John Felton. The Contemporary Middle East: A Documentary History. CQ Press, 2008.
Israel’s capture of the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from its Arab neighbors during the June 1967 War raised the prospect of the Zionist dream of “Greater Israel” becoming reality. Shortly after that war, and at an increasing pace in the 1970s, a succession of Israeli governments promoted or allowed the establishment of dozens of Jewish settlements in these territories. One idea behind the settlements was to allow Israel to tighten its hold on the land, making it politically and practically impossible to relinquish it in any peace negotiations with the Arabs. The negotiation of Israel’s first peace treaty with an Arab nation proved that expectation flawed: In 1978 Israel agreed to remove a handful of settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and return the peninsula to Egypt as the price for peace with its largest Arab neighbor. In 2005 Israel unilaterally eliminated Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in response to the demographic and security challenges posed by the presence of some 8,000 Israeli Jews in the midst of more than 1 million Palestinian Arabs (June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, p. 94; Camp David Peace Process, p. 118; Israeli Disengagement, p. 313).
Some of the settlements in the territories occupied by Israel resulted from official policies publicly articulated by successive governments. Others, established with little or no public announcement, stemmed from the behind-the-scenes actions of the military or government agencies. Still others took hold through the actions of religious organizations, sometimes with the implicit support of the government and in other cases only after the government had tried with varying degrees of sincerity to block their establishment.
However the settlements came about, four decades later, more than one hundred of them were populated by nearly 450,000 Israeli Jews: approximately 200,000 settlers in and around East Jerusalem, some 17,000 on the Golan Heights, about 230,000 in the West Bank, and an estimated 8,000 in the Gaza Strip. (Israel dismantled its settlements in Gaza in 2005.) Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan Heights in 1981, but the United Nations does not acknowledge these annexations as legitimate and considers these lands, in addition to the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as occupied territory.
The Israeli government approved the first settlement in the West Bank three months after the June 1967 War. Called Gush Etzion and located south of Jerusalem between Bethlehem and Hebron, this community represents the reestablishment of the Kfar Etzion settlement, which Jews had built decades earlier but Jordan had dismantled after it conquered the West Bank in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Gush Etzion subsequently grew into a collection of more than a dozen settlements and by 2004 had a total population of around 15,000 settlers. Israel argued that many of the post-1967 settlements in East Jerusalem also were not new, but instead were restorations of Jewish neighborhoods that had existed in the area before the 1948 war, some for hundreds of years.
In the first few years after the 1967 war, the Israeli government focused on placing settlements in the Jordan Valley, immediately to the west of the Jordan River. It justified these settlements as part of security measures to thwart any future attack by Jordan, to the east of the river. The government used this same reasoning to establish Jewish settlements on the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau captured from Syria in 1967 that offers commanding views of northeastern Israel.
Starting in 1971, however, senior government officials put forth the broader rationale that the settlements demonstrated Israel’s determination to hold onto the territories, despite the UN Security Council’s call for Israel to return them to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan made one of the boldest such statements in an August 19, 1971, speech, asserting that Israel must “create facts” in what the government called the “administered territories.” Said Dayan, “We should regard our role also in the administered territories as that of the established government—to plan and implement whatever can be done without leaving ‘options open’ for the day of peace, which may be distant.”
In July 1967, Yigal Allon, a minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, put forth the closest thing to a “master” settlement plan in the early years of Israeli occupation. Allon proposed to divide the West Bank between Israel and Jordan: Israel would control most of the Jordan Valley (except for an enclave centering around the Palestinian town of Jericho) and the midsection of the West Bank neighboring Jerusalem; Jordan would control the rest of the West Bank, including the Arab-majority cities of Bethlehem, Hebron, Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, and Tulkarm. Officials of the ruling Labor Party endorsed Allon’s plan and several subsequent modifications of it, but the full cabinet never did.
