Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007

by Idith Zertal, Akiva Eldar

Lords of the Land tells the tragic story of Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of the 1967 war and Israel’s devastating victory over its Arab neighbors, catastrophe struck both the soul and psyche of the state of Israel. Based on years of research, and written by one of Israel's leading historians and journalists, this involving narrative focuses on the settlers themselves — often fueled by messianic zeal but also inspired by the original Zionist settlers — and shows the role the state of Israel has played in nurturing them through massive economic aid and legal sanctions.

The occupation, the authors argue, has transformed the very foundations of Israel's society, economy, army, history, language, moral profile, and international standing. “The vast majority of the 6.5 million Israelis who live in their country do not know any other reality,” the authors write. “The vast majority of the 3.5 million Palestinians who live in the regions of their occupied land do not know any other reality. The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments and have brought Israel's democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss.”

Genres: History, Middle East, Israel, Nonfiction, Politics, Political Science

576 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Idith Zertal is an Israeli historian and essayist, the author of many books and articles on Jewish, Zionist and Israeli history. She is currently teaching at the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her works include From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel (1998), and Lords of the Land: The War over Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967–2007 (co-authored with Akiva Eldar, 2007). Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood has been published in eight languages.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 1 out of 5]

The tone of this book was all wrong for me. Zertal does preface things by saying there will be no Palestinian perspective. She is fucking spot on there, but I won't critique the book for that as it would be ridiculously unfair. As to what is included. Ugh. I have read enough to know the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was always part of the Zionist Program, and the settling of all the land of Palestine that followed was too. While she doesn't completely deny these facts, she elides the first as if wiping out of the Palestinians was performed by someone other than Jews, and that the land just magically emptied. How else to fulfill the Militant Zionist Program? The people were gone and the land was empty, why waste it? OK, maybe she didn't go that far, but there is an almost jocular tone to the facts she relates. A bit of a "Go East, Young Jews!" feel which soured me on the academic exercise. The Settlements are an overt and clear violation of International Law, and the Settlers are awful people who could have chosen NOT to steal someone else's homeland. Moral high ground lost, Israel. Sorry, but there isn't any other way for me to see this.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is written from the Israeli perspective and is the only book written just about the history of Jewish settlements. “Rabin hated the settler phenomenon.” “Rabin’s loathing of the settlers accompanied him throughout his political career, as did his flinching from confrontation with them.” He said the settlements did not contribute to Israel’s security. Sharon meanwhile was “the settlers’ guardian angel ever since 1974.” “Equipped with high-resolution maps, Sharon and his aides skipped from hill to hill, from bald mountain to bald mountain, locating the settlements on high ground mostly for political and strategic reasons so that they would both overlook their environs and limit the expansion of Palestinian villages and towns that had existed there for hundreds of years.”

Rabbi Yitzhak Shilat of Ma’aleh Adumim declared that “anything we do as a result of distress and anger, even killing, is good, is acceptable and will help. Killing is just a matter for the kingdom.” Could an SS officer in WWII have said it any better? “Settlers allowed themselves to act as if there was no law at all, and did whatever they saw fit in the territories.” One person living in Hebron Hills described his area as “first rate anarchy. Everyone can do whatever he wants. It’s a different planet. You are the law.” No wonder convicted US pedophiles flock to Israel (see articles in CBS News, Times of Israel, Haaretz, the Independent). “We go out at night, cover the license plates, go into the nearby Arab village and the fun begins.” Apparently, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy should have moved to Israel for some real fun. “In May 1989 settlers broke into Palestinian houses nearly every night. In one of these incursions, a sixteen-year-old girl was killed.” “The huge investment in the settlements once again dug a deep deficit of about $500 million in the Ministry of Housing and Construction budget for 1991.” “On October 5, 1992, Congress approved guarantees of $10 billion to Israel.”

“In the Hamas writings, alongside motifs of sacrifice, there is an explicit prohibition against indiscriminate harm to helpless people. The massacre (of 29 Palestinians) at the mosque (Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron) released them from that taboo and introduced a dimension of measure for measure, based on citations from the Koran. The murderous act of the Jewish physician (mass murderer Baruch Goldstein) thus released dormant demons on all sides.” Still, in Hebron “Baruch Goldstein was sanctified and became the savior of the Jewish people.” Who knew the sacred Jewish concept of “tikkun olam” is now for sissies?

The number of settlers “soared” by more than 40% “during the periods of the Rabin and Peres governments.” “In 1996 Benjamin Netanyahu brought the right back into power after Rabin was assassinated.” The settlers loved him and threw their support behind him. “Barak’s term saw the steepest growth of construction in the territories since the signing of the Oslo agreement.” Some settlers “argued that the Arabs were even worse than the Germans in the Nazi period.”

