Inspired by my conversation with Meir Shalev, I got back in the car for another road trip, this one to the Golan Heights. The first leg of the trip took me past the Sea of Galilee and Kibbutz Ma’agan. As I approached the Golan, the clouds on the horizon were tinged with peach, probably from fields burning somewhere. The temperature outside topped a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. As kids, Srulik and I used to stare up at the Golan’s jagged, rust-colored ridge and at the grass and brambles growing over the rocky soil then under Syrian control, imagining blasting away at enemy soldiers. In those days, what did I know or care about the territory’s two hundred Arab villages, towns, and farms? I was a kid who went to class in a bomb shelter; Syrian rockets were what I associated with the Golan.
My drive took me past Hamat Gader, a water park built on the ruins of the Arab village of Al-Hamma. Already in the Roman days, it was a place famous for its baths.
Next I drove through Kibbutz Tel Katzir, the site of a 1967 battle in which the man I was slated to meet the following week, Pinchas Wallerstein, the organizational brain behind the settlement movement, had fought. Pinchas’s brigade had come under artillery and machine-gun fire, and he’d been badly injured. My father came up from Ma’agan to help evacuate the wounded soldiers. Israel prevailed, and as a result we no longer had to drive armored tractors into no-man’s-land. The Golan was ours.
The next week, with these images of the Golan battlefield fresh on my mind, I set out to meet Pinchas at his home in a West Bank settlement. Most of my left-wing friends, including my wife, Biba, have never understood why I sit down with West Bank settlers who, to leftists, are weeds and cancers, as Rabin once said and Ariel Sharon more or less repeated ten years later, slowly choking off our democracy until we become an apartheid state. But my story includes them, too. I’m mindful of what Uri Elitzur, a right-wing settler-activist, once said in response to the hatred spewed toward his kind by the Israeli left: “You expelled the Palestinians in 1948. You did not allow them to return; you established communities on top of all their villages. After that you built a separation fence and then you came complaining to us, even though we never destroyed even a single village on the West Bank in order to build a settlement.”
While the truth is a lot more complex than this, kibbutzniks and settlers both believe Jews have a right to the Land of Israel. People forget that it was the secular kibbutz movement, supported by the Labor Party, that first built settlements after 1967, an effort that for many years I, too, backed with every fiber of my being.
The road to Pinchas’s town of Ofra, the crown jewel of our settlements in Judea and Samaria and the throbbing heart of Gush Emunim — the Bloc of the Faithful — took me past Megiddo, better known by its Greek name, Armageddon, and now home to a military prison across the road from a gas station and a McDonald’s. With the Israeli Arab towns of Umm al-Fahm and Tira behind me, I crossed into the West Bank. If I had continued driving east, I would have reached the settlements in the Jordan Valley built by my friends after the Six-Day War.
Once I reached hill country, the air turned drier, so I could finally roll down my windows. The long strings of mountains on both sides of the road make up the heart of the biblical Promised Land. On one of the many hilltops I spotted Beit El, a sprawling settlement of red-tiled houses marking the site where Jacob had his dream: “Behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven…” Every red-tiled house cutting into the hillside represented for me a continuation of the idealism I’d been raised with on a small banana plantation. Like my parents, today’s messianic settlers are convinced they are liberating the Land of Israel.
Driving past the guardhouse at Ofra, I continued up a street of identical stucco homes with neatly trimmed hedges and sprinklers watering the grass. The stiff breeze made all the Israeli flags on the block snap — each house had at least one.
I rang the doorbell, and Pinchas, kippah clipped to what remained of his gray hair, greeted me warmly. “So good to see you again, Ami. It’s been what, ten years?” With his plaid blue short-sleeved shirt and slacks, he could have passed for an ex–banking executive in a retirement community.
I followed him inside, where we sat at the kitchen table. A jar of Nescafé sat open on the counter next to the microwave and framed photos of kids and grandkids. Outside the sliding glass doors stood a clutch of scraggly pines, the kind settlers plant to quickly root themselves, literally and figuratively, to make a new place look like it’s always been there.
