"Outside Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's office, we met Beiga Shochat, Minister of Finance," says Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun. "He asked us what we had done there and we replied that we had shown him the Ramallah bypass road. He asked how much money it would cost, and we replied that not much, a million shekels per kilometer of road, 18 kilometers for starters. He looked at us and said, 'OK.' That's it, that was all. Do you know the chances that Rabin will agree to accept us, look at the map Pinchas Wallerstein brought with him, and that the Minister of Finance will be waiting for us outside the door? Within minutes, we completed a process that could take months. The Oslo Accords were terrible, but in this way we managed to achieve achievements. We saved Judea and Samaria."
Late at night in the mid-90s, we made our way on bus number 160 from Jerusalem to Kiryat Arba, the town where we lived. We passed through the Dheisheh refugee camp, crossed the town of Halhul and continued inside Hebron. Then I saw the car parked on the side of the road with its lights on, as if waiting for us. This was shortly after the murder of Yehuda Partosh and Nahum Huss on a bus traveling at the Glass Junction. My former kindergarten teacher, Leah, later found a bullet in a book she was carrying. The moments of terror I went through are palpable to this day, despite the fact that I was only 11 years old. Was he a terrorist ambushing a bus that was only stone-proofed? Finally we got through the car and continued to the settlement. Everything went well, this time.
Today it is a description that seems to have come from another world. There is no Israeli traveling within Palestinian villages and cities, except at very specific points in Judea and Samaria, which are also in the process of being repaired. A relatively short time after that attack, the Halhul bypass road was opened, preventing residents of Kiryat Arba and the South Hebron Hills from traveling through hostile Halhul and Hebron. At the same time, the tunnel road was also opened, bypassing Bethlehem and Dheisheh. Travel time has been dramatically shortened, the quality of travel has soared, and the need to travel through Palestinian cities has become distant history. A similar phenomenon took place throughout Judea and Samaria, all because of the Oslo Accords.
Photo: Yaakov Saar GPO,
The agreement, which is currently marking 30 years since its signing, is considered a red sheet by the settlers, one of the greatest disasters in the history of the State of Israel, no less. "Don't give them guns," cried the right to Rabin and Peres, rifles that were later used by murderers in serious attacks during the second intifada. 1,000 Israelis were murdered in this intifada, which was a direct continuation of the unfortunate agreements that gave autonomy to Yasser Arafat and his terrorists. "Don't give them land," the settlers pleaded. In those areas, the Palestinian Authority, which is currently unable to impose order within its borders, has been built, allowing parts of its territory, such as the Jenin area, to deteriorate into anarchy. As far as the settlers are concerned, the writing was written on the wall even before the agreement was signed, and its results are clear on the ground today.
But was the agreement retrospectively bad for the settlers, or did it fortify the settlement in Judea and Samaria and turn it into a fait accompli? The agreement, on which there was a wall-to-wall consensus on the right that it was bad and terrible, gave the Palestinians a de facto state despite the risk, but today there are half a million settlers in Judea and Samaria and the hand is still tilted. Those who prior to the Oslo Accords had to travel through Palestinian cities to isolated communities deep within the territory are now doing so on main and well-lit roads, which are now also expected to be dramatically upgraded. It is possible, say quite a few on both the right and the left, that it was the same bad agreement that caused the settlers, backed by the state, to press the gas and turn the settlement in Judea and Samaria into an empire.
Direct channel to Rabin
Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun, the rabbi of the Har Etzion Yeshiva, was one of the key figures of those dark years in the eyes of the settlement. But unlike some of his fellow travelers, who fought with all their might against the agreement without compromise, he decided to go against the current and opened a secret channel with Yitzhak Rabin.
"When the talks for Oslo began, I had to make a decision. Even before the formation of the government, I met Rabin with Israel Harel, and we asked him to stabilize the swinging coalition of Shamir and Peres. Soon after, when he formed a government and saw what was happening, I debated whether to support him. Finally, I decided to keep in touch with him to try to influence from within. I understood the consequences of my decision, that I would be severely attacked, but I understood that I could change the situation.
"The agreement was forced on Rabin. He didn't believe in it from the start and didn't think it would work, and I knew that. For this reason I was very torn. On the one hand, there was my state obligation as a religious Zionist person, and on the other hand, I felt an obligation to my friends from Gush Emunim, students of Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, who strongly opposed it. It was a very big break for me, but in the end I decided to go in the direction of cooperation with Rabin in order to try to salvage what I could from this difficult situation. At one meeting, I asked if I could write him direct letters. We don't need a laconic answer from him, just that I can bring up problems from the field so that we can try to solve them together. Rabin agreed, and I wrote him many letters, sometimes several times a week. Together we succeeded in advancing various projects for the benefit of the settlement."