A IDF soldier’s story about all you need to know about Israeli Settlers: “An elderly Palestinian woman laden with shopping baskets passed by. Settler children, girls, picked up stones, as if automatically, and began to stone her. When he asked the girls why they were doing this they replied: ‘How do you know what she did in 1929’?” Charming. That story came from a demobilized soldier who organized the Breaking the Silence group. One settler explained it this way, “For every drop of our blood, they will pay in land.” Not to be outdone, Meir Kahane said “Anyone who says vengeance is not a Jewish virtue is simply wrong.” The old religious standby, “Turn the other cheek” becomes “Rip ‘em a New One.”

Two “rich covetous settlements” in Gaza were evacuated in August 2005. Paid Zionist trolls love to tell you Israel how evacuated Israeli settlements in Gaza in 2005 but never will tell you that not only did the occupation continue, but ALL of the occupation’s infrastructure intentionally remained. That’s like saying, “Hey, two of our prison guards using the BEST rooms at your super max prison where you are ALL imprisoned for NO reason vacated those BEST rooms so what’s your problem?” Maybe, it’s the fact that you are ALL STILL imprisoned without cause! And when Israel left Gaza, “Israel left behind scorched earth, devasted services, and people without a future.” Zionist trolls won’t tell you that Israel “continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable might.” As Colonel Shlomo Gazit explained, “It would be a catastrophe to bring two settlements into the heart of the Gaza Strip.” Yep… “The settlers saw the territories as their own domain and themselves as its lords.” The joys of delusional entitlement. “The settlers are champions at endearing themselves to officers who can do right by them.” Narcissist pathological anger also happens with entitled settlers historically: “Four times the French settlers (colons) tried to assassinate (Charles) de Gaulle during his visit to (French occupied) Algeria.” Maybe instead stop taking land by force that clearly belongs to others.

What Palestinians call the Al-Aqua Intifada, the author calls Sharon’s War, or the Settlement’s War. It was started by Sharon’s ascent of the Temple Mount in 2000 in hopes to appease the right wing, and to kill Palestinian negotiations. It alone started the Second Intifada. By May 2007, Israel had restricted Palestinian access to 50% of the West Bank in efforts to erode Palestinian society. Textbook settler-colonialism.

Settlers: Hilltop Youth are the new settlers who believe in a closed alternative subculture of violence and harassment. They either see the Israeli state as a nuisance or as the enemy; just like US settlers fought the law out west when told to slow down their endless land grab from Native Americans. Ah, the impatience of youth. “But I wanna be violent to people who don’t look like me NOW!” Israeli “settlers who represent the disaster of the occupation and in the long term also the loss of Israel if they continue to maintain their project, remained faithful to themselves, and honest in their own fanatical way.”

This book was super long, and hard to read because it was filled with endless stories of selfish entitled thieving armed losers. I learned less than two pages of stuff which puts it as one of the least informative books I’ve yet read and reviewed on Israel/Palestine (23 done so far). But I’m glad I read it in case it was all that and a bag of chips. Now only 45 more Israel/Palestine books left for me to read and review (while my liberal friends on Facebook continue to intentionally ignore Israel’s Genocide in Gaza) and I’ll be done. If Donald Trump only had Israel’s PR department, our media would call him svelte.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

A compelling book about an important subject--at least for an American reader for whom these issues and events are not generally well-known--but there were a few issues that stopped me from finding the book really useful and enlightening. My biggest complaint is that it's really, really hard to tell from this book just how central these characters and the settler movement as a whole are integrated into mainstream Israeli (and, by extension, Israeli-American) politics. Maybe this is because Zertal is an Israeli author writing in Hebrew for an Israeli audienceand can thus assume that her readers already have a general understanding of the status/popularity/visibility in mainstream Israeli political culture and power, and she does make a few attempts to address that, but I'm not Israeli, and I just kind of don't really know. The number of settlers themselves isn't massive, but then again, Israel/Palestine is not a large area. So...is this sort of a fringe movement? Are the settlers fringe elements? How do mainstream Israelis really feel about them? Are they really aware of them and their actions? Are settlers and the settler movement really central to Israeli parliamentary politics? Do they have significant political influence? Or is this an in-depth book about what are effectively extremists in a niche movement? I just don't know, and maybe that's my fault. But it made it pretty hard for me to grasp the actual scope of the book.

