalem.
On the face of it, it’s security that’s the key driver here, security in having civilian Jewish communities in these areas. And the aim broadly is to establish the Jordan River as Israel’s eastern security border. So you can see over here. So the idea is to encircle the large Palestinian population in the mountain range, runs north to south and protect Jerusalem by forming kind of a wide buffer all around it. And this is essentially the Allon Plan. And you can see pictured here on the right is its author, Labour Minister Yigal Allon. And Allon’s plan is to divide the West Bank between Israel and Jordan. Now, the plan is it’s never formally adopted by the government. But while Labour is in power, it’s a hugely influential touchstone and it guides the thinking of politicians and officials alike. Yigal Allon wasn’t alone in pushing settlements as a security measure. He was supported by, in particular, two heavyweight figures in the party, Moshe Dayan, who was inside the cabinet and the general secretary at the time of Mapai, the Labour Party, Shimon Peres. But something else is going on here, not just security. And that’s something else is going to prove far more powerful in the years to come. Because there were some Israelis who saw the 1967 victory, not just as a military triumph but as a religious sign, an omen that the Jews are meant to return to the hills of ancient Judea and Samaria, to biblical Israel, the full biblical Israel. And in late 1967, a small convoy, which is led by a handsome right-eyed young man called Hanan Porat. I mean, look at him. He’s a Bnei Akiva poster boy. This convoy crosses the Green Line to the Etzion Bloc, which is just below Jerusalem, just south of Jerusalem as we saw earlier. So this is the southern part of the West Bank. And that first evening, they hammer first stage into the rocky land of Kfar Etzion.
And this is a place they chose because it symbolised return. Kfar Etzion had been a Jewish settlement before 1948, and it was the scene of a massacre by local Arab villagers during the 48 War. Now, at the time of convoy in 67, Hanan Porat is 24 years old. He and his friends see themselves as the successes of the secular Zionists who’d founded the states. They’re religious Zionists, and they see it as their destiny to settle the whole biblical land of Israel and redeem the Jewish nation. He completes his military service, he’s a paratrooper. Hanan Porat goes to study at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva, and we’ll be hearing more about the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva. It’s a really important centre for those who later formed and become members of Gush Emunim. Mercaz HaRav is in Jerusalem. And while he’s there, he’s mentored by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Rav Kook, Zvi Yehuda Kook. And he’s known today as the spiritual father of the religious settler movement. Rav Kook imbues Hanan Porat with a heady mix of religious idealism, activism, and political savvy. Porat feels it’s only right and proper Kfar Etzion is the first on the settler list. He’d lived there as a boy 19 years earlier, aged five. And together with women and other children, he’d been evacuated from this place before those who were left were killed.
And now, now, he’s back. In this first decade after 1967, Hanan Porat and his colleagues played a continuous and cunning game with government ministers and officials, meeting them, pushing, cajoling, deceiving, and tugging on heartstrings. They’d apply pressure on the one hand. Rav Kook or Porat would meet with Shimon Peres, who’s shown here, with Moshe Dayan, with Yigal Allon, or with others. And then wait patiently for the right moment to take action. This is what Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who was one of those who went to Kfar Etzion and settled in Kfar Etzion. This is what Moshe Levinger said of those years, "This was our strategy, not to bang our heads against the wall but the opposite, drag out the action. So that in the end, it would be accepted when the moment was right. We knew how to use the time factor in the democratic game. They simply got used to facts on the ground.” Facts on the ground, well, there’s a phrase we’ve all heard, and this phrase has become intertwined with the settler movement ever since. While some in government may have seen the return to Kfar Etzion as a one-time gesture to the families of those who were killed in the 48 massacre, Hanan Porat, Moshe Levinger, and Rav Kook, saw it as something else, a precedent, a modest first step in a bold project and a long war. Their next target was Hebron. Hebron, the site of one of the bloodiest massacres of mandate Palestine where 60 Jews had been murdered by their Arab neighbours in 1929.
