16ISRAELI SOCIETY AFTER THE YOM KIPPUR WAR

When the Yom Kippur War broke out, Israel was in the midst of an election campaign in which Golda Meir’s slogan claimed that the country’s situation had never been better. Given the war and its aftermath this choice of slogan was rather ironic. The elections were postponed until late December 1973 and held while the country was still in shock and while the disengagement negotiations were taking place. The Alignment (Hamaʿarakh) comprising the Labor Party reestablished in 1968 as a unified party with Mapam, Rafi, and Ahdut Haʿavoda lost five seats in the Knesset, dropping from fifty-six to fifty-one. This weakened it but did not cause its loss of hegemony. The Likud (comprising Gahal and some small right-wing parties), appearing in these elections for the first time, won thirty-nine seats (Gahal had won twenty-six in the 1969 elections). The result was a substantial shift in the balance of power between left and right.

Golda Meir, however, managed to form a coalition with the National Religious Party. She insisted that Moshe Dayan continue as minister of defense. The Israeli public, whose pressure had brought about Dayan’s appointment to the defense portfolio on the eve of the Six-Day War, had put almost unlimited faith in Dayan as the man in charge of Israel’s security. Now their idol had let them down. It was a painful, difficult, unforgiving disappointment. Initially Dayan refused to join the government. However, Meir saw his refusal not as a bowing to public opinion, which blamed him for the failures, but as an attempt to torpedo the government she had worked so hard to form. Dayan eventually capitulated and joined the government.

In the meantime public pressure had led to formation of the Agranat Commission, an independent commission of inquiry chaired by a Supreme Court justice, which was to determine who was responsible for the mehdal (failure or great blunder) of the army being taken by surprise and unprepared for war. The commission’s report apportioned blame among Chief of the General Staff David Elazar, the head of military intelligence and several of his aides, and Head of Southern Command Shmuel Gonen. The chief of staff and the other IDF officers were relieved of their duties. The commission chose not to blame the civilian leadership, a verdict received angrily by broad segments of the public, who expected justice to be meted out to the political leadership. The soldiers back from the war took part in mass demonstrations outside the government offices under the slogan “Dayan—Resign!”

In the face of this public outcry, Golda Meir resigned on April 11, 1974, mandating the resignation of her government. The Labor Party central committee convened to elect her successor. The party’s veterans and its left wing (formerly Ahdut Haʿavoda) favored Yitzhak Rabin. Shimon Peres, a close friend of Dayan, was the candidate of another section of the party and its right wing (formerly Rafi). Rabin won by a small margin. A new government was formed in June 1974 by Rabin, the Six-Day War chief of the General Staff, who had recently completed his tenure as Israel’s ambassador to Washington, DC, and had served in a minor ministerial post in Golda Meir’s previous government. Although he was inexperienced as a politician, his nonparticipation in the decisions leading up to the Yom Kippur War was a point in his favor. Shimon Peres was named minister of defense.

Thus, almost unnoticed, a change of generations took place in Israel’s leadership. Golda Meir came from the “founding generation” that had immigrated to Palestine in the early twentieth century and been part of all the enterprises and travails preceding statehood. It was a resolute, tough generation of leaders formed by the crises of the Yishuv period, World War Two, and Israel’s wars. When Levi Eshkol died in 1969, the baton of leadership should have been passed to the native-son generation that fought in the War of Independence. But out of fear that a contest between the two candidates, Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, would tear the party apart, Golda Meir was chosen as an interim measure to defer the internal struggle. With Golda’s departure the veterans’ generation, which saw itself as personally responsible for the fate of the Zionist enterprise, left the political stage.

After the Yom Kippur War Israeli politics moved from the corridors of power and the established frameworks of Israeli democracy into the street. Political protest as a permanent event, expressed in demonstrations and mass pressure on the government aimed at influencing policy, was previously unheard of in Israel. There were protest movements such as the Black Panthers and a women’s demonstration at Mapai headquarters calling for Dayan’s appointment as minister of defense on the eve of the Six-Day War, but they were fleeting or small in scale. Now for the first time movements appeared that succeeded in mobilizing the masses in repeated demonstrations. This phenomenon seems linked to the appearance of television in Israel. The Yom Kippur War was the first of Israel’s wars to take place in the television era. The immediacy of visual information brought the war and its horrors into every home, creating a sort of virtual community of participants in the experience that united the troops at the front and their families at home. Initially the demonstrations comprised only a few people, but the telecasts showing the demonstrators and their placards turned a relatively marginal phenomenon into a central one in Israeli life. Because of this exposure they gained momentum week by week.