My second complaint, which is sort of related, is just...where are the Palestinians? I mean, the settlers are on Palestinian land, living next to (often hostile) Palestinian neighbors, in what they perceive as an epic holy war against a Palestinian threat to the land. And yet Palestinians, and the Palestinian experience, are largely absent from the book. Zertal clearly and blatantly states that this is a story of the settlers, and that her perspective is an Israeli one, which is fine. But the complete absence of the Palestinian context ends up kind of validating the settler worldview and narrative, because it makes the land seem empty and deserted, like a blank canvas just waiting for Jewish settlement designs. And it also makes acts of violence seem like they come completely unprovoked and out-of-the-blue, with no rhyme or reason. Palestinians end up looking like nameless, faceless terrorists who only really exist as the unpredictable aggressive foil to Jewish settler ideologies and plans. And I'm absolutely sure that was not Zertal's actual intention or perspective.

But, despite all of that, it was an interesting and well-researched book. The chronology could be a bit confusing since it was organized thematically rather than chronologically, but her arguments were solid and compelling. She did an admirable job of exposing just how radical and how much religious fanaticism has gone into the settler movement (and later how much of that has seeped into wider Israeli politics). She does an impressive job of exploring the complex ties between the settlers, the military, and the government. I definitely feel that Lords of the Land gave me a better understanding of Israeli politics and policy and of the Israel/Palestine conflict as a whole. Read it if you're interested in any of those things.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oppression and occupation are such banal tasks of collusion, power, and winking acquiescence. What is most interesting is how the land is transformed into ideology, religion, and identity. Damning.

[Oscar J · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely worth reading, but the total absence of Palestinians and Arabic language sources is notable. At the same time, the thesis makes clear that the Israeli state is responsible for the colonial enterprise in the oPt, but overall, as you read through the narrative, the weight of burden is placed on the religious nationalists. This reflects a common liberal Zionist outlook designed to obscure their role in what is a criminal enterprise ("It's ultimately THEIR fault!").
There is also a certain tone to the book that is common to Israeli narratives of the occupation: the idea that 1967 represented some sort of drastic "break" in Israeli institutional and military history. The authors should instead recognize how 1967 represents a continuation more than a break (when we recognize Israeli military rule over Palestinian citizens between 1948-1966/68).

[Maya · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a bit dry and I think this might be because it was actually written in Hebrew and was translated. The reason I gave this book 3 stars is because if you weren’t part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict scene from the beginning you probably won’t know a lot of the names and places used in this book. It is obviously written for an Israeli audience. Another reason was the tone of the writer…or maybe the translator…I’m not sure. I couldn’t decided what the tone of the writer was and that bothered me for some reason. The information presented though was very important and after reading this book if anyone says that Israel is not a setter-colonialist country then they didn’t really read this book.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL STUDY OF SETTLEMENTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Authors Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar wrote in the Introduction to this 2007 (English edition) book, “When this book was first published in Hebrew, in early 2005, the Israeli proposal for ‘disengagement’ from the Gaza Strip and the dismantling of the Jewish settlements… was still a raw idea… and seemingly threatened to break Israeli society in two… However…. The actual disengagement, carried out in August 2005, has already nearly sunk into historical oblivion. To a large extent it was the settlers themselves who paid for their repeated apocalyptic prophecies and their going to the brink too many times. There is a limit to the catastrophic traumas that the overflowing collective Israeli memory can contain.” (Pg. xi) They continue, “Most of the settlements … look fragile, neglected, ephemeral, as though they lack vitality of their own. The network of infrastructures that link the settlements …are the elixir of life for the settlements… Remove them… and the project collapses. If Israeli society ever finds the courage to separate itself from the territories it occupied in war forty years ago, the country might finally restore its place in the region, and among the community of nations.” (Pg. xv-xvi)

They explain, “not a single comprehensive book has been written… about the Jewish settlements. The tale of the territories that were conquered by Israel in 1967… has not yet been told in full. This book attempts… to do so… [This book] charts a two-pronged development. On the one hand… the settlement movement … was imbued with a sense of sacred national-religious mission. On the other hand we have seen the gradual collapse of the state’s institutions… This, this is the intertwined story of the settlers and of the State of Israel over the past forty years.” (Pg. xvi) Later, they add, “The book’s aim, among other things, is to expose what was meant to be concealed from us, or what we have not wanted to see, and to stimulate a more informed public debate on the subject of a time that is so critical for the settlements, and even more for Israel and for the entire region.” (Pg. xxiii)