Hebron, of course, has tremendous religious symbolic value for both Jews and Muslims because it’s the place where tradition has it that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob with their wives, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah were all buried in the Cave of the Patriarchs or the Cave of Machpelah. So it was that in the lead up to Passover of 1968, Rabbi Moshe Levinger, and his wife, Miriam, applied to the military governor of Hebron for permission to hold a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in the middle of Hebron. And they promised they would spend two nights only and leave the city straight after the holiday. Permission was granted, and 16 men and women turn up to celebrate. Famously, Miriam Levinger turns up with her fridge. And, of course, they’ve got no intention of leaving. And the continued presence of this group, of course, inflames the local Arab community. But there’s little that they can do because the likes of Yigal Allon turning up a few days later to show support. And after that, there’s a flurry of official and semi-official visitors, all of whom are bearing supplies, munitions, and even a car. So the town’s inhabitants aren’t taking kindly to this unwanted intrusion, and they try to repel their visitors, and they do so violently, and thus begins the first of many of the violent clashes between Arab and the Jew in the West Bank that’s going to characterise the next 40 years. It was only after two years, in 1970, that the Levingers and their fellow settlers were finally persuaded to leave the town itself and move 15 minutes up the hill to an area known as Upper Hebron and renamed as Kiryat Arba. Levinger was rewarded by the government with 250 apartments, which were built and paid for from public money. Moshe Levinger had said, “Drag out the action and use the time factor,” and it’s exactly what he did.
So let’s now fast forward to February, 1974 when a group of rabbinical friends gather in the house of Haim Druckman, who’s shown in this slide in the middle below. As well as Druckman, the number that night included Hanan Porat, Beni Katzover, Eliezer Waldman, and Moshe Levinger. Most of those who were there were native born sons of Ashkenazi veteran and religious families. Most of them have fought in the 67 war and in the 73 war, which had finished only six months earlier. Most of them had been in Hebron at that Passover Seder in 1968. So here they are in Druckman’s flat, and they start off discussing ideology. ‘Cause another thing they have in common is that they’d all studied at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva, and they’d mostly all studied under Rav Kook, Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook, who’s shown here. Zvi Yehuda, as their mentor, is obviously a huge influence. Zvi Yehuda was the son and heir to the first Rav Kook, Abraham Isaac Kook, who’d founded the Yeshiva back in the 1920s. The elder Rav Kook was a great scholar and had a reputation as a bridge, a man who brought together Zionism with religion and religion with secular studies. His son, Zvi Yehuda Kook, was cut from a different path. He wasn’t the scholar that his father was, but he did have a tremendous gift for simplifying ideas and inspiring young men to action. He taught that settlement of the land or the biblical land of Israel was a divine mission and would hasten the coming of the Messiah. And now, here were these young men in Druckman’s home discussing what to do.
Post the Yom Kippur War, they were fearful that the government was weak and was going to be too amenable, the trading land for peace. So they decide to create an informal movement of the faithful who were willing to settle the land up into Samaria throughout the West Bank and into Gaza. And it’s Haim Druckman who suggests a name for the movement, Gush Emunim or Bloc of the Faithful. They determined that Gush Emunim would work within the system. They’d meet ministers, they’d meet officials, they’d stand for elected office, they’d obtain all the legal consents and documentation they needed, but they would also work outside the system. And that’s because the religious imperative trumps democracy in secular rule of law every time. Over the next three years, the leaders of Gush Emunim would work under the radar and without any fanfare to establish more settlements and more facts on the ground. A new prime minister after Golda Meir stood out was Yitzhak Rabin. And he hated Gush Emunim from the start. He hated everything they stood for. Rabin was the soldier, blunt-speaking, practical, and secular to his bones. At a meeting in the Knesset, Rabin said, “The group that called itself Gush Emunim is threatening the democratic way of life in the state of Israel, and confronting it must be done at all levels.” But the cause of Gush Emunim was being quietly assisted inside government from within government by powerful figures, Defence Minister Shimon Peres for one, and a former general turned senior advisor to the prime minister called Ariel Sharon. Yes, lest we forget, Sharon was a Mapai veteran, a Labour veteran before he crossed over to Likud.
