A Bitter Prize

On June 13, 1967, a small group of Israelis traveled to an area south of Jerusalem. The land, on the west bank of the Jordan River, had just been conquered by the Israeli army in the Six-Day War, as had East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.

The visitors were looking for the remains of a group of Jewish villages known as Gush Etzion, which the Arabs had occupied and destroyed during Israel's War of Independence, in 1948. For the intervening 19 years, the West Bank had been under Jordanian control. But the survivors of Gush Etzion had never given up hope of returning, and now they planned to stay. So did the Israelis who, around the same time, moved into the newly occupied Golan Heights and Jerusalem's Old City -- forcing out hundreds of Arab families.

Today, nearly 40 years later, about 250,000 Israelis live in some 125 officially recognized West Bank settlements. Another 180,000 live in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem, and about 16,000 live in the Golan.

The most comprehensive book on these settlers is Lords of the Land, by the journalist Akiva Eldar and the historian Idith Zertal, which was published in Hebrew in 2005. Lords of the Land describes Israel's settlement of the occupied territories as the result of political and emotional pressure that the settlers skillfully applied to a largely unenthusiastic but weak Israeli government. Now, Gershom Gorenberg, in a careful and fluently written book, has produced a much more sophisticated analysis. In The Accidental Empire, Gorenberg depicts the settlements as the product not just of political maneuvering, but also of the Israeli identity itself. Settling the land had always been at the core of the Zionist experience, but by 1967, when the Six-Day War began, many Israelis had lost their confidence in the old Zionist dream. Israel's smashing battlefield success in the war reversed this trend, galvanizing many Israelis into taking up the Zionist mantle once again and making a fresh beginning in the newly captured land.

Gorenberg, a U.S.-born Israeli and a columnist and editor for the English-language Jerusalem Report, presents this drama with impressive skill. He fails, however, to accompany it with a clear analysis of how and why these settlements went from being an expression of Zionist enthusiasm to an existential hazard and a moral burden for the country.

THE UNNECESSARY OCCUPATION

Although the Six-Day War resulted in the occupation of Gaza, the Golan, and the West Bank, grabbing the West Bank was hardly Israel's priority when the fighting began; at the time, most Israelis probably would have settled for peace on the basis of the 1949 armistice lines.

Many Israelis, however, had never stopped dreaming of a Greater Israel. Some justified their desire for more territory on strategic grounds; others were motivated more by national and religious sentiments. Although they remained outside the mainstream, both camps exerted considerable moral and political influence during Israel's first 20 years.

Gorenberg writes with great insight about such forces, including radicals within the ruling Labor movement who had opposed the idea of partition since the 1920s and continued to do so after Israel's independence. He quotes leading rabbis who prayed that the Jews would recapture the Western Wall and other holy sites that had fallen under Jordanian control in 1949. He gives scant attention, however, to another important force: Menachem Begin's right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party, which, after 1948, did more than any other group to keep the hope for a Greater Israel on the political agenda. As a member of the war cabinet, which was hastily formed in June 1967, Begin played a major part in the fateful decision to occupy East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza.

This decision was by no means a natural or necessary consequence of the war. In 1967, the primary military threat to Israel came from Egypt. This threat, however, was effectively eliminated during the first hour of the war, when the Israeli Air Force wiped out almost all of Egypt's warplanes before they even took off. From that point on, Israel no longer had reason to fear for its existence. Why, then, did it nevertheless proceed to occupy the West Bank? Only six months before the war, Israeli intelligence experts had warned the government against seizing the area, since doing so would require Israel to control a large, hostile Palestinian population. Yet the government ignored this advice. True, the Jordanian army provoked Israel by disregarding warnings not to shell the Israeli sections of Jerusalem. But fending off Jordan's attack did not require occupying the West Bank. Taking that land was an irrational act contrary to Israel's national interest.

The explanation for this folly seems to lie in the euphoria that seized Israel's war cabinet following the quick military conquest on the Egyptian front. Reason and strategy were forgotten. None of Israel's government ministers even asked whether it was really in the nation's interest to seize the West Bank and Jerusalem's Old City; the value of such land was treated as self-evident.

Victory, in fact, seems to have driven the entire country into a frenzy. Many Israelis acted as though they had been miraculously rescued from annihilation and had reached the age of redemption; they interpreted winning as a sign from God. The army's own chief rabbi, Shlomo Goren, demanded that the mosques on the Temple Mount be blown up; David Ben-Gurion (Israel's first prime minister) wanted the Old City's walls destroyed; and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol seriously considered transferring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of the territories and to Iraq.

SHOCK AND AWE