Olmert & Israel: The Change

Amos Elon, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008

Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007

by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden - Nation Books, 531 pp., $29.95

Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse

by Sylvain Cypel - Other Press, 574 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life

by Meron Benvenisti, translated from the Hebrew by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta, in consultation with Michael Kaufman-Lacusta - University of California Press, 253 pp., $27.50

The barrier wall, 723 kilometers long, much of it eight meters high, takes up a vast amount of land in the West Bank, more than all the settlements put together. In many places the wall area is fifty meters wide, including moats, sand strips for detecting footprints, and patrol roads. Now nearing completion, it is one of the biggest construction projects ever carried out by any Israeli government. It may have been modeled after the Morris wall built during the civil war in Algeria, named after the commander in chief of French forces there.

The settlement project that Zertal and Eldar describe so clearly has gone on now for nearly forty years. It continues to this day, they write, "as though it were an involuntary, unconsidered movement of a body that has lost its mind." Water resources in the West Bank are controlled by the settlers, whose lawns and swimming pools are often within view of Palestinian villages where water is so scarce it has to be brought in by truck.

Ignoring international protests, all Israeli governments, left and right, gave lavish support for the settlement project, openly or by subterfuge. The financing was often indirect—filtered through concealed channels—and went under many names. Settlement funds were hidden in health, transportation, or education budgets. The full cost so far is not known, but must amount to billions of dollars. The Israeli writers Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, in their excellent, well-documented book Lords of the Land, write:

Deception, shame, concealment, denial, and repression have characterized the state's behavior with respect to the flow of funds to the settlements. It can be said that this has been an act of duplicity in which all of the Israeli governments since 1967 have been partner. This massive self-deception still awaits the research that will reveal its full magnitude.

Lords of the Land describes the political history of the settlement project in detail, showing how after the Six-Day War, the project was launched and sustained by, among others, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Golda Meir, and Menahem Begin. As for Ariel Sharon, they describe him as

the powerhouse behind the expansion of the settlements and their spread throughout the West Bank in order to thwart evacuation and return of the land to the Palestinians.

The settlement project grew to its present dimensions in the years after the great victory of 1967. After three wars, terror, superinflation, two intifadas, suicide bombers, and other troubles, a defiant and seemingly unreal cast of mind has taken hold among many Israelis. I have observed this mindset in my own family. It is well described by Sylvain Cypel, a French observer and editor of Le Monde, who spent many years in Israel, in his insightful book Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. He writes, "The occupation automatically reinforced the most ethnicist tendencies." The original French title of the book, Les Emmurés—those walled in—better expresses the peculiar mixture of joie de vivre, arrogance, provincialism, aggressiveness, fear of another Holocaust, and claustrophobia that has struck foreign observers and also some Israelis for years. All Israeli governments after 1967—whether on the right or the left—supported the settlement project more or less enthusiastically. When the project began, the world was in an age of decolonization, and the Algerian war had occurred less than a decade before. How Israeli leaders thought they could get away with a permanent occupation without provoking another war remains a mystery. Ben-Gurion, then out of office, advocated a quick withdrawal.

Meron Benvenisti, one of the very few who years ago foresaw the way things have gone, points out in Son of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections, and Regrets from a Political Life, his new, very courageous book, that within a decade, even within the old 1967 borders, Arab Israelis may already make up as much as 25 percent of the population. He writes:

The attempt to fight the "demographic threat" by dragging more and more new immigrants from every remote corner on earth has been carried to absurd extremes.... The time has come to declare that the Zionist revolution is over.