The Accidental Empire : Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977

from the NYT Sunday book review...

Generally speaking, there have been two prevailing explanations: one of Israeli innocence, the other of guilt. In the first, the tiny state was forced into war in 1967 and grabbed Gaza, Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights in self-defense, planning to hold them only until they could be safely traded for peace. In the other, Israel used its victory in 1967 deliberately to expand its borders. It disenfranchised the locals, stole their land and settled the territories with religious fanatics.

Now Gershom Gorenberg, an American-born Israeli journalist, has produced a remarkably insightful third account. In "The Accidental Empire," he portrays the first two decades after '67 as a melancholy story of inadvertant colonialism. It's a groundbreaking revision that deserves to reframe the entire debate.

According to Gorenberg, the Israelis did not quite acquire their colonies as the British were said to, in a fit of absent-mindedness — but just about. In 1967, Israel won an unexpected victory in a war it didn't seek and found itself sitting on new territory three times its original size.

But Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was paralyzed by this unhappy prize. He refused either to annex the land (since this would mean either expelling or absorbing 1.1 million Arabs) or to return it (since Israel's 1949 borders were deemed indefensible).
Instead, he and his Labor Party successors (Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin) pursued a policy of no policy. The tragedy of this dodge, Gorenberg reveals, was that it ended up amounting to a policy anyway, for "stalemate was the soil in which settlements grew." As the deadlocked cabinet dithered, a decisive few — mostly young zealots dreaming of a biblical "Greater Israel" — took action.

The Accidental Empire : Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 by Gershom Gorenberg