My new piece on the Labor Party is up at The American Prospect:

Sini died. My son spotted the square black-bordered obituary notice deep inside the newspaper. It was placed by Sini’s kibbutz. It referred to him as “Sini,” his nickname — “Chinaman” in loose translation, politically incorrect today but accepted when he got the name, somewhere so far back in the previous century that no one is around to remember when it happened. The nickname referred to his eyes, which had the Tartar look that occasionally occurs among Jews of Eastern European ancestry. The ad gave his real name, Arnan Azaryahu, in parenthesis. It said nothing of what he’d done in life. Those who need to know, know — those who were high up in the movement, the underground, the party. The death notice mirrored how he lived, between understatement and secrecy.

I was surprised by my own surprise at his death, and by how sad I was. When I interviewed Sini five years ago about the history of Israeli settlements, he was already 87. He spoke for four hours, with a deep voice and a clear memory, never getting out of the chair in the tiny kitchen of his kibbutz apartment, a few hundred meters from the Lebanese border — an old, slightly slumped man in the Spartan frontier dwelling of another era. I’d been told to go to him by those who remembered him as the shadowy aide of the Yisrael Galili. Galili’s official title in the 1960s and 70s was minister without portfolio; his actual job was advising three Labor Party prime ministers — Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin — on defense policy and party intrigue and quietly (always quietly) orchestrating settlement in the occupied territories. For me, Sini was a living connection to the inner sanctum of Labor in its days of power.

Read the rest here; come back to SoJo to comment.

In honor of that decision, I’m adding a new document to my online archive of settlement history. The mimeographed Hebrew flier, from the flagship settlement of Ofrah in 1976, shows how aware settlers were at the outset that they were using land that belonged to someone else, how intentional the theft was.

First, some background on the latest legal case. The land-owners from Dura a-Kara got legal help from the intrepid human-rights activists of Yesh Din’s Land Advocacy Project. Earlier this year, Yesh Din filed a similar petition on behalf of Palestinians who own the land on which new houses have been built in Ofrah.

To be clear: Neither of these actions touch on whether it’s legitimate for a government to settle its civilians in occupied territory. The issue here is old-fashioned property law. To build your house on someone’s land is theft. It’s like going into someone’s home and taking his TV. The only difference is that the burglar vanishes into the night. The land thief stays in public view. A larger chutzpah quotient is needed.

Together, the two petitions touch on a tiny portion of land theft. According to a Peace Now analysis, using official Civil Administration data, 32 percent of the land used by settlements is the private property of Palestinians. Ofrah is a particularly severe case: 85% of the settlement’s land belongs to Palestinians.

Ofrah was established in April 1975. A small group, led by Gush Emunim activist Yehudah Etzion, moved into an abandoned Jordanian army base north of Ramallah without government permission and in defiance of a policy barring settlement in the area. Nonetheless, Defense Minister Shimon Peres allowed them to stay under the guise of a “work camp,” and became the settlement’s patron. (You can read the full story in Chapters 10 and 11 of my book, The Accidental Empire.)

In 1976, the settlers were planning to build houses on an area of 220 dunam (55 acres) which, they believed, belonged to the state. The 1976 flier, “Build Your House in Ofrah,” clearly states that construction will take place “without approval from the owner of the land.”

According to Dror Etkes of the Land Advocacy Project, the actual area of the Jordanian base was 140 dunam (35 acres), and the surrounding land is the private property of individual Palestinians. Ownership of the land on which the Jordanian base stood is uncertain. Actual construction, as shown in aerial photographs, did not take place until the early 1980s, by which time the settlers may have had government permission to use the area of the base.

The current legal fights are over land taken from Palestinians. The settlers’ original intent at Ofrah was to take land without permission from the state. The bright red thread running through the settlement story, from then to now, is readiness to build “without approval from the owner of the land.”

The Ofrah document is here. The full archive is here.

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.

Thousands of settlers and their supporters were expected to come to the mountain to picnic that day and hear Housing Minister David Levy speak at the formal dedication of the settlement of Brakhah, which would be one more statement that Israel would rule “Judea and Samaria” forever. Only a few hundred showed up. The Peace Now demonstrators came by the busload and surrounded the ceremony, with very soggy soldiers separating the rings of people. The peace activists had not planned on a day of fun, and they by the thousands came despite the weather. So David Levy gave his speech inside a prefab structure – that’s what it looked like over the heads of the soldiers – and peaceniks rode home cold and soaked, but happy that they’d dominated the field that day.

Except that 25 years later, according to Peace Now’s excellent settlement monitoring effort, Brakhah has about 1,200 residents. The demonstrators were there for an afternoon, and were gone.

Tonight, as I write, Peace Now is holding a celebration of sorts in Tel Aviv to mark 30 years of activism since it was born in response to Anwar al-Sadat’s offer of peace. I’m not sure a peace movement, especially one with the word “Now” in its name, should feel happy about a 30th birthday, which represents a dream long deferred.

Peace Now can point to notable successes. Unlike most movements on the left, it did not wallow in arguments on minute points of doctrine. Instead, it began as a coalition of everyone who agreed that Israel should be willing to give up land taken in 1967 in exchange for peace. Laborites who still supported the Allon Plan could back the movement, along with believers in a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines – though very few of those were willing to speak their views publicly in 1978. Peace Now’s moderate coalition arguably helped create the public backing for the deal with Egypt, and later the Oslo Accords. And over those 30 years, it has helped an essential shift in Israeli public opinion. A two-state solution is no longer a radical idea.

Yet 270,000 Israelis are now living in the West Bank, not counting East Jerusalem. Ehud Olmert, former believer in the Whole Land of Israel, now believes in giving up land as long as he doesn’t have to confront settlers or even members of his own coalition who would like to keep building in Givat Ze’ev. Of the reasons that Palestinians don’t trust Israelis, the ineluctable spread of the settlements is surely central. Peace Now helped make a division of the land into conventional wisdom, while the settlers and their backers in government made division of the land more difficult every day.

I could list many reasons that Peace Now has not gotten further. This failure has many fathers – Israelis, Palestinians and others. But an essential imbalance, as demonstrated that day at Brakhah, is a major factor. Settlers “created facts” – they expressed their views by staying on the hilltops, looking down on Palestinians in every meaning of the words. Their opponents spoke and demonstrated and went home. Even if they believed as passionately in their cause, their homes in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were not statements in the same way. Vice Premier Haim Ramon has admitted that all of Ofrah, the first Gush Emunim settlement on the mountain ridge north of Jerusalem, stands on private Palestinian land. Ofrah was established with the connivance of Shimon Peres, then defense minister. Ramon, who made the admission, has done nothing to remove illegal outposts. The pattern of government connivance and active support for lawbreaking continues. The “Zionists” of the hilltops have blurred the borders and the laws of Israel. In the name of the land, they have taken apart the state – with the state’s willing help. Inside the cabinet as well, supporters of settlement acted, often illegally, while their opponents spoke.

I am not suggesting that Peace Now should have ignored laws in the way that the settlers did, or turned to violent confrontation. But democratic protest is at a disadvantage against a revolutionary movement that undermines the state in the name of patriotism. The playing field has never been even.