Nine months after the Six-Day War, the occupied territories are still a kind of popular sensation in Israel, a source of pride and a headache. For some, the occupation has proved that Jews can be as beastly as others; for others, it has proved the exact opposite. But for most Israelis, it has above all provided a seemingly inexhaustible tourist attraction. Hotels in the traditional vacation grounds of Israel—Eilat, Haifa, and Safed—were half-empty last fall; bitterly complaining owners resorted to what is by now the almost automatic reaction of Israeli businessmen in trouble: an appeal to the government for subsidies.

But into the occupied areas of Hebron, Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip, Israelis pour by the tens of thousands on weekends and holidays. The military permit system, having broken down under the sheer weight of “protect-sia” (Hebrew slang for “pull” or connections in high places), has been abolished altogether on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. There are still customs checkpoints, however; since Israel's extremely high import duties have not been levied in the occupied territories, returning cars are searched for television sets, English woolens, Japanese tape recorders. But travel back and forth is free, upon presentation of an identity card or passport. One index of the extreme popularity of the occupied territories as a tourist attraction is the fact that Israeli tourism to Europe, on a sharp rise in recent years, diminished drastically in 1967. Only some 60,000 Israelis went abroad last year, as against more than 100,000 in 1966. On a nice weekend, by contrast, 30,000 Israelis will likely stream into East Jerusalem or drive through Samaria and Judea. A few thousand more can be found roaming about the Gaza strip, exploring the vast wastes of the Sinai peninsula by jeep, or even venturing on the latest craze of them all: a week-long safari by camelback from the secluded 4th-century Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Catherine to the top of Mount Sinai, and from there southward to Sharm el Sheikh, the route leading from one military outpost to the next, all hospitable but entirely ill-equipped for the purpose.

A few years ago, when Israeli tourists to Cyprus—hungry for consumer goods—bought up nearly all the electric irons and transistors on the island, a local humorist commented that Israelis are not merely travelers, they are traveling salesmen. Now, whether in uniform or mufti, they are not simply conquerors; they are also fanatic sightseers and eager shoppers at the bazaars of Hebron or Nablus. Shops on the West Bank are constantly replenishing their stock from dealers in Jordan, as semi-official trade across the Jordan River continues, undisturbed by—and sometimes in the midst of—frequent border incidents. But if Israelis do not behave like conquerors, they are not simply tourists either; rather, like embarrassed patriots, they can be observed in the attempt, undertaken without ease, and perhaps over-optimistically, to redraw in their minds the geographical borders of their country. Although by now they have done so several times, many still feel a bit of a sweet chill as they cross what civilians call “the borders of the state” and what in military jargon is known as “the green line.” Why green? Perhaps because on most maps the borders of 1949 are marked in deep green, or perhaps because the border really is green. On the Israeli side—shady forests, artificially irrigated plantations, intensely cultivated fields, and above all, lawns, green, cool-looking, and pleasing to the eye on a hot summer day. On the other side—bare rock, poorly cultivated land, naked hilltops, and, above all, virtually no trees. Further inland, to be sure, around Hebron, or in Jericho and Nablus, the Jordan administration was responsible for considerable economic progress, evidence of which comes as a surprise to many Israelis. But along the old borderline, the past twenty years have left their mark like a tattoo on the landscape.

Across this dividing line, one learns something about a former enemy as well as about oneself. Hardly another modern occupation regime has seemed on the surface so much of a picnic, but of course this one is no picnic either. It is a situation fraught with high drama and occasional Schweikian comedy, human frailty, and courage. Most Israelis are still adjusting—with difficulty, misgivings, and much confusion—to their new and unaccustomed roles as master. Few ever anticipated this state of affairs; fewer still have been trained in the exercise of this kind of power. So far, the situation has been handled with humaneness and an impressive administrative talent that was rarely evinced in the past within the borders of Israel proper. It is still marked by an atmosphere made up of a curious—though under the circumstances entirely natural—mixture of extreme nonchalance and touchiness, bad conscience and a sense of superiority, self-confidence and fear, braggadocio and humility, sympathy and scorn, hatred and pity. There are some who almost seem to be saying, “Forgive us for winning,” and who frantically overpay shopkeepers, waiters, and taxi drivers in an apparent attempt to appease. Others have been known to loot, and to excuse themselves with the remark, “But we shed blood here!”—a comment which prompted one Israeli columnist to quote Samuel Johnson: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

