When Benjamin Netanyahu speaks about “economic peace,” his new, brilliant diplomatic platform, which will postpone any diplomatic moves far into the unforeseeable future, I see his face shrink, his chin sharpen, a patch cover his eye. Moshe Dayan is speaking, just as he spoke in a cabinet meeting 40 years ago, in early December 1968.

The Eshkol government met then to discuss Dayan’s proposal for a policy on the occupied territories. Dayan’s plan had three pillars: large-scale settlement on the West Bank mountain ridge, permanent Israeli rule of the territories without Israeli citizenship for the Arab residents, and economic integration of the territories with Israel. Arabs would work in Israel, Hebron would get its electricity from the Israeli grid, and Israel would raise the standard of living of the residents of the territories. As a result, Dayan argued, they would become dependent on Israel, maybe even grateful to it.

The official cabinet minutes are still classified, but a partial record from a reliable source exists. Dayan’s words reveal his worldview with shocking clarity. “We want to keep this population calm. Let them work, let them study,” he said – and then added that when he visited the one-time German colony of Togo in Africa, “I was impressed by the memories they still have of German rule before World War I. [The Germans] left orchards and culture.”

Read the rest in Hebrew or English at Ha’aretz, and feel free to come back to SoJo to comment.

Col. Binyamin Gibli took his secrets with him to the next world when he died this week – unless, as historian Tom Segev forlornly hopes, the old spookmaster left instructions to publish the ghost-written manuscript of his autobiograhy, and it explains what really happened in the Dirty Business of the 1950s. The hope is forlorn because it presumes that we would have reason to trust Gibli’s version.

Gibli was the head of Military Intelligence back in 1954, when MI recruited a handful of Egyptian Jews to bomb American and British cultural centers and other places frequented by foreigners in Egypt. (Yes, you read that correctly.) The idea was that the attacks would look like Egyptian fury against the West, and would derail any improvement in relations between Western governments and Cairo. But the spy ring was caught. One member was tortured to death, another committed suicide, two were executed, others served long prison terms.

Though the military censor in Israel hushed up discussion of the Dirty Business for years, the affair shook the Israeli political and military establishment repeatedly. Gibli said that Defense Minister Pinchas Lavon had approved the operation. Lavon said he hadn’t. He wanted to dismiss Gibli and the young director-general of the ministry, a certain Shimon Peres. (Why is it, I keep wondering, that every time I pull books off the shelf to look up a Machiavellian intrigue from Israel’s past, I find Shimon’s name?) Prime Minister Sharett supported the army against Lavon, who quit.

Six years later, citing new evidence, Lavon demanded his exoneration. The evidence included possible perjury and obstruction of justice by Gibli. Lavon launched a battle that tore apart the ruling Mapai party and eventually ended Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s career. Part of what undid Ben-Gurion was defending Peres and Moshe Dayan, who’d been military chief of staff at the time of the Dirty Business.

All right, both the politics and the spookery are so tangled that only old Mapai hacks with deep gravelly voices and deeper grudges can explain the business, and they never do so coherently. Let’s get back to Gibli. A few years before the Dirty Business, during the War of Independence, he was a judge in the kangaroo court that executed a certain Meir Tobianski, who’d purportedly spied for the enemy. Tobianski was later exonerated, which I suppose was a comfort to those who knew him, even if it didn’t help Tobianski much. Segev writes of Gibli:

He belonged to a generation of officers who came of age in the time of fighting for the state’s establishment, and thereafter when they were called upon to obey the rule of law, viewed it as an unnecessary encumbrance… Gibli was never punished for his role in [the Tobianski] affair: He was allowed to continue serving in the army, and doubtless learned thereby that the law is something that restricts other people.

In other words, if Gibli had been cashiered in ’48, he wouldn’t have been head of MI in ’54. The failure to make it clear to officers that they were bound by the law would deeply damage the state’s internal and foreign relations.

Segev is right about this. Gibli isn’t the strongest example. That dishonor surely belongs to Ariel Sharon (more on him here, and see my book, The Accidental Empire, on Sharon’s role in expelling thousands of Beduin from their homes in 1972).

The problem is that the attitude didn’t change when the generation of fighters who came of age before independence took off their uniforms. As evidence, I note just one affair, out of several that has been in the news this week: The Supreme Court intervened in the case of Lt. Col. Omri Burberg, who held a bound Palestinian while a soldier shot and wounded him with a rubber-coated bullet during demonstrations in the West Bank village of Na’alin. As Ha’aretz reports:

Burberg and the soldier, L., were charged with conduct unbecoming, and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi transferred Burberg to the armored corps training grounds at Tze’elim…

In response to the petition [by human-rights groups], Justice Ayala Procaccia issued a show-cause order giving the military advocate general, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendelblit, three weeks to submit a detailed justification of his decision not to press more serious charges. She also issued an interim injunction delaying proceedings against the defendants until the court makes a final ruling…

[The petition] expressed outrage over statements made by [Chief of Staff Gabi] Ashkenazi regarding the likelihood that the officer would eventually resume the post from which he had been removed as a result of the incident.

Ashkenazi apparently feels that he can’t let a minor atrocity cost him a good officer. Besides the obvious disrespect for law and ethics that he is broadcasting, Ashkenazi is also wrong on practical grounds. A commander who sees no limits on his behavior is a ticking bomb. At an even higher rank, his ability to make disastrous decisions will be greater. Gibli is gone, but the business of cleaning up remains.

