Israel

Israel now had a policy known as the “Begin Doctrine,” which would endure long after Begin himself was gone from the political arena. It held that Israel would not countenance any of its mortal enemies seeking to develop or acquire a weapon of mass destruction

The PLO leadership and thousands of its fighters, expelled from Jordan, fled to southern Lebanon. By 1975, civil unrest had broken out in Lebanon—which had long had a precarious and tense agreement between Muslims and Christians—and all-out civil war would follow. The “Paris of the Middle East” would eventually lie in rubble, and largely because of Arafat, Lebanon’s days as a functioning country were numbered

No peace, no recognition, and no negotiations” became a mantra of the Arab world

WHAT TO DO WITH the captured territories now became the most contentious issue in Zionism. In the movement’s early years, Herzl had sought a state, while Ahad Ha’am insisted that statehood would be a mistake and that the Jews should build a cultural center—but nothing more—in Palestine. Later there had been the battle between Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, between the mainstream Zionists and the Revisionists, about how much to resist the Ottomans and the British to push them out of Palestine. Years later, Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin locked horns over German reparations—and more deeply about the role that Jewish memory ought to play in determining Israel’s policies and political agenda. Now, it was Right versus Left, settlers versus those who thought Israel should relinquish the land it had captured. As with the prior ideological debates, this was no pro-Zionist/anti-Zionist split. It was a deep divide between two camps who loved the Jewish state and who were committed to its flourishing—but who disagreed about what course of action would best protect its soul

The return to Gush Etzion was far more than a general drive to settle the land, or to change Israel’s physical and political landscape. Porat and his friends were going home. They were returning to the land where most of them had been born, the land that their mothers and fathers had cultivated and on which they had built their homes and their community. It was the place their fathers had died trying to defend, where their parents had been massacred.

Not all religious Jews saw matters that way, however. A notable exception was one of Israel’s most important public intellectuals, an Orthodox Jew, Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. For Leibowitz, the principal religious obligation that flowed from the victory in June 1967 was for Israel to save its soul. To do that, he insisted, Israel needed to withdraw from the territories it had captured, so Israelis would not be imposing their rule on a foreign population

Displaced by the fighting in 1948, some 135 Arab families had sought refuge there and had lived there ever since. On the evening of June 10, with the military’s approval, the families in the Mughrabi Quarter were instructed to leave the area so it could be cleared out to create a wide plaza to accommodate large crowds in front of the Western Wall. Soon thereafter, army bulldozers rolled into the square to level the homes and to enable mass access to the wall.

Meir, who was renowned for her wit, noted with bitter irony that a
comfortable division has been made. The Arab states unilaterally enjoy the “rights of war” [while] Israel has the unilateral responsibility of keeping the peace. But belligerency is not a one way street. Is it then surprising if a people laboring under this monstrous distinction should finally become restive and at last seek a way of rescuing its life from the perils of the regulated war that is conducted against it from all sides

In October 2006, Israel’s minister of education, Yuli Tamir, instructed Israeli schools to commemorate the Kafr Kassem massacre and to reflect upon the need to disobey patently immoral orders. In December 2007, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, attended a reception in Kafr Kassem during the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, and asked for the community’s forgiveness. “A terrible event happened here in the past, and we are deeply sorry for it,” he said. In October 2014, Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s tenth president, became the first to attend the annual memorial ceremony at Kafr Kassem

Like the state to which he devoted his life, Sharon seemed to lack a coherent, consistent policy, and at times appeared internally contradictory. In his mind, however, his principles never varied: Israel’s survival depended on being both powerful and smart. Survival would require very different policies in different periods. Sometimes it would demand taking the fight to the enemy, wherever it might be; at other times, it would mean retrenching and withdrawing from territory Israel once held. Sharon did both, and more. Decades later, a government commission would censure Sharon for allowing Lebanese Christians to slaughter Muslims in the Lebanon War of 1982. But years after he was censured, Sharon was elected prime minister, and in 2005, he single-handedly initiated and masterminded Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza