Unsettling: how self-delusion led Israel and America to disastrous occupations of Arab lands.

• Author: Sinderbrand, Rebecca
• Position: The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1997-1977 - Book review

The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 By Gershom Gorenberg Times Books, $30.00

In 1969, an official from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv took an exhausting afternoon trek out to the fledgling desert community of Kalyah, in the West Bank territory Israel had taken from Jordan in the Six Day War just two years earlier. A Time magazine report had painted a worrying portrait of a rising Jewish settlement presence that hinted at permanence, and the Americans had decided to investigate. At the time, there were just a handful of Israelis living there, in one of only two official settlements out on the far eastern edge of the West Bank.

The consular rep didn't want to announce his mission by actually entering the community, so he decided on a quiet drive-by instead. He reported back to his superiors that those alarming tales of settlement growth were standard-issue media exaggeration, a "somewhat distorted picture of reality" In any case, he argued, Kalyah was too far from the highway and the Jordan River to offer the new residents much of a military advantage. To the United States, it was simply incomprehensible that these makeshift communities were anything more than some sort of temporary security measure, albeit a diplomatically inconvenient one.

If that embassy rep made the same desert drive today, he'd encounter some 4,000 residents living in at least two dozen communities on the Israeli-controlled side of the Jordan River. In all, there are at least 261,000 Jews still living in lands conquered by Israel during the Six Day War. They live in orderly government-planned suburbs north and east of Jerusalem; in more isolated, far-flung towns surrounded by barbed wire and heavily-guarded highways; in small, fortified enclaves in and near the ancient biblical cities of the West Bank. These settlements are filled with the second and even third generations of those early post-war pioneers, who would have told that U.S. official, if he had only asked, that in their view there was nothing temporary about their new home.

If U.S. officials, blinded by regional Cold War considerations, were deceiving themselves about Israel's intentions in 1969, they weren't alone. As journalist Gershom Gorenberg demonstrates in his new book, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, their Israeli counterparts were doing the same. A few may have entered the post-war period with a determination to create "facts on the ground," but two years after Israel first entered the area, even many government officials were still under the impression that their exit from most or all of the West Bank would arrive sooner or later. Through arguments equal parts intellectual and emotional, Israeli leaders wound up locking a state unprepared for the scale of their military success into a disastrous policy after the fact. The Middle East is full of desert mirages; Israel has already spent a generation chasing theirs. The United States has just gotten started.

By any standard, it was never much of an empire--at its height, just 26,000 square miles--but by the time the dust cleared on June 4,1967, Israel controlled roughly four times as much land as it had just a week earlier. The new land had an intoxicating effect on the Israeli public. For young people...