A Bitter Prize

After the war, the Israeli cabinet split over how to proceed. On one side stood the doves, led by Finance Minister Pinhas Sapir, who favored returning most of the captured land for peace; on the other were the hawks, including Begin, Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon, and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who wanted to keep most of the land. Eshkol himself was indecisive and hesitant. And Israel's citizens were divided over what to do. The majority agreed, however, that East Jerusalem and Gaza should be permanently incorporated into Israel, and most also favored keeping at least a section of the West Bank.

The idea of settling these lands came from deep within Zionism. The notion of shiva (return) is firmly rooted in Jewish and Zionist tradition. According to the Zionist vision, the state of Israel was born when the Jews returned from exile to the land of their biblical forebears, and many Israelis felt they had an unchallengeable right to the land -- all of it. The settlement ethos had been the cornerstone of Zionism ever since the first pioneers came to live in the area.

Gorenberg points to another, novel source for the zeal that drove Israel's new settlers after 1967. Writing with neither contempt nor approval, he draws on in-depth conversations he had with many of these settlers, whose experiences he places in the context of the unrest that marked the late 1960s in Europe and the United States. The young people around the world who went on to found the New Left suffered from an "illegitimacy complex," Gorenberg writes: raised in comfortable surroundings on stories of their parents' Old Left heroism, the generation of 1968 (or, in Israel's case, 1967) must have felt like failures. Israeli schoolchildren had been weaned on stories of prestate pioneers braving Arab and British antagonism; their own lives seemed soft in comparison. By the 1960s, when these people were coming of age, Israel's early challenges seemed to be fading, and the Zionist drama was being replaced by Israeli routine. Many young Israelis felt that their country had stopped offering them mythological adventures; not only did immigration to Israel virtually cease during this time, but thousands of young Israelis began leaving the country for good, most settling in the United States.

According to Gorenberg, the victory of 1967 changed all that. Many young Israelis suddenly discovered a "New Zionism," just as young people elsewhere were discovering a New Left. Radicals but not revolutionaries, these new settlers regarded themselves as disciples of the early Zionist pioneers. And like their role models, many of them chose to farm the new land: agriculture was seen not merely as a way of life, but as a moral and patriotic calling.

Although Gorenberg's parallel between the New Left and the New Zionism is interesting and original, it explains little in the larger context of Israeli history. To be sure, Israel did experience its own generational crisis in the 1960s. But the struggle there never became part of the apocalyptic upheaval that shook the industrialized West. Moreover, Israelis continued to settle the West Bank long after the fervor of the 1960s had faded; indeed, they continue to do so today.

Understanding the settlers, in fact, does not require a generational thesis. Many of them were religious and were driven by messianic nationalism. Indeed, as Gorenberg explains, the triumph of 1967 had the effect of turning messianism into a mainstream belief among some religious Israelis, particularly young ones. Like their more secular kibbutznik colleagues, the New Zionists believed that Jews must shed their supposed weakness, return to the land, and embrace physical labor and military strength. But after 1967, these New Zionists refused to relinquish traditional Judaism in the process (as the kibbutzniks had). The events of 1967, in other words, created a new fusion of Israeli patriotism and religious faith, producing a particularly fanatical brand of settlers in the process.

A POISON PILL

Regrettably, by limiting himself to the first decade after the war, Gorenberg largely misses the story of the nonideological settlers who came later. The religious die-hards were not the only ones to relocate to the territories after 1967. Many Israelis moved into new housing projects in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza simply because homes were cheaper there and the settlements offered a higher quality of life than they could afford elsewhere. A large portion of these settlers were new immigrants to Israel, especially from the Soviet bloc, who saw little difference between Israel proper and the occupied territories.

Gorenberg's limited focus also restricts his attention to the Labor governments of Eshkol, Golda Meir, and Yitzhak Rabin. Gorenberg seems to accept the conventional view that these prime ministers permitted the settlements not out of any innate enthusiasm for the project, but as a way to keep themselves in power. In Israeli memory, Gorenberg writes, Begin's rise to the prime ministership in 1977 is often seen as the moment when settlement building began in earnest. But "a more accurate description" of Begin's policy, Gorenberg argues, "would be an escalation of existing trends."

This claim is not quite right. Although by 1977 settlers had already started moving into the territories, at that point they numbered less than 60,000, and about 40,000 of them lived in East Jerusalem. These numbers increased dramatically under Begin, creating a new strategic reality. By ignoring this period, Gorenberg provides only the first half of the settlement story. The second half has been much more disastrous.