My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  But Etzion is pensive and introspective. He quietly tells me how he came to the conclusion that the time had come. Not one Ofra and not a thousand Ofras would suffice. So he carries on with the cherry orchard and with buying land from Arabs and with planning the Ofra synagogue and with weekly meetings of the Gush Emunim leadership. But his mind is elsewhere. His heart is with the Temple. He collects ancient cedar logs that were purportedly once part of the Second Temple. He imagines the Temple, thinks of the Temple, reconstructs the Temple in his mind. And he knows for certain that without redeeming the Temple there will be no redemption. Because he has never been put off by unconventional thinking, he is not put off now by the unconventional idea that is capturing his mind. And because he has always been disgusted by people who talk but don’t act, he knows he must act. He goes up the Mount of Olives at night to observe the Temple Mount, and he studies its defenses. He draws maps and acquires aerial photos and collects every piece of relevant intelligence. And he makes a detailed plan. He mobilizes men and instructs them to get explosives. He reaches a point where he has four major explosive devices (20 kilograms each) that will bring down the four pillars of the Dome; then he reaches a point where he has twelve medium-sized explosive devices (7 kilograms each) that will bring down the twelve columns surrounding the Dome. He is ready. “In my mind,” Etzion tells me, “I already saw the Dome collapsing on itself with a huge cloud of rising dust. And then the confusion stops and Israel’s stuttering stops and there is clarity at last as one chapter ends and another begins. One era closes and another era opens. And all is different now, for we have done our share and God is bound to do His.”

  When, in the spring of 1984, Israel’s Secret Service arrives in Ofra to arrest Yehuda Etzion, the community is up in arms. The official leadership denounces his deeds, but many others are supportive. It is soon revealed that Etzion is not the only Ofra resident who is a member of the now notorious Jewish underground. Several Jewish terrorists live in Ofra. A number of the terrorist operations the clandestine ring has managed to pull off earlier were planned in Ofra. From Ofra came the instructions to booby-trap the cars of three Palestinian mayors, which left two of them without legs. Only five years after Ofra settled among the Palestinians, it became a terrorist hotbed that bred ideological Jewish murderers. Ofra was home to militant messianic ideas and to a radical school of thought that believed in transforming the land by using unrestrained force.

  The exposure of the Etzion-led underground is a shock. And the shock is healing. Now even the Ofra settlers realize that messianism is radioactive, that combining metaphysics with politics breeds insanity. After the initial storm subsides, the zealots’ way is rejected. The Ofra majority chooses pragmatism over fundamentalism, moderation over extremism, Wallerstein over Etzion. The settlers enlarge Ofra and strengthen it. They acquire more land and found new neighborhoods. As a community they survive two intifadas. They suffer their losses and bury their dead. They withstand the outbreaks of violence and the constant uncertainties of living in a disputed territory. True, once in a while violent Ofra gangs take the law into their own hands and carry out brutal attacks on the neighboring Palestinian villages. Even Wallerstein himself gets into a shooting incident in which he kills a Palestinian boy after his car is stoned. But as a rule, Ofra does not openly revolt against the state. It advances its agenda not by fighting state and law, but by using them. Adopting Old Labor’s step-by-step approach, Ofra goes from strength to strength. In 1983 it has five hundred residents. In 1995 it has twelve hundred residents. Today it has approximately thirty-five hundred.

  And yet, when I sit with Yehuda Etzion and hear him talk, I know that he has remained a part of Ofra’s DNA. For Etzion is right: Ofra as such is futile. Settlements as such are hopeless. In spite of Wallerstein’s longitudinal and lateral roads, the settlements have remained isolated Jewish islands in the Arab West Bank. In spite of Wallerstein’s communities and industrial parks and highways and bridges, the settlers are a minority in Judea and Samaria. As the international community will never recognize them as legitimate, the settlements are built on precarious ground. As Israel of the plains never really embraced the settlements, they remain distant and detached, living beyond mountains of darkness. Like Algeria and Rhodesia, they will not survive. They are at a dead end.