Photo: AP,
This is a decision that sounds trivial but was controversial by any measure in real time. Today, the protest over the Oslo Accords is mainly remembered for the injustice of Yigal Amir who murdered Prime Minister Rabin, but it must be said that it was accompanied by legitimate public anger from a public that felt that they were harming the security of the State of Israel and contributing to the establishment of a dangerous Palestinian state headed by terrorists without sufficient public legitimacy. If the description sounds familiar, you're not alone. Ben-Nun draws an unequivocal comparison between those days and the agreement that changed the face of Israel and the protest against the legal reform these days.
"Oslo was forced on us by a minority government. A historic move that changes the world order was made by a government that did not have broad legitimacy, far from it, and it affected human lives on a significant scale. And the Supreme Court stood by. To this day, the Supreme Court does not intervene in all matters pertaining to homes built by Palestinians illegally, but it does allow the eviction of Jews."
Shortly after the signing of Oslo I in September 1993, the teams began work on Oslo B, which divided Judea and Samaria into Areas A, B and C. Peres' people spoke with Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, while Rabbi Ben-Nun and some of the heads of the Judea and Samaria councils spoke with Rabin, trying to minimize the damage they realized was already inevitable. In those days, the idea was conceived to build bypass roads in Judea and Samaria that would bypass the Palestinian cities.
360 - Zeev Elkin marks 24 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords // Archive photo
In December 1993, Rabin addressed the editorial committee. He claimed that a political agreement was necessary, but at the same time made it clear that he would do everything to protect the residents of Judea and Samaria. "What I must achieve are the same goals that I defined and that will ensure security for all residents. To all communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. The trend that began on November <> – a strong sovereign Jewish state that fulfills its national Zionist and Jewish missions. Not territorial expansion in our minds, but fulfilling the mission of the return to Zion of the Jewish people, which is first of all important what will be within the borders of the state and less important where the borders of the state will be, as long as it covers most of the territory of the Land of Israel and its capital is united Jerusalem."
"Rabin realized too late that the Palestinians were striving for an agreement at any price, and that we should have demanded a better agreement, and when he realized that, the party had already gone for it," Ben-Nun says. "He told me he had no choice, but that he would try to fix it as much as possible. Rabin did not believe that Oslo would succeed. He succumbed to pressures inside and out. But when he realized that this had already been done and there was no escape, he tried to amend and improve the agreement as much as possible on the fly. He understood that there would be no permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians. He told me that it would be impossible to reach an agreement without Jerusalem, and that the Palestinians would never give up Jerusalem.
"After a meeting I held with the commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, I wrote to Rabin that there were many casualties in Ramallah and asked to pave a bypass road. Rabin replied that he had looked into the matter, and so it was agreed to pave the road. I went to Rabin with Pinchas Wallerstein, who was the head of the Binyamin Council, and he gave Rabin a map of the road. Rabin, who was a man of details, delved into the map for a long time and then gave us OK. Outside the room, we met the finance minister, who approved the matter, and so we set off."
Treasure bypass route
Journalist and settlement historian Hagai Huberman says that the person who pushed the idea of bypass roads the most was Central Command General Ilan Biran, who fought the Finance Ministry, whose people opposed the matter because they claimed that they would return the entire area anyway and that it would be a shame to invest the money. "The redeployment will cost you a billion shekels a year. Write down what I'm saying. When I'm no longer in command, these roads will still stand, and you'll still have to pay this money," he told them. The treasury lost the battle, the roads were on their way.
"And so, with the retreat in the background, a momentum of paving began, since Judea and Samaria have not known each other since Roman times," Huberman describes it in a column published in the sectoral newspaper "The Mood" last Saturday. "The sight was amazing: dozens of heavy vehicles, trucks, excavators and sheep uprooting mountains and grinding them together in a revolutionary change in the landscape. All the vehicles were busy paving new roads, long and short, wide and narrow, bypassing the Arab communities."
Bypass roads began to be built throughout Judea and Samaria, in a grandiose project unlike any seen until those years. The Nablus bypass road made it possible to reach communities such as Alon Moreh and Har Bracha. The Ramallah bypass road paved the way from Ofra and Beit El to Jerusalem. The Tunnel Road, which included the longest tunnel in Israel and the highest bridge, shortened the road from Jerusalem to Gush Etzion. And the Halhul bypass road enabled residents of Kiryat Arba and the South Hebron Hills to reach their homes without the danger to life that would have entailed passing through Palestinian city centers.