Pinchas, like Dani, was well prepared for our conversation. Over a cup of Nescafé, he opened a thick hardcover book full of black-and-white photos of generations of Wallersteins. His father immigrated illegally from Poland in 1936, and like Biba’s mother, Rachel, he got caught by the British overlords, who detained him in a refugee camp in Atlit: Today the headquarters of Flotilla 13 is in the same area. He eventually got out and ended up in the town of Kfar Atta near Haifa and close to the Mediterranean coast, where he somehow rustled up funds to buy a horse and made a living delivering bread to neighboring villages.
Unlike my parents, who left their religion back in Europe, Pinchas continued to practice Orthodox Judaism. During his military service before the Six-Day War, he worked the fields on a kibbutz, an experience that stuck with him because of the insanely hardworking kibbutzniks and their antibourgeois ideals. After his injury in the Golan, Pinchas spent a year in a body cast, dreaming of using his wounded legs again. When he finally got out of the hospital, he headed straight to the religious Kibbutz Ma’ale Gilboa, built on the ruins of the Arab village of Khirbat al-Jawfa. Like Kibbutz Ma’agan, Ma’ale Gilboa was imbued with a Zionist culture marked by hard physical labor, the songs of Naomi Shemer — “Hurshat Ha’Eucalyptus,” The Eucalyptus Grove — and rebellion against middle-class individualism. The Zionist imperative to build, to settle the land, and to defend the community informed everything.
I told Pinchas that I’d long seen parallels between the kibbutz movement and the religious, right-wing settlement movement Gush Emunim. “Is this just coincidence, or is there something more to it?”
Pinchas cracked a smile. “Have I ever told you that we got our heroes, Bar Kokhba and the Maccabees, from the kibbutz movement?” Of course, the secular part of the Zionist revolution — the way my parents erased the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism — Pinchas and his friends respectfully set to one side. What they got from us was how to dig into history books to find their “roots.” Hasmonean leaders from antiquity like John Hyrcanus and Alexander Jannaeus, obscure figures familiar only to history buffs, archaeologists, and us secular Zionists, became their role models.
Because of his war injuries, Pinchas couldn’t quite hack the physical labor required by kibbutz life, so instead of settling down at Ma’ale Gilboa, he traveled from kibbutz to kibbutz like a journeyman, imbibing the spirit of kibbutzim that in Mandatory Palestine functioned like forts in the Wild West — we called them Tower and Stockade settlements.
In 1969 he decided to get a university degree in agriculture. He flipped a few pages in the family album that was open on the table in front of us until he came to the photo of a striking young woman who became his wife. They met at the university, and like Biba she agreed to go along with the crazy dreams of a man who was, as Pinchas described himself at that age, “too young to be a city slicker. I wanted adventure, and I wanted to be a part of building the state.” He just didn’t know how to go about it when all of the kibbutzim in the newly conquered territories were being founded by my friends from the kibbutz movement, secular desecrators of the Sabbath. For the first three years of their marriage, Pinchas grumbled to his wife about being a kibbutznik without a kibbutz.
“It all began after the Yom Kippur War,” he went on to explain. “Because of our losses, I was more frustrated than usual. I was sitting at home when I heard a knock on my door. It was Hanan Porat.”
I nodded knowingly because I had studied Porat, a charismatic genius, during my stint at the Shin Bet. This was after Rabin’s assassination, and I was eager to understand the ideology of the settlement movement, of which he was a leader. As a soldier, he fought in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, helping capture the Temple Mount. In the Yom Kippur War, he was badly wounded. Soon after recovering, he launched the messianic Gush Emunim movement, based on the promise God made in Genesis 15:18: “To your descendants I give this land…”
“I didn’t know Hanan at the time,” Pinchas said, continuing the story. “But somehow he knew me and what I wanted. That evening I heard for the first time about a core group of other Torah-true believers eager to do something. Though hesitant to trust this perfect stranger, how could I say no, after all my bellyaching about there being no outlet for my dreams?”
Porat told Pinchas about his idea to build a religious settlement in the Arab town of Sebastia in the West Bank. The history of Sebastia is as twisted and gnarled as one of my olive trees. A short list of its founders, conquerors, and destroyers includes the Canaanites, the Israelites, Alexander the Great, John Hyrcanus, Pompey, Augustus Caesar (who gave it as a gift to Herod the Great), and a bishop in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.
