Yaakov Perry spent the winter studying from morning till after midnight, sometimes straight through the night. The course consisted of Palestinian Arabic – not as one language, but a Babel of dialects of towns and villages, so students could know where a suspect was from or change their own speech to fit a disguise – and local customs and the reading of handwriting, so they could read a half-educated informer’s note in a second, and the art of “winning the heart of potential agents,” as Perry wrote many years later, after a long career in the Shin Bet. That winter he was twenty-three years old, having spent less than two years in the security agency, a square-jawed young man whose hairline was just hinting at later baldness, who had expected to study music at Juilliard until, in a fit of frustration with drunken fellow musicians in a radio orchestra, he answered a cryptic ad offering “challenging work.” The promising trumpet player sought to become an artist of secrecy.

The Shin Bet handled counterintelligence – catching spies, uncovering terror groups, preventing attacks. “Defends and Shall Not Be Seen” was inscribed on its seal. The full name of every employee, up to the agency’s director, was classified. Until June 1967, it was a compact agency of a few hundred staffers. Suddenly it had to add the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip and West Bank to its watch, along with the Sinai’s sparse population and the Syrian Druse who remained in the Heights. By that winter, the agency was expanding like a company whose product has found a new market. It called back retired agents and borrowed from the Mossad, the service that spied on foreign countries, but also began wholesale recruitment of young people right out of the army.[1]

The Shin Bet build-up was one piece of the entrenchment of Israeli rule over the occupied territories – a piecemeal process, guided by no agreed government policy, based on no explicit decision except, perhaps, the ambiguous government response to the Khartoum summit. Left undefined was how long Israel would stay put, what outcome it sought and – most important – what Israel’s attitude and policy would be toward the people over whom it now ruled.
In the war, Levi Eshkol was fond of saying, “we got a lovely dowry. The trouble is that with dowry comes the wife.”[2] His government was unable to give up the dowry of land or make up its mind about what to do about the bride, the people. It could not answer, even for itself, the question that Lyndon Johnson put to Eshkol: What kind of Israel do you want?
           
IN THE LONG MEANTIME, that meant the Palestinians lived under military rule, which meant they lived under the rule of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. The military government was tossed together in a hurry after the unplanned conquests. In August 1967, needing help, Dayan told Colonel Shlomo Gazit, the outgoing head of Military Intelligence’s research department, that he was canceling his leave for university study. “We’ve held the territories for over two months and we still can’t see the end,” Dayan told Gazit, as he appointed him to the new, half-undefined position of “coordinator of government activities in the territories,” perhaps best translated as viceroy to Dayan. Gazit expected to fill the job for a few months, until the occupation ended.[3]

Dayan ruled the occupied land directly, personally, with minimal oversight from cabinet or parliament. That role became his central concern, filling his time. According to Gazit, Dayan’s appointment book stayed virtually empty, except for the cabinet meeting at the start of each week and the military staff meeting at the end. He decided how to spend his day when he got up each morning, visiting Arab mayors and Israeli officers to see what was happening in the field, issuing verbal commands on the spot, to be translated by an officer at his elbow into formal orders. He cut the military general staff out of the loop.[4] Dayan transformed himself into the sultan of the occupied territories.

He regarded himself as a benevolent ruler. Soon after the war, officers began allowing West Bank trucks to ford the Jordan River to carry produce to the East Bank, giving farmers an outlet without undercutting the Israeli market. As winter rains approached, Bailey bridges were put up to replace those destroyed in the war. Dayan, artful improviser, enshrined the measure as his “open bridges” policy. West Bank and Gaza residents could cross into Jordan. De facto, they could also enter Israel and get jobs in manual labor.[5] By October, Dayan formulated a policy of “invisible” rule, with the goal that “a local Arab can live his life . . . without needing to see or speak with an Israeli representative.” The army was to avoid unnecessary patrols in Arab towns, keep Israeli flags to a minimum, refrain from interfering in how Arab mayors ran their towns.[6] 

Dayan presumed that as long as life improved economically for his subjects, as long as he was a stern but kind ruler, they would tolerate his rule indefinitely. In his memoirs, he expressed fascination with the West Bank’s biblical history. Without pausing, he went on to portray the Arabs who lived there now, “the field hands behind a wooden plow and pair of oxen, the women moving sedately from well to village with a pitcher on their heads. . . . I did not think of them as being interposed between me and the land.” He felt closest, he said, to the Beduin of the southern Gaza Strip, who maintained their desert customs. Dayan, infatuated with the ancient past, unabashed about his decades of pilfering of antiquities from archaeological sites he obsessively sought out, did not see the Arabs as standing between him and the land because they were figures in his diorama of the romanticized Bible.[7] That they would step off his stage and seek to live by a script they wrote themselves was not on his mind. 

Then again, military orders issued in the summer of 1967 forbade strikes, the celebration of Egyptian national holidays in Gaza, the publication of political material without military government approval.[8] One needed an Israeli permit to cross the bridges, or to sell goods in Israel, or for other matters.[9] The raw material most easily exported to Israel was physical labor. “At the end of the sixties,” Gazit would write with striking honesty nearly three decades later, “the world was already watching the end of the era of colonialism, and precisely then Israel found itself marching in the opposite direction.” That was all the more surprising, in Gazit’s view, because Israel’s leaders were themselves the veterans of a national liberation struggle against foreign rule.[10]

“Colonialism” is a loaded word today, but if we accept British scholar Stephen Howe’s bid to restore its dry meaning – a system “of rule by one group over another, where the first claims the right . . . to exercise exclusive sovereignty over the second and to shape its destiny,” – then Israel was indeed backing into colonialism in the occupied territories.[11] Colonialism, like the conquest itself, reflected a vacuum of strategy. It was born of a national evasion of choices.