Death of a true believer
By Yosef Goell October, 19 2001
(October 19) - How did 'transfer' advocate Rehavam Ze'evi move from the heart of the defense establishment to the far-right fringe of Israeli politics? Yosef Goell assesses the career of the controversial ex-general turned Moledet founder, shot down this week by an assassin's bullets
Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi wearing a dog tag inscribed with the names of all of Israel's MIA's and a Palmah badge on his lapel.
(A. Jerozolimski/JPost)
In the early 1980s, while preparing a series of articles for the Post on developments in the Arab sector, I dropped into a village in Lower Galilee with which I was totally unfamiliar. One of the residents of Arab el-Heib, a local teacher, invited me into his home. It soon became clear that my host and his family were Beduin, as were all the other villagers. The impressive stone houses which they inhabited, however, were as modern Israeli in their internal furnishings as they were in their external architecture.
What surprised me even more, however, was that in each of the homes I visited there was a prominently displayed photograph of Maj.-Gen. Rehavam Ze'evi, the former OC of the IDF Central Command, better known by his nickname "Gandhi." The explantion for those ubiquitous icons was that many of the Beduin men in the village had served under Ze'evi's command as trackers with the Bik'a Brigade, which was charged during the first years following the Six Day War with fighting terrorist infiltration from across the Jordan River and hunting down those few infiltrators who had made it across.
The reason Ze'evi was so well-remembered in Arab el-Heib was that he had used all his impressive connections in the Israeli military and political establishments to ensure that his Beduin ex-soldiers got the land on which their village was established, and the initial budgets needed to make it a going concern. I was told that Ze'evi continued to visit the Beduin village which he helped establish to keep up with its progress and help in overcoming the snags along the way.
Over the last decade and a half, however, Ze'evi became best known - and notoriously reviled among both Israeli Jews and Palestinians - as the foremost espouser of the proposal for the Palestinians' eventual "transfer" from the territories which fell into Israel's hands in the Six Day War of 1967, to Jordan and other Arab countries. He made no secret of his belief that such a major population transfer of Palestinians held out the only real prospect for eventual peaceful coexistence between a Jewish Israel and the Palestinians. For this he was roundly lambasted, not only on the Israeli Left but even among some figures on the Right, such as Binyamin Begin, as a fascist and racist Arab hater.
Was Ze'evi indeed a racist Arab hater? The evidence of Arab el-Heib and the many friends he had among Israeli Arabs would seem to indicate that he was not. As a professional soldier who spent 31 of his formative years in the army, and as a typical military man who disdained hypocritical politicians who toed the line of political correctness - even before that term was invented - he had no compunction in seeing the Arabs and Palestinians as Israel's mortal enemies.
In this, as in many other aspects of his personality, he was very much in the mold of other War of Independence professional officers who grew to maturity before the establishment of the state, such as the late Palmah commander Yigal Allon, former IDF Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and former Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin. They all grew up with Arabs, knew them and in many cases respected them. But they were also hard-nosed realists who spent lifetimes dedicated to defending the newborn Israel against those Arab and Palestinian enemies.
ZE'EVI was a sixth generation scion of a Jerusalem family. This is what imbued him with that profound feeling of being a deeply rooted native of this country, certainly more authentic than the newcomer Dayans, Allons, Rabins and their ilk, and even more so than many local Arabs whose families had arrived in Palestine long after Ze'evi's original forebears had.
His Old Jerusalem Jewish yishuv origins made him rather unusual in the Palmah units which were based during the final years of the British Mandate in kibbutzim which, in that highly politicized era, were clearly controlled by the left-wing Siya Bet and Hashomer Hatzair parties. In fact, that left-wing control of the Palmah was what convinced prime minister and defence minister David Ben-Gurion, who, as a Middle European revolutionary intellectual, was always paranoid over the possibility of a military putsch, to disband the Palmah as a separate military formation in the middle of the 1948 war.