The Allon plan influenced government policy for two decades, as successive governments adopted key elements, notably retaining control of the Jordan Valley and all of the area around Jerusalem. Allon’s idea of sharing parts of the West Bank, however, lost all validity after 1988, when Jordan’s King Hussein renounced his country’s claim to the West Bank. Even so, the essential idea of Allon’s plan—Israel keeping some of the West Bank and returning the rest to Arab control—has become the foundation of policy for some Israeli governments over the years and of many international plans for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
In 1973 Israel Galili, a minister without portfolio in the cabinet of Prime Minister Gold Meir, drafted another semiofficial document that promoted the establishment of settlements. Known as the Galili Document, this plan called for new settlements in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, but also promised government assistance for Palestinian refugees living in the occupied territories. Labor Party leaders also endorsed this document but never submitted it to the government for formal approval. Government officials, however, reportedly used the plan as the basis for approving at least some new settlements.
The religious nationalist movement emerged as a crucial force behind the expansion of the settlements. Its leaders argued fervently that God intended—indeed, had ordered—that Jews live in all of the lands between the Mediterranean Sea and the eastern bank of the Jordan River. An increasingly powerful voice for this argument arose in March 1974 with the creation of Gush Emunim (Block of the Faithful), a movement based on the “redemptionist” teachings of Rabbi Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who argued that Jews would be redeemed, as a nation, by fulfilling God’s command that they control all of Eretz Yisrael ha-Shlema (Greater Israel).
Gush Emunim devoted much of its early efforts to combating one of the implications of the unofficial Allon plan—that much of the central section of the West Bank remain free of Jewish settlements so that it could be returned to Jordan in an eventual peace settlement. For almost five years, the city of Nablus, north of Jerusalem, would be the focal point of a struggle between Gush Emunim and other settler groups and the government.
On July 25, 1974, a group of Gush Emunim adherents moved into the abandoned Sebastia train station near Nablus. The army, under orders from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, forced the settlers to leave. Rabin’s cabinet on July 26 issued a statement asserting that settlements only be established “solely in accordance with the government’s decisions. The government will prevent any attempt at settling without its approval and decision.” Explaining the government’s action in a speech to the Knesset, Rabin noted that the settlers had moved into Sebastia after being told not to and therefore had evaded the “rule of law.” Rabin did not argue, however, that Israelis should not live in the West Bank and the other occupied territories. “Our right to this land is indisputable,” he said.
Such government intervention did not deter Gush Emunim leaders, who argued that they were acting in accordance with God’s higher authority. The group made six more attempts to settle at Sebastia, and each time the army forced them out. In late 1975, however, Defense Minister Shimon Peres relented and agreed to allow the settlers to move temporarily into a nearby former army camp. This camp eventually became the Kedumim settlement, which today is home to some 3,000 settlers.
Gush Emunim was allied in its early years with the National Religious Party, one of Israel’s small political movements that exercised leverage when the mainstream parties needed its votes in the Knesset. Starting in 1977, Gush Emunim and similar groups found an even more powerful patron in the rightist Likud Party, which won elections that year, and its leader, Menachem Begin, who became prime minister. After Begin agreed in 1978 to return the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in exchange for peace, he apparently became even more determined to hang onto the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank by expanding the settlements there. A legal battle over the Elon Moreh settlement, near Nablus, coupled with pressure from Gush Emunim led Begin’s government in 1979 to decide to expand the scope of the settlements. A key element flowing from this decision was the creation of five large communities, known as settlement blocs, that have since grown to include the majority of Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The official policy of every U.S. administration since the early 1970s has been to oppose Israel’s establishment of settlements in the territories, referring to them as “obstacles” to peace. Every U.S. administration since that of Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s, also has called on Israel to “freeze” settlement construction, a request that Israeli governments have interpreted as applying to the construction of new settlements, not the expansion (or “thickening”) of existing ones. President George W. Bush substantially altered U.S. policy in April 2004, however, by asserting that Israel should be allowed to keep its major West Bank settlements as part of any eventual peace agreement with the Palestinians. Bush’s aides said his statement merely reflected reality, and they noted that Washington policymakers long had assumed that some settlements would be included in a final agreement. Palestinians were angered that the United States presumed to dictate the ultimate outcome of negotiations between themselves and the Israelis.