The first wave of protest movements called for Dayan’s head. Participants came from left and right alike, soldiers and bereaved families, demanding that the man they considered responsible for the mehdal take responsibility for it. As noted, the Agranat Commission report placed all the blame on the military, while exonerating the political leadership that gave the military its orders. Until then the principle that a leadership was obligated to take public responsibility for its acts and omissions had not been put into practice in Israeli politics (and it is doubtful that it was strictly adhered to in Western democracies). It was inconceivable that Ben-Gurion would be called upon to resign after defeats in the War of Independence. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was not viewed as a failure of President Roosevelt’s. In terms of the sensitivity of both the public and the leadership to the leaders’ obligation to own up to mishaps, blunders, and failures, and also the ability of public opinion to influence the centers of government, 1974 was a watershed year. The demand that the leadership assume responsibility for a failure, especially if it involved loss of life, recurred in Israeli politics from then on.

Together with this protest movement, which did not represent a specific political group, another new movement appeared: Gush Emunim. It originated in spontaneous organizations of young yeshiva students, especially from the Merkaz Harav yeshiva, students from yeshivot hesder (yeshiva programs that combine advanced Talmudic studies with service in the IDF ), graduates of the Bnei Akiva religious youth movement, devotees of Greater Israel from both religious and nonreligious camps, and veterans of settlement in the occupied territories (Hanan Porat from the Etzion Bloc; Rabbi Moshe Levinger from Hebron; and Yehuda Harel from the Golan Heights). Fully aware of the despair and pain prevailing among the Israeli public in the aftermath of the war, they discerned that the government was willing to make territorial concessions in Sinai and the Golan Heights and feared that the bitter war with its numerous casualties would lead the government to yield to American pressure for an Israeli withdrawal.

As we have seen, since the Six-Day War the Israeli public had been divided on the future of the occupied territories between those who saw them as collateral held by Israel until the Arabs saw fit to reach a peace agreement and those who asserted, “Liberated land shall not be returned” and “Not one inch.” The left viewed the war and its terrible cost as the result of unwillingness to compromise and withdraw from territory in exchange for an agreement (for even less than peace) and demanded flexibility regarding territorial concessions. The right, especially the founders of Gush Emunim, saw the war as proof of the Arabs’ resolve to destroy Israel and concluded that there should be no concessions or policy that might be construed as submitting to pressure, since that would only invite further, unending pressure. To the right the war and its outcome was a great victory, the likes of which had not been seen since 1948; they paid no attention to the weaknesses it had exposed or, even more to the point, the price it had exacted.

The circles that founded Gush Emunim came mainly from the national-religious bloc. Gershon Shafat, a founder-member, wrote that despair and pain had evoked in the members “new hope for a new beginning, a beginning derived from unshakable faith in The Creator and the command imposed on us to go forward.”1 These assertions are appropriate to a messianic movement guided by a hidden divine commandment revealed only to its adherents, which ignores reality in the name of a loftier truth. They do not involve rational consideration of what is possible and desirable; rather, they impose a concept of faith on reality and act in accordance with it. This frame of mind ran counter to the fundamental Zionist concept that viewed the return to Zion as a project coming to fruition in the real world, while abiding by the real world’s constraints.

For Gush Emunim the natural channel for political activity was the NRP. Yet although the party’s “youngsters,” led by Zevulun Hammer and Yehuda Ben-Meir, were stronger, the party was not controlled by its Greater Israel devotees, and its positions were politically moderate. Its leadership, headed by the experienced veteran Yosef Burg, sought to continue the party’s “historical alliance” with the Labor Party. Gush Emunim and the younger leaders demanded that the NRP not join Golda Meir’s government after the December 1973 elections unless she agreed to form a national unity government. The Labor Party rejected this idea, since such a government would undermine any possibility of an agreement with Egypt and Syria. And that was precisely what Gush Emunim wanted. Once the group’s members realized they would be unable to act through the NRP, they chose an extra-parliamentary strategy. The disengagement negotiations with Egypt indicated that the danger they had predicted in any progress toward an agreement was imminent, for it was clear that Israel would be compelled to concede territory. Although it was difficult to contend that Sinai or the Golan Heights—both outside the borders of the historical Land of Israel—were “the land of our forefathers,” the willingness to relinquish territory occupied in the Six-Day War pointed to a trend that in time was likely to affect Judea and Samaria.