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Some Israelis are angry at the absence of a more active spirit of cooperation on the part of the vanquished toward the victors; others despise the Arabs for sheepishly collaborating with the occupation forces. Not infrequently, both attitudes find lodgment within the same person. Some are surprised at what they see across the border, others disappointed. Oldtimers with nostalgic memories of the early 40's, the last time when Palestine was a single country at peace, cross the green line only to smell jasmine, rare herbs, and deliriously charcoaled lamb. Newer immigrants and youngsters see only the dirt and the flies, the barefoot, undernourished kids in the street; they turn up their noses: “There seems to be something wrong here with the sewer.” (An epidemic of stomach disorders swept Israel last summer and fall as a result of culinary expeditions into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.) The youngsters especially, born and reared after the establishment of the state in 1948, and fully accustomed to Israel as it was before last June, are torn and do not easily know what to think. For years these lands were “abroad”—indeed not only abroad, but enemy territory. Now the children are being told by an impressive array of poets, teachers, and even some politicians that this is moledet, the homeland, the Jews' historic cradle, united at last with what they knew as Israel.

A few impressions of Israelis in their new role:

• The mishpocheh. The Israeli as conqueror is rarely alone. He travels in a company which is usually large. Everywhere in the new territory, in Sinai as on the West Bank, one notices entire families posing for photographs on burned-out or blown-up Egyptian or Jordanian tanks, like so many St. George's on their dragons. A small pickup truck, driven by a Haifa grocer, the rear overloaded with children and uncomfortable grandparents, rolls into the off-limits headquarters of the Nablus military governor, ignoring a shouting, gesticulating young guard at the gate. A heavy woman climbs out and addresses the quickly summoned officer (who is young enough to be her son) in Hungarian-accented Hebrew: “Shalom, habibi, banu. l'vaker!” (Shalom, dearie, we've come to visit!)
• A nonchalance and self-assurance among the military. The Israeli army of occupation, or at least that part of it in uniform, is rarely arrogant or haughty. On the contrary, the impression one gathers of the army in Gaza, Nablus, or Ramallah is one of ease, even bordering on apathy. Relaxed, calm, no doubt also bored, the typical Israeli sentry, as he mans a roadblock or guards the entry to a military installation, is usually to be seen perched on a straw armchair, feet nearly horizontal, cap tilted back, his young mouth munching away on a sweet.

At times this nonchalance can seem slightly ludicrous. In Nablus recently, I saw the military commander of the area lunching with two other senior army officers in Jacob's Well, a leading Nablus restaurant which faces the traditional site of Jesus's encounter with the Samaritan woman. The three officers were enjoying ample portions of hoummous, shishkebab, and eggplant salad; one was casually leafing through a newspaper as he ate. A large radio, prominently displayed on the bar counter, was tuned to a noisy broadcast from Amman which featured a live report of King Hussein's triumphal return to his capital following a state visit to Turkey. Then the King himself spoke, promising the cheering crowd a speedy liberation from the Israeli forces oppressing their brethren on the West Bank. The officers—all of whom spoke Arabic fluently—ordered another round of beers. When the bill came, they paid and walked out, leaving a sizable tip behind.

In Hebron I came upon some thirty Arabs crowded into the vestibule of the office of the military governor, apparently waiting for their turn to be heard. An officer emerged and scolded the sentry at the door: “How many times have I told you not to let people crowd the entry. There's a waiting room for that.” Answered the sentry: “Well, what can I do? I told them not to crowd the vestibule. After all, I can't move them out by force.” With this he casually turned to the Arabs and said: “Come on now, out of here and into the waiting room.” The officer: “You might at least get up off your seat when you talk to them. How many times must I tell you that getting up adds authority!”

• Invisible power. “One hardly sees them nowadays,” says a young doctor in Ramallah. “In the beginning they were everywhere, patrolling the streets, searching houses. But not any more. I don't know why.”

