A Durable Peace

by Benjamin Netanyahu

  After years of looking at television shots from refugee districts, the average viewer in the West cannot help believing that Judea and Samaria are one large, squalid, teeming cluster of shanties packed one on top of the next, all the way from Tel Aviv to Jericho. The myth is readily punctured by a one-hour outing. Driving from Tel Aviv due east toward the Jordan River, one sees mountain after mountain after mountain covered with—nothing. No Arabs, no Jews, no trees, nothing. When here and there one finally comes to an Arab village or two, or a Jewish village or two, they are followed by yet more nothing. To the unaided eye, it is instantly obvious that entire cities can be built here without taking anything away from anyone.

  This is not only a physical fact but a legal one as well. In 1967 the Israeli government took direct possession of the roughly 50 percent of the land that had been owned by the Jordanian government, 68 the vast majority of it land on which no Arabs were living and over which Arab individuals had no legal claim. In fact, Israeli courts admit Jordanian land law as the decisive factor in determining legal title to West Bank land (except for those provisions in Jordanian law that prohibited Jews from owning land at all), and while there have been cases in which West Bank Arabs have taken the government to court and won land to which they had legal title, the simple fact is that most of it was not taken from anyone. It was simply empty public land.

  It is to this land, virtually as barren and lifeless as it was when Mark Twain and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley visited it over a century ago, that Israel is now bringing life. The Jewish West Bank town of Ariel, for example, now has fifteen thousand residents, a shopping mall, a hotel, a college, an orchestra, and an avenue named after George Bush for his role in the war against Saddam. The town is planned for more than a hundred thousand people, and from the car window you can see why: There’s nothing in the way. Ariel was built on an empty hill, and there is plenty more where that came from in every direction you look. And the same is true for Ma’aleh Adumin, Immanuel, Elkana, Oranit, Givat Ze’ev, Efrat, Betar, and other major urban settlements.

  Not surprisingly, the reassertion of the right of Jews to build their homes and their lives in East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria after an absence of nineteen years has raised howls of protest from the Arabs, and particularly from the PLO. It is this decision to grant Jews the right to live where Arabs do not want them that has sired the entire international campaign castigating Israelis for their “settlement activity”—which is to say, for moving into the neighborhood.

  In this campaign, the sour logic of the Reversal of Causality is at its most pernicious. For what is manifestly occurring is that the West, which so sharply condemned anti-black apartheid in South Africa, is being used by the Arabs as an enforcer of the anti-Jewish apartheid that pertains in the Arabs’ own countries. The Arab states generally prefer not to have Jewish residents (Morocco being the only real exception), but some are more devoted to this than others. Most zealous are some of the other “moderate” monarchies. Saudi Arabia will not honor any passport if it indicates that the bearer has ever been to Israel. In Jordan, the sale of land to a Jew was punishable by death. Yet rather than criticizing the patently anti-Semitic laws in force in Jordan and Saudi Arabia or asking these governments to alter these laws (much less imposing a UN resolution or economic sanctions to prompt them to do so), the United States and the other democracies issued statement after statement in favor of the application of apartheid to Judea and Samaria, demanding that Jews submit to Arab anti-Jewish strictures and stay out of territory that the Arabs wished closed to them. More incredible, the West regularly demands Israeli government intervention to prevent Jews from going to live where only Arabs supposedly should live. And this from people who would recoil in disgust if they heard that Jews were being told they had no right to move into any neighborhood or any suburb in any other part of the world.

  The absurdity of this approach is most pronounced in the international tumult that erupts every time a Jew attempts to buy or rent a house in Silwan, a neighborhood not far from the center of municipal Jerusalem. Silwan had Jewish residents until 1948, when it ended up on the Jordanian side of the cease-fire line (by a few hundred yards) and the Jews were thrown out. Today Jews buying homes there are challenged not only on the basis of individual property claims, which can be settled in court, but by an additional principle that Jews are forbidden to live there even if their individual property rights are unassailable. Silwan is the Arabization of the Hebrew name Shiloach, given to the spring and pool that supplied water to Jerusalem in ancient times. It was around this waterworks, described in the Bible in detail and very much intact today, that King David first built and fortified the capital of the Jewish people. Silwan, in fact, is the City of David. It is this place, two hundred yards from the Western Wall, that Jewish “settlers” are told to stay out of.

  Usually the demand to stay out of such neighborhoods and the 150 Jewish cities and towns in the territories is not presented in terms of dismantling them but in terms of a “freeze” on Jewish construction (no one ever speaks of a freeze on Arab construction). This term became even more familiar under Israeli’s Labor government between 1992 and 1996, which committed to freezing some of the settlements. But freezing these communities is condemning them to gradual and certain death, as is ultimately the case with anything alive. A freeze would prevent the natural growth and health of these communities, ensuring that there would be no new hospitals or clinics, no new schools, no new stores, libraries, or services of any kind. It could mean that children could not build homes near their parents, that struggling young communities would be doomed to keep struggling forever. Why would anyone want to live in such places, frozen in time as though in a fairy tale? The answer, of course, is that no one would, which is why a “freeze” is such a handy euphemism for people who wish to find a polite way of saying, “No Jews.” This is perhaps why in practice the policy did not materialize under the Labor government. Between 1992 and 1996 the Jewish population of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria grew an unprecedented 50 percent. Life has a power of its own.