The first demonstrations against the disengagement agreement were organized by right-wing intellectuals and political activists. But Gush Emunim swiftly made its mark on these actions. In contrast with the small number of participants in the right’s demonstrations, and especially the difficulty people had in continuing to demonstrate over time, Gush Emunim mobilized settlers from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights and “settled” outside the Knesset and the prime minister’s office. They came one day with their wives and children, set up a temporary encampment, and by the next morning some two thousand people in prayer shawls were standing beneath the windows of the cabinet conference room, an image that was immediately broadcast on television. Gush Emunim’s mobilization capability was total. It was not restricted by either financial constraints or another agenda. Each time Kissinger shuttled to Israel, he was met by stormy demonstrations and roads blocked by Gush Emunim.

During the difficult negotiations with Syria in May 1974, when it appeared that the sticking point between Israel and Syria was the fate of Kuneitra, settlers from the Golan Heights established an unsanctioned “settlement” in a bunker in the deserted town. The first ones were nonreligious members of kibbutzim and moshavim. Once they realized that their movement, Hakibbutz Hameuhad, did not support them, they handed the settlement over to a Gush Emunim group that had undertaken to establish a permanent settlement, with the proviso that if the government demanded that they move to another location, they would do so. And that is what happened. Kuneitra was eventually vacated, but Keshet, the illegal settlement, became a permanent settlement on the Golan Heights in Israeli territory. Thus was set a precedent of establishing a settlement without government approval, and receiving that approval retroactively. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten.

At this early stage the Gush Emunim modus operandi was already set: mass mobilization of settlers, yeshiva students, and other students from the national-religious education system; use of the settlements’ logistical resources to mobilize and maintain demonstrations; long-term protests; and illegal settlement with the help of supporters or quasi-supporters from the military and political establishments. What made this effort possible was the religious fervor that drove the Gush leadership and endowed it and its supporters with extraordinary mental fortitude at a time of waning confidence and loss of direction in Israeli society. Poet Yehuda Amichai gave expression to the connection between the trauma of the war and the strengthening of messianic movements: “This is a country whose dead are in the earth / In place of coal and gold and iron / They are the fuel for the coming of messiahs.”2

The hard core of the Gush was small, as was evident during the Rabin government’s term of office when the same Elon Moreh core group settled in different locations as a protest against the government’s refusal to permit Jewish settlement in the heart of Judea and Samaria. It was a sort of wandering group of activists that initiated settlement at a specific location, announced the action through social and study networks to mobilize supporters, and then, once they had embarrassed the government, which had them removed, would plan their next settlement in a different location. Each time a political decision was on the agenda, the Gush communication network would heat up and go into action to mobilize the masses. During the negotiations on the interim agreement with Egypt, Gush demonstrators accompanied Kissinger throughout his stay in Israel, making life a misery for him and his bodyguards and chanting antisemitic epithets such as “Jew-boy” (an allusion to a Jew in the service of non-Jewish rulers).

It was not only the self-sacrifice of the Gush and the eagerness of its youngsters to take part in its demonstrations as a break from their daily religious study routine (especially since this allowed boys and girls to engage in joint activities and hike all over the country) that worked successfully for the movement. It was also the government’s indecisiveness in the face of the Gush activists’ resolve. That indecisiveness accompanied settlement activity from the start. When Rabbi Levinger refused to leave Hebron, he was supported by Yigal Allon, even though settlement in that city contravened the Allon Plan. Settlement in the Etzion Bloc resonated with the mythology of the loss of the bloc in the 1948 war and received government approval after pressure was exerted. Gush Emunim adamantly refused to settle within the borders of the Allon Plan, which although not officially accepted by the government was the de facto guideline for Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. Defiance of the prohibition of settlement in the densely Arab-populated heart of Samaria was a declaration of intent: the government must be prevented from compromising on areas of the historical Land of Israel.

