The Occupied Territories: Political Issues

Israel’s Labor Party leadership emerged from the 1967 war still committed to the principle of partition. They envisioned limited changes in the 1949 armistice lines: Jerusalem would be reunited under Israeli sovereignty, and there would be minor rectifications in Israel’s favor on the West Bank. The Straits of Tiran, for which Israel had fought twice, and the Golan Heights, from which the Syrians had bombarded Israeli settlements, would also remain under Israeli control. Jordan was seen as the key to future negotiations, based on the return of the bulk of the West Bank (particularly the Arab population centers) to King Hussein. But there would be no withdrawal except as part of a final peace treaty. With the West Bank and Sinai as leverage, Israel could afford to wait for the Arab states to come to the negotiating table.

As a consequence, the Israeli government adopted an open-bridges policy on the Jordan River and discouraged the emergence of independent Arab leadership on the West Bank. Both of these measures served to protect the Jordanian presence in the territory, in anticipation of a peace treaty with Hussein. The government established settlements in those areas where border changes were anticipated. Policy in this area was guided by what was called the “oral law,” since Israel’s claims could not be presented formally at this stage. In accordance with the oral law (a concept borrowed from Jewish tradition), settlements were concentrated in the Jordan Valley, on the Golan Heights, and on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. The settlements in the Jordan Valley were also connected to what became known as the Allon Plan. In this conception, Israel would establish a security frontier, distinct from a political boundary, on the Jordan River. Most of the West Bank and nearly all its Arab population would be demilitarized and returned to Jordan, to which it would be connected by a corridor through the Israeli security belt on the Jordan.

But the Labor approach was challenged from the outset by Herut and others who opposed any return of the West Bank to Arab rule. Herut, which came to dominate the Likud bloc after its formation in 1973, represented the historic position of the Revisionist movement. In this view, Israel had a claim to Judea and Samaria on both historic and security grounds, and should act toward realizing this claim. Palestine west of the Jordan River should not be redivided, no “foreign sovereignty” should be reintroduced in this area, and there should be no restriction on Jewish settlement anywhere in the historic homeland. Arabs in the occupied territories would be offered autonomy as individuals but should express their national identity in the framework of one of the existing Arab states (especially Jordan, seen as basically a “Palestinian” state). The peace process was thus basically conceived as a negotiation between Israel and these Arab states, on the basis of existing lines of demarcation; the Palestinians did not appear as an independent body.

Behind these opposed conceptions, there was a fair degree of consensus on certain basic issues: both major parties (and most of the Israeli public) opposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan, and both opposed recognition of and negotiation with the Palestine Liberation Organization as then constituted and represented. Also, Likud, like Labor, favored the continuation for the foreseeable future of the “temporary” military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, given the fact that immediate annexation (a course favored only by small groups on the right) would at once pose the question of the civil rights of Arab inhabitants, who still comprised 95 percent of the population there after two decades of Jewish settlement. Nevertheless, the basically opposed conceptions of Labor and Likud prevented development of a coherent foreign policy during periods when the two parties shared power, and the Likud’s opposition in principle to Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories stymied diplomacy based on this quid pro quo—the only one in which Arab interlocutors were interested—during periods of Likud dominance.

Interwoven with the opposition to withdrawal was the rise of religious nationalism, representing “the first attempt by a religious community to determine political-religious objectives for the entire Jewish People since the beginning of the Haskala [the Jewish Enlightenment, at the end of the eighteenth century].” ^[43] The main expression of this perspective came from Gush Emunim, an extraparliamentary movement founded in 1974 to secure Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) through massive Jewish settlement there. Religious nationalism in the Zionist context shares the characteristics of other fundamentalist movements, drawing selectively from tradition to formulate an activist ideology that challenges modern secular culture.^[44] It differs, however, from the fundamentalism of the ultra-Orthodox (haredim) in Israel, which draws strictly from religious sources; Gush Emunim advocated a “political theology” that drew from both religion and from modern nationalist thinking, and its success was in large part due to a simultaneous rise of secular nationalism.^[45]

Consequently religious Zionists, who had been marginal players in classical Zionism, emerged as the most fervent practitioners of the pioneering Zionist settlement ethic. This gave them an ideological importance far beyond their actual numbers, as Israelis in general respected an ideological commitment and intensity that were increasingly hard to find in secular Israeli society. The ability of Gush Emunim to incorporate values and methods of secular Zionism, together with the rise of “civil religion” that increased receptiveness to traditional Jewish symbols, created a favorable atmosphere for religious nationalism and a “permissive” attitude toward settlement in the territories. Though activists numbered only in the thousands, a large part of the public supported their endeavors in spirit.^[46]

The key figure in the development of religious nationalist ideology was Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose father—Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook—was the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi in Palestine. The elder Rabbi Kook had provided important intellectual underpinnings to religious Zionism by defining secular Zionists as unwitting agents of a divine plan for Jewish restoration and redemption. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook took this traditional messianism further, declaring that redemption was to be achieved in the present age by restoring Jewish rule to the remaining areas of the Land of Israel that had been by divine providence captured in the 1967 war. A religious vision thus became a radical political program to carry out the sacred task of reclaiming Judea and Samaria by intensive Jewish settlement in all areas of the historic homeland. Land itself became a supreme moral and religious value; Israeli authorities were forbidden by religious decree from relinquishing control over any part of the ancestral domain.

As with other fundamentalisms, this worldview posed issues for democratic governance. In the first place, the idea of a “higher law” legitimizes or even requires resistance to a government that derives its authority from society; in this context, the commandment to settle the land takes precedence over the democratic procedures of Israeli government. In the eyes of Gush Emunim settlers, it is the government that acts illegitimately when it abandons any part of the homeland.^[47] Second, there is no sense of Arab rights to be measured against Jewish claims, since the latter are absolute. Given the focus on Jewish rights, religious nationalists do not have an agreed-upon position on the future of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria. Some would grant citizenship to those who accepted the Zionist framework, leaving others in a second-class status. Others argue that even granting autonomy or limited self-rule to Palestinians in a Jewish state is not permitted, and some openly urge voluntary or compulsory “transfer” (that is, expulsion). The most extreme position, expressed by Rabbi Yisrael Hess in a student publication of Bar-Ilan University in 1980, is that Arabs are descended from Amalek and that the Bible therefore commands their destruction.^[48]