Israel's Tragedy Foretold

The New York Times

March 10, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

By GERSHOM GORENBERG
Jerusalem

WITH Israel's national election approaching, each day's news emphasizes a clear political shift: the settlement enterprise has lost the support of the country's mainstream voters.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the front-runner in the March 28 vote, plans to evacuate more West Bank settlements unilaterally, a top figure in his party said this week. Mr. Olmert himself announced he would stop decades of investment in infrastructure for settlements. Those promises reflect a change not only in Mr. Olmert, a lifelong rightist, but in the electorate. Polls show that a strong majority supports parties ready to part with settlements.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire. Sobriety and sadness replace euphoria. Arguments that once turned dissidents into pariahs now seem obvious: in this case, that to keep the West Bank will require Israel either to cease being democratic or to cease being a Jewish state. Not only settlers but national leaders have eroded the rule of law in pursuit of what they considered a patriotic goal.

As an Israeli who has pored over the documentary record of the settlement project, I know there is one more painful, familiar element to this story: the warnings were there from the start and were ignored, kept secret or explained away. Leaders deceived not only the country's citizens, but themselves. So begin national tragedies.

Here is one critical example. In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel's 1948 war of independence.

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