  Pragmatic Wallerstein does not have a solution. He won the war of the hills, but his victory is Pyrrhic. The homes he built don’t have long-lasting foundations; the trees he planted have no deep roots. The only way to save his monumental project is Yehuda Etzion’s way. The only way to believe in the future of Ofra is to believe in cataclysm or divine intervention, or both. Etzion is honest enough to say it, but every intelligent person in Ofra must know it: they harbor in their heart a great belief in a great war, which will be their only salvation.

  There will be war, no doubt about it. Because of 1948 and 1967, and because of Ofra, there will be war. But war will not save Ofra or Israel. The reality created by Wallerstein and Etzion and their friends has entangled Israel in a predicament that cannot be untangled. The settlements have placed Israel’s neck in a noose. They created an untenable demographic, political, moral, and judicial reality. But now Ofra’s illegitimacy taints Israel itself. Like a cancer, it spreads from one organ to another, endangering the entire body. Ofra’s colonialism makes the world perceive Israel as a colonialist entity. But because in the twenty-first century there is no room for a colonialist entity, the West is gradually turning its back on Israel. That’s why enlightened Jews in America and Europe are ashamed of Israel. That’s why Israel is at odds with itself. Although the founders of Ofra wished to strengthen Israel, in practice they weakened it. So when the great war does break out, it will meet an isolated, ostracized, and divided Israel—an Israel that will hardly be able to defend itself.

  On this clear winter day, everything is still quiet. The radar station on Ba’al Hazor Mountain scans the blue skies. The white homes of Ofra and the stone houses of the Palestinian village of Silwan watch one another. In the distance lie the vineyards and the cherry orchard and the gray rocks and the mountain soil. A thousand years of memory and a thousand years of silence and an uncertain future.

  Yehuda Etzion carries on. He tells me about the project he has taken up since his release from prison, a plan for a New Jerusalem: a Jerusalem without mosques and without Arabs, a Jerusalem of the Third Temple. Pinchas Wallerstein carries on, too. “We were not mistaken,” he says. “We built a splendid project. We did what our forefathers did in Hanita and Ein Harod. We followed Labor’s ethos and used Labor’s methods. In the last quarter of the twentieth century we did in Samaria what Labor did in the Valley of Harod in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”

  “But this is exactly what the argument is about,” I interrupt. “The question is whether Ofra is a benign continuation of Zionism or a malignant mutation of Zionism.” The answer, of course, is that it is both. On the one hand, the spirit and the modus operandi are remarkably similar. No fair-minded observer will deny the assertion that in a sense Ofra is Ein Harod’s grandchild. But on the other hand, the historic and conceptual context is completely different. In this sense, Ofra is not a continuation but an aberration, a grotesque reincarnation of Ein Harod.

  Wallerstein doesn’t get it, so I try to explain. I tell him that from the beginning, Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand it was a national liberation movement, but on the other it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first fifty years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly. It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world’s forces of progress. With great sophistication Zionism handled the contradiction at its core. It managed to arrive at the great war of 1948 just and strong and came out of the war with a Jewish democratic nation-state that
had clear borders and a massive Jewish majority. It had turned the conflict between an emigrant community and a native population into a conflict between sovereign states. Gone was the danger that our fate would be the fate of Algeria or Rhodesia, that Zionism would be perceived as just another ill-conceived colonial project.

  “But after 1967, and after 1973, all that changed,” I tell Wallerstein. “The self-discipline and historical insight that characterized the nation’s first years began to fade. You settlers took advantage of the feebleness and of the political vacuum created by the wars. You abused Labor’s weakness and Likud’s recklessness. But although you think you outsmarted everybody, you were wrong. You were wrong to think you could have done with Ofra in 1975 what was done in Ein Harod in 1921. You were wrong to think that a sovereign state could do in occupied territories what a revolutionary movement can do in an undefined land. You didn’t grasp the deep wisdom of the 1950s housing-estate-Israel and the 1960s Dimona-Israel. Ironically, you brought back the Palestinians Ben Gurion managed to keep away. You have turned a conflict between nation states into a conflict between a settlers’ community and an indigenous community. By doing that, you endangered everything. Your energy was remarkable, but on everything that matters you were utterly wrong. Out of an understandable yearning for the Zionist past and for Zionist glory, you contradicted Zionist logic and undermined Zionist interests. You brought disaster upon us, Wallerstein. On our behalf, you committed an act of historic suicide.”