They report, “On May 17, 1977, the Israeli voter handed political control to the rightist parties headed by the Likud under ... Menachem Begin. The illusion that it was possible both to satisfy the settlers and to keep the option of peace and compromise intact was thrown into the face of the Labor movement. More than that, the outcome of the elections revealed the existence of a new political force in Israel… Since then, there has been no political struggle or public debate in Israel on the … country’s future, the fate of the territories and politicians’ life expectancies that has not derived from the settlers’ words and actions, even though they have remained a minority… The pragmatic philosophy … which had guided the pioneers of secular socialist Zionism and established the state, had now been confiscated by the new alliance of the Revisionists and the national-religious, and had become their tool.” (Pg. 53-54)

They recount, “The massive, systematic establishment of as many settlements as possible in the least possible time while scattering them over as vast a territory as possible in the West Bank was Sharon’s typical pattern of action. This aim shunted aside every economic, security, moral, urban, and ecological consideration. Sharon promised the ministers that by the end of the twentieth century there would be 2 million Jews living in the territories.” (Pg. 59)

They state, “the heads of Gush Emunim… brought to the fore the plan to blow up the Dome of the Rock… During the course of the following months the terrorists gathered intelligence information, reconnoitered on the Temple Mount, and prepared the explosive charges. The trio of founders… discussed the formulation of an advance announcement to the press, public figures, and rabbis, which would forestall the ‘distorted and hostile’ versions that would be spread immediately after the attack. But the completion of the withdrawal from Sinai, and especially last-minute dithering, put a stop to the plan. Eventually Livni claimed that it was only his illness, hepatitis, that stood between him and carrying out the mission. Etzion, however, claimed that it was Livni’s doubts that led him to reconsider the idea.” (Pg. 84-85)

They note, “The Palestinian uprising [the ‘Intifada’] crushed the illusion of coexistence between the occupied and the occupier, and shattered the false vision of the benevolent, ‘enlightened’ Israeli occupation… Accumulated feelings of long years of military rule, oppression, and exploitation among those who had seen their dignity trampled and their lands and their water taken from them and given to the Jewish settlers exploded all at once and slapped the complacent face of the settlers and all of Israeli society.” (Pg. 104)

They observe, “The race for more land was common to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. For their part, the Palestinians engaged in intense construction in order to create facts prior to the Israeli withdrawal. But their effort was a pale shadow compared with the settlers’ endeavors. The general feeling that Netanyahu was about to lose the elections… [in] 1999 spurred the settlers to grab hilltop after hilltop… the settlers took full advantage of the twilight days of a crumbling government that did not have the ability to use force against them. This time, however, it was a decidedly right-wing government, devoid of internal brakes. Within a few weeks, new settlements were established, one after another, unhindered.” (Pg. 170-171)

They suggest, “the ‘ghost’ of Gush Emunim…has for thirty years also been Israeli society’s demon… that emerges from time to time … to torment it with the question of whether this blend of messianic belief with political astuteness and stunts, or bursts of irrationality with cutting-edge organizational and operational skill, of violence and lawbreaking with sweet talk and self-righteous discourse—which for many years had characterized Gush Emunim—had defined Israeli society as a whole.” (Pg. 244)

They point out, “the security system[‘s] … functionaries were ordered to protect Israeli civilians who settled in the territories. The army and other security services were given a mission for which they were not intended. An army… is not supposed to train its soldiers to defend trespassers who settle outside of the sovereign territory, with or without the government’s blessing. Military service in the territories suddenly hurled soldiers into the bottomless abyss that separates occupation from democracy.” (Pg. 279-280) They state, “The heroism of the settlers---women and men who chose to settle in the heart of an occupied and hostile population outside the borders of the sovereign State of Israel, and in so doing to endanger their children’s lives---was a central motif in the speeches of leaders of the military.” (Pg. 302)

They note, “Throughout the years of occupation, and under the auspices of the Israeli legal system, the steadily tightening Israeli rule had been in far-reaching breach of international conventions … Israel has tried, successfully, to enjoy the best of several worlds that do not reconcile with one another legally. It has maintained a regime in the territories based on a military commander’s authority and power in an occupied territory. However, it has not taken upon itself the limitations and prohibitions that obligate an occupying state, like the prohibition on transferring population from that state into the occupying territory, or the prohibition on confiscating private property. Nor has it fulfilled its obligation to serve as a trustee for the public property in the occupied territory.” (Pg. 334)

They state, “While statesmen and legal experts were splitting hairs over the question of the legal status of the territories and the matter of the proper terminology for them, the army was prepared and willing as always to fill the governing and administrative vacuum left by politicians.” (Pg. 341) Later, they add, "The Jewish settlers behaved as though the territories were their own, and the Israeli law and justice system collaborated, both actively and passively.” (Pg. 374-375) They observe, “The small number of cases that have been discussed here shows that in a systematic way the courts did not exact justice from settlers who were convicted. And this despite the fact that … many of the settlers in these cases were tried for ‘lesser’ charges…” (Pg. 385-386)

