- Settlements, this word is associated
with many other names, both negative and positive.
West Bank, Judea and Samaria, occupation,
disputed territories, in this miniseries on settlements,
we're going to unpack the ideas
behind those controversial terms.
Today, many consider the settlements
to be at the very center of the Israeli-Arab conflict,
while others view this is a red herring,
that blaming the settlements is simply an excuse
for a longer-held opposition to the existence
of any Jewish state.
We'll explore all that, but in the first episode
of this five-part series,
let's dive into some of the more fundamental questions,
like what are settlements and how did they come to be?
(lively electronic music)
Today, settlements refer to Israeli towns, villages,
and cities in the West Bank, an area also sometimes called
by its ancient historical name, Judea and Samaria.
This land was generally Jewish, hence the term, Judea,
until the Romans expelled the Jews about 2,000 years ago.
Over the centuries, the lands lay remarkably desolate
and undeveloped, with a small but increasingly Muslim
and Arab population.
There was also a significant Jewish population
in some places like Jerusalem and Hebron, but the real story
of the settlements starts way back at the end
of the 19th century, when an influx of Jews
began immigrating to the area known as Palestine.
For centuries, Jews all over the world had dreamed
of returning to the region, their original homeland,
but they were faced with a complex situation.
There were already people living in Palestine.
In fact, Arabs had been living there
since the Muslim conquest of much of the Middle East
in the mid-seventh century.
Still, though, the total population was pretty sparse.
By the late 19th century, approximately 400,000 Arabs
and 40,000 Jews lived in the area referred to as Palestine,
which was then a region controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
This only changed at the end of World War I,
when the region fell to the British.
The British were tasked by the world powers
to administer the land
under what was then called the Palestine Mandate.
They tried to keep a lid on the region
but didn't go so well.
there was infighting, riots and revolts
on both the Jewish and Arab sides.
After the Arab Revolt of 1936, the UK began working
on a plan for partitioning the land,
and after hearing testimony from both Jewish
and Arab representatives, they proposed allocating 75%
of the land to Arabs and roughly 25% to the Jews.
Jewish leadership was pretty divided,
but ultimately accepted the proposal,
while the Arab leadership rejected it immediately.
By 1947, the UN put forth a new partition plan
to create one Jewish and one Arab state
with about 43% of the land set to go to the Arabs
and 56% to the Jews.
Jews reluctantly accepted the plan, but to the Arabs,
the attempt by an international institution like the UN
to allocate any land to the Jews
was plain old Western imperialism.
They rejected it and war broke out immediately
before the British even left Palestine.
The fighting lasted five months until May 14th, 1948,
when the British finally lowered their flags and departed.
At that point, Israel declared its independence
on the section of the land that had been assigned
to them by the UN.
The combined armies of the five surrounding Arab countries
attacked the tiny new state with the goal
of driving the Jews out completely.
Ultimately, the result of the war
would end up determining the boundaries of the new state.
Although the Jews won the 1948 war of independence,
it wasn't exactly smooth sailing from then on.
The West Bank was annexed by Jordan,
and Gaza was taken by Egypt,
and the local Arabs were not given independence.
Any Jews who had lived in those regions were driven out,
their communities dismantled, and their land confiscated.
Israel's northern villages were regularly shelled
from the Syrian-held Golan Heights,
and terrorists from the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank regularly infiltrated the border
to carry out attacks against Israeli civilians.
These terrorist attacks were part of the reason
for the little-known Sinai War,
also referred to as the Suez War of 1956
in which Israel conquered the entire Sinai desert
and Gaza from Egypt.
Now, they eventually returned it all
in exchange for an international guarantee
that Egyptian waterways would remain open
to Israeli shipping and that UN peacekeeping troops
would occupy the Sinai desert as a sort of buffer zone
between the two countries.
Still, though, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser
didn't let up on his military plans and rhetoric,
and then in May 1967, Nasser began moving Egyptian tanks
into the Sinai and ordered the UN peacekeeping troops
to immediately evacuate the Sinai which, to the bewilderment
of the Israelis, they simply did.
Israel was now exposed as Egypt continued moving troops,
tanks, and artillery towards Israel's southern border.
Israel's leadership was pretty not sure how to react.
They wanted desperately to avoid a war
and sought international diplomacy to avert the crisis,
but any international help was slow in coming
and far from guaranteed.
About a week later, Nasser set up a blockade
to cut off vital Israeli shipping routes.
This action clearly violated
UN Security Council Resolution 118
and was an internationally-recognized act of war.
Nasser was pretty open about it, stating,
our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.
Still, for two more weeks,
Israel continued to seek international intervention,
but as diplomatic efforts failed, many Jews feared
they were on the verge of another Holocaust.
A few days before the war on May 30th,
Nasser announced, today, they will know that the Arabs
are arranged for battle, the critical hour has arrived.
We have reached the stage of serious action
and not of more declarations.
Israel had to face the fact that diplomatic efforts
had failed, and ordered a preemptive attack on June 5th.
The Israeli Army destroyed the Egyptian Air Force,
which allowed the IDF to sweep through Gaza
and the Sinai Desert.
Soon, Israel had reclaimed all the land it had returned
to Egypt 10 years earlier.
Prime Minister Levi Eshkol immediately sent a message
to King Hussein of Jordan, that if Jordan stayed out
of the war, Israel would leave them alone,
but King Hussein was under immense Egyptian pressure
and turned down Israel's offer
and launched multiple attacks.