Although bypass roads were a very significant aspect for the settlers, it was not the only aspect. Since they knew that soon there would be a Palestinian Authority, which as far as they were concerned as a hostile and dangerous body, next door to the settlements, they made sure that the settlement remained protected and orderly. The settlers who were in the know were exposed to maps of the agreement being formulated before transferring them to the Palestinians, and made necessary amendments to them for the continued existence of the settlements. Military officials also influenced the nature of the settlement and the area. Thus, due to the IDF's insistence, the entire area where passenger planes make their rounds for landing at Ben Gurion Airport remains under full Israeli control.
Rabbi Yoel Ben Nun, Photo: Oren Ben Hakon
A prominent example, Ben-Nun says, was a meeting he attended together with Prime Minister Rabin and then-head of the Gaza Coast Council, Zvi Hendel. "Hendel turned to Rabin and told him that Gush Katif needs a beach so that it will not be an enclave. Rabin listened, and the next day he left for Cairo. On television, Mubarak can suddenly be heard telling Rabin, 'What part of the beach do you want?' We had an open channel to it, and that led to changes on the ground."
Huberman believes that both the left and the right won a strategic victory and failure with regard to the Oslo Accords. "The withdrawal was like an oil stain that spread and stopped in the settlement. The Oslo Accords are a victory and a strategic failure of Peace Now and a victory and strategic failure of Gush Emunim. Peace Now succeeded in introducing the concept of "land for peace" into the discourse, but the withdrawal was halted by settlement. If you take all the Oslo maps and analyze them, what drew the area was only the settlement."
Ben-Nun agrees: "The architects of Oslo believed that settlement in Judea and Samaria would fall apart after the agreement. They were sure that the settlement would not last and that people would leave on their own. Rabin did not agree to evacuate any settlements and thought that the security of the settlement and bypass roads had to be taken care of. That's why I was willing to absorb all the attacks from my friends. Rabin was more right-wing than Ariel Sharon, who at the time was perceived as an enthusiastic supporter of the settlements. Rabin was the one who insisted on not evacuating a single settlement; he was the one who said that if we evacuate Gush Katif, Hamas would control Gaza. It must also be said, to a certain extent, Oslo saved Judea and Samaria. True, it cut us off from the big cities, but if we hadn't done what we did then, there would be no Israelis living in most of Judea and Samaria today."
The left also understood
Just as the Yom Kippur War made it clear to Gush Emunim that in order to preserve the land, settlements must be established in Judea and Samaria, the same happened during the Oslo Accords. The new roads dramatically shortened the road to the communities, and a trip from Gush Etzion, which took half an hour, was shortened to only 12 minutes. A trip from Shiloh to Jerusalem, which used to take nearly an hour, was shortened to half an hour. Now the settlers could turn their attention to strengthening the actual settlement – that is, bringing tens of thousands to settle in Judea and Samaria.
The heads of the Yesha Council began holding settlement fairs throughout Israel, with the assistance of the Settlement Division. The Amana movement, Huberman says, rented large halls in different cities and divided them into small chambers where each locality presented itself. Buses were sent all over Judea and Samaria with interested families, and it did its job. In 1993, there were 115,134 people in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip. Two years later, with the Oslo Accords hovering in the background, there were already 1999,183 Israeli residents in Judea and Samaria. In <>, the population was <>,<>. The number of Israelis who have settled in Judea and Samaria since the liberation of these areas in the Six-Day War has doubled within a decade. The masses that reached Judea and Samaria prevented, among other things, the evacuation of settlements. Judea and Samaria became largely a fait accompli because of that agreement.
On the left, too, quite a few believe that in the end the settlers managed to do the impossible and exploit the Oslo Accords to their advantage. In an article published a few years ago, Hagit Ofran of Peace Now claimed that Rabin was not sympathetic to the settlements, but thought that evacuating the settlements would cost him too much political price. "But Rabin was wrong if he thought it would be better to postpone dealing with the settlements to the permanent stage." While Peace Now, she said, did not do enough to prevent construction, the settlers continued to build and build. Today, the number of settlers in Judea and Samaria is more than half a million people. Another Oslo agreement seems more distant than ever.
From Oslo to Disengagement
Was the Oslo Accords good for settlement? It depends on who you ask. There is no dispute on the right that this is a bad agreement, which caused enormous damage to the entire State of Israel. The people who believe in Greater Israel will read these words and will be outraged, saying that this is a surrender of the Land of Israel to the Arabs and that this should not be welcomed. Some in the settlements will also point out that prior to the Oslo Accords, there was construction on a much more significant scale, compared to Rabin's freeze at the beginning of his term as prime minister, and also much smaller construction in subsequent governments, including during Netanyahu's term.