And so as 1977 drew closer, two different narratives began to take shape in the West Bank, one Jewish and one Arab. One said that Jewish settlements were moving onto mostly empty plots of land that had been captured in war and that had deep historical and spiritual significance to the Jewish people. The other side, which most of the world ended up believing and still does, said that these settlers were colonised in the land, sorry, to expand their nation. And in doing so, we’re denying the Arabs their most basic rights. On the 17th of May, 1977, a political earthquake hit the state of Israel. After spending 30 years in opposition, the political right under the leadership of Menachem Begin were swept into power. Begin had married his own constituency with the left outs in society, the left behinds, and he’d pulled off a stunning victory. And the leaders of Gush Emunim saw this moment for what it was, an opportunity to accelerate that project. One of Prime Minister Begin’s first actions was to visit a disputed settlement in Samaria. So he goes up there, and in front of the assembled world press and TV camera, Begin declares, these are liberated territories which belong to the Jewish people. But in fact, Begin, in office, turns out to be something of a disappointment to Gush Emunim. Because once he’s in the prime ministerial chair, he finds that he has to balance his sympathy with the Gush project, with Israel’s tenuous relationship with the US and the rest of the world, all of whom positively hostile to the settlers with their goals and to their methods. So Begin is cautious. He doesn’t exactly pull the brake on the settlements, but neither is he too keen to put his foot on the gas. And worse still for the settlers, Begin signs the Camp David Accords in 1978.
And these, of course, they forge peace with Egypt in return for the Sinai Peninsula to be given back, and that includes the settlement of Yamit. That a Likud prime minister would not only yield land to a sworn enemy, who was prepared the dismantle and destroy a Jewish settlement. Well, that enraged the Gush leadership. Rav Kook, in one of his last speeches before he died in 1982, declared that the forcible evacuation of Yamit was, quote, “a government betrayal.” And Begin was never again trusted by Gush Emunim. But in the end, it didn’t really matter what Begin did or didn’t do because the minister he put in charge of West Bank settlements, of course, was none other than Ariel Sharon. And unlike Menachem Begin, Sharon was forceful and decisive on the matter. In his inimitable bulldozer style and often acting on his own and without consulting any of his government colleagues, Sharon spends the next six years forging ahead, new settlements in the north, new settlements in the east, expanded settlements in the south, and the construction of a network of roads going from east to west that would link many of the settlements and bypass the Arab towns in between. Now, so far in this talk, we’ve been focusing on the origins and the early years of the settler movement for good reason because this is the period which sets the tone for the next 40 years. And there’s a long and thoughtful and complicated story to tell about those next 40 years. But suffice to say, that from the point of view of Gush Emunim and their supporters, the settlement project has been a success. I mean, you can see on this chart. By the way, I promise you this is my last chart. No, it’s my second-to-last chart. Sorry to the class, promise withdrawn.
So you can see on the chart that the growth of the settlements really took off here in the kind of early to mid 80s, and it’s been a straight line ever since. It’s not quite been the success that Ariel Sharon had envisaged in the late 1970s when he predicted that by the year 2000, there would be 2 million Jews living in the territories. And even today, there’s only a quarter of that number, but it’s still been a tremendous achievement. So what I’d like to do now is rather than talk about those 40 years, is just spend a little time on a few key developments that have punctuated that period and how they’ve impacted prospects for the future. And the first of these is the Oslo Accords that were signed in 1993 on the White House lawn. Here’s that famous photo with President Clinton, who’s got his arms around Arafat and Rabin, and is gently coaxing or forcing, however you’d like to see it, a handshake from Arafat with a very reluctant Yitzhak Rabin. The Oslo agreement meant that for the first time, local Palestinian communities would have a measure of self-government in the West Bank and Gaza. What Rabin later described as, quote, “A Palestinian entity less than a state, which will be a home to most of the Palestinian residents living in the Gaza Strip in the West Bank.” But Oslo, with other things, it divided in a way, divided the West Bank into three areas.