The massive assault of Israeli tourists has caused some residents of the West Bank to comment that there must be at least ten million Israelis, the official figure of 2.5 million being a case of typical Jewish deception. But just as obvious as the influx of tourists is the absence of a noticeable military presence. One of the most striking characteristics of this occupation regime is its extreme thriftiness in the display of force. The overpopulated Gaza Strip, with its horrible refugee camps and slum conglomerations, is a special case in this regard, but in the hill towns and villages of the West Bank one can at times travel for days without meeting a single Israeli soldier, except for those sitting on leave at Arab cafes or hitchhiking along the road. Some villages that were searched for arms a few days after the occupation began have not seen an Israeli on duty since that time. In other places, an Israeli machine gun is to be seen about once a month. In Jericho and Nablus (the latter a hotbed of civil disobedience), a few canvas-covered tanks are parked in the courtyard of the massive police fortresses that were built by the British in the 30's and have been used since then by three occupation regimes (British, Jordanian-Bedouin, now Israeli). There are few serious shows of force, except after a particular act of terrorism or before an announced demonstration of protest. But even directly following a sniping attack on passing automobiles, or the discovery of a mined road, violent intervention remains highly selective. After some forty El Fatah terrorists were discovered in caves and isolated plantations in Samaria, the army staged a large-scale hunt for similar bands hiding out further south in the Judean Hills—the same area where a few years earlier the famous Dead Sea scrolls had been found. A touring staff officer requested from the local commander an intelligence briefing on the area, and was told: “We have a list here of people known to be hiding weapons in their homes.” His reply was: “Never mind weapons. We do not care about people hoarding machine-guns and the like. Let them live in peace. Arms as such don't interest us. We are interested only in active marauders.”

• A gentleness in manners. Another marked characteristic of this occupation regime remains the relative lack of military swagger, and absence of an attitude of condescension toward the masses of the vanquished, their leaders and their dignitaries. Israeli soldiers do not kick open shop doors with their boots. For goods received, all pay the full price. During the war itself, there was only one known case—subsequently severely punished—of rape. Now, nine months later, there is still no evidence of bad blood caused by soldiers “stealing” local girls. There is no black market of note; cigarettes are worth no more than their legal price of 97 agorot (28 cents). Occasionally a house is blown up in which arms have been discovered, but even this is a practice resorted to with diminishing frequency; generally, there has been an almost total absence, as Robert Alter recently remarked in these pages,¹ of the “mystique of destructiveness.” Very rarely indeed does one hear of a soldier humiliating an Arab. Even he who may speak privately of “Arabushim” (a derogatory slang word) will in most cases behave in a polite, matter-of-fact way when encountering an Arab.

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The same unfortunately cannot be said of many civilians who come into daily contact with the other side, whether as tourists, businessmen, or even as government officials on “inspection trips.” It is true that the Israeli army is a people's army. Most of its personnel is nonprofessional, on reserve duty or in national service. Today's soldier is tomorrow's visiting civilian, and vice versa. Nevertheless, civilian behavior has by and large been much less understanding than that of army personnel, and has frequently given cause for bad feeling. It is invariably civilians, not soldiers, who drive through occupied cities singing patriotic tunes, or stroll the streets ostentatiously waving Israeli flags. Each city's own Arab police force, quickly reinstated and even rearmed by General Dayan soon after the conquest (much to the consternation of traditionalists and security experts) is now in charge of local law and order. Understandably, these blue-uniformed officials (the Jordanian royal crown or Egyptian half-moon carefully removed from their caps) still lack an adequate amount of self-assurance and authority. Military drivers are careful to obey their instructions, but some civilian drivers tend to ignore them or even treat them insolently. In Gaza recently, I watched two young Israelis buying corn from a street vendor. When it was time to pay, they handed him ten agora. The vendor asked again for the regular price, some ten times higher. The boys laughed and walked on. “You lost the war,” one of them called out. A few feet away stood an impassive local policeman. “Had he been asked to intervene—and that rarely happens—he would not have known what to do,” an Israeli officer, in charge of the Gaza police, later remarked.