Avraham Shvut (81) is one of the leaders of Gush Emunim and is behind many of the plans that outline the path of the settlement to this day. His answer is unequivocal: "Oslo is a sick evil, and without that agreement, the settlements would be much bigger today," he is convinced. "The Oslo Accords stopped settlement drastically. Prior to the Rabin government, quite a few plans were approved, without government involvement. The meeting of the Civil Administration's Supreme Planning Council, which approves housing units, was purely professional, and now go look for such plans, which are the basis for everything. Could it have been worse? Of course, but you can't say that Oslo was a good thing under any circumstances."
Mochi Batter, director of the Katif Heritage Center in Nitzan, agrees with Shvut. As someone who lived in Neve Dekalim during the years the Oslo Accords were signed, he says that the same agreement eventually led to the disengagement. "The reality created by the Oslo Accords inside the Gaza Strip made life very difficult for settlement in the bloc, reduced our territory and restricted movement on the one hand, and on the other hand created a safe space on the Palestinian side from which terror emanated. This impossible reality, some would say, is what gave rise to the disengagement."
Ben-Nun, for his part, believes that in the midst of the difficulty and the agreement imposed on the settlements, the settlers managed to do their best. "Every time I leave my home in Gush Etzion I see the blossoms. If we hadn't done what we did, there would have been no settlement in Judea and Samaria. Period." Huberman agrees: "Oslo gave serious fortification to the settlements. The first 25 years of Judea and Samaria were official state settlements. The eight years in the 90s and early 2000s were a process of political agreement and drying up, but despite all the difficulties they brought in 100,<> people. Oslo did good even though it was bad."
Oded Revivi, head of the Efrat Council, distinguishes between the agreement that was signed and the one that was actually implemented: "The question of whether the Oslo Accords were good for the settlements is a complex question, among other things because the Oslo Accords that were signed are not the ones that were actually implemented. If we examine what we ultimately received from Oslo, we see that we received quite a bit of construction and the system of bypass roads, which injected a great deal of life and development potential in terms of the number of residents. Imagine if all the residents of Efrat were traveling through Bethlehem today - it's a hallucination. Therefore, there is no doubt that the Oslo Accords did good in retrospect for the settlements."
Revivi argues that the settlement could have benefited more from the agreements if only its leaders had acted correctly: "There is no doubt that we could have exploited what happened after the signing of the Oslo Accords better, and the potential was not realized. There are two schools of thought in Judea and Samaria – one side that says that what exists must be embraced and empowered, and one side that says that it is necessary to spread out as much as possible. In practice, as a result of the Oslo Accords, they tried to create more facts on the ground and establish more small settlements, but forgot to strengthen the existing ones. For example, in 1999 the number of residents in Efrat and Gush Etzion was the same – 8,000, and nine years later, when I was elected mayor of Efrat, the number hardly changed in the locality, and Gush Etzion doubled. The reason is that in Gush Etzion there was crazy construction while in Efrat they didn't approve anything. Instead of taking the centers of the blocs – Efrat, Ma'ale Adumim and Ariel – and turning them into anchors, weaken them."
Looking Forward
Although the Oslo Accords were signed 30 years ago, it still affects Judea and Samaria and the entire State of Israel today, not only in terms of security and politics, but also in the way Israel conducts itself in Judea and Samaria on a daily basis, and therefore it is also appropriate to attach an epilogue to this article.
A few months ago, as part of the state budget, the current government approved an unprecedented sum for investment in roads in Judea and Samaria. Route 60, which includes a significant portion of the bypass roads built in the 90s, will mostly double and will become a quality and safe road for the millions of passengers, Israeli and Palestinian, who travel on it.
Israelis in Judea and Samaria, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
Although the need for the road is transportation of the first order, since the roads are too narrow to accommodate all the vehicles that pass through them, there is no doubt that it will serve the settlers who want to strengthen control over Judea and Samaria. A high-quality, fast road, without traffic jams, reduces the gaps between the communities. Alon Moreh and Har Bracha are still considered relatively isolated settlements, but this will change when the Huwara bypass is opened. Kiryat Arba's potential, deep in Judea, will leap when it has a two-lane, two-lane road leading directly to Jerusalem. So it's perfectly clear why far-left organizations stood on their hind legs when the transportation plan was approved.
30 years after the Oslo Accords, has the threat to settlement faded? The answer is unequivocally no. About 77% of the settlers still live in cities near the Green Line, and almost half of them live in the four largest cities in Judea and Samaria. There are still quite a few isolated communities on the ground, including Beit Hagai, from which a Nigerian Bathsheba left last week, who was murdered by terrorists. But as far as the settlement is concerned, every harm is what strengthens it. "When they torture him, he will break out," they define it. Every blow only strengthens Judea and Samaria and only pushes it forward. The Yom Kippur War, the Oslo Accords, the Disengagement, terrorist attacks – all are only part of a struggle in which, as far as they are concerned, they will win.
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