One of the most controversial aspects of Israeli settlement has been disputes over the ownership of land. Before the 1967 war, most of the land in the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank (including East Jerusalem) was owned by private individuals, some of them absentee Arab landlords who lived in neighboring countries or by Islamic charities known as waqfs. After 1967, the Israeli government took possession of much of the private and waqf lands in these areas through a variety of maneuvers. In some cases, the army seized land for “security” reasons, then turned it over to civilian Jewish settlers. The government also decreed that all landholdings in the territories had to be newly registered; many absentee Arab owners, including those who had fled during the war, were unable to register their lands, enabling the Israeli government to take possession of them. Over the years, the government and military also confiscated thousands of acres of Palestinian land for such public purposes as building access roads between settlements and erecting the separation barrier surrounding much of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Some Palestinians were compensated for their losses, but many were not.
In general, Israelis have moved to the settlements for one of two reasons. Members of Gush Emunim and similar groups established settlements in the West Bank and other territories primarily for religious reasons, to fulfill what they said was God’s command. Thousands of other Israelis, however, were attracted by more practical considerations: the housing, tax, and other subsidies provided by the government as inducements. Most of the settlements near Jerusalem were established as suburbs for people who work in the city and desire affordable housing nearby.
The eventual fate of the settlements will depend on the state of affairs if Israel and the Palestinians are able to negotiate a “final status” peace agreement. The Israel-Palestinian agreements of 1993-1995 committed Israel to handing over the administration of Gaza and parts of the West Bank to the newly established Palestinian Authority. All prime ministers since that time have, however, said that Israel would hold on to all of East Jerusalem and the surrounding neighborhoods that Israel has annexed, plus the West Bank settlement blocs. The Palestinians have insisted on their right to designate East Jerusalem as the capital of their state. They also have argued that some of the major Jewish settlements must be dismantled so the new Palestinian state can be a contiguous unit on the West Bank.
Following are the texts of two documents. The first is a communiqué issued by the Israeli cabinet on July 26, 1974, following the expulsion of Gush Emunim members from the abandoned railway station of Sebastia, near the city of Nablus in the West Bank. The second is a speech delivered on July 31, 1974, by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to the Knesset on the authorized establishment of settlements.
DOCUMENT: Cabinet Communiqué on Israeli Settlements
JULY 26, 1974
Settlements in the Administered territories are established solely in accordance with the government’s decisions. The government will prevent any attempt at settling without its approval and decision.
The Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence are authorized to implement this policy.
The proposals put forward by the Prime Minister were passed unanimously.
SOURCE: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1974-1977/17%20Cabinet%20communique%20on%20settlements%20in%20the%20West%20B
DOCUMENT: Statement by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Settlements
JULY 31, 1974
Mr. Speaker, Members of the Knesset,
On the Thursday of last week, when I learned the facts about the Sebastia incident, I had no doubt about the negative significance of the act. The Attorney-General was consulted and expressed the opinion that this was a breach of the law. I had no doubt that it was the duty of the government to expel the people who had occupied the location without its approval, as governments of Israel have done since the Six-Day War. I submitted the subject to the entire cabinet. The government of Israel thoroughly discussed the matter. At the end of the discussion, the government adopted the decision proposed by the Prime Minister:
Outposts and settlements in the administered areas are established solely according to the decisions of the government. The government will prevent any attempt to occupy a location or establish a settlement without its approval and decision. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence are authorized to implement this policy.
I see no need to describe the course of events. The government’s decision was carried out. The Israel Defence Forces acted according to orders. I cannot say that the people evacuated the place of their own free will, but their evacuation was carried out without it being necessary to adopt measures which we wished to avoid so long as it was possible to carry out the evacuation without resorting to them.
We acted irrespective of considerations of prestige, but consistently and according to plan. It was clear to the people in Sebastia that there would be no negotiations with them on settlement elsewhere before they evacuated Sebastia. In determining the timing of the operation, we took into account the observance of the Sabbath and the Ninth of Av fast. The timetable we adopted enabled the people to realize the strength of the government’s determination, to consider their actions, and to choose evacuation without a clash with the I.D.F. I regard this event as a test of the inner strength of Israeli society and not as a test of strength for the I.D.F. I am glad that we have saved ourselves pain and shame—and perhaps even more.
Members of the Knesset,
In the basic principles of the government’s policy, it is stated that we will work for the continuation of settlement in accordance with the decisions that the government of Israel will adopt. This undertaking is being carried out, in practice. The policy on this subject has been repeatedly clarified and the Knesset has also decided to hold a debate on the matter. I must therefore emphasize at the outset of my remarks that in this statement I shall not discuss plans and criteria, possibilities and limitations affecting our actions in the sphere of settlement.
