Why ‘Greater Israel’ never came to be

For those who long considered it a folly to settle a handful of Jews among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the deci...

For those who long considered it a folly to settle a handful of Jews among hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the decision to remove them an acceptance of the obvious. What possible future could the settlers have had? How could their presence have done the state of Israel any good?

But for those, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who created and nurtured the settlements, the move to dismantle them is something very different. It is an admission not of error but of failure. Their cherished goal—the resettlement of the full Biblical land of Israel by contemporary Jews—is not to be. The reason: Not enough of them came.

‘‘We have had to come to terms with certain unanticipated realities,’’ acknowledged Arye Mekel, Israeli Consul General in New York. ‘‘Ideologically, we are disappointed. A pure Zionist must be disappointed because Zionism meant the Jews of the world would take their baggage and move to Israel. Most did not.’’

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David Kimche, who was director-general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry in the 1980s, noted: ‘‘The old Zionist nationalists’ anthem was a state on ‘the two banks of the River Jordan’. When that became impractical, we talked about ‘Greater Israel,’ from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realise that this, too, is something we won’t be able to achieve.’’

The failure has two main sources. First, contrary to the expectations of the early Zionists, as Ambassador Mekel noted, most of the world’s Jews have not joined their brethren to live in Israel. Of the world’s 13 million to 14 million Jews, a minority—5.26 million—make their home in Israel, and immigration has largely dried up. Last year, a record low 21,000 Jews immigrated to Israel.

The second explanation for the shift in settlement policy is that the Palestinian population has grown far more rapidly—and Palestinians have proved far more willing to fight—than many on the Israeli Right had anticipated. On Thursday, the newspaper Haaretz reported that the proportion of Jews in the combined population of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza had dropped below 50 per cent for the first time. This means, many Israelis argue, that unless they yield territory, they will have to choose a Jewish state or a democratic one; they will not be able to have both.

The question of the role played by Palestinian violence in Sharon’s decision to disengage is hotly contested. Some argue that the two Palestinian intifadas, or uprisings, from 1987 to 1993 and from 2000 to the present, drove Israel out. Others say that Israel’s increasingly effective counterterror measures broke the back of the insurgents, allowing Israel the sense of strength to walk away. In fact, both factors seem likely to have played a role.

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‘‘Of course, terror has a role in the disengagement,’’ said Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Institute, a conservative Jerusalem research group. ‘‘It convinced us that Gaza was not worth holding on to and awakened us to the demographic danger. It took two intifadas for a majority of Israelis to decide that Gaza is not worth it.’’ —NYT