A few days later, again in Gaza, I watched a long caravan of government sedans drive up to a wooden jetty at the port that services small freighters loading citrus and unloading imported goods (Gaza was, and still is, a tax-free port). The car doors opened and out stepped a bevy of eager bureaucrats, crowding around a portly figure of medium height who was clad in the quasi-official uniform of the Israeli labor elite, light gray slacks and a white, open-collared shirt. The visiting dignitary moved forward through the crowd in slow, measured steps. It was Israel's Minister of Transportation, on a state visit to greet the arrival in Gaza of the first citrus freighter since the Six-Day War. None of the local Arab dignitaries had been invited. A few Gaza residents, mute and seemingly indifferent, stood by as the local stevedores, dressed simply in loincloths, lifted the Minister onto their shoulders and carried him from the shaky jetty into the boat that would take him out to the freighter mooring some two hundred yards away. Upon the Minister's return, again atop the shoulders of the waiting longshoremen, a short ceremony was held. “After all, this is what you might call an historic moment,” remarked one senior official. The Minister, a member of the left-wing Ahdut Avoda party, then affixed a mezzuza to the gate of the small customs shed. Thus, without much ceremonial ado, was Gaza Port brought into the Covenant of Abraham. The small group of local residents stood by silently, watching the proceedings. “Would you like to meet Mr. Carmel?” a newspaper reporter asked a local dignitary who happened by and stopped to watch. “No thank you,” he replied.

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Nearly everywhere on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, old British police fortresses are currently being repainted and refurbished. Having served Jordanian and Egyptian authorities for the past twenty years, they are now being redecorated for their newest occupants. Corridors are cluttered with timber, sacks of cement, rolls of telephone wire, and buckets of paint; Arab masons move walls, carpenters saw away at closets and doors. Within, against a background of hammering and the screeching of wooden boards, officers and civilian employees of the military government sit behind heavy Jordanian and Egyptian desks, inlaid with mother-of-pearl; the walls are hung casually with flags, army insignia, and portraits of Eshkol, Dayan, Shazar, and Rabin. Young secretaries, girls performing their tour of duty in the national service, keep their bosses well-supplied with cups of freshly-boiled tea and instant coffee.

While the occupying army takes on the settled appearance of having come to stay, the overall number of officers in the occupation regime is still extremely limited. The first principle of the regime, as enunciated by General Dayan a few days after the war and subsequently approved by the cabinet, has been the avoidance of unnecessary friction between occupier and occupied, and of maximum non-interference in local affairs. Local administration has been left almost entirely in the hands of former (elected or appointed) mayors, all of whom have remained and none of whom has yet resigned his office. Similarly, most other departments of the government—health, education, public works, social welfare, etc.—are still being managed by their previous directors, former Egyptian or Royal Jordanian civil servants. In the few cases where officials have left, their jobs have been taken over by their former deputies. A few Israeli liaison officers—in the fashion of the indirect rule of the old British colonial system—act as overseers and final arbiters of local administration. Theirs is a behind-the-scenes function; they rarely meet field personnel, and they deal mostly, and even then not very frequently, with top-level Arab officials only. Thus, health services in the occupied areas are run by seven Israelis together with 2,900 Arabs, education by nine Israelis and 4,600 Arabs, agriculture by five Israelis and 1,300 Arabs. A similar proportion is maintained in other fields of government activity, such as commence, public works, and social welfare.

Another basic and general principle has been that 1967 will not become another 1956, when Israel was forced to withdraw from occupied Sinai after three or four months. There is a certitude that this time the occupation will last much longer, that perhaps it will last a very long time indeed, and it is best that local Arabs realize it. This does not mean that Israel will annex the occupied territories. But the assumption is that Israel is determined to hold and run these territories, with or without the cooperation of their inhabitants, until such time as there will be a permanent settlement with the Arab states. In stressing this intention, the hope of course is to encourage people to cooperate with Israel without the fear that within a few months they will be returned to Egypt and Jordan to suffer the consequences of the charge of collaboration. Such fear has been common primarily in Gaza, where residents who cooperated with Israel in 1956 were later severely dealt with by the returning Egyptians.