My friend John showed up in South Jerusalem. Long ago and far away, John and I slouched in the back of high school classes together in Los Angeles, mumbling snidely about what was being left out of American history (women, blacks, slaughter of Indians, lynch mobs, poor folk…). Eventually I went into mumbling snidely as a profession. John, by contrast, is gainfully employed in high-tech, working for an Israeli firm that kindly brought him for a visit to the home office.

In late afternoon we walked out to the promenade. Some Palestinian kids were playing soccer on a stretch of lawn despite the ferocious heat. In front of us was the Old City and the Dome of the Rock. On the east, I pointed out to John, was the high concrete wall dividing the Palestinian side of Jerusalem from the Palestinian towns of the West Bank.

“So,” John asked me, “is there anything parallel to Israel’s control of the West Bank? What do you think of Jimmy Carter calling it apartheid? Is it like Jim Crow?” (I don’t claim this is a precise quote; it was Shabbat afternoon, when I don’t write.) But that’s the gist.

I don’t know if there’s any precise parallel to a military occupation that’s lasted 41 years, I told him. Everyone looks for parallels in history and politics, trying to judge an unfamiliar situation on the basis of a familiar one, or a morally ambiguous condition on the basis of a morally clear one. But history isn’t like medicine, in which 100 million cases can be classified as one disease. In history, there are two few cases, each one too idiosyncratic. Every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way, to misquote Tolstoy.

If, nonetheless, one looks for a category, what is happening in the West Bank resembles colonialism more than apartheid. It is closer to Algeria than South Africa, though there are flaws in the Algerian parallel as well. Apartheid applied to the entire territory under the rule of the old South African regime; it was explicitly based on the construct of “race” and had no other purpose but to divide the races.

Even if the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary, does not appear on official Israel maps, it exists as a legal and administrative boundary. Inside sovereign Israel, pre-1967 Israel for practical purposes, there’s a democracy, even if flawed. Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination, but they are voting citizens. The multiparty system insures that their votes can’t be gerrymandered away. They have more reasons than I’d like to list here for being dissatisfied – and are sometimes able to use an imperfect political and legal system to press for change.

The West Bank, on the other hand, isn’t legally part of Israel. Legally, for 41 years, it has been under military rule, temporary in apparent perpetuity. It was originally acquired in Israel in 1967 in something close to a fit of absence of mind – a defensive war, planned at the last minute, in which the goals shifted from hour to hour and the troops advanced further than anyone expected in advance. Palestinians live under military rule, and in some areas with the limited home rule of the Palestinian Authority.

But Israeli citizens who have settled there, with government support, as if Israel will control the territory forever, have the rights of Israeli citizens and then some. The two-tier legal system has been there virtually from the start. In a secret memo written in 1968, urging expanded settlement, then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan acknowledged that “settlement in administered territory, as we know, contravenes international agreements,” dismissed that as a problem, and went on to worry about the legal status of settlers. He didn’t want them subject to local law. He got his way. (Much more on this in my book, The Accidental Empire.)

He did want economic “integration” of the West Bank and Israel, which meant Palestinians would work for Israelis. He expected Palestinians to be appreciative. In a cabinet debate, he proposed German rule of Togo as a positive model. Dayan’s opponents explicitly warned from the summer of 1967 onward that permanent Israeli rule of the West Bank would be colonialism and would be denounced as such internationally. They lost the political argument. Shlomo Gazit, who in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the military officer working directly under Dayan in administering the West Bank, wrote three decades later:

At the end of the sixties, the world was already watching the end of the era of colonialism, and precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.

But colonialism is also imprecise. On one hand, France could leave Algeria without fearing that Algerians would claim France as their own and keep up the war. Domestic support for leaving the West Bank would be much higher in Israel if we could abandon our Algeria as easily. Israelis on the moderate left would be much more comfortable at labeling the occupation as “colonialism” if Palestinians and their supporters did not apply the same term to pre-1967 Israel, as if Jews were just Frenchman who’d come here to build plantations, with no historical tie to the land.

On the other hand, as I once explained in the American Prospect, Ariel Sharon’s plans for Palestinian “autonomy” in fragmented enclaves, and later for “statehood” in those same enclaves, was influenced by South Africa’s grand apartheid, with its fictitiously independent bantustans.

In general, I don’t like the use of “apartheid” as a term, because it delegitimizes Israel as such, and not just the occupation. It also ignores the original cause of the occupation, a war of defense. But as long as the occupation continues, and settlement grows, and the possibility of withdrawal and a two-state agreement grows dimmer, the use of the word will grow. The insult exaggerates but is not utterly imaginary.

I’m not trying to reproduce word for word what I told John as we looked out over the wall-divided landscape of Jerusalem. This is more or less the idea. At the end I suggested one more weak parallel. He’d brought me a book about the Lincoln-Douglas debates. In those awful days of American history, many Americans were willing to allow the moral blight of slavery to continue lest civil war erupt. Today many Israelis would rather accept the occupation than face armed conflict with the settlers. Their fear is justified, yet the blight cannot continue. One of our deepest challenges is to find a way to leave without fratricide. It will take more than one quiet Shabbat afternoon with a friend to figure out a solution to that problem.

See also:

Is All Criticism Anti-Israel? A Question for NGO Monitor

The First Settlement, the Lasting Danger

Israeli Right Supports Right of Return