52 pages • 1 hour read
My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel
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Chapters 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Settlement, 1975”
In 1967 Egypt’s army threatened Israel, and the international community did not respond. Israel panicked, fearing that without international support a Pan-Arab invasion would destroy the young state, so Israel launched a preemptive strike. Israel’s strike was so successful that it won the war within six days and conquered the Sinai desert, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, tripling its size and becoming a respected military superpower. In 1973 during Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday, the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal and launched a surprise attack against Israel. Israel defeated Egypt, but not before losing ground and lives in costly battles. This near defeat shook Israel’s self-confidence and reduced the nation’s perceived status as a military superpower among its neighbors in the Middle East. These two events—the resounding victory in 1967 and the near defeat in 1973—provide context to help understand Israel’s occupying settlements in Palestine.
Ofra was the first settlement of the Israeli Gush Emunim settlers’ movement. The movement was not sanctioned by the Israeli government. Its members were determined to settle Judea and Samaria for “Greater Israel.” Before the Yom Kippur War in 1973, less than 3,000 settlers lived in the West Bank. The Yom Kippur War incited a mass movement that pressured the government to sanction settlements north of Jerusalem. Charismatic and dynamic leaders of the movement convinced many religious young Israelis to join, then nonreligious as well. Shavit explains of the first settlement:
Ofra is no Ein Harod. It did not issue from a desperate Diaspora but from a sovereign state. It did not intend to give the Jews shelter but to build the Jews a kingdom. It did not stand up to a foreign power but against the Jewish democratic state (206).
The movement’s enigmatic leaders started small, with one settlement, and built from there, lulling the government into accepting the settlements as they expanded.
Shavit sets the next section in 1975. The strategic purpose of the settlements is to expand Israel’s permanent border to contain Samaria, the most significant city in the area, provide increased protection from Israel’s regional enemies, and bring spiritual depth to Israel. In 1975, the movement’s leaders occupy the abandoned Jordanian military base of Ein Yabrud. The base is not private property and contains usable buildings. The Israeli government instructs military personnel at the abandoned base not to assist the settlers, but also not to hinder them. This vague instruction grants the settlers permission to begin their movement. Within two years, Ofra is a thriving community.
Shavit describes this first settlement as the foundation of Israel’s colonial project. In interviews with Shavit, Gush Etzion and Pinchas Wallerstein, two founders of the movement, admit they knew Arabs lived in area villages. Wallerstein contends the Arabs of 1975 showed no signs of Palestinian nationalism or a rejection of the settlements. Etzion realized that if Ofra survived, the Palestinian villages would not, but he didn’t care. Shavit’s conclusion from his interviews is that the men are ignorant rather than evil. They did not wish to conquer the Arabs; they simply didn’t think about the repercussions of their actions.
The settler movement grows in response to Israel ceding the Sinai desert to Egypt in a peace agreement. The movement now seeks to prevent Israeli-Palestinian peace by constructing dozens of settlements. In doing so, it redefines Israel and alters the public image of Zionism. Etzion is soon convinced that settlements alone will not accomplish their goals. He believes Israel must replaces its secularism with a Torah-governed kingdom and that Israel must take the Temple Mount by force.
In 1984 Etzion is arrested by Israel’s Secret Service. He has explosives, a network of militiamen, and a detailed plan to violently conquer the Temple Mount. Shavit explains:
Only five years after Ofra settled among the Palestinians, it became a terrorist hotbed that bred ideological Jewish murderers. Ofra was home to militant messianic ideas and to a radical school of thought that believed in transforming the land by using unrestrained force (219).
The settlers enlarge and strengthen Ofra and survive two intifadas. Ofra now has over 3,500 residents. The international community does not recognize the settlers’ legitimacy, nor do many Israelis. Shavit argues the settlements are a dead end that has placed Israel in a noose and tainted the legitimacy of the entire state. Because of the settlements, the international community views Israel as a colonialist entity, and colonialist entities are not accepted in the 21st century. Settlers believe an event will occur that will justify their actions, redeem their struggle, and convince all Israelis to accept the settlements.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Gaza Beach, 1991”
The first intifada was in December of 1987. Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip protested and revolted against Israel’s military rule. Israel quashed the unarmed rebellion with its army and Shin Bet secret service, then constructed detention camps to imprison thousands of Palestinian protesters. In 1991 Shavit was assigned to serve as a jailer in a Gaza detention camp as part of his compulsory military service, which is demanded of all Israelis. Shavit was opposed to occupation and the detention camps, and he debated refusing the position but decided instead to serve the post and write about his experience for Haaretz.
Shavit sets the next section in the Gaza Beach detention camp where he was stationed. The camp is one of several, each housing over 1,000 Palestinians. Most are not dangerous. They are protesters, not terrorists. Most are teenage boys, some small. The compound has two layers of fencing, topped with barbed wire. Shavit feels imprisoned in the camp along with the Palestinians. Israeli guards complain that the facility resembles a concentration camp. Shavit abhors analogies to concentration camps, but even he agrees, stating:
[…] the problem is not in the similarity—no one can seriously think there is any real similarity. The problem is that there isn’t enough lack of similarity. The lack of similarity is not strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes (231).