  But it is not only the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria that would be devastated by a freeze. Most of the “settlers” live in what in the West is usually known as a suburb: a large-scale industrial and residential development, ringing an urban center that is crucial for the natural development of all cities—and which normally develops without any relation to politics. Thus, the great majority of the 250,000 Jews living in what are being called “settlements” are for the most part suburbanites, living in much the way that New York City commuters whose homes are in New Jersey or Long Island live, driving twenty or thirty minutes from “the heart of the West Bank” to downtown Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. With out its suburbs, a city would become overcrowded, living conditions would decline, and industry would be forced to relocate. The ultimate result of constraining the development of suburban areas is the strangulation of any metropolis and its eventual decay. Yet Tel Aviv is only a few miles from the West Bank, and Jerusalem is surrounded by the West Bank on three sides. (In fact, more than half the city, “East Jerusalem,” may be said to be on the West Bank.) To imagine the effect on these cities if all contiguous real estate were forbidden for development, one has to imagine what New York City would be like today if New Yorkers had never been allowed to “settle” New Jersey, Connecticut, or Long Island. Throttled, the city would have declined long ago.

  The campaign of delegitimization that has challenged the right of Jews to live in the heartland of Israel and in its capital is predicated on the bizarre idea that Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem are “foreign land,” seized by Jewish interlopers from those who had owned them since antiquity. To entertain this idea, of course, requires an astonishing flight of historical amnesia. For these were places where Jews had lived—for millennia in places like Hebron and Jerusalem, and for decades preceding the War of Independence in the emerging Jewish communities in Judea and southern Samaria. When my parents we
re students in the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem in the early 1930s, a common pastime was to go down to bathe at the Jewish resort of Kalya on the Dead Sea and find refuge from the scorching sun in the orchards of Jericho. The destruction of the Jewish communities in 1948 did not mean that the Jews of Israel lost their attachment to the lands that were abruptly cut off from them. From 1948 to 1967, when the territories were occupied by Jordan, Israelis knew much of this “foreign terrain” by heart from their studies of the Bible and subsequent Jewish history. Some could look out their windows and see the hills of Samaria rising above their homes. Others knew the land from their parents who had lived in Judea before being driven out by the Jordanians. Most of all, Israelis remembered the Western Wall, the hallowed rampart of the Jewish Temple that was buried inside the Arab-controlled section of divided Jerusalem. The holiest place of Judaism was barred to them as Jews—even though it was only a few hundred yards away across a no-man’s-land.

  The eerie feeling of imprisonment, of being so close and yet so very far away from the cradle of Jewish history, was hauntingly captured a few weeks before the outbreak of the Six Day War by the publication of Naomi Shemer’s “Jerusalem of Gold,” a song that deeply moved the entire country:

  Amid the slumber of trees and stone

  Imprisoned in her dreams

  The city dwells alone

  Within her heart a wall

  How have the wells gone dry

  The market square forsaken

  And no one climbs the Temple Mount

  In Old Jerusalem

  In the caves carved in the stone

  The winds cease not to cry

  And none descend the Dead Sea road

  By way of Jericho 69

  After the walls dividing the city suddenly came down during the Six Day War, thousands of Israelis streamed through the Old City to the wall—following the steps of the soldiers to the place where, just hours earlier, secular, battle-weary paratroops had wept to a man over the privilege granted to them of sewing back together the broken heart of the Jewish people. Like the soldiers, the citizens of Israel stood before the ancient Wall, touching the massive stones in wondrous awe. From there, in the days and weeks that followed, they made their way, at times wide-eyed with a barely contained excitement, to Bethlehem, Hebron, Shechem, Jericho, Beth El, and all the other places in whose names, landscape, and history was cemented the identity of the Jewish people.

  This exhilaration was felt by almost all Israelis, and each one experienced it in a different way. My brother Yoni, like many Israelis, would often spend his weekend leaves from the army exploring such sites:

  It seems that the cradle of world civilization is all around us, everything dating back thousands and thousands of years. A few Saturdays ago I visited the Biblical Gibeon and saw the remarkable ancient pool there. It’s this pool that’s mentioned in Second Samuel in connection with Avner ben Ner and Joab ben Zeruya [Saul and David’s generals] who “met together by the pool at Gibeon” and let “the young men arise and play [i.e., do battle] before them.” The entire country is like that. 70

  I myself remember the experience less from weekend leaves than from the training that I underwent in a reconnaissance unit. We would criss-cross the hills and mountains in exhausting marches and hikes aimed at honing our navigating skills. Inevitably, if there was a craggy peak along the route, we would climb it; a steep gorge, and we would descend into it. As the shirt on your back stiffens into a mixture of sweat and dust and the soles of your feet burn as if on fire, it is difficult to feel deeply for a country. But not impossible. I remember nights when we would come to a sudden halt at the foothills of Shiloh, the first capital of the Israelites after the exodus from Egypt; or stop midway up the steep pass of Beth Horon, where the Maccabees triumphed over the Greeks in their desperate struggle for Jewish independence; or gaze up at the fortress of Betar, where Bar Kochba’s revolt met its tragic end at the hands of the Roman legions. We would stand there, a handful of youngsters barely nineteen, taking in the night air and gulping water from our canteens, saying nothing. Because what we felt did not need saying. We had come back—for all the generations of Jews who had suffered oppression, degradation, and humiliation while they dreamed and prayed that we would return to this land.

