Calling Israel’s March 28 election “a referendum on pulling out of the occupied territories,” journalist Gershom Gorenberg said the situation has reached the point of “not whether Israel will pull out, but how much will we give and how will we do it?”
A former associate editor and columnist for the Jerusalem Report and author of the new book “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977,” Gorenberg spoke at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo on Monday night, April 3. Norm Frankel, Beth El’s executive director, introduced Gorenberg, his friend since their college days at U.C. Santa Cruz. Gorenberg and his family now live in Jerusalem.
Gorenberg discussed how idealism and political agendas came to shape Israel’s settlement policy after the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel took over land it won in the conflict with Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
When the secular left and religious Zionists broke in the 1970s after the Yom Kippur War, Gorenberg said, labor leaders who’d settled in Israel in their youth were unable to get their secular children involved. At the same time, he said, religious Zionists seized the opportunity to be at the vanguard.
Gorenberg cited several reasons why settlements developed in occupied territories, including security in geographic distance from Palestinians and a biblical connection many regarded as a historical right to the land. Some leaders of the war had grown up in British Palestine and were returning to the land of their youth, he said. Additionally, many of the settlers ideologically saw themselves at the forefront of the settler movement.
The Knesset did not want to establish Palestinian land, he said, fearing it could eventually lead to the demise of the Zionist state if Jews lost their majority status. Looking at birthrates of Palestinians and Israelis, leaders of the Jewish state calculated that the birthrate of Palestinians would outpace Israeli Jews and overtake them as the majority.
In effect, said Gorenberg, “Israel got a wonderful dowry with the war, the land — though the war also got them the bride, the people.”
Gorenberg said that every step in the peace process had been facilitated by the United States, which “has been AWOL from the process since Jan. 20, 2001,” when President Bush was inaugurated.
Though Israel has been looking for an Arab partner with which to talk, this has been difficult when the Palestinians deny the existence of an Israeli state, he said. Gorenberg suggested that Hamas, the victor in January’s Palestinian election, needs to moderate its position.
As for the construction of Israel’s security barrier miles near and inside the “green line,” the border established by the 1949 armistice between Israel and Palestinian territories, Gorenberg said Ariel Sharon had opposed the creation of a wall as tactical defense. And while the government states publicly that the barrier is not the border or de facto annexation, he said, public sentiment contradicts this.
Susan Silver of Mountain View asked how many settlers would be displaced as Israel gives up some of the territories. Gorenberg replied that estimates are at around 70,000 to 90,000 settlers.
The discussion closed with a reception and book signing.
Gorenberg, whose sister Carol lives in the Bay Area, also spoke at U.C. Santa Cruz on Tuesday, April 4, and was to speak later in the week at Congregations Kol Shofar in Tiburon and Netivot Shalom in Berkeley.