  Angry and dejected, I walk from Pinchas Wallerstein’s home to the home of Israel Harel. Harel is my colleague at Haaretz newspaper, a columnist and longtime partner in conversation about the nation’s future. He is pleasant, wise, and low-key. Unlike Wallerstein and Etzion, he is neither defiant nor obstinate, but thoughtful and sad. In 1967 he was among the first paratroopers to reach the Temple Mount, and in 1973 he was among the first paratroopers to cross the Suez Canal. As a young student he was one of the founders of the Greater Israel movement, and as a young journalist he settled in Ofra a year after it was founded. He initiated and edited the Ofra-based settlers’ weekly magazine, Nekuda, and he founded the settlers’ representative council, Yesha. Although I like Harel and respect him, I am now cruel to him. “The more I look into Ofra and the more I think about it,” I say, “I come to the conclusion that you simply went mad. A zealot’s fever blinded you; a collective national-religious fervor made you not see the Arabs all around you. Your tribal psychology and bizarre ideology led you to lead Israel to a dead end.”

  My excitement doesn’t affect Harel. Through his thick glasses he looks me right in the eye and replies with surprising candor. “Any person coming to live in Ofra is required to give answers,” he says. “From our first moment here we were required to give answers.” He lists four of them:

  1. A wave of immigration will come—from the USSR or from the U.S.—and will sweep away the demographic problem.

  2. Of their own accord, the Arabs will leave and go to live with their brothers in Jordan.

  3. The State of Israel will not transfer its population by force but will encourage the immigration of individual Arabs to Arab states.

  4. There will be a war resembling the war of 1948.

  “Then I was right,” I cry. “Ofra’s assumption is that the Arabs will not stick around. Its secret hope is that there will be a great war and the Arabs will vanish.”

  Harel politely ignores me and continues. “We always knew a day might come when we would be forced to leave,” he says. “It was not talked about. It was concealed in the darkest corners. But from the day Ofra was founded, every person here knew this. But we all knew something else, too. There is a belief here that a grand event will happen, like the 1967 war or the 1948 war. And that grand event will prove that we were right. It will redeem our struggle and will convince the people of Israel to join us. The people of Tel Aviv will understand how hollow their existence is, that without us they have no roots, no depth, and no life. The masses will come. And then, when a million Jews live on the mountaintops, there will really be a new map. And there will be a new consciousness. What began in Ofra will make Israel Jewish and Zionist once again.”

  Only when I listen to Harel do I comprehend: Gush Emunim was so strong because it was the liberation movement of religious Zionism. By going to Judea and Samaria it tried to turn a petit-bourgeois Shabbat-keeping community into a revolutionary movement. By establishing settlements, it tried to move religious Zionism from the fringes of the Zionist narrative to its center. That’s why the yearning for Ofra was not only political or religious, but visceral. Only in the disputed territory outside of the borders of sovereign Israel was the national-religious tribe able to assert itself. Only in this undefined territory could it define itself. Only in Ofra could national-religious youngsters raise their heads and find a place in the world. That’s why they refused to see the folly of Ofra, why they shut their eyes to a reality that was closing in on Ofra from the very start. That’s why they did not understand that in the twenty-first century, Ofra simply could not be.

  But for the time being, Ofra is here: thirty-five hundred strong and counting. And when I leave Israel Harel and stroll to the commercial center and visit the day-care nursery and the kindergarten and the school, I am impressed by how lively it all is. Life is good here. Not a cloud in the sky. That is, as long as you don’t raise your eyes and see the neighboring Palestinian villages. As long as you don’t know exactly how the land under your feet was acquired. As long as you are not aware of how the calm is maintained here.