The inhabitants of the settlements along the River Jordan, in the Rafah Approach, and on the Golan Heights, settlements established in accordance with the Allon Plan, gave the Gush Emunim settlers a tailwind as well as moral and material support. To those settlers and their supporters, the messianic fervor of Gush Emunim and their mobilization to settle the Land of Israel were a continuation of the enthusiasm of the labor movement settlers along the borders. The two types seemed similar: the fruit of youth movement education with the same simplicity, the same direct approach, the same straight-talking sabra Hebrew. To all appearances only the yarmulke and observance of the commandments separated the pre-Six-Day War settlers, the later “Allon Plan settlers,” and the new settlers who operated on the other side of the Green Line and usually challenged governmental authority. Gush Emunim exploited their similarity with the other settlers to bolster their legitimacy in the eyes of Labor ministers. What is the difference between Jewish settlement in Afula and in Samaria, they argued. Both had the same degree of legitimacy, deriving from the Jewish people’s right to its homeland. They swiftly developed the notion that they were the true successors of the early pioneers, a legitimate branch of the tree of Zionist pioneering that had settled the country. They had received the torch from the nonreligious pioneers, who had lost their fervor and whose time was past. Now the time of religious Zionism had come, which was raising the banner of the new pioneering. “Handing over the torch” symbolized what they perceived as an essential change needed in Israeli culture: the shift from secular to religious hegemony. Not only were these new settlers the implementers of the Zionist pioneering endeavor, they were also the forerunners of Israeli culture, owning “the full cart” of traditional Jewish culture, as opposed to the nihilistic secular Jews, who had lost direction and whose cart was empty of values and true meaning.

During 1975 evacuation of illegal settlers from areas of Judea and Samaria was a permanent part of the IDF’s daily routine, a recurring ritual that neither side took very seriously. This nonchalance came to an end with a clash at the Sebastia settlement, initiated by Gush Emunim. In early December 1975 hundreds, and perhaps more, Gush Emunim members and their supporters went to the old railway station at Sebastia, stubbornly insisting that they would remain there, in contrast to previous instances when they had agreed to leave. All attempts at persuading them to leave voluntarily so as to avoid military force were fruitless. It was also clear that if the army evacuated them forcibly, they would reenact the same performance a few weeks later. As the settlers remained in place, the fear of the need to use force against them heightened. The press began to show sympathy for these young people who did not flinch from the harsh living conditions, remaining on-site with their wives and children, exposed to the wind, rain, and cold. The television images highlighted their self-sacrifice. Nor was the army eager for the confrontation that would occur if it had to evacuate them by force. A compromise began to emerge that the government eventually accepted. A thirty-family group of settlers would be housed in the nearby Kadum army camp, and the army would provide them with employment.

This was a breakthrough for Gush Emunim: the beginnings of settlement in Samaria. “Some would call this the course of history. The believers will call it realization of the will of Divine Providence,” wrote Gershon Shafat, a leading player in this drama.3 As for the government, it suffered a harsh blow to its authority. During the discussions that ultimately led to the compromise with Gush Emunim, the memory of the Altalena and the need to impose the state’s authority were evoked. But Rabin was not Ben-Gurion, and his government, which relied on a small majority in the Knesset and was divided between supporters of Rabin and Peres, did not dare undertake an action that might lead to Jewish bloodshed caused by other Jews. In the midst of this crisis, representatives of Jewish communities in other parts of the world convened in Jerusalem to express their solidarity with Israel in the wake of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. Rabin was understandably reluctant to present them with a scene of the IDF using force against Jews. Gush Emunim’s victory in the Sebastia affair proved that a small but determined minority, prepared to go to the brink of violent confrontation, could impose its will on a vacillating government.

The Rabin government did not enjoy many good days. As part of the interim agreement with Egypt, Rabin obtained a package of economic benefits, as well as large allocations of advanced weaponry that the United States had agreed to supply, above and beyond what Israel had received in the past. But the war cost Israel $8 billion, a vast sum that severely depleted the country’s foreign currency reserves and led to a huge deficit in its balance of payments. The rise in oil prices and the resulting global economic crisis also burdened the Israeli economy. The government had to cut its spending and lower the country’s standard of living. Tens of thousands of workers lost their jobs. In the Rabin government’s first year, annual inflation passed 50 percent. To curb inflation and improve the balance of payments, the lira was substantially devalued. At the end of 1975 the rate of exchange was nine lirot to the dollar, compared with 4.2 lirot to the dollar before the emergency economic program. Inflation began to drop but was still above 30 percent annually.

