The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 | Gershom Gorenberg | Adds much to a better understanding of the historical context of the current strife in the West Bank and Gaza

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The Accidental Emp...

	The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 Gershom Gorenberg Times Books, 2006 - 480 pages average customer review:based on 13 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The untold story, based on groundbreaking original research, of the actions and inactions that created the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories
     After Israeli troops defeated the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in June 1967, the Jewish state seemed to have reached the pinnacle of success. But far from being a happy ending, the Six-Day War proved to be the opening act of a complex political drama, in which the central issue became: Should Jews build settlements in the territories taken in that war?
     The Accidental Empire is Gershom Gorenberg?s masterful and gripping account of the strange birth of the settler movement, which was the child of both Labor Party socialism and religious extremism. It is a dramatic story featuring the giants of Israeli history?Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Levi Eshkol, Yigal Allon?as well as more contemporary figures like Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres. Gorenberg also shows how the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford administrations turned a blind eye to what was happening in the territories, and reveals their strategic reasons for doing so.
     Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Gorenberg reconstructs what the top officials knew and when they knew it, while weaving in the dramatic first-person accounts of the settlers themselves. Fast-moving and penetrating, The Accidental Empire casts the entire enterprise in a new and controversial light, calling into question much of what we think we know about this issue that continues to haunt the Middle East.

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Full, in depth, information

The Accidental Empire is a wide ranging book, but a wonderfully focused and well researched account aftermath of the Six Days War, the capture of the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. TAE appears to be a wider treatment of Gorenberg's far less successful (though very interesting) first book, The End of Days, about the growing power of religious Zionists. Instead of focusing on the Temple Mount, TAE provides an account of the religious settlement movement, primarily Gush Emunim, and their attempts to create illegal settlements in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Perhaps the strongest point of the book is how muddled the thinking of the Labor leadership was about the new settlements. As aging revolutionaries, they were still wedded to the idea that settlements meant security; that creating facts on the land would lead to a more secure Israel. But they were equally drawn to the idea that land was a negotiating chip with surrounding Arab states. The pull between both impulses led to a sustained paralysis.

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Adds much to a better understanding of the historical context of the current strife in the West Bank and Gaza

It is essential in reading this book, and perhaps more significantly in reading reviews of this book, to separate the views of religious expansionists from those of the secular government and of by far the highest portion of the population of Israel throughout its existence regarding the settlements. It is also important to compare the strong emotional, almost messianic, attachment to the land of Samaria and Judea felt and espoused by the settlers with the need of the government to "create facts" on the land that supposedly distinguished its own internal legal opinions, and those of most of the rest of the world, regarding the "legality" of the settlements. Whatever personal views you may have on these and other core issues raised by Gorenberg's thoroughly researched, well documented and extensively footnoted work, his dispassionate, well written report of the events is an invaluable reference work that helps define the significance of the settlements as contributing to Middle East unrest. Moreover, Gorenberg's fascinating report of the inner workings of the Eshkol, Meir and Rabin cabinets, and the arrogant disregard of official government policy by cabinet members who represented a small but powerful portion of the population, provide insight into the intrigues that seemingly drive many national decisions in Israel because of the need to form coalition governments that direct the policies of the country.

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Any interested in Zionist history and issues must have this.

THE ACCIDENTAL EMPIRE: ISRAEL AND THE BIRTH OF THE SETTLEMENTS, 1967-77 offers up the untold story based on new original research, of the actions and issues which created the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. It goes beyond detailing the well-known events of the Six Day War to probe the birth of the settler movement in Israel, the product of Labor Party socialism and religious extremism. Israel's major figures and how they interacted with U.S. administrative forces - distracted by Vietnam - are probed in chapters which tell of the first Israeli settler in occupied territory p to modern times. Any interested in Zionist history and issues must have this.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

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An outstanding work

This is an excellent work on this subject. Gorenberg has given readers a valuable look into how Israel's spectacular victory in June 1967 has become one of the most entangled quagmires in the world. His research and scholarship have laid open the events of June 67 and the eventual occupation like never before with a level of detail rarely matched. His book is a clinical account of the circumstances and the political players who drifted towards the situation that eventually reigned.