Now, there was serious debate in high command
about what to do with Jerusalem.
Israel didn't enter the war with any plans
for reclaiming the old city of Jerusalem,
but opposition leader Menachem Begin pleaded with Eshkol,
"Our soldiers are almost in sight of the Western Wall.
"Future generations will never forgive us
"if we do not seize it."
Eshkol agreed, and Israeli troops
crossed the 1948 Armistice lines, fighting their way
to the strategic Mount Scopus overlooking the old city.
After the 1948 war, Jordan had evicted the Jews
from the ancient Jewish quarter of the old city,
and had barred them from visiting their holiest sites,
but now, the Israeli paratroopers descended Mount Scopus
and soon, for the first time in 2,000 years,
a united Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest city,
was back in sovereign Jewish hands.
The Army then moved through the West Bank,
securing the cities of Hebron, Bethlehem, and Gush Etzion.
Soon, IDF tanks climbed to the Golan Heights in the north
as well from which Syria had been firing at Northern Israel
ever since 1948.
Syrian defenses crumbled.
In six days, Israel had tripled its size,
and now in control of three major regions,
the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt,
the old city of Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank
from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria,
giving the state more defensible borders
and reducing future threats significantly,
but the Six-Day War was a victory
that came with a lot of complications.
As you can imagine, opinion in Israel was pretty divided
about what to do with this land, not to mention,
the Palestinian Arabs living there.
But unlike 1956, this time, Israel wasn't going to let go
of the land so easily.
It had several new issues to consider,
and these issues would ultimately lead
to the settlement movement.
First, the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria,
had deep historical and religious significance to the Jews,
more so than the Sinai, Gaza, or the Golan Heights.
Israelis felt they had a unique claim to the heartland
and birthplace of the Jewish people.
Second, this land had been conquered in a defensive war.
To many, this meant the new 1967 lines
were no less legitimate
than the internationally accepted 1949 border.
At the time, international law made it illegal
to conquer territory in an aggressive war,
but that didn't apply to a defensive war, which this was.
Israelis had faced the annihilation of their state,
and now they had won.
Only 20 years after the Holocaust, Israelis felt
that they had finally achieved the promise of Never Again,
and to solidify this promise,
many were moved to settle the newly acquired lands.
A third consideration was that much of the land
Israel had conquered had no previous Palestinian dependents.
The West Bank, for example, had been occupied
by Jordan ever since 1948.
Israelis now asked themselves,
why should they return land to Jordan,
an enemy country that had no legitimate claim to it?
A fourth major consideration was the trade-off
between security and hopes for peace.
When Jordan occupied the West Bank highlands,
Israel's narrow width made it possible
for an attacking country to easily cut the country in half,
but now, with the West Bank in Jewish hands,
Israel was much wider.
Meanwhile, holding Gaza and the Sinai in the south
and the Golan Heights in the north as security buffers
helped prevent the terrorist and artillery shelling
Israel had faced since its founding.
Many Israelis felt they could not give up this degree
of security without some guarantee of peace,
and military analysts agreed, and some felt
that by settling the land and forming blocks or communities,
they would both enhance security by their presence
and make it difficult for the Israeli government
to ever relinquish land that they saw as vital
to that security, which brings us
to the other side of the equation,
the hope that by holding on to the territories,
Israel would have powerful bargaining chips
that it could eventually exchange for peace.
These hopes turned out to be irrelevant at that time
because three months after Israel's victory,
Arab leaders passed the Khartoum Resolution,
famous for its three nos, no peace with Israel,
no recognition of Israel, and no negotiation with Israel.
So, for now, the land would remain disputed or occupied,
depending on who you ask.
To many, since there had been an Arab population
in parts of the region for centuries,
they should be entitled to self-rule
even if they didn't have it in the past.
To them, the disputed lands are occupied.
On the other hand, those who viewed these territories
as vital for security, as being won in a defensive war,
as having a deep historical Jewish connection,
and as having had no previous Palestinian Arab sovereignty,
those people viewed the word occupation to be way off-base.
So with the land in Israel's hands and Arab rejection
of any negotiations for peace, new developments began.
For a long time, Zionism's pioneering spirit
of settling land had been secular, but now,
there was a new frontier,
and one was so much religious significance
in the heartland of the biblical homeland.
Soon, a new group of religious Zionist pioneers
would take the helm.
Through them, the settler movement would be infused with
and fueled by religious passion and faith.
Many religious Jews saw this as a historic moment
they couldn't possibly ignore, the dawn of the Jewish return
after long exile described by the ancient prophets,
but this settlement movement was still going strong, too
and the first place they chose to resettle
was Kfar Etzion in the Judean hills.
The Jewish community of Kfar Etzion had been massacred
in the war of 1948.
The settlers arriving now in 1967 were the children
of those who had been massacred.
They were literally returning home to the place
where many of them had been born.
Meanwhile, the religious settlement movement
continued to grow, and in 1974 formed a political entity
known as Gush Emunim, or the Bloc of the Faithful.
Fueled by the newfound pride of being able to live
in all of their ancient homeland,
and brimming with euphoric hope, Gush Emunim continued
to settle communities in Judea and Samaria,
but in the words of author Daniel Gordis,
there was a sense that the conquest was more complicated
than the euphoria suggested.
We'll explore these complications in later episodes,
starting with the crucial question,
what exactly is the Jewish connection to the land
that has fueled the settlement movement,
and why does it seem to hold so much influence?
For now, thanks for watching.
(lively electronic music)