Success on this score has been only partial. Even in Hebron, where cooperation seems to have been greatest (to the point where Jordan has officially branded the mayor a “traitor”), most citizens still hold on to the prospect of change with the next “decisive” moment, after which Israel will surely withdraw and, if not, “we will think about it again.” Such moments have been “at the end of the United Nations debates,” “after the visit of Mr. Thalman, or of Mr. Jarring,” “after the Khartoum summit meeting,” or “after Rabat,” or “as a result of King Hussein's visits, first to Cairo, then to Moscow and Washington.” Such decisive moments have come and gone, followed neither by withdrawal nor by any firm commitment on the part of local Arabs; new dates will undoubtedly crop up in the future, and will continue to provide occasion for an indefinite postponement of decisions.

The principled avoidance of unnecessary friction has forced the authorities to distinguish between vital needs and those merely desirable. The absolutely vital minimum need, as against the desirable maximum, has been to maintain the Israeli military presence and prevent terrorism. So far this has not been too difficult to achieve; terrorist activity, which at first posed a considerable menace in the new territories, has apparently been well curtailed.

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A side from the prevention of terrorism, all other matters, despite the possible desirability of having it otherwise, have been left in the hands of the conquered Arabs. General Dayan stated his policy immediately after the war, in his many talks with Arab dignitaries: it was entirely up to them to lead the kind of lives they wished. If they wanted their children to go to school, if they wanted industrial and agricultural development, if they wanted to export and import, to take out loans, to produce and work, or to travel freely back and forth between the West Bank and the Arab countries for trade or pleasure, then the occupation regime would help them. If not, Israel could not care less, at least for the present. Dayan's stated policy has been widely heralded in Israel and abroad. One leading columnist went so far as to suggest that had some of the former colonial powers practiced such a policy, the course of history might have been different. No few Israelis hope that perhaps Israel will indeed succeed where others, greater and more powerful, have failed. Should a Palestinian-Arab leadership emerge that will be prepared to make a separate peace with Israel (a distinct possibility considering the utter weariness and dejection of the Palestinian Arabs after fifty years of futile conflict with the Jews and twenty years of unpopular, at times savagely repressive, Jordanian rule), many people will take it as a vindication of General Dayan's policies.

In the occupied territories themselves, things are often less clear and infinitely more complicated than might appear from a reading of neat policy papers. While the declared policy is that Israel will avoid all unnecessary points of friction, there has, for instance, been what some might term unnecessary friction in the field of education, and in such service areas as the production of electricity.

The schooling problem arose when the government last summer tried to eliminate from the Arab schools those textbooks which contained rabid anti-Israel propaganda and incitement to war. This, by itself, would have been easy; yet the government went much further. In the apparent hope of converting West Bank children to Zionism, the Education Ministry—which had been charged by the occupation regime with opening the Arab schools—tried to impose Israeli textbooks, complete with Arabic translations of Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim, Herzl, and others, on Arab schoolchildren. Tens of thousands of textbooks had already been printed when the scandal broke. Even those Arab dignitaries who were ready and willing to cooperate with Israel, such as Mayor Joabri of Hebron who has all but burned his last bridge to Amman, considered the books not only a violation of international law but an unacceptable affront to their national dignity. The West Bank public was quick to accept rumors fed by Radio Amman that Israel wished to stamp out Moslem religious education; as a result, within days a near-total parent-teacher strike closed down all West Bank schools. Ministry officials then proposed a compromise solution: the Israeli textbooks would be withdrawn, in exchange for the censoring and, if necessary, the elimination of any offensive Arab books. This, too, might have worked; but the first step in the compromise solution was the complete cancellation of some seventy textbooks on the ground that they were dangerous as a whole. This action also met with objections, not only from Arab leaders and school officials, but from General Dayan's military governors as well, who argued that the Ministry of Education was being overly sensitive, was expecting the impossible, and was denying to the vanquished the last thing they had to cling to: self-dignity. Here the paradox that marks the Israelis as conquerors re-emerged. The army represented in this case, as in many others, the more liberal approach, while a civilian body, in this instance, Zalman Aranne's Ministry of Education, took the more extreme position.

