When They Called for a “Jewish Presence in Gaza” in the Labor Party
Yigal Alon demanded a Jewish presence in the center of the Gaza Strip; Haim Gvati was in favor of building a Jewish neighborhood in the center of Gaza City, “just like in Hebron”; Galili heard from Sharon about plans for settlements in the Gaza Strip and his eyes shone; Moshe Kol called for “locating more areas for settlement in the Gaza Strip”; and Rabin, at the ceremony marking the transfer of Netser-Hazani to civilian control, declared that “this is a great day for Israel and for our settlement of the land, a day which symbolizes our adherence to the soil here”; the Labor Party for many years built up Gush Katif
Hagai Huberman
“These settlements are supremely important to the Gaza Strip’s political future, because they split it up south of Gaza City. In addition, a Jewish presence there is also very important from a security point of view”.
When Minister Alon said these words most of the members of the cabinet agreed with him. This was not Beni Elon speaking before his shameful dismissal by the Prime Minister, but the late Yigal Alon, one of the Labor Party’s great leaders, speaking less than a year after the Six Day War, on May 9, 1968.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon can take much of the credit for establishing a Jewish presence in the Gaza Strip. But he was not the first. It was the Labor Party, the same party whose leaders today are among the greatest inciters against the settlers there, which initiated and led the settlement project from its very beginning. Unlike Judea and Samaria, in Gaza there was no “Sebastia”: whereas the settlement in Judea and Samaria was carried out mainly through private initiative (witness the sons of those expelled from Kfar Etzion who returned and reestablished the Kibbutz where they were born; Rabbi Levinger and his colleagues who renewed the Jewish community in Hebron; the struggle to establish Elon-Moreh; and scores of other settlements built by private initiative) in the Gaza Strip the settlements from the very beginning were established by government initiative, just as it says in the books: the government initiated, proposed, planned, built and settled.
By “the government” we mean all governments in Israel, especially those led by the Labor Party.
The Alon Plan: The Gaza Strip as an integral part of Israel
Less than two months after the Six Day War, on July 13, 1967, Yigal Alon submitted his plan to the government in the form of a document entitled “The future of the territories and the way to treat the refugees”, which was to become known as the Alon Plan. Alon at the time held the ostensibly minor post of Minister of Labor, but he was also the Deputy Prime Minister and due to his personality was considered one of the Party’s leaders. According to his plan Israel would hold on to the Jordan Valley, Gush Etzion, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, but would withdraw from the densely-populated mountainous areas. The Minister of Defense at the time, Moshe Dayan, had a proposal of his own for five Jewish “enclaves” in the mountains of Judea and Samaria. The Labor Party did not officially discuss either of these plans but in fact acted in accordance with Yigal Alon’s proposal.
In paragraph 7 Alon wrote: “The Gaza Strip will become an integral part of the State of Israel, including its permanent residents. It will be officially annexed to Israel only after the refugees residing in it will have been rehabilitated outside it; until then the Gaza Strip will have the status of occupied territory”.
In keeping with his thinking Alon on May 9, 1968 brought a proposal to the cabinet to establish two villages “whether as military settlements or as civilian places, between Rafah and Gaza City”. He explained that “there exist plots of land which can be made fit for settlement at a reasonable cost. These settlements are supremely important to the Gaza Strip’s political future, because they split it up south of Gaza City. In addition, a Jewish presence there is also very important from a security point of view”.
A year passed and nothing happened. Alon never stopped “nagging”. On July 15, 1969 he asked the Minister of Agriculture at the time, Haim Gvati, for an opinion concerning “the establishment of settlements in the two areas in the Gaza Strip”. Two days later he contacted the Jewish Agency’s Settlement Department and asked it “to locate two plots of land for settlements in Gaza”. The two plots were found, one in the Abu-Mediyan area, not far from the Nusseirat refugee camp (where eventually the village of Netsarim would be built), and the other in the Smeiri area, not far from Tel Qteifeh (where later the village of Katif would be built).
The Minister of Agriculture Haim Gvati, one of the “doves” in the government, was quick to answer, through the Coordinator of Activities in the Territories, Shlomo Gazit: “As for the establishment of military settlements, one in the Abu-Mediyan area and the other in the Smeiri area,” Gazit wrote to the Secretary of the Cabinet on August 1, 1969, “the Minister of Agriculture will not approve any agricultural settlements in the area before a sufficient supply of water can be guaranteed”. This is not a typographical error: the limitations which the dovish Minister of Agriculture and member of the Labor Party saw to settlement in Gaza were neither political nor military, but the lack of water.
