By Amos Elon
The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967–1977by Gershom Gorenberg
Times Books, 454 pp., $30.00
After weeks of bargaining with smaller parties, each with its own special interests, Ehud Olmert, the leader of the new Kadima party, has finally formed a new Israeli government. The election campaign was overshadowed by the specter of the comatose Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in the third month of a massive hemorrhagic stroke but still formally in office. Hawks and doves pledged their undying loyalty to his "legacy," whatever it was. Sharon was a reckless, controversial man, exceedingly contradictory— as perhaps many interesting men are; only the dull have simple characters. He was not a man of peace, as President Bush once called him, but out of tune with his time. In an age of decolonization, half a century after the French–Algerian war, he was mainly responsible for the huge "settlement project" in the occupied territories, now often described as the great historical mistake of 1967. The occupied territories continue to fester in Israeli life like a monstrous disease. Their days seem numbered. "I hate the corpses of empires," Rebecca West wrote. "They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy."
It was a mean little empire, even before the inhabitants became restive. Other colonialists co-opted local elites, intermarried, built universities, great waterworks, and other public amenities for the colonized; Israel did little of the sort. Nearly all real improvements in the territories since 1967 were financed by the Saudis and the Gulf States. In 2001 there was not a single traffic light in the occupied territories. They were a captive market and a source of cheap labor; this was ultimately counterproductive, since it retarded the modernization of the construction and other industries. The settlement project remains a main, some say the main, impediment to a historic compromise to end a hundred-year war between two national movements over the same piece of real estate.
How this mini-empire first came into being after the brief 1967 war is brilliantly described by Gershom Gorenberg in The Accidental Empire, his masterly book based on original research. The empire was not founded in a fit of absentmindedness, as was once (wrongly) said of the British Empire, but as Gorenberg's documentation shows, it was the result of deliberate decisions by Israeli governments of the left and the right. In a book that could have served as a telling additional chapter in Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, he shows how only seven months after the 1967 war there were already eight hundred settlers living in the West Bank. The obsessive drive by all Israeli governments after 1967 to establish "facts on the ground" (the Hebrew translation for faits accomplis) was also an almost blind reflex reaction born of past experience—the practice of Israel's founding fathers to add "one dunam after another" and the memory of the UN partition resolution of 1947, which assigned to Israel precisely those parts of Palestine in which many Jews were already living. After the 1948 war, during which some 600,000 Palestinians fled the country or were kicked out, most nations recognized Israel within 78 percent of mandatory Palestine, an area much larger than was allotted it in the original partition resolution.
The settlement project, as Gorenberg shows, was promoted by successive Israeli governments of the left and the right, overriding objections voiced at various times by a minority of cabinet ministers and a handful of dissenters outside the government in the academy and the press. The project was first intended to provide Israel with secure borders, as called for in Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 war. But soon there was no stopping it. The result, as Gorenberg puts it, was nothing less than "an artificially created Bosnia." Its first promoters were the secularists Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, and Yigael Allon, of whom it was said that after God the Father had been declared dead, they had married the Motherland. The first settlements were modestly called "outposts." Raymond Aron, then visiting Israel, asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol if he wasn't worried about a rebellion by the Arabs as had happened in Algeria. Gorenberg cites Eshkol's answer: "No. This isn't Algeria. We can strangle terror in the occupied territories."
Much, much more at;
New York Review of Books
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