They assert, “The great victory… that Sharon succeeded in chalking up to his credit, before his withdrawal from Gaza, was the causal disconnection of the Palestinians’ war against the forty-year Israeli occupation for any historical context, and from his own handiwork over many years. This victory is likely to be short-lived, however. It will lead Israel along a sure path to more disputes, more hatred, and more bereavement.” (Pg. 404)

They conclude, “In Gaza Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might. But the trauma that was promised to the Israelis passed them by without leaving a mark.” (Pg. 450)

This book will be of great interest to those studying the issue of the settlements in Israel.

[Brittan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really shows how physical land can be transformed into something more than just dirt and rocks. It's main premise is how ideology used as justification for outright theft and murder. For anyone who wants to know what this whole "settlements is a roadblock to peace" argument that is being bandied about is REALLY about, read this.

[Mike F · Rating 4 out of 5]

An expose of the nature of the Israeli settlement movement and its disproportionate influence in Israeli politics and Israel's relations with Palestine. Polemical, but good.

[سري سمور]

لا يكاد يمضي يوم إلا ونسمع عن اعتداءات المستوطنين في أرجاء الضفة الغربية؛ وبعد الحرب على غزة منذ شهور، تصاعدت هجمات المستوطنين على الأهالي والبيوت والمركبات والمزارع والمواشي، وصارت تأخذ طابعا دمويا غير مسبوق في زخمه، وهي تتم غالبا تحت حماية ودعم وإشراف قوات الجيش الإسرائيلي.

فصار خبر هجوم المستوطنين على قرية برقة قرب نابلس أو (سميَتها) برقة قرب رام الله وحوارة ودوما والمغيّر وسنجل ومسافر يطا، خبرا روتينيا مع أنه عادة يسفر عن ارتقاء شهداء بنيران المستوطنين، وعن الخسائر المادية فحدث ولا حرج.

فكيف صار المستوطنون بهذه القوة والجرأة؟ وما هي ملابسات تحولهم إلى ما يشبه الدولة الغازية، خاصة خلال السنوات الأخيرة؟

بالصدفة -أقولها حقيقة دون ادعاء- وقعت عيناي على كتاب في مكتبة عامة، مترجم عن العبرية، فاستعرته وعكفت على دراسته، ووجدت أنه يجيب على كثير من الأسئلة المطروحة وغير المطروحة. حيث أنه يناقش بتفصيل وبيانات نشأة وتغول الاستيطان في الضفة الغربية منذ 1967 وحتى 2004.

أما ما بعد ذلك فنحن نراه ونلمسه، فقد تفشى السرطان الاستيطاني في الأرض الفلسطينية وصار خطرا على كينونتها وهويتها ووجود وتطور ونمو أهلها الحقيقيين العرب الفلسطينيين فيها.
الكتاب مترجم عن العبرية بعنوان (أسياد البلاد المستوطنون ودولة إسرائيل 1967-2004)، وقد اشترك كاتب وكاتبة إسرائيليان في تأليفه هما: – عقيبا الدار (هكذا اسمه على غلاف الكتاب ولكن دوما نقرؤه في ترجمات مقالاته: عكيفا إلدار) وعديت زرطال.
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[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

A readable history of the Israeli movement to plant settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. It's a long book but if you want to understand the first 4 decades of settlement activities, this book will do well.

[Amos Kovacs · Rating 3 out of 5]

כתוב בחלקו רע. נולד כנראה כשני ספרים נפרדים שאוחדו יחד ללא הרבה עריכה. התוצאה אורך בלתי נסבל וחזרות רבות. עם זאת ספר מדאיג ומרתק. הביא אותי למסקנה שהסיכוי לשלום באמת אפסי. לא בגלל הפלשתינאים כי אם בגלל חוסר הסיכוי להוריד את המתנחלים ולרסן את מלחמת האזרחים שתפרוץ בעקבות ניסיון לעשות זאת.

[Aboud Hamayel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books dealing with the rise of Israel's settler movement, tracing its historical roots, dissecting the tactics settlers use and showcasing Israel's government complete backing for this enterprise. A must read.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

infuriating, heartbreaking and incredibly informative. it was hard to read this book in one go as it was like getting punched in the stomach with the point over and over again.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ok book, being 65 I've grown up with this, so the topic was not as riveting as I expected.

[Thomas Simard · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that will give you a good understanding of the settlements and of the settlers' ideology.