  Moshe Dayan captured this sentiment a few weeks after the Six Day War in a ceremony on the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem, marking the reinterment of the soldiers who had fallen in Jerusalem in the battle for the city in 1948:

  Our brothers who fell in the War of Independence: we have not abandoned your dream nor forgotten the lesson you taught us. We have returned to the [Temple] Mount, to the cradle of our nation’s history, to the land of our forefathers, to the land of the Judges, and to the fortress of David’s dynasty [the Old City]. We have returned to Hebron, to Sh’chem, to Bethlehem and Anatoth, to Jericho and the fords over the Jordan. 71

  For the normally uneffusive Dayan this was an uncharacteristic outpouring of feeling. Israeli culture does not encourage outward displays of profound emotion, and in the years following the Six Day War many Israelis kept their deepest sentiments about this, the heart of their land, to themselves. The ones who expressed it more openly were the religious members of the settlement movement, who spearheaded the drive to rebuild the ancient (and modern) Jewish cities in the largely barren land. Even though many Israelis who did not go to live there supported their activities, the result was that the world came to believe that the claim to the land was espoused only by a “radical fringe” of the Israeli public. This erroneous view was heightened by the emergence of a vocal movement on the left that for a variety of reasons argued that Israel should leave “the territories.”

  Successive Israeli governments did not bother to articulate the emotional connection that so many Israelis, including a significant number on the left, felt toward the land, choosing rather to stress the more readily explainable security arguments against relinquishing the land outright. That—and the fact that, unlike most Israelis, the Arabs had no compunction in expressing their attachment and their claims, almost always embellished with a false history that few in the international media had the knowledge to debunk—soon combined to produce a commonly accepted view that the Jews had taken an Arab patrimony to which they had no moral rights and no enduring ties. Quickly forgotten was not only the fact that it was the Arabs who had driven the Jews out in 1948 and attacked them again from these territories in 1967, but also the entire course of Jewish history, the focus of which was the great Return. Return to what? Certainly not the quaint cafés of Tel Aviv or the lush villas of its wealthy suburb Savion, both of which had been sand and swamp until a few decades earlier and which had never before existed in Jewish history or Jewish memory. When the Jewish people yearned to return to their land, when they actually did so in the course of this century, their souls were enthralled by the idea of returning to all the places that Moshe Dayan enumerated, and to many more that he did not, in the mountains of Samaria and Judea.

  Yet the endless parade before the television cameras of Palestinians castigating Israeli “occupiers” was able to erase all of this from the public mind. It was asserted that Israel had taken “foreign land,” and that Israel must return it to its “rightful owners”; if it did not, it would suffer the risk of war.

  This was not the first time in Jewish history that the Jews reclaimed these very lands from which they had been barred. More than twenty-one hundred years ago the Maccabees had done the same after a thirty-year war of liberation. It is instructive to read today the exchange of letters between the Seleucid king Antiochus and the Jewish leader Simon, the only survivor of the five Mac-cabee brothers who fell leading their people in the long struggle for freedom. Antiochus, just as convinced that the land was an inextricable part of his Seleucid Greek empire as the Arabs today are convinced that it is an inextricable part of their realm, demanded:

  You hold control of Joppa and Gazara and the citadel
of Jerusalem; they are cities of my kingdom. You have devastated their territory, you have done great damage in the land, and you have taken possession of many places in my kingdom. Now then, hand over the cities which you have seized…. Otherwise we will come and conquer you.

  Simon’s reply could have been written today:

  We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time had been unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity, we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers. 72

  This land, where every swing of a spade unearths remnants of the Jewish past and where every village carries the barely altered Hebrew names of old; this land, in which the Jews became a nation and over which they shed more tears than have been shed by any other people in history; this land, the loss of which resulted in an exile of the Jews such as has been suffered by no other people and the spilling of a sea of blood such as has been spilled by no other nation; this land, which never ceased to live as a distant but tangible home in the minds of Jewish children from Toledo in medieval Spain to the Warsaw ghetto in our own century; this land, for which the Jews fought with unsurpassed courage and tenacity in ancient as well as in modern times—this is the “foreign land” that world leaders now demand be barred to Jews and that Israel unilaterally forsake. This is an unjust demand. The Palestinian Arabs on the West Bank now live under Palestinian rule. The remaining territories are almost entirely uninhabited by Palestinians, but are replete with historical significance for Israel.