Security problems? Then let us build two settlements
On Feb. 24, 1970 the Cabinet Committee on Settlement held a meeting to discuss settlement in the Gaza Strip. The proposal on the table was for establishing two NAHAL outposts, one at Abu Mediyan (Netsarim) and one by Khan Yunis. Yigal Alon supported the proposal. Agriculture Minister Gvati was opposed, again because of the problem of water: “The proposal seems problematic to me. There are sand-dunes there, which are unlike those at El-Arish and the NAHAL outpost in Diqla. The second problem is water. Water is being pumped out of the ground in the Gaza Strip at a rate that is much too high. We would have to take out another two to three million cubic meters per annum although we already know that in a few years we shall have to bring water to that area from the north (i.e., from Israel). If it were not for the serious security problems within the Gaza Strip we should not even have thought of establishing the two settlements. It may very well be that we will have to build two NAHAL villages there with the knowledge that they would remain there for many years”.
The committee did not reach a decision. A few months later, on June 2, 1970, the committee met again to discuss the same issue. Minister of Agriculture Gvati again spoke his mind: “I agreed to hold this discussion, but I don’t like the plan. I heard from security experts things that are different from what Gazit said. These people claim that the importance of our presence there derives from security, not political, considerations. Ariel Sharon is an enthusiastic supporter for security reasons, and also in order to rid the Arabs of the Gaza Strip of the illusion that we shall ever get out of there”.
Minister Haim Landau (father of Uzi Landau), a member of the Herut-Liberal Block (eventually to become part of the Likud Party) disagreed with the opinion of his colleague the Minister of Agriculture: “The political consideration must prevail. There must be Jews in the Gaza area. The proposal before us is not good. I suggest (the settlers there) manufacture parts, components for various industries … they say that the prospects for finding petroleum are good. The moment the Arabs will realize that we are there to stay a very different kind of communication will be established (between them and us). At first there will be difficulties but after that the (terrorist) curve will go down sharply. We must find a solution for a Jewish presence in Gaza”.
The greatest surprise at the meeting came from Minister of Agriculture Haim Gvati (who was, as mentioned already, an ideological “dove”). He proposed building a Jewish neighborhood at the outskirts of Gaza City: “The government has decided to settle 250 families in Hebron”, Gvati pointed out, “It is building a neighborhood there and will see to it that they have work. Why can we not do the same in Gaza? (I want to emphasize) not in Khan-Yunis or Rafah, in Gaza. It is easier to find a place for 250 families there than in Hebron”. But Gvati was not determined enough and the proposal to establish a Jewish neighborhood on the outskirts of Gaza City was shelved.
The committee chairman Israel Galili summarized the discussion as follows: “Certain objections were heard concerning the establishment of agricultural villages. We shall set up a team that will re-examine proposals for populating the Gaza area, taking into consideration both the proposal for a neighborhood next to Gaza City and also the possibility of agricultural settlement”.
Another three months passed before the government decided, on Sept. 13, 1970, to establish two NAHAL villages in the Gaza Strip, one at Abu Mediyan, which would be called Netsarim; the second would renew the settlement of Kfar Darom. Netsarim had to wait for two years before it was populated, whereas the settlement at Kfar Darom was renewed a few weeks after the cabinet decision. No one disagreed with the feeling that the renewed building of Kfar Darom was an act of historical justice, since Kfar Darom possessed a significant past in Zionist history, as part of the linkage between settlement and security.
Compensation for vacating their property – to Arabs
Ariel Sharon himself, when he was Minister of Industry and Commerce and senior “hawk” in the cabinet of Yitzhak Shamir, told me in an interview: “In July 1971 I organized a tour of the Cabinet Committee for Settlement in the Gaza Strip. The helicopter landed on the high dune where today Netsarim stands. I stood there and surveyed the “fingers plan”, the plan I had thought of for the establishment of settlement blocks in the Gaza Strip. When I described how the settlements would look I saw the eyes of Alon and Galili light up. Their eyes were shining when they heard the plan. These were serious people, real supporters of Jewish settlement”.
On Oct. 12, 1971 the Cabinet Committee on Settlement convened again, this time to approve the budget for settlement for the fiscal year 1972-3. The discussion became more generalized. Maj. Gen. Shlomo Gazit, Coordinator of Activities in YESHA explained that “security experts” preferred to settle Netsarim first, “because of its location between Gaza City and the two large refugee camps Shati and Jibaliya. The site of Abu Mediyan will block the expansion of Gaza southward, to detach Gaza City from the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Our presence there of and by itself will constitute a means of security supervision”. What Gazit presented was in fact the results of a discussion that had been held in his office three weeks previously, on October 5, 1971, in which it was decided to establish a military outpost on the lands of Abu Mediyan, to be manned by the NAHAL Jordan Valley Patrol Unit which would be transferred from the Jordan Valley to the Gaza Strip.
During this meeting Gazit said: “All state lands in the area where Netsarim is to be built have been fenced in. As for state lands that are currently being cultivated (by the local inhabitants), we shall have to come to an arrangement. We shall remove them from the land by paying them compensation or by giving them other lands elsewhere”.