But while the economy showed signs of recovery and the gross national product rose, the lowering of the standard of living and high unemployment, together with continuing inflation, did nothing to boost the government’s popularity. Economics experts argued that these measures were vital for economic recovery, but the public refused to accept this. There were demonstrations by the Black Panthers and other protest organizations. Workers called upon to tighten their belts responded with a series of strikes that hit the economy and prevented implementation of some of the government’s reforms. In the medium and long terms, the reforms in taxation, subsidies, wages, export incentives, and devaluation ultimately benefited the economy. But in the short term they aroused public hostility.

An atmosphere of gloom and dissatisfaction pervaded the country, remnants of the national trauma of the war. Israelis neither forgot nor forgave the Labor Party for the mehdal. The conflicts between left and right sharpened when “territorial compromise” and “not one inch” occupied a permanent place in the headlines—even though no Arab leader had shown himself open to territorial compromises. Fears of the PLO’s rise in the international arena and Zionism’s loss of legitimacy were also worrying. In addition the Rabin government was damaged by several serious cases of corruption involving figures connected with the Labor Party. These affairs further damaged the government’s reputation. There was a sense of loss of direction. In 1975 Yehonatan Geffen gave expression to this feeling in a pop song titled “Yakhol Lihyot Shezeh Nigmar” (Perhaps it’s over): “They say it was great here before I was born / And everything was just wonderful until I arrived.” He enumerates a series of Zionist symbols from the Mandate period, such as Little Tel Aviv and the sand dunes, the swamps and the mosquitoes; quotes lines from old Zionist songs like “For This Is Our Land”; and contrasts nostalgia for the past with the present: “They say that there was a wonderful dream here once / But when I came to see I didn’t find a thing. / Perhaps it’s over.”

In 1968, when the Labor Party was formed as a union of Ahdut Haʿavoda, Rafi, and Mapai, the former two factions, which had left the party in the previous generation, had ostensibly “come home.” But actually the wings of the party were strengthened at the expense of the old Mapai. Mapai’s decline had begun with the Lavon Affair, in which the party’s veterans fought one another fiercely, with Ben-Gurion and Pinchas Lavon leading the fray—prepared, like Von Kleist’s character Michael Kohlhaas, to destroy the party for the sake of justice. Mapai, which had been the anchor of every political alliance, gradually faded away, leaving the arena to the two wings, which were preoccupied mostly with competing with each other. The political moderation and keen sense of reality that had characterized the historical Mapai—together with a total commitment to the public interest, as its leaders understood it—won the party the trust of broad segments of the Israeli public, who saw it as a balanced, responsible force that could navigate Israel to a safe haven. But now the public felt that the party had lost its moorings, its leadership was weak and divided, and it was not providing direction to a nation in crisis.

In the reality of the 1970s, with the emergence of a new middle class comprising people from the liberal professions, businessmen, and various types of contractors, and clearly oriented toward capitalism, the old socialist slogans sounded hollow. The Rabin government’s attempts to institute social norms promoting accurate income tax statements and to fight what was known as the “black economy” hit the middle class and did not inspire sympathy for the government. Israeli welfare policy functioned to prevent wide socioeconomic gaps in Israeli society, which up to the early 1970s maintained (relative to Western countries) a high level of equality. Now arguments were heard for a free market economy and a decrease in state involvement. Intellectuals and businessmen demanded that the socialist ethos be replaced by a Western liberal ethos emphasizing individual rights and freedoms, as opposed to the rights of the collective. There was a feeling that the Labor Party had run its course and it was time for a change of government.