As a result of all this pressure, the education officials capitulated; most of the books could stay they said, but at the same time they came up with a list of some 120 objectionable passages and published them in a detailed report entitled: “Words of Hatred in Textbooks Current in Jordanian Schools and on the West Bank in 1966.” One of General Dayan's aides, after reading the report, was quoted as saying: “When I saw what they wanted to censor, my hair stood on end!” In their index of hateful material, Mr. Aranne's aides had included quotations from the Koran and poems extolling the beauty of the Palestinian landscape that is now Israel. There were, to be sure, a dozen or more clear-cut hate passages and others bordering on incitement to genocide. But it appeared that education officials had also seen El Fatah terrorists hiding behind such passages as “Jaffa, beloved of the sea,” or “Nablus, the historic city, surrounded by olive trees and villages, breathing memories of heroism and honor. . . .” Other passages, praising the love of a fatherland “worth dying for,” or commiserating with the “bitter fate” of Arab refugees, were also declared dangerous. Arab educators objected again to the report. In the end all but ten of the 120 passages were reinstated, and the schools finally opened in November after a three-month delay.

Further incidents involving friction between conqueror and conquered, which have also been finally solved by Israeli capitulation, have included the struggle over the supervision of Moslem religious property by the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs (full autonomy has been restored), and the attempt to force the Gaza municipality to sell its power plant to the Israel Electric Corporation; on this issue, too, after a noisy outburst and threats to resign by the mayor of Gaza, the Israelis backed down. There have been other, less publicized incidents as well.

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A variety of reasons has been offered to explain the contradiction between policy on paper and policy in the field. One factor has been a difference of temperament among the various military leaders at different levels of command. Others which have been suggested include interdepartmental feuds, jealousy between the military and civilian establishments, and General Dayan's personal difficulties with his colleagues in Eshkol's government. But the most convincing reason that has yet been offered is also the simplest: lack of experience. As one harassed official commented recently, “Look here, my father had no experience in running occupied territories. Did yours?” Optimists have been encouraged by the fact that in the three major cases of friction I discussed above—as well as in others—the government finally backed down and gave in to the vanquished on practically all important points. General Dayan has always been known for his un-doctrinaire approach as well as for his flexibility (a trait which has led his detractors to accuse him of a daily change of mind). But observers here cannot remember when they have seen a government agency move as quickly under stress as Dayan's Ministry of Defense, which seems to be learning from past mistakes and is unhampered by considerations of personal prestige.

For the most part, indeed, the smoothness of relations between conqueror and conquered has surprised a considerable number of observers who are accustomed to thinking in terms of Algiers, or Aden, or even Vietnam. An almost total strike by East Jerusalem shopkeepers last August reminded oldtime veterans of the Palestine conflict of the bloody general strike which began in 1936 and spread quickly over Arab Palestine, lasted almost a year and sparked some of the ugliest massacres of the 1936-1939 anti-Jewish, anti-British disturbances. But the 1967 strike lasted one day only, and so far has not been repeated. Acts of terrorism, which were fairly widespread last fall, have become quite infrequent since the arrest of three rings of marauders, all of whom had been trained and armed in Syria and infiltrated into the West Bank via Jordan following the war. As a precaution, policemen are still posted at the entrances to movie houses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to check outsized handbags and briefcases, but the last attempt—an unsuccessful one—to plant a bomb in a Jerusalem cinema occurred back in September. El Fatah and other Syrian-based terrorists are said to be under the guidance of Algerian experts, but until now West Bank residents have not rushed to join their ranks. Most of the active agents have been infiltrated into the West Bank from elsewhere. Some 1,500 have so far been arrested, thanks largely to the absolutely amazing readiness of most of those arrested to betray their comrades-in-arms.

On the other hand, quite a number of West Bank dignitaries have openly attacked the terrorists, calling them a “disaster for the Arabs of Palestine.” There may indeed be some significance in the fact that terrorists have not usually been able to rely even on the passive support of West Bank villagers, that they hide in caves rather than in the barns of farmers, or in the cellars of urban supporters. After the most recent mass arrest of some thirty terrorists who had been hiding in the caves of Samaria and were taken after a short battle, some army and police leaders suggested that “El Fatah is finished.” This is hard to believe, but it is clear to most observers that earlier fears of large-scale, or at least effective, partisan activity in the occupied territories were premature. Above all, it would seem that the vicious spiral of terrorism-reprisal-terrorism, previously so common here as elsewhere, has been avoided.