There’s area A, which is the area with full Palestinian control. There’s area B with Palestinian administration but Israel is responsible for security. And area C, full Israeli control. And what this did was two things. First of all, it’s the first time that the Palestinians had limited self-rule, but it also provided an element of legitimacy, albeit not permanent, but an element of legitimacy to Jewish settlement in the West Bank. But in a nation becoming ever more polarised on the issue of Land for Peace, Oslo was hugely divisive. The settler movement hated it, and it still does to this day. So now, we jump 20 years ahead to 2005, the disengagement from Gaza. This would ignite the, it would ignite even greater anger in the settler movement because this was a decision that was made by none other than Ariel Sharon, the great hero when he was prime minister, decision to unilaterally exit the Gaza Strip. Gaza, at the time, had a network of 17 Jewish settlements and they were known collectively as Gush Katif. Sharon’s decision meant the forced eviction of around 8,500 settlers from Gush Katif and, of course, from Gaza itself. And with it, their homes were demolished and the settlements were dismantled. Well, we all know what comes next. Political chaos ensues. The PA, the Palestinian Authority who were completely blindsided and unprepared for the Gaza withdrawn, lose the next election to Hamas. Then we have a violent struggle for power between Fatah and Hamas, and this results in a Fatah-led PA in the West Bank and the fateful takeover of Gaza by Hamas.
As for the settlers themselves, they interpret Sharon’s collapse into a deep coma only a few months after with the withdrawal from Gaza as a sign of God’s punishment for someone who were dead to challenge their divine mission. And today, nine months after the terrible events of October the 7th, the heirs of Gush Emunim, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Daniella Weiss and their like are all calling for Jewish resettlement of Gaza and for the return of Gush Katif. When we look back to the 1970s, it seems that the future of the West Bank and Gaza was a lot more fluid than it is today. It’s not just that it was early days in the settler movement and early days in the number of settlers, it’s more that minds were more open. Today, we find that positions are much more entrenched, views are more hard line, and relations between Israelis and Palestinians, not surprisingly, are at historic low. What we’ve witnessed over that period above all has been a seemingly endless cycle of violence to conspire to make the two sides want to have absolutely nothing to do with each other. We’ve had two intifadas. The second of which was far bloodier and deadlier than the first. Intifadas make news, but the past 20 years has also seen the regularisation of acts of bloody violence by our communities against the settlers. Murders, drive-by shootings, and the firing of rockets and mortars with terrorists claiming that settlers are legitimate targets who have forfeited their civilian status by living in illegal settlements.
And on the other side, well, the early 1980s were dark years inside the settler movement because this is when the Jewish terrorist groups began to form, the so-called makhteret or Jewish underground, incited in part by the violent rhetoric from the likes of Meir Kahane and his Kach fellows. The makhteret, the underground caused a rift inside the settler movement. What disturbed some in the movement but by no means all, is that these characters who joined the underground, who become terrorists and murderers were by no means outliers. They rose from the heart Gush Emunim, from the heart of the movement. Menachem Livni who’s there at the bottom on the left, he was a resident of Kiryat Arba and a disciple of Moshe Levinger. He’d been a deputy commander of a combat engineering battalion. In the mid 1980s, he received a life sentence for his part in the plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the attempted assassination of six West bank mayors, and several other violent crimes. Baruch Goldstein, who’s in the middle, was born and raised in Brooklyn and graduated from Flatbush Yeshiva. On the 24th of February, 1994, the day of Purim, Baruch Goldstein enters a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron that was serving, at the time, as a mosque. He opens fire on the worshipers, killing 29 of them and wounding another 125. And he only stopped because he was seized by the survivors and beaten to death by them. Goldstein was a resident of Kiryat Arba. And by day, he was the hospital doctor. In the wake of this terrible massacre, the prime minister of the day, Yitzhak Rabin, stands before the Knesset.