The corruption scandals that rocked the country during those years also undermined trust in the government. The standards expected of a government changed; what had been acceptable in the early years, such as the use of state resources to advance the Histadrut economy, was now rejected out of hand, and Israel accepted the conventional governmental norms of Western countries. The corruption cases exposed the existence of the old norms, but also highlighted the transparency of the new norms that were now expected from the government. Television broadcasts focused on the scandals, emphasized government weaknesses, and presented the leaders as laughingstocks, especially in the satirical TV revue Nikui Rosh (head cleaning), which became very successful. Satirizing government figures was another new, previously unknown practice.

The Arab population of Israel underwent a shift in identity and a psychological change as a result of its encounter with the Arabs of the occupied territories. At first the Israeli Arabs boasted of their economic achievements compared with those of their brethren from the West Bank. But as time went by, their identification with the Palestinian people became stronger, while their sense of identity as Israeli citizens weakened. This process gained impetus due to the Yom Kippur War and the dramatically heightened international status of the PLO. During the Nasser period pan-Arabism was popular among Israeli Arabs. When he died, they mourned him as a symbol of pan-Arabism. But the Arab states’ military failures and the relatively scant attention paid to the Palestinian issue weakened this nationalist pan-Arab connection, and Palestinian identity became the shaper of Israeli Arabs’ national character.

This change was revealed in reduced support for moderate Arab politicians who considered the existence of the State of Israel a fait accompli and sought to integrate into it. The moderates fought for equal rights and to raise the status of the Israeli Arabs, while maintaining channels of communication with the authorities and avoiding confrontation with them. Most were represented by parties associated with either the ruling party or Mapam. Now Arab public opinion perceived them as servants of the Jews who were not fighting the battle for Palestinian rights. The parties allied with the Jewish sector declined. Rakah (New Communist List), composed mainly of Arabs, rose, in comparison to Maki (Israeli Communist Party), whose members were Jews. Unlike the PLO, whose covenant claimed rule over all of Western Palestine and removal of Jews who came to the country after 1918, Rakah was loyal to the Moscow line that recognized Israel’s right to exist. However, it underwent processes of radicalization that were also influenced by increased Soviet support of the PLO. Rakah studiously avoided illegal activities and restricted itself to protests, parliamentary activity, and publications. It warned of discrimination against the Arab minority, but at this stage did not encourage people to take to the streets in protest, fearing it would lose control of them, which might lead to suppression by the authorities. Attainment of equal rights was at the top of the Israeli Arab agenda, and since Rakah had championed this cause for years, its status was enhanced.

The increased radicalization of the Arab citizens of Israel arose from several factors. The first was demographic growth. In 1949 some 150,000 Arabs lived in Israel. By the mid-1970s this figure had reached half a million. This population increase created a sense of increased power. Second, the behavior of the Arabs of Judea and Samaria influenced the Arabs of Israel. In the first half of 1976, there was a flood of demonstrations in the West Bank due to the PLO’s heightened status and the Palestinian population’s growing identification with it after the Rabat summit. In addition radical PLO supporters were elected in the municipal campaign held in April 1976. The Gush Emunim settlement at Kadum and other, government-initiated settlements also enraged the Arab population. On television the Arabs of Israel saw their West Bank brethren hurling stones and Molotov cocktails at IDF soldiers and learned from their methods. Third, the situation of the Israeli Arabs caused discomfort. Members of the Arab intelligentsia compared themselves with the university graduates on the West Bank, noted the comparatively high standard of high schools there, and realized they were in an inferior position. From that point on Israeli Arabs no longer compared their situation with what it had been before Israeli statehood, but with the progress made in the Jewish sector. The leaders claimed that discrimination was practiced against Arabs in the education system and in allocations for building classrooms, libraries, laboratories, and sports facilities. They also came out against the minimal teaching standards, which they claimed were designed to keep the Arabs ignorant so as to provide manual laborers with low status and low wages. The Ministry of Education was accused of discrimination against the Arab heritage in its curricula in order to obscure Arab national identity. These claims were not unfounded.

A central issue in the propaganda and protests of Rakah and the radicals was the Arab village. Although agriculture in the villages had advanced, irrigation projects were undertaken, and houses had running water, the protest leaders contended that the Arab farmers were discriminated against with respect to government guidance and aid and marketing conditions. A core problem they raised was land. In Palestinian culture the land (al-ʿard) is not just a means of production but a symbol of possession; there is an unbreakable bond between the farmer and his land on both personal and political levels. The land is the homeland. It was not by chance that at the end of the 1950s a nationalist movement named Al-ʿArd appeared in the Arab sector. It was outlawed. In the 1950s the state expropriated large tracts of land for development. Throughout the 1960s and up to the mid-1970s, there were no expropriations, yet the sensitivity toward land continued, and Rakah promoted this issue as a central component of the local identity.

