Open Bridges
Shortly after the war ended, a Fiat with yellow Israeli plates drove up to the Tawil house, and an elegantly dressed man got out, approached the front door, and disappeared inside. The man was a relative of Raymonda’s from her mother’s village of Kfar Yassif in the Galilee. No one in Nablus knew him, and his was the first Israeli civilian car to venture into that part of the West Bank. Raymonda’s behavior had for years fed the rumor mill, mainly that she was a CIA spy. Now people suspected the stranger of being a Mossad agent and Raymonda of being a collaborator. That night someone slipped a note under the front door. It was her first of many death threats.
Suspicion was for many Palestinians an automatic response to defeat, in particular when Dayan, the man at the helm of the victorious military machine, proclaimed to the international press, days after the war, that there was “no more Palestine,” that that chapter in world history was “finished,” that “Judea and Samaria” were “part of our land, to be settled, not abandoned,” and that Jews were “returning to the cradle of our people, to the inheritance of the Patriarchs, the land of the Judges and the fortress of the Kingdom of the House of David.”
And yet the fact that one of Raymonda’s cousins could so easily drive across the old fortified border was a sign that Moshe’s was no ordinary military regime. With the same speed and determination the veteran commando had used in conducting warfare, he gave orders to clear away the barbed wire and land mines separating Palestinians like Raymonda and Daoud from their former homes in Haifa, Jaffa, Ramle, and other cities and towns and villages. Everyone, it seemed, was “returning.”
In public, his policy for the occupied territories and the million Arabs living there, including hundreds of thousands of refugees from 1948, was referred to as the “Open Bridge.” Dayan told General Zvi Elpeleg, the man he sent to govern the West Bank, that the Israeli army had no business running the schools, courts, and garbage collection services for Arabs, and he should stay out of people’s hair as much as possible. Elpeleg, the antithesis of the pompous colonial administrator, agreed. The military governor of Nablus, General Givoli, another fine officer of great ability, received the same instructions: Let Palestinians plant their crops, raise their kids, work in Israeli supermarkets—they can even hop an Egged bus for an afternoon at the beach. The “Open Bridge,” Dayan knew, was a temporary measure and would only delay the inevitable clash. Because the disarray among local Arabs couldn’t last forever, because people don’t forget the pain of conquest and loss, because Israelis would have to push through with their “work against the wishes of the Arabs . . . we are doomed to live in a constant state of war with the Arabs, and there is no escape from sacrifice and bloodshed.”30
With Moshe’s often-paralyzing headaches, his one eye that made reading difficult, his spotty written English, and his impatience with sitting at a desk, he relied on Yael for much of his writing. “We will leave [the Palestinians] alone,” she declared to the Daily Telegraph, “as long as they don’t co-operate with saboteurs.” The article dangles the prize of “self-determination” in front of well-behaved Arabs.
What Dayan confided to his inner circle of commanders, men such as his pal Arik, was the way amicable relations with local Arabs was a tactic in the struggle over land and resources. He envisioned streams of Jewish settlers populating East Jerusalem and the hills above Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus.31 With this long-term strategy, Moshe took decisive steps in inventorying the land, conducting censuses, sending in water and agricultural experts, and laying the bureaucratic foundation for what within a decade would become the settlement movement. Already in 1968 the IDF set up the first militarized moshav along the Jordan Valley.