The facility does not detain dangerous terrorists or enemies of the state. Its purpose is to quash a popular uprising against Israel’s occupation of a sovereign state. Shavit understands how Nazi soldiers with no personal animus towards Europe’s Jews committed the atrocities of the Holocaust. He laments, “in most cases, the evil do not know they are evil” (233). The camp’s division of labor permits evil to occur in the absence of evil people. Israel’s entire society is divided in such a way that permits atrocities to occur without individual actors in the chain of events intending to commit them. Fragmented groups of nonevil people produce evil outcomes. Shavit contends that the moral vacuum in the Gaza Beach detention facility is clear-cut. It is an evil place with no mitigating circumstances.
The Gaza detention facilities were closed after the signing of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and Palestine. Palestine’s own security forces now occupy the facility.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Peace, 1993”
Zionism’s desire for peace has historically clashed with its desire to increase its power and add more sovereign land to the state of Israel. For decades Israel spoke of peace but worked instead to promote immigration, settlement, and nation building. A real mainstream Zionist peace movement formed only after the wars of 1967 and 1973. Israeli peace activists were against settlements, the Palestinian occupation, and Israeli control of Palestinian land. They argued that perpetual conflict was not normal, and that Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolution was different than how other nations solve their problems. The Israeli peace movement was toothless and largely ineffectual—unable to deter Israel’s government from endorsing more settlements and increasing its control of Palestinian territories. Shavit says to Yossi Sarid, a leading peace activist, “It was on your watch […] that Israel became a rudderless nation, lost at sea with no captain and no compass and no sense of direction” (244).
The peace movement’s finest moment was in 1993, when deputy foreign minister Yossi Beilin clandestinely worked to negotiate a peace agreement with Palestinian representatives. Beilin’s negotiations were unknown even to Israel’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. Beilin negotiated an agreement for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and consent to an autonomous Palestine in the West Bank, while opening negotiations on a final status accord. Beilin eventually took his agreement to the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and obtained approval for further negotiations. On September 13, 1993 Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat agreed to the accord in a public ceremony on the White House lawn.
Shavit celebrates the agreement but argues it should have included Palestinian recognition of the Jewish people and Israel’s national rights and relinquished Palestinians’ right of return. Shavit argues that the agreement represents the appearance of peace rather than what it should have been: the beginning of a process that would eventually lead to real, lasting peace.
Shavit himself used to be a peacenik but has since determined Israeli-Palestinian peace impossible. He claims the fight for peace plays a vital role in Israeli life but that it is a simplistic narrative with no empirical basis given the realities if Israeli-Palestinian life. The left fails to distinguish between the issue of occupation and the issue of peace. Occupation can and should end, but peace cannot be achieved. Shavit explains the strategic flaw of the left: “Instead of sticking to the sound, rational position of ending occupation simply because it is immoral and destructive, the Left endorsed the unsound and irrational belief that ending occupation would bring peace” (254). Israel forcibly removed people from their homeland, turned respected people into beggars and refugees, and continues to oppress people and exercise military control over sovereign lands beyond its borders. For its part, Israel exists in constant apprehension—fear of attack or destruction. Israel can’t let in Palestinians because it fears what they will do when they arrive; Palestinians can’t forget Israel violently removing them from their homeland and taking everything from them. Peace cannot be achieved under such circumstances between two such peoples.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Israeli history from the 1970s to the present is full of violent Israeli-Palestinian clashes and misdeeds. Israeli-Palestinian conflict was inevitable: Zionists migrated to Palestine, improved the land, removed Arab Palestinians, and formed a sovereign state in what was for centuries Arab Palestinians’ home. After the initial Zionist migration to Palestine, some factors were inevitable, and some were avoidable. It is understandable that eternally persecuted Zionist Jews would believe they could not secure their future safety in a political system shared with Arab Palestinians, especially after the periods of violence in the 1920s and 1930s, but their fear does not justify their actions towards Palestinians. European, African, and Middle Eastern Jews sought a secure, sovereign state for survival, but in violently wresting an occupied state, they relinquished moral superiority.
Israelis exacerbated the Palestinian conflict by constructing occupying settlements in the sovereign state of Palestine. The partition and subsequent war created two sovereign states: one for Israeli Jews and one for Arab Palestinians. After the partition, in contravention to international law, Israelis attempted to claim land granted to Arab Palestinians in the partition. People who already had half their land taken from them by decision of a foreign power whose authority they did not recognize now faced encroachment on the half they were permitted to retain. Of course, they fought back. When the process began in the 1990s, it was too late. Generations of Palestinians have festered in anger and wallowed in the sorrow of their loss; generations of Israelis have become accustomed to what they have and are unwilling to relinquish it. Peace now seems impossible. Israel has the land; Palestine wants the land. There is no middle ground. Withdrawing from the settlements will not satiate Palestinian anger. It is too late, and the wounds are too deep. This conflict will inevitably climax; the question is when.
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