For Ze'evi, the most potent focus of identification of his young life was the Palmah. He named two of his five children, Palmah-Yiftah (for the Palmah brigade in which he had served as chief scout and head of field intelligence) and Zahala (for the IDF). He came by his own nickname, Gandhi, when as a prank in his early days in the Palmah, he dressed up (or down) his swarthy and spindly-legged body in a Gandhi-like dhoti. The name stuck with his Palmah buddies, who were never much bothered by the astronomical ideological light-years between him and the extreme pacifism of the real Indian Gandhi.
Ze'evi never disavowed his early Labor Movement affinity. But for him, that Labor Movement was the security-oriented militarily activist wing represented by Ben-Gurion in Mapai, Yitzhak Tabenkin, Yisrael Galili and Allon in Ahdut Ha'avoda and the founders and commanders of the wartime Golani and Givati brigades who were members of ultra left-wing Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim.
Over the years, and especially after the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, all these left-wing parties had changed and become pronouncedly more dovish, with their hawkish activists being relegated to tolerated but consistently outvoted minorities, or being forced to depart into hawkish breakaway parties, such as Rafi, the State Party and the Third Way.
Ze'evi himself did not change; he remained a stalwart true believer and became even more entrenched iin his original hawkish beliefs.
In recent years, when attacked for the "fascist and racist" nature of his transfer proposal, Ze'evi often asserted that he was not the one who had invented the idea, but gave the credit to two of his early left-wing Labor Movement mentors, Berl Katznelson and Yitzhak Tabenkin.
Was he making it up? Not at all; in matters like that Ze'evi was as straight as an arrow, which is what eventually made him such a failure as a politician when he took the plunge into party politics.
KATZNELSON and Tabenkin were, in the 1930s and until Katznelson's death in 1944, the two leading ideological gurus of the pre-Israel Labor Movement (at a time when Ben-Gurion himself was the movement's major political leader and apparatchik, but not thinker). Tabenkin continued in that status in the Kibbutz Hameuhad and the Ahdut Ha'avoda party until their merger into the United Kibbutz Movement and the Labor Party following the Six Day War.
In his final years, Tabenkin became one of the founders of the hawkish Greater Israel Movement which espoused Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories and their settlement by Israelis, together with other defectors from the Left such as Eliezer Livneh.
Did Katznelson and Tabenkin ever seriously consider the idea of forcibly moving the Arabs out of Palestine as a precondition for the creation of a Jewish majority and a Jewish state. The answer is, yes, although when challenged they usually referred to transfer "by agreement." But one has to consider the zeitgeist, the reigning intellectual spirit, of the last two decades of pre-Israel.
By the late 1930s, the Zionist leadership, including the Labor Zionists who wrested control of the movement in 1935, were in despair over the slow pace of aliya, the frustratingly faster pace of Arab immigration and population growth in Palestine, the outbreak of the armed Arab Revolt of 1936-39 and Britain's reneging on its earlier support for the creation of a Jewish national homeland in the country. Transfer, voluntary or coerced, was one of the ideas making the rounds. But given the Zionists' lack of any real political power, the whole idea remained totally hypothetical.
But the very idea of transfer, a voluntary or coerced population exchange, was far from being seen as a clearly immorally reprehensible idea in the inter-war modern world. Katznelson, Tabenkin, Haim Arlosoroff and other Zionist leaders of that period were profoundly impressed by the dramatic events in Turkey a decade earlier. Following the breakdown of the Ottoman Empire in the years following the end of World War I, the Greeks, encouraged by Britain's Lloyd George invaded Anatolia. But the tables soon turned and the Turks led by Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) succeeded in expelling them from Anatolia and European Thrace.
In the seesaw fighting there were major murderous depredations (pogroms) against the civilian Greek populations in primarily Turkish Anatolia and against civilian Turks in Thrace. The mutual slaughter became so bad that in the Lausanne Conference of July 1923, at which a territorial compromise was hammered out between Greece and Turkey, a separate agreement between the two governments also provided for a compulsory exchange of populations. The winning argument behind that agreement was that if large intermixed ethnic populations proved that they could not live together in relative tranquility, it was preferable to separate them, even forcibly.