  This is what is so deceptive about Ofra. To begin with, it was a pregnancy outside the womb. It was conceived outside state law, state borders, and state sovereignty. But even today Ofra lives beyond international law, devoid of international context, bereft of international goodwill. So at the very same time Ofra exists and doesn’t exist. Although vibrant and dynamic, it is clear that sooner or later Ofra’s internal logic will be crushed by the exterior logic it revolted against and ignored.

  I think of the Rhodesian farmers who felt safe on their vast farms in the 1960s. They had it so good. They looked down upon critics and skeptics. In their eyes, their reality was so solid they could not see how fragile it was. They were wrong to believe that their virtual reality of affluence was a sustainable reality of survival. And I remember the Nezer Hazani settlement in the Gaza Strip, which I visited just before it was evacuated and demolished during the 2005 disengagement. I remember the very deep fear that the destruction of Nezer Hazani aroused in me. It was just like Ofra, prosperous and self-assured. But then the bulldozers razed it to the ground. Within a day it was gone. First it was and then it wasn’t. Vanished.

  I feel for Ofra. I feel strongly for the Ofra that I am furious with.

  The Ofra archive is as neat and tidy as a pharmacy. In one of the white boxes I find an old statement by Yehuda Etzion: “Our real goal: to establish a proud kingdom that is spiritually robust and politically powerful.” In another white box I find a tattered map that shows the sixteen concrete buildings of the Jordanian Ein Yabrud base scattered on the rocky mountain slope. And black-and-white photographs: a lonely Arab stone house overlooking the first settlers as they take hold of the Ein Yabrud base. Some 8 mm footage: energetic young women sweeping the deserted military barracks. A baby carriage, a water tank, hanging laundry. Young men in shorts and undershirts building vigorously. Young women in T-shirts painting walls white. Twenty-three-year-old Yehuda Etzion in a red bell-shaped hat. Twenty-six-year-old Pinchas Wallerstein speaking excitedly to his fellow settlers. The innocence and the blindness of April 1975. The determination to climb the mountain and to light the fire. To force God to intervene in history and save his people, his Israel.

  (photo credit 9.1)

  NINE

  Gaza Beach, 1991

  TWENTY YEARS AFTER OCCUPATION BEGAN AND TWELVE YEARS AFTER Ofra was founded, the first intifada broke out. In December 1987 the Palestinians residing in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip revolted against Israel’s ongoing military rule. Tens of thousands took to the streets. Cities and villages and refugee camps were engulfed by protest. An unprecedented Palestinian rebellion challenged Israel and nearly brought down its reign over the occupied territories. But after the initial shock the Jewish state fought back. It mobilized its army and trained it to become an effective police force. It unleashed the Shin Bet, its efficient secret service, on the unarmed masses that rebelled against it.

  Within a few months the Israeli military built several detention camps in which thousands of Palestinians were imprisoned after having been convicted by military tribunals. Within a few years, the intifada rebellion was in decline. The systematic and determined use of oppressive force worked. The Palestinian campaign lost momentum. Gone were the mass demonstrations. Gone was the notion that the popular uprising would force Israel to end occupation. Thousands of Palestinian civilians languished in the detention camps. In many ways their mass imprisonment tainted Israel’s democratic identity.

  In March 1991 I was a young journalist about to become a father. When I reported to a military base not far from Lydda for my annual reserve duty, I had no idea what that duty would be. Once told I was to serve as a jailer in a Gaza detention camp, I was horrified. An antioccupation peacenik, I was not willing to compromise everything I believed in, and for the first time in my life I seriously considered breaking the law, refusing to serve, and going to jail.

  But as the IDF bus was taking me and my fellow reservists south, I had a better idea: I would write about the experience. I would put on paper the experience of an Israeli citizen who was suddenly transformed into a military jailor. Documenting occupation, I believed, would be a far more effective act of protest than refusing to take part in it. In the twelve days I spent in the Gaza beach detention camp I took notes, and in the three days that followed I wove the notes into a three-thousand-word piece. “On Gaza Beach” was first published in Haaretz and then in The New York Review of Books. By the time it came out in English, my eldest daughter, Tamara, had been born.