And this is what he says, “This murderer who grew up in a swamp whose origins are found here and across the sea, to him and those like him, we say, you are not part of the community of Israel, you are not part of the National Democratic camp. In this house where we belong, you are not partners in the Zionist enterprise. You are a foreign implant, and sensible Judaism spits you out.” Less than a year later, Yitzhak Rabin was dead, assassinated at a rally in Tel Aviv, held to support the Oslo peace process. His murderer is shown at the bottom here on the right, Yigal Amir, resident of a Efrat in the Etzion Bloc. Yigal Amir had served in the Golani Brigade, and then he’d graduated from Bar-Ilan University where he studied computer science and law. So where do we go from here? For most of my conscious lifetime, I am now, was born in 1964. So I was seven when Yom Kippur War took place. The answer to that question, where do we go from here? The answer that the political mainstream has always given has consisted of four words, a two-state solution, meaning carving out for the Palestinians a state somewhere in the West Bank and Gaza regions. But if you look at the map, you can see that it’s been getting harder and harder to do that. The settlers who live in the West Bank aren’t just living in tents and caravans. They’re living, as we saw in developed communities, with schools, hospitals, even a university. And you can’t just uproot all these communities. So we have to ask, “Is partition even, is it even technically feasible?” Now, when you look at this map, this shows the green line here to the west. So here’s the green line, and the red line is the separation barrier.
And what’s interesting is that in between the green line to the east, sorry, to the west, and the red line, the security barrier to the east, 75% of all Jewish settlement is inside those two lines. And if you include the Jews who live in East Jerusalem, that makes it 85% who live between the Green Line and the security barrier. Now, no one is saying that the barrier should be the border. It’s not. It’s a barrier. But what those numbers tell us is that with land swaps, it’s still technically feasible to do a version of two states. If Donald Trump is elected in November, it’s possible that he might just dust down his old plan from 2020. This is what it looked like. And if you remember, it’s a plan that was designed pretty much to give Israel of most of what it could possibly want from a deal. And no surprises at the time, the Palestinians rejected it outright. Mahmoud Abbas said, “Palestinians would be living in a kind of Swiss cheese land,” while Saeb Erekat, the PLO, was more direct and said that rather than the deal of the century, which is what Bibi called it, it was the fraud of the century. Be that as it may, the real question here is not, is two states technically viable? The real question is, do people still want it? Last week, you may have seen that the Knesset voted 68 to nine to reject the establishment of a Palestinian state even as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel right now, 68 to nine, most of the opposition absented themselves from the vote. But if we look at where the Israel, the Israeli public is today, if we look at the mood in Israel, we see that that vote isn’t so far off.
Whereas 10 years ago, the majority supported the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Now, the majority are against, now, 2/3 are against. Now, this poll was taken a couple of months after the 7th of October. So let’s just remember that. The poll of the bottom was taken before the 7th of September. It’s another Gallup poll. And this was taken among Palestinian Arabs. And this shows a similar story. 10 years ago, a majority, albeit not as big, but a majority were broadly in favour of two states. Whereas now, the overwhelming majority is against the idea two states. And in case I haven’t depressed you enough, when you break down those numbers at the bottom, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be opposed to the idea of two states. It tends to be those who are 45 and older who are a little more sympathetic to the idea. So I’m afraid I don’t have any grand conclusion today, and I also don’t have any great insights to offer. We’re still in the middle of a war. There are still 120 Israeli hostages held somewhere in Gaza, and everything is just too raw. The only thought I’d like to leave you on is this. I found this from a professor of mathematics in the US, a guy called John Paulos, and he was talking about uncertainty. And this is what he says, “Uncertainty is the only certainty there is, and knowing how to live with insecurity is the only security.” Okay. So thank you all for your patience. I see there’s a quite a few comments and questions in the chat, which is not a surprise. So let’s see what everyone’s saying, and let’s see if there’s any questions.
Q&A and Comments:
So. Yes, one or two of you say thank you. “A bit depressing looking ahead.” I quite agree. Okay.
Arlene. Arlene says, “I know another version of what happened that from someone who was there. The Jewish people hearing the Megillah were threatened by the Arabs with words and guns. Dr. Goldstein’s friend was killed the day before. He used his gun to defend innocent people. Listen to the Megillah.” Well, this episode has been poured over and investigated, and I don’t think any alternative version will never get near to excusing what or explaining what Goldstein did. I’m sorry, Arlene.
Q: “Re the illegal settlements,” asks Lorna, “those not sanctioned by Israeli government, where does money come from to build these settlements?”