In today's parlance that would be called compulsory "transfer" or if you will, "mutual ethnic cleansing." Following the agreement, several million Greeks and Turks, from Anatolia and Thrace, respectively, were transferred from their minority situations to join their ethnic majority countrymen. The human tragedy entailed on the Greek side of that brutal dislocation was to be expressed over decades in the hauntingly sad bouzouki music and songs which the transfered Greeks of Anatolia brought with them to Greece.
But the overall attitude of the world community was very different. Not only was the mutual transfer approved by the mutually hostile Greek and Turkish governments, but the international diplomat who was most prominently associated with carrying out the forced population exchange, Norway's renowned arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Such was the strange course of the idea of forced population exchange: from Nansen, Ataturk and the Greeks to Arlosoroff, Katznelson and Tabenkin, and eventually to Ze'evi and his handful of Israeli supporters. One of the ironies attached to the Zionist leg of this intellectual journey, is that the quasi-Bolshevik ideologues and political leaders of the Zionist Left were not averse to toying with the idea. In contrast, the truly liberal progenitor of Israel's Right, the Revisionist-Zionist Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spoke of establishing a Jewish state by overcoming the Arabs by superior military force, but then extending full equality and citizenship rights to the local Christian and Muslim Arab populations.
THE APOTHEOSIS of Ze'evi's military career was during the five years in which he served as OC of the Central Command from the end of the Six Day War until his retirment in 1973. Central Command was in charge of the campaign against PLO terrorist infiltration from Jordan. In that bloody campaign, which resulted in the "pacification" of the newly acquired territories until the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in December 1987, Ze'evi is reported to have personally participated in 120 battles of hot pursuit against terrorist infiltrators.
Following Rabin's selection as prime minister to succeed Golda Meir, in the immediate aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Rabin appointed his close friend and Palmah buddy Ze'evi to be his adviser on fighting terrorism and coordinating intelligence. He resigned after the Likud's electoral victory in 1977.
After becoming identified with the Tehiya party of Prof. Yuval Ne' eman and Geula Cohen, which had split away from Menachem Begin's Likud, but for long shunning active involvement in party politics, Ze'evi entered electoral politics in the 1988 elections under the logo of the Moledet Party. The single point differentiating Moledet from the Likud and Tehiya was the idea of transfering the Palestinian population out of the territories to Jordan.
Ze'evi was very much in the mold of the other rough-hewn sabra military commanders of his own and the immediately preceding generation, which had succeeded the founding fathers and mothers: Ben-Gurion, Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Begin. The difference between him and the others such as Allon, Dayan, Rabin, Peres and now even Ariel Sharon, was that while they gradually grew away from their early hawkish beliefs as a result of having to confront the brutal realities of international, and especially American constraints, arrow-straight, true-believer Ze'evi refused to change.
Sharon, for example, was the first to publicly raise the argument that Jordan, with its majority Palestinian population, should be considered the true Palestinian state, thus negating the need to grant the Palestinians independence in the territories. But following the conclusion of the 1995 peace treaty with Jordan's King Hussein, he muted the idea of Jordan as Palestine. By the time he became prime minister earlier this year, Sharon abandoned public espousal of that idea completely, realizing that it might well endanger the position of the ruling Hashemite family in Jordan and undermine Israel's peace treaty with them.
To Ze'evi such realpolitik considerations played no role whatsoever.
He was included as minister without portfolio in the Shamir government, following Peres' "dirty maneuver" which brought an end to the Likud-Labor unity government. But he soon quit the government, over Shamir's participation in the Madrid Conference which had been imposed on him by America's George Bush (the elder) and James Baker. It was typical of the non-politician Ze'evi, that while the equally hard-line Shamir was prepared to bow to political realities and participate in Madrid, with the intention of eroding its decisions to death over time, true believer Ze'evi insisted on principle, on not supping with that devil, and not falling into the "trap of Madrid."
