The Border Follows the Plow
A Call for Settlement in Gaza, the Bashan, and the Lebanon
“Wherever the Jewish plow plows its last furrow, that is where the border will run.” Joseph Trumpeldor
The Zamir doctrine named for IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir has seen Israel create largely depopulated, IDF-occupied buffer zones in the Gaza Strip, the Bashan region of southern Syria, and now south Lebanon as well. This forward posture is a welcome departure from the old and failed defense “conception” of containment.
These militarized buffer zones, however expedient in the short term and however preferable to the failed strategies of the past, are unsustainable on their own. Since Trumpeldor, the father of the kibbutzim, Zionist leaders have understood that the political reality follows the social and economic reality, the law is formed around the facts-on-the-ground.
Where there is no plow, where there is no social or economic production, there will ultimately be no border, and Israel will be pushed back into encirclement.
Israel’s new buffer zones will ultimately go the way of its old buffer zones. Either they will go the way of South Lebanon; the IDF will withdrawal, hostile elements will return, and Israel will again face an existential threat on its border: or they will go the way of northern Samaria; Jewish families will be allowed to return, to settle, to build community and organic life, and the area will be solidified as an unassailable share of the Jewish state.
Israel must not return to the days of insecurity and must be allowed to develop free from existential threat. These buffer zones which hold this promise must be transformed into lived, productive areas of civilian settlement; places where daily life, work, and community take root and endure beyond the fluctuations of military necessity. Only through the integration of sustained social and economic presence can these frontiers cease to be temporary lines of defense and instead become stable, self-reinforcing boundaries, securing both the safety and continuity of the state over the long term.
Borders are ultimately not drawn by the politician’s pen nor by the soldier’s boot, rather by the plow. Where the plow furrows, where organic social and economic production are allowed to take root, there and only there will Israel’s border run.