In 1975, though secular men like Dayan and Shimon Peres were still at the helm of the Labor government, it wasn’t hard for a group of religious Israelis to get started on their quest. The IDF needed to build a fence around the ruins of an Ottoman-era train station to prevent Palestinians from looting the site, so Pinchas and his group, led by Hanan Porat, volunteered to help. Every morning for months they dug ditches and erected sections of wire, before returning to their homes in Jerusalem. At one point they took over a former Jordanian police station and set up camp there. Perhaps they were inspired by my father and his friends, who had taken over an abandoned British army camp to build Kibbutz Ma’agan.
“It’s not as if we were squatters,” Pinchas explained. “We told people inside the army and the government: If you’re against what we are doing, we’ll leave. They said nothing.”
“A wink for you to go ahead,” I added. Today I’m convinced the Labor government quietly created the space for settlements in direct violation of international law explicitly forbidding an occupying power from building on conquered territory. Had I been in the government, I would have done the same thing. The more settlements, the less likely a future American president would force us to hand back the land of our forefathers to our enemies, like Eisenhower had done in 1956 with the Sinai Peninsula.
As Pinchas tells the story, Dayan and Peres didn’t think the Arabs would care if we built on barren hilltops, especially because the roads we built connecting Israel with new settlements also ferried Palestinian workers to jobs at Israeli factories. Sebastia was just the start of the settlement drive, of course. After Menachem Begin and the Likud Party took power in 1977, settlers were championed by the new government as pioneers for Zion.
Pinchas, though, cautioned me from making too much of the Likud. “Begin couldn’t say enough about Judea and Samaria belonging to us, but he didn’t know the first thing about settling and defending territory. Likud politicians, city folk for the most part, could go on and on about settlements in their speeches, but it wasn’t in their blood. Do you think our rabbis were any better? Think again. At first, only a handful of them supported us. So we asked some of your friends at Kibbutz Merom Golan, people with experience, drive, and organizational ability, to help. They came to Ofra and taught us how to settle the land, acre by acre, ditch by ditch, house by house. How to create facts on the ground. It was only once we succeeded that the rabbis and politicians came around.”
And Labor Party support continued through the decades. “Rabin, even if he called us weeds, built bypass roads, tunnels, and bridges that allowed us to thrive. After Rabin’s murder, which shocked me as it did most people, I went on a hunger strike for three days when the army for some reason wouldn’t let us pave a road. Shimon Peres, prime minister at the time, invited me to his office; and you know what? We got our road.”11
So with the help of governments, both left and right, for much of his life Pinchas and his ever-expanding group have been reclaiming real estate they saw as rightfully ours, bestowed by none other than the mighty Word of God, the Bible itself: “And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families.”
I was eager to get back on the road before rush hour hit Route 6. But before squeezing his hand and saying good-bye, I asked Pinchas what he would do if there were a national referendum and a majority voted in favor of a two-state solution: Jewish and Palestinian states based on the old 1967 border, with some minor adjustments. Would he resist evacuation?
Pinchas stood up solemnly, as if saluting a flag. “If the Jewish people in a referendum supported such a decision, I would regard the decision as the voice of God and would comply. Our national sovereignty is more important than the lands of Eretz Israel.”
“More important than Sebastia and Ofra?”
“Ami, I’m a student of Jewish history. In my reading of the three thousand years since the kingdom of David, we forfeit our sovereignty whenever we fight among ourselves. So yes, I would heed the will of the majority.”
When he said this, I reminded myself that he wasn’t propounding a faith in the sort of nonethnic democratic commonwealth Herzl envisioned in Old New Land. The referendum he had in mind would include only Jews; Arab citizens of Isreal wouldn’t count. But at least, when pressed to the wall, he considers the unity of the Jews of Israel more important than the dream of reestablishing the Kingdom of David.
Not all of the settlers feel that way, of course. In the Shabak, I met with the most extremist messianic rabbis and told them that as far as I am concerned, Jewish terrorism and Arab terrorism are the same thing. The murder of an Arab civilian by a Jewish terrorist and the murder of a Jewish civilian by an Arab terrorist are the same crime: murder. I saw a kind of horror in their eyes when I would say this to their faces, and invariably they would try to educate me about the Chosen People and the Redemption of Zion. One settler leader and leader of a terrorist underground group, Yehuda Etzion, once described to me in great detail how he was preparing the altar and the laws of sacrifices for the Third Temple to be built on the ruins of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque. These are the people we should be really afraid of.