In the thirty-six years that have passed since the Six Day War (June 1967), some 260,000 Israelis have settled in the territories that Israel captured during that war. Approximately 230,000 settled in the territories of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, and nearly 20,000 settled in the Golan Heights. Another 6,000 people, who settled in the Sinai area, were evacuated from their homes in 1982, in the wake of the peace agreement that was signed with Egypt. In addition, another 180,000 Israelis moved to the neighborhoods built by Israel in the parts of Jerusalem that had been under Jordanian control before the war.
Ostensibly, all these Israeli settlers took the not inconsequential risk of being evacuated in the future, for two reasons. First, the international community never accorded recognition to Israeli control over these areas, let alone to the establishment of settlements there. Even the United States, Israel’s greatest ally in the international arena, declined to recognize the neighborhoods that Israel annexed in Jerusalem. Second, Israel itself has refrained from officially annexing most of these territories because of the anticipated reaction of the international community and because of misgivings about the annexation of territories with large Arab populations (mainly in Yesha). In addition, Israel wanted these territories to remain a “bargaining chip” for any future negotiations towards a peace settlement. In effect, the only territories that Israel annexed right after the conclusion of the war were the areas in previously Jordanian Jerusalem. This annexation stemmed from the deep Jewish significance of Jerusalem, and especially its “holy belt” – the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives and the slope of the Gihon adjacent to the City of David, which were under Jordanian control before the war. Even the annexation in Jerusalem was carried out meticulously and along a meandering line so as to include as little of the Palestinian population as possible.
Later on, in 1981, Israel also annexed the Golan Heights in an accelerated process that was meant to prove that although the then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin had relinquished half of the Sinai Peninsula two years previously in a peace treaty with Egypt, his willingness to surrender territories did not extend to the Golan Heights. We learn from this that the annexation of the Heights was meant to counterbalance Israel’s much greater surrender of territory in Sinai. And in fact, Israel refrained from annexing not only the Sinai Peninsula but also the territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, despite their great significance (especially of Judea and Samaria) in Jewish history. Moreover, even the annexation of the Golan Heights did not prevent several subsequent prime ministers (Rabin, Netanyahu and Barak) from conducting negotiations (some publicly, some secretly) with Syria. These negotiations meant only one thing: relinquishing the Golan within the framework of a peace treaty.
In light of these developments, which would leave the status of Yesha and the Golan open to negotiation, the settlers took steps meant to generate an antithetical dynamic. They encouraged Jewish settlement in Yesha in the hope of creating a critical mass of inhabitants that would hamstring future governments if they attempted to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Israelis. The settlers felt that this would prevent the signing of a peace agreement or at least prevent the granting of far-reaching concessions as a prerequisite for such an agreement. In addition, the settlers and the organizations that supported them hoped that time was on their side. They hoped that the creation of a critical mass aggregated during years of settlement would cause Israeli society to develop a natural, deep and basic affinity for these territories so that it would become unthinkable to give them up. In other words: the combination of two variables – settlers and time – was supposed to prevent leaving these territories open for negotiation and counterbalance the view of the international community, which viewed Israeli control of these areas as only temporary.
In the twenty years between 1967 and 1987, the historical dynamic moved in only one direction: towards annexation and intensification of the Israeli claim to the territories. No Arab nation joined Egypt in signing a peace treaty with Israel, thus the field was left open for action on the part of those advocating annexation. Until the Yom Kippur War, settlement activity was pretty much consensual and it enjoyed widespread support even by many segments of the ruling the Labor Party, which advocated settlements according to the Alon Plan: annexation of the Golan Heights, the Jordan Valley and Gush Etzion. In those years, the kibbutz and moshav movements, affiliated with the Labor Party, established settlements in the Golan and the Jordan Valley, while the religious kibbutz movement renewed settlement in Gush Etzion, which had been lost in the War of Independence in 1948. There was one significant deviation from the Alon Plan: the settlement of some religious youngsters in Kiryat Arba near Hebron. Even this anomaly received the blessing of Yigal Alon himself, the crafter of the Alon Plan.
In contrast, after the Yom Kippur War, restraints on settlement were breached, and in the post-war atmosphere of a general lack of trust in the Establishment and the government, a group called Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful) also burst onto the public scene. They claimed that their dissent was constructive: they did not protest in order to bring down the government but to “raise the spirits of the nation” through a return to classical Zionist values and especially that of settlement, but this time in Judea and Samaria. For three years they struggled against the government and succeeded in establishing a few settlements. In 1977, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War crisis, there was a political revolution in Israel and for the first time since the establishment of the state, the Right assumed the reins of power. The new prime minister, Menachem Begin, promised upon his election “many settlements like Elon Moreh” and his agriculture minister, Ariel Sharon, made this a reality. Under Sharon’s leadership, a fruitful cooperation was devised with the “mitnachlim,” the term coined for the settlers in controversial territories. Widespread government support was extended both to the settlers themselves and to enterprises that would provide employment for the settlers, in order to attract people willing to move to Yesha for pragmatic and not ideological reasons. Eventually, by June of 2003, the Jewish population in Yesha numbered approximately 231,000 Israelis.[1]
The change began in 1987. On 9 December of that year the first intifada broke out – the first general uprising of the Arabs in the territories against Israeli rule (this is distinguished from the local riots that occasionally erupted even before this). Different theories attempt to explain the reasons why the intifada started at this time, but they are not relevant to our issue. What is important is that a new Arab generation had grown up in the territories that was no longer willing to agree with the submissive stance of their parents to post-Six Day War Israeli rule. The beginning of the intifada took the form of a popular uprising with mass demonstrations that saw the hurling of rocks and Molotov cocktails. Later on, however, this was supplanted by more sophisticated terrorist acts. More and more Israelis who had previously not been partner to the ideology of the Left began to feel, for the first time, that the price of rule in the territories might be too high and that perhaps there was no choice but to relinquish all or most of the region. Also, as a result of the intifada, King Hussein of Jordan announced that he was abdicating all responsibility for the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Thus, no choice remained for Israel but to carry on a dialogue with an independent Palestinian leadership.
The Madrid Conference was convened in 1991, about four years after the outbreak of the intifada. This was the first attempt of its kind to convene an international conference with the avowed purpose of solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The conference was the result of two factors: the intifada on one hand, and the American war in Iraq in January 1991 on the other. (Most of the Arab Muslim world had joined the coalition that supported the attack on a sister nation, and they viewed the Madrid Conference as a sort of counterbalance to this coalition.) At the Madrid Conference, Israel tried to safeguard at least a semblance of two of its prohibitions: no dialogue with a separate Palestinian delegation (hence the insistence that the Palestinian delegation appear together with the Jordanians, as if the Jordanians were still responsible for the territories) and no dialogue with the PLO. The Palestinians saw the PLO as their official representative, but Israel saw it as a terrorist organization. All too soon it became clear that the talks about the future of the territories were carried out by Palestinian representatives who received their instructions directly from the PLO. The representatives made sure to flaunt this by flying back and forth from Madrid to Tunis, which was then the base of the PLO leadership.