In the summer of 1975 there was news of government plans for the “Judaization of Galilee” that would include expropriation of certain lands. The Arabs perceived the term “Judaization of Galilee” as a plot aimed at neutralizing their dominance in this region, which had an Arab majority. Village committees were set up to defend the land. In February 1976 news emerged of a government decision to expropriate some 5,000 acres, of which 1,750 were Arab-owned and the rest either Jewish-owned or state lands. The decision also spoke of compensating the landowners and the possibility of land exchange. But neither the fact that the expropriation was relatively small nor the attempt to soften the blow with compensation prevented the ensuing uproar. On March 30, 1976, the Committee for the Defense of Arab Lands, run by Rakah and other nationalist entities, declared a general strike—Land Day—“as an expression of the genuine anger beating in the soul of our people against the policy aimed at uprooting us from every piece of land we own.”4 During the strike the protesters threw stones and cans of burning kerosene at the security forces and erected barricades of rocks and burning tires on the roads. The curfew imposed on the Galilee and Triangle villages was not observed, and the protesters clashed with police and army forces. In shooting incidents six Arabs were killed and dozens wounded, along with numerous policemen and soldiers.

Since then Land Day has become a key date on the calendar for the Arabs in Israel, the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and even the Palestinian diaspora, as a symbol of national solidarity and unity of objective. And since then the agenda of the Israeli Arabs has included the demand to establish a Palestinian state side by side with the State of Israel as an expression of the Palestinian right to self-determination. Land Day and its associated events exposed the Jewish public to the bitterness and outrage of the Arabs of Israel. But it is doubtful that it helped bring the majority and minority closer together. The Jews saw Arab violence as a demonstration of the government’s loss of control and of the urgent need to increase the number of Jews in Galilee. From the Rabin government’s point of view, Land Day was another development that weakened its status.

In July 1976 the government did have a gratifying moment when an elite IDF unit freed the hostages from a hijacked airliner in Entebbe, Uganda. This Air France plane took off from Israel and was hijacked after a stopover in Athens, then flown to Uganda, whose ruler, Idi Amin, cooperated with the hijackers. The hijackers demanded the release of terrorists held in Israel, Germany, and other countries. After a few days of anxiety during which the government authorized Rabin to negotiate with the hijackers, the IDF formulated a plan to free the hostages, who were being held six thousand kilometers from Israel. The government approved the operation. Hercules transport aircraft carried the IDF force, and the mission was accomplished with very few casualties. It was a daring operation, executed in exemplary fashion. For a day or two Israel forgot its day-to-day troubles and the depression that had prevailed since the war and celebrated the operation’s success, which garnered superlatives in the world press. But the reprieve did not last long.

In December 1976 the first F-15 aircraft arrived in Israel and received a state welcome. Rabin viewed their arrival as an expression of the warm relations he had nurtured with the American administration, and wanted to highlight it. Unfortunately the aircraft arrived on a Friday afternoon. The welcoming ceremony, with an aerobatic display, ran late, and it seems that desecration of the Sabbath by the government ministers and the heads of the army occurred. The ultra-Orthodox parties submitted a motion of no confidence in the government. The NRP now found itself between a rock and a hard place; in the end most of its members abstained in the Knesset vote and did not support the government. Rabin accused them of dereliction of the principle of collective responsibility, to which all ministers were subject. He dismissed three NRP ministers and, using the vote as a pretext to dissolve the government and hold new elections, which he hoped to win with a larger majority, tendered his own resignation to the president. The new elections were set for May 17, 1977.

Rabin’s move was initially seen as promising in light of his popularity after the Entebbe operation. But everything went rapidly awry. At a meeting with Rabin the newly elected President Carter did not hesitate to publicly express support for the idea of “a Palestinian homeland.” The press reports on the meeting indicated that previous agreements between Rabin and the American administration had not been taken into consideration, and that the president had exerted brutal pressure—bordering on insult—on the prime minister. At home Shimon Peres again announced that he would run against Rabin at the party central committee, even though Rabin was an incumbent prime minister. Rabin won again at the committee, albeit by a very small majority, reflecting diminishing support.

