COMMENT.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 29-AUG-05

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

After the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the Israeli political establishment vowed that the existence of the state would never again be in doubt. Eventually, one bulwark of its strategic defense would be the construction of dozens of settlements in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip--first as small, stealthily built outposts, then as larger, more established "facts on the ground." As the rationale evolved, these settlements were intended to buffer a tiny state from foreign attack, to shift some population away from the coastal plain, and, finally, to undermine Palestinian contiguity. Over the years, Israel's principal leaders, both Likud and Labor, participated in the expansion of the settlements, but the most committed architect, the truest believer, was Ariel Sharon.

Sharon recognized that he could not build the new settlements by calling on the traditional secular elites, which were then in decline: the kibbutzniks, the intelligentsia, and the labor movements. Instead, he relied on a new breed of idealist. As he writes in his memoir, "Warrior":

By the 1970s the pioneering spirit that in the past had found its home among the Labor...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.