A: Well, if you’ve walked around large settlement, you’ll notice there are an awful number of buildings that are named after very generous donors. Many of those donors come from the diaspora, particularly from the US. So where money doesn’t come from the government, a lot of it is coming from outside of Israel. Hillel.
Hillel Schenker says, “It should be noted that only 7,000 settlers came to live in the West Bank between 67 and 77 when Begin took over.” Hillel, I’d love to know your source. 'Cause the numbers I’ve seen, it’s more like 40,000. So I thought it was a much larger number. I mean, it’s still relatively small compared to today. But I’d be interested to see your source. So thank you for that.
Aaron says, “So perhaps Gush Emunim should have been stopped and perhaps we should accept that Levinger and his crazies are responsible for our problems. The elder Rav Kook and Rabin are probably spinning in their graves.” Oh, Aaron is now saying, so that this wasn’t correct, and hasn’t been said in his name, so. Well, yeah, I mean, the elder Rav Kook was a brilliant and inspiring man, and he was a healer and a unifier. The younger Rav Kook was also a brilliant man, but you wouldn’t call him a unifier.
Q: Let’s have a look at some of the other comments up here. I’m going to start from a different place. This is from David Sefton. “A personal story of the settlements. Whenever I go to Israel, I’m involved in politics for first 15 minutes of arriving because I rent a car.” I’m amazed it takes as long as 15 minutes. “My sister lives in Ma'ale Adumim. The leasing company advises me that the insurance doesn’t cover the car beyond the Green Line.” Yeah, that’s a familiar story. “I tell them I’m using the car to go to Ma'ale Adumim, which the Israelis have designated as part of Jerusalem, that the car rental agent then returns and says, oh, the car rental agreement returns and says I’ll be covered. Is this politics?”
A: Yes, David, it is. Welcome to Israel.
Yona says, “We need a definition of international law.” I mean, quite right. This is a huge subject. “Not done explicitly as I’ve read by the ICJ. The only applicable law is Geneva specifically being applicable at the Geneva Fourth Convention.” Okay. This is a hugely intricate and complicated subject, but I’m glad you raised it because it’s not at all simple.
Carol. Carol says, “Some years back, I wanted to see the story of us from the Arab point of view. So I joined,” oops, sorry, I’ve just lost that. “So I just joined tours run by barrier watch. It is a fact today that the Jewish settlers completely control, they factor the lives of the non-Jewish inhabitants. Also, the facts on the ground are in many cases impossible for running normal lives for these Arab inhabitants. The West Bank is like a bleeding wound for the state of Israel, in my opinion. I cannot see any solution of two states.” Certainly, the first two or three sentences you say, Carol, I don’t think anyone could dispute those. Whether or not there is any solution, not now but in 5, 10, 20, 30 years, time will tell. Okay. And one final one 'cause it’s almost 15 past the hour. This is from Anne. Oops, sorry, I keep losing this.
I grew up in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. And as a preteen in the early 60s, I saw Meir Kahane get arrested several times for his racist rant against Blacks and Latinos, promoting violence against non-white people. The original settlers were kids I knew who were unemployed and not well-informed about Judaism. They went to Israel for free housing, social assistance, and healthcare. They’re full observant and don’t practise the values of Judaism. It’s an intellectual explanation for a land grab.“ Well, clearly, and that was your experience. I mean, what’s interesting about the Americans who originally went the 67 generation is that so many of them were, had been involved in the civil rights movement. They saw themselves as on the left, idealists on the left. And they desperately wanted to do something after the 67 war. And for them, an expression of their idealism and their attachment to civil rights was Jewish civil rights 'cause they felt they’d been rejected by the civil rights movement in the US. And so they went there as left-leaning idealist. And some of the people who ended up in a frat and in places like Tekoa come from that tradition. If you’re interested in that, I can recommend a book called "City on a Hilltop” by Sara Yael Hirschhorn. She’s an excellent writer and she tells a good story as well.
So thank you everyone so much for your comments. Thank you for listening. And it’s now almost 15 minutes past the hour. So let’s leave it for now. I kind of feel I should be quitting while I’m still ahead on this subject. But thank you, everyone, and I hope you have a pleasant rest of day and evening. Bye-bye.