Free The Unmaking of Israel by Gershom Gorenberg Page B

boundaries—“will not be printed.”
    Note this well: the mandatory border and the Green Line were the closest thing Israel had to an internationally recognized border. Except in annexed East Jerusalem, they still delineated the territory in which Israel itself said that its laws and sovereignty applied. Yet Allon’s memo removed from the map one of the defining characteristics of a modern state and especially of a democracy—its borders. In official Hebrew, meanwhile, places got new names. The West Bank was known henceforth by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, Judea being the southern half, Samaria the northern half.
    The future of the occupied territories was already the single most important political issue in Israel, but maps no longer showed where occupied territory began. Bored schoolchildren staring at the map on the classroom wall would not learn the shape of their own country. Tel Aviv and Hebron would appear to be part of the same entity. Nearly forty years later, a study conducted among students at Hebrew University, Israel’s top academic institution, found that only 37 percent could draw the approximate line between Israel and the West Bank. They had grown up in a country that treated its border the way Victorians treated sex. The border shaped society, but portraying it was simply not done.
    While the change in maps was symbolic, settlements would physically blur the country’s border. Before describing how that happened, I should dispose of several myths. The standard Israeli telling is that settlement in the occupied territories began with religious extremists imposing their will on pragmatic Labor leaders. That story is mistaken. Nor did the secular right, led by Menachem Begin, play any measurable role in starting the settlement process—though Begin escalated it once he took power in 1977.
    Abroad, defenders of Israeli policy sometimes describe settlements as mere bargaining chips, intended to last only till Arabs agreed to make peace. This is pure fiction. On the other hand, Israel’s critics cite settlement as proof of a deliberate Israeli policy of conquest and colonization. As we’ve seen, though, the conquest was unplanned, and the government could not articulate a clear policy in its wake.
    What actually happened is this: the policy vacuum allowed a cultural disposition to take control. Settlement was a Zionist value, especially a Labor Zionist value. Now there was new land to settle. Time had rolled backward; partition had never happened. Pioneers could again set borders for the Jewish state before negotiations began. They would act like members of a movement again—but a movement with the power of a state behind it.
    The initiative to start settling came mainly from Labor politicians, officials, and activists. At first, religious Zionists were junior partners. Labor governments approved new settlements on a piecemeal basis. The map of what they expected Israel to keep was drawn one fact at a time. The spread of settlements roughly fit the Allon Plan. Cabinet ministers who wanted Israel to keep a maximum amount of territory were satisfied to see new settlements; those opposed to permanent rule over the Palestinians could live with settlements in lightly populated areas. Labor governments never formally approved the Allon Plan or any other coherent strategy. But indecision allowed pro-settlement ministers—led by Allon, Galili, Dayan, and Dayan’s successor as defense minister, Shimon Peres—to pursue creeping expansion. Tension between Labor and Orthodox activists began in earnest only after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the religious settlers feared that the government might return a piece of the West Bank to Jordan.
    By the time Begin came to power as head of the Likud, an alliance of the right, the internal Israeli argument was over where to settle, not whether to. Labor had provided legitimacy for settlement and a solid start. Begin, however, did not share Labor’s hesitations