The most fascinating aspect of this account and history of this occupation is how it came about. It was not the inevitable consequence of a determined leadership guiding a resolute population, but was instead the bungling of a ruling political party in its last gasps and a fractured population riven with ethnic, religious and political strife. The governments of Eshkol, Meir and Rabin were almost completely ineffectual, and hamstrung by their own inertia so that instead of guiding occupation policy their governments were guided by the policies of occupation and settlement. After 67 Israel was in a unique position in its very short history, they had the power. Instead of the little besieged nation fighting for its existence, Israel had become a warrior nation of mythic proportions, and Israel needed a strong determined leadership to shore up its gains and present a decisive negotiating partner on the international stage. Instead Israel's labor leaders let Israel drift with no real policy, while allowing fringe groups to dictate settlement policy to the government.

I was extremely impressed by the author's attention paid to those settlers. He gives readers an excellent glimpse into the minds of these vastly different people. He offers their letters and correspondences to give readers an insight into what settler life was like for the different ranges of settlers from the religious to the secular leftists. He not only offers the viewpoints and perspective of the leaders of these movements, but also the grassroots level people. This top down perspective gives his audience a feel for the complexity and diversity of Israeli society, and also the almost impossible tightrope political leaders were forced to walk to keep this society together (or the more cynical viewpoint to keep their ruling coalitions together so they could hang on to power).

The author does not limit his focus to Israel though. Instead the author gives us a macro look detailing the outlooks and policies pursued by successive U.S. administrations, and writing somewhat of the Palestinian perspective as well. These different international perspectives are essential to understand what the Israeli political leaders faced and what options they had. It also goes a long way in showing the inherent difficulty in dealing with a superpower that has an election every four years that can drastically change policies directed towards those politicians and their country.

The fact that this offer tackled such a complex and sordid topic, and did so with such a tremendous level of research and courage is astounding. The author has done the world a service in producing this work, and giving us a very unique and detailed look into this extremely important 10 years (67-77). If you are interested at all in Israeli history or the Middle East then this book has to be on your shelf. I highly recommend this book.

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Romantic view of Israeli history from Israel's leftwing

Israel came into being as a result of a civil war during the last days of the British Mandate over Palestine. As the civil war gathered momentum the British abandoned the mandate with the approval of most of the rest of the world. The Israeli left knows this war as the war of Independence and the Arab Palestinians whether now Israeli citizens or stateless Palestinians as the 'Nakba' or 'disaster'.

In Gorenberg's book it is the war of Independence with its effective partition of mandatory Palestine without most of the Jewish religious sites and most of the Arabs with the exception of the Arab areas of the Galilee.

What frightens Gorenberg the most about the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria is that they contain most of the sites of Jewish religious significance and that they now also contain centers of Jewish religious population. He fears their existence more than he fears the Palestinian Arabs. The reason is quite simple: one is a distant neighbor and the other is too much like his own mother-in-law.

So the remaining areas of the stateless British Mandate for Palestine which Israel conquered in 1967 are referred to as being occupied territory. This serves both the interests of the Israeli left who don't want the Jewish religious sites nor the re-emergence of a strong religious sentiment among the Jewish people. It also serves the interests of the Palestinian Arabs who want to return to the days of 1948 when partition of the land on better terms for them was still available.

The Palestinian Arab viewpoint is that the entire area should be Islamic and Arab despite its large Jewish population. This is not well discussed. The idea that UN resolution 242 is effectively a return to the Peel commisions partition plan or the 1947 UN plan for partition plan is also not discussed. It is presented only as a preservation of the status quo of the 1949 armistice lines now disguised as being Israel and the rest as being occupied territory. This mis-reading of history maximizes the area of the partition for Palestinian Arabs without taking on additional Jewish religious sites. It also helps prevent the re-emergence of strong religious sentiment among the Jewish people in Israel.

As an Israeli it is a fun book to read, but understand that you are reading propaganda from a very interested party. A book on the same events from the standpoint of a Palestinian Arab or a religious Palestinian Jew would tell you an entirely different story.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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