A new party, Dash (a Hebrew acronym for Democratic Movement for Change), was formed, which expressed the public’s dissatisfaction with the existing parties and leadership. Dash was proof of the decline of the socialist ethos and the rise of the civil-liberal one. A typical centrist party representing the educated middle class, it was joined by fragments of parties such as the liberal Shinui (change) and the right-wing Hamerkaz Hahofshi (the free center). Its main power lay in the list of impressive figures from industry, the security establishment, and academe who joined it. Dash was headed by former chief of the General Staff Yigael Yadin, now a professor of archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Yadin, the uncrowned prince of Israeli politics, had been asked more than once to join one party or another in a leadership role, but he remained a tantalizing enigma since he never dipped his toes into the hot water of politics. Dash seemed an attractive alternative to the Labor Party, whose star had dimmed. Rabin, the successor of the old guard, could not convince the Israeli public that he was a real leader capable of meeting the challenges the country faced. Dash, with its impressive, experienced figures from the important fields of security, economics, and policy, appeared to have strong potential for leadership. It offered an agenda that was moderate-liberal in terms of civil society, and moderate-activist from a security angle. Surveys showed a meteoric rise in its apparent support from voters. On top of everything, in March 1977 Rabin was hit by a scandal involving a bank account in dollars that his wife continued to hold in New York after he had completed his term as ambassador in the United States. Israeli currency regulations at the time forbade Israelis to hold foreign accounts. Deciding to stand by his wife, Rabin withdrew his candidacy and was replaced by Shimon Peres. Thus did the Israeli political system move into the 1977 elections.

NOTES

1.Gershon Shafat, Gush emunim: hasippur meʾahorei haklaʿim (Gush Emunim: The Story behind the Scenes), Beit-El: Beit-El Library Publications, 1995, p. 33.

2.Amichai, “Shirei eretz tzion Yerushalayim,” p. 12.

3.Shafat, Gush emunim: hasippur meʾahorei haklaʿim, p. 220.

4.Al-Ittihad, 9.3.1976, cited in Eli Rekhess, Hamiʿut haʿaravi beYisrael: bein communism leleumiyut aravit, 1945–1991 (The Arab Minority in Israel: Between Communism and Arab Nationalism, 1945–1991), Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University and Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1993, p. 80.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

English

Horowitz, Dan, and Lissak, Moshe, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel, New York: State University of New York Press, 1989.

Rabin, Yitzhak, The Rabin Memoirs, Boston: Little, Brown, 1979.

Slater, Robert, Rabin of Israel, London: Robson Books, 1977.

Smooha, Sammy, and Cibulski, Ora, Social Research on Arabs in Israel, Haifa: University of Haifa, 1987.

Hebrew

Goldstein, Yossi, Rabin: biografia (Rabin: A Biography), Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken, 2006.

Raʿanan, Zvi, Gush emunim, Tel Aviv: Sifriat Hapoalim, 1980.

Rekhess, Eli, Hamiʿut haʿaravi beYisrael: bein communism leleumiyut aravit, 1945–1991 (The Arab Minority in Israel: Between Communism and Arab Nationalism, 1945–1991), Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University; Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1993.

Rubinstein, Danny, Mi lashem elai: gush emunim (On the Lord’s Side: Gush Emunim), Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 1982.

Shafat, Gershon, Gush emunim: hasippur meʾakhorei haklaʿim (Gush Emunim: The Story behind the Scenes), Beit-El: Beit-El Library Publications, 1995.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

Barkai, Haim, Economic Patterns in Israel since the Six Day War, Jerusalem: Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, 1988.

Gush Emunim and Religious Zionism

Feige, Michael, Settling in the Hearts: Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009.

Ish Shalom, Benjamin, The World of Rav Kook’s Thought, New York: Avi Chai, 1991.

Autobiography

Dayan, Moshe, Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, New York: Warner Books, 1976.

Kissinger, Henry, The White House Years, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979.

Kissinger, Henry, Years of Upheaval, Boston: Little, Brown, 1982.

Meir, Golda, My Life, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975.