All components of the government at the time, which was headed by Golda Meir and included the Labor Party, the National Religious Party and the Independent Liberals (the Herut-Liberal Block had left the government a year-and-a-half earlier), agreed about the need for settling in the Gaza Strip. Even a “dove” like Moshe Kol (Minister of Tourism, Independent Liberals) said during one of the discussions: “While there is no official cabinet decision to annex the Gaza Strip, in fact all the political parties agree that it must be a part of the State of Israel, especially in view of the fact that it lies within the international borders. In light of Sadat’s latest announcement, which constitutes a step backwards from the previous Egyptian position, I attach great importance to our presence in the Gaza Strip. Let there be no doubt: peace and quiet in Gaza depend on what the Arab inhabitants believe about our intention to remain there”. Later during the same meeting he asked whether there were any chances “to locate more lands in the Gaza Strip, with regard to both soil and water, since it is not desirable that the settlers there remain isolated”.
Even Minister Nathan Peled of MAPAM (then part of the same parliamentary faction as the Labor Party) said during the same discussion: “The matter of establishing security settlements in the Gaza Strip is not open to question, just as it is not with respect to other places. The establishment of permanent settlements arouses problems of timing and other considerations”. Galili answered that he hoped that Peled would “join in the proposal to establish a permanent foothold in Khan Yunis (he was referring to the NAHAL village Morag which was being discussed at the time – H.H.) in view of the fact that all the factions constituting the present government shared the conviction that the Gaza Strip should not be outside the borders of Israel”.
At the end of the meeting the establishment of Netsarim was approved. On the morning of Purim, Feb. 29, 1972, two NAHAL groups of the Herut movement occupied the land, and a short time thereafter Morag was also established. By the end of 1972 there were then three NAHAL villages in the Gaza Strip, including the veteran one in Kfar Darom which renewed the Jewish presence there. A year later the NAHAL villages of Gadish (on May 29, 1973; it would later serve as the temporary abode of the village of Atsmona after the latter’s eviction from Sinai; about two years ago it was populated anew under the name of Shalev) and Katif were founded.
Rabin ordered: move in immediately
In the spring of 1973 Minister of Welfare Michael Hazani toured the Gaza Strip. Among the places he visited was NAHAL Gadish, a very new settlement, barely a month old, which had been established exactly one year after its sister Morag, on May 29, 1973.
Hazani was a leader of the National Religious Party and became known as the “father of religious settlement”. He walked through the village, saw the golden sand, the dark-blue sea and the clear skies above the beautiful dunes, observed the green palms, bushes, tamarisks and the rest of the vegetation coming out of the sands from one horizon to the other and could not hide his pleasure. To the NAHAL youth that had gathered around him, from the Ezra and the Religious Moshavim movements, Hazani (who was a member of the Cabinet Committee for Settlement) promised that “according to the plan very soon three more settlement will be established here, in addition to a rural center, all populated by religious people. The main problem here is water, and we hope that the search for water will meet with success”.
More than three settlements were established there, but Hazani did not live to see them. The NAHAL village where he made his declaration would carry his name after it had become a civilian village. At the beginning of 1977, before the site was turned over to civilian hands, Eliezer Avtabi, them a Member of Knesset for the National Religious Party, asked then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to commemorate Michael Hazani in the name of the new village. Rabin, who remembered his late colleague agreed immediately. That is how the name Netser-Hazani came into the world.
After fifteen months in Kfar Darom the first dozen families moved to the site of their permanent homes in Netser Hazani in February 1977. To the very last day they did not know if they would be able to move or not. Someone in the army was worried, until the matter reached the office of the Prime Minister. Rabin did not hesitate, and ordered: let them move in immediately. Their belongings were transferred from Kfar Darom on a wagon drawn by a tractor (unfortunately that day it rained very heavily and the cargo was soaked through and through).
Rabin himself attended the ceremony of turning the site over to civilians, together with two-thousand other guests, senior officers and people from all over the country who had fought in the area. They all came to rejoice with the settlers, whose excitement grew when Prime Minister Rabin ascended the stage and expounded his beliefs. Many years later Rabin’s words would still echo in their ears: “This is a great day for the State of Israel and for Jewish settlement, a day which symbolizes our deep-rooted presence in this area, which has since the Six Day War become an integral part of the State and its security”. After the ceremony Rabin fixed the first Mezuza on the entrance to one of the houses, together with the son of the late minister Hazani.
Nine years later, in 1986, Rabin, then Minister of Defense in Shimon Peres’ cabinet, visited Gush Katif and told the settlers: “Like nine years ago, when I was here as Prime Minister at the inauguration ceremony of the first village Netser Hazani, so today also I believe that this area has a future as an area for settlement, economically and socially, as well as a security function – and it must remain an integral part of the State of Israel”.
(An excerpt from the book On the Jewish Settlement of the Gaza Strip, in preparation)
Translated by: S. Michael Guggenheimer |