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In Israel meanwhile, the unexpected seizure of the “whole of Palestine,” as well as of sizable chunks of Syria and Egypt, has given rise to a national debate of an intensity that has not been seen here since the earlier, more fervent days of Zionist colonization. An impressive number of writers, poets, and others has joined in the “Movement for the Whole of Eretz Israel.” The central precept of this movement is that all of Palestine, indivisible, is part of Israel's historic birthright and must be immediately annexed—together with the Syrian Heights and Sinai. War—or, perhaps, victory—makes strange bedfellows. Prominent names thread the list of the movement's sponsors, who include such diverse personalities as Nobel Prize winner S. Y. Agnon, former Secret Service chief Isser Harel, novelist Moshe Shamir (Mapam), and poets Uri Zvi Greenberg (Herut), Chaim Guri (Ahdut Avoda), and Nathan Alterman (Mapai-Rafi).

The movement is deeply suspicious of peace proposals (“even if a peace treaty is concluded, it will not be worth much more than the paper it is written on”); it has called for the founding of a Greater Israel and the urgent establishment of at least a hundred Jewish settlements throughout the “liberated territories.” Members have appeared in print and before packed audiences armed with political arguments and biblical quotes to propagate a message of such apparent emotional force and popular attraction that even cabinet ministers, who are known to think differently, have been afraid to disagree in public. Only Foreign Minister Abba Eban has publicly criticized them, and by throwing their own book back at them: “The Bible,” he said, “is not just the tale of Joshua's conquests, but the book of the prophets and their ethics as well.”

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The appearance of this movement has thrown the intellectual community here into its first really heated debate in years. The old questions arise once again: “Who are we?” “Why are we here, and not in Uganda or America?” “Are we here by right or by sufferance?” The annexationists argue that Israel has a historic right to all the lands once promised by God to His chosen people. This right, they say, supersedes the rights of West Bank Arabs to national self-determination. They tell their critics: “If you do not recognize our right to Nablus, you cannot recognize our right to Tel Aviv. That being the case, you must emigrate.”

The argument offered in rebuttal to the movement is that two “rights” have clashed over Palestine; as Amos Oz, a young novelist, has written, “no angel, no God will dare judge which of these two rights be the better.” The only practical, and, at the same time, the only moral, solution to this conflict, according to opponents of the movement, is the partition of Palestine between the two “rights.” Mr. Oz, in a reply to Nathan Alterman's call for immediate annexation, has written that Israel must not by any means withdraw before a final peace treaty, but that after a treaty is signed, the West Bank's million-odd Arabs should be left freely to decide their own future. Until such a time, Israel must stay as conqueror, not as self-styled liberator. “You cannot liberate land,” Mr. Oz has written, “You can only liberate people. There are no subjugated lands, only subjugated people.”

Daily newspapers in Israel enjoyed a bonanza recently when both parties to the debate filled pages with advertisements calling for public support. The issue is far from exhausted. It has been suggested that the fact that none of the poets, novelists, or intellectuals who belong to the “Movement for the Whole of Eretz Israel” is younger than forty may not be sheer coincidence. Leading spokesmen on the other side are representative of a younger generation of poets and novelists. One columnist has even suggested that the “Movement for the Whole of Eretz Israel” may be a “literary and intellectual anachronism” as the “patriotic feelings” among younger people, born or reared here, are said to be “more rational, more balanced,” than those of the older Zionist generation. Rather than relying on “divine promises made in the early Bronze Age,” this younger generation is said to place its reliance on the “normative effect of the facts—as they presently exist—and on international law and the opinion of those who have given it recognition.” But the strongest objections to annexation have come from those who, realizing there can be no large-scale immigration to Israel within the foreseeable future, fear the end of the Jewish State through the emergence of an Arab majority by 1980.

¹ “Israel and the Intellectuals,” October 1967.