Today, after the events of last week, the Knesset must first of all discuss the public and national significance of the incident in order to resolve once again that in the state of Israel the procedures of the rule of law shall be maintained and no one shall be permitted to violate them. This is vital for the democratic stability of Israeli society. It is vital for the continuation of responsible action in the sphere of settlement.
The Knesset cannot evade its duty to resolve once again that the law in Israel is binding on all citizens in various fields, including settlement in the administered areas. Our country protects the rights of the citizen and respects his liberty, but these precious principles cannot be preserved without meticulous compliance with the laws enacted to the Knesset.
The rules were violated in the Sebastia incident. Members of the group which concentrated in Sebastia met me and a few of my ministerial colleagues before they decided on this inadmissible act. We explained to them the policy of the government, which engages in rural and urban settlement in keeping with an order of priorities, security, political and settlement considerations, possibilities and limitations. During the meetings, principal proposals were made to them and other locations designated where the population is sparse and its reinforcement vital. They were promised consideration of specific proposals. They were not convinced. From the course of the meetings it was clear that according to their concepts they were entitled to decide where and when settlement should take place. That they believed that their will would prevail and that ultimately they would impose their decision and their plan on the government. It was in this conviction that the Sebastia operation was born. The people knew that the government would use its authority, and nevertheless they believed that they would create an accomplished fact and the government of Israel would say amen.
Thus, the argument today is not over settlement, but over the maintenance of state responsibility and authority, over the foundations of the democratic system, over the authority of the government, which is subject to the Knesset. The Knesset must reject acts whose aim is to undermine the foundations of the democratic system and governmental authority in Israel. This is vital not only as a judgement on the past, but also to secure the future. The Knesset’s ruling will be of the utmost educational and political importance. Aspirations in the sphere of settlement must not serve as justification for actions against the authority of the state.
Israel is a free society which respects various views and differences of opinion. Differences of opinion exist, inter alia, regarding various aspects of the settlement issue. Every person and group holds its opinion dear, and many of us are zealous in their views. It is intolerable, however, that any group of people in Israel—whatever its motives—should take the law into its own hands in spheres which are not the private domain of the individual but are subject to the decision of the community. The people of Israel do not adopt their decisions by arbitrary will, but according to democratic rules and processes, and by the will of the majority. These rules must also apply to settlement in the administered areas, which have not been annexed to Israel, and in every act of settlement in the areas’ security and political considerations must be taken into account. Every act of settlement in the areas imposes obligations on Israel’s defence forces and involves national responsibility.
Only the government of Israel is authorized to decide where and when to settle, whether at one time or another, and no government can tolerate the violation of this authority.
The government’s decisions can be influenced by means of the ballot box. By the Knesset’s decisions, by public opinion, but not by deeds which undermine the foundations of our regime. This consciousness is binding on all sections of the community, and first and foremost on the people’s representatives and emissaries.
In conclusion, under the circumstances in which Israel is placed, every new settlement requires the prior approval of the government of Israel, which is subject to the authority of the Knesset. Provocative and unauthorized initiatives in the administered areas cannot be tolerated. Settlement is not a demonstration, nor is it compatible with violation of the law. The IDF should not have security obligations stemming from irresponsible acts imposed on it. The IDF should not be burdened with tasks that disrupt its preparations and plans, and it should not be confronted with a situation wherein it is obliged to use force to prevent occupation of a location without prior and authorized sanction.
The government will, in the future as in the past, scrupulously maintain the customary procedures in the sphere of settlement. It will work for the continuation of settlement in line with its authoritative decisions. It will do whatever has to be done to prevent any attempt to exploit the ideal of settlement for an anti-democratic purpose.
Members of the Knesset,
Our right to this land is indisputable. That is not what the argument is about. The Knesset is asked today not to divert its mind from its duty.
The government calls upon the house to give its full support to this policy, which provides a guarantee for the maintenance of the rule of law and the authority of the administration and the Knesset.
SOURCE: Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Foreign%20Relations/Israels%20Foreign%20Relations%20since%201947/1974-1977/17%20Cabinet%20communique%20on%20settlements%20in%20the%20West%20B