Moledet's defection eventually led to the collapse of Shamir's right-wing coalition. In the 1992 elections the Labor Party, under Rabin, formed the government after a razor's edge electoral victory. Actually, the parties of the badly fragmented Right bloc, had won more popular votes than the Left, but that combined Right bloc lost a crucial one to two Knesset seats due to that very fragmentation, to which Ze'evi's Moledet had contributed.
In that sense, Ze'evi's defection was a direct progenitor of the Oslo Accords which he despised.
HAD ZE'EVI learned that lesson of realpolitik? Earlier this week, prior to his assassination, Ze'evi and rest of his National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu bloc had decided to quit the Sharon coalition government on the basis of a similar argument: that Sharon was selling out on his ostensible decades-old commitment to right-wing orthodoxy on the Palestinian issue. Arguments by other right-wing colleagues that the result might be as catastrophic as the debacle of 1992, failed to dissuade him.
Ze'evi was a failure as a politician, a profession he said, like many others of his ex-military buddies who had made the jump, he detested. It is unlikely that his assassination will bring about a major change on Israel's political map, although it did serve to postpone the last-minute implementation of his party's resignation from the Sharon coalition.
Interestingly, where his political career may have had a longer-lasting impact, is in his hammering away at the theme of imposed transfer of the Palestinian population. To be sure, the very idea remains anathema to nearly all the other political parties and to a large majority of the Israeli population. But attention should be paid to the growing popularity, among many Israelis who are despairing of ever attaining a liveable modus vivendi with the Palestinians, much less a real peace, of the idea of a "unilateral Israeli separation" from the Palestinians in the territories.
President Moshe Katsav, in his reaction to Ze'evi's assassination, on Wednesday joined many other supporters in principle of such unilateral separation, in pointing out the obvious: that expecting Palestinian acquiescence in such a step was totally unrealistic. But without such Palestinian acquiescence, the goal of the proposed separation, that of attaining a large measure of security and tranquility for Israel, with "us on this side of the fence, and them on the other side," is unattainable. Which leaves Ze'evi's idea of coerced transfer, to which the Israeli majority is totally opposed, and which, in any case would be prevented by the world community.
One of the ways of squaring this apparently frustrating circle may be by advancing from Ze'evi's idea of unilateral transfer to one of mutual population exchange, as in the case of Turkey and Greece. In such a scenario, most of the Israeli settlers in the territories would be evacuated as the Israeli contribution to such an imposed population exchange. This idea would certainly have been anathema to Ze'evi, who was one of the last staunch supporters of the Greater Israel ideology, and of the retention of all of the settlements.
Despite insistent official Israeli denials, it seems obvious that Ze'evi's fingering for assassination by terrorists from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was in revenge for Israel's killing of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa several weeks ago. At the time his PFLP followers vowed appropriate revenge.
The factually correct Israeli argument that Mustafa was not merely a Palestinian political leader, but was personally actively involved in the planning of terrorist acts against Israel, is neither here nor there for the Palestinians. They viewed him as a top political leader, immediately below Arafat, who should have enjoyed immunity from assassination under the curious rules of the game of the year-long Palestinian terrorist uprising against Israel.
The Israeli policy of pinpoint attacks against identified Palestinian terrorists and their leaders is fully justified, and should certainly not be suspended. It is infinitely more preferable to the alternative of retaliating for Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilian targets by similar Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians. But if one accepts that rationale, then it was horribly short-sighted for the General Security Service not to insist on imposing round-the-clock bodyguards on Ze'evi who was an obvious target for revenge, despite his macho opposition to such guards.
In this, Ze'evi once again remained in the mold of his lifelong Palmah buddy, Rabin, who died at the hands of a right-wing Israeli assassin because he adamantly refused to wear a bullet-proof vest.
