What Occupation? Efraim Karsh Commentary, July 2002 NO TERM has dominated the
discourse of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict more than "occupation." For
decades now, hardly a day has passed without some mention in the
international media of Israel's supposedly illegitimate presence on
Palestinian lands. This presence is invoked to explain the origins and
persistence of the conflict between the parties, to show Israel's allegedly
brutal and repressive nature, and to justify the worst anti-Israel terrorist
atrocities. The occupation, in short, has become a catchphrase, and like many
catchphrases it means different things to different people.For most Western
observers, the term "occupation" describes Israel's control of the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank, areas that it conquered during the Six-Day war of June
1967. But for many Palestinians and Arabs, the Israeli presence in these
territories represents only the latest chapter in an uninterrupted story of
"occupations" dating back to the very creation of Israel on "stolen" land. If
you go looking for a book about Israel in the foremost Arab bookstore on
London's Charing Cross Road, you will find it in the section labelled
"Occupied Palestine." That this is the prevailing view not only among Arab
residents of the West Bank and Gaza but among Palestinians living within
Israel itself as well as elsewhere around the world is shown by the routine
insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" that is meant to reverse the
effects of the "1948 occupation"Israel itself.Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction
between Israel's actions before and after 1967. Writing recently in the
Israeli daily Ha'aretz, the prominent Palestinian cultural figure Jacques
Persiqian told his Jewish readers that today's terrorist attacks were "what
you have brought upon yourselves after 54 years of systematic oppression of
another people"question not Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza but its very
legitimacy as a state.Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the
Palestinian cause, has been even more forthright in erasing the line between
post-1967 and pre-1967 "occupations." "I come to you today with a heavy
heart," she told the now-infamous World Conference Against Racism in Durban
last summer, "leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing
naqba [catastrophe]":In 1948, we became subject to a grave historical
injustice manifested in a dual victimisation: on the one hand, the injustice
of dispossession, dispersion, and exile forcibly enacted on the
population.... On the other hand, those who remained were subjected to the
systematic oppression and brutality of an inhuman occupation that robbed them
of all their rights and liberties.This original "occupation"the creation and existence of the state of IsraelAshrawi's narrative, as a result of the Six-Day war:
Those of us who came under Israeli occupation in 1967 have languished in the
West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip under a unique combination of
military occupation, settler colonization, and systematic oppression.
Rarely has the human mind devised such varied, diverse, and comprehensive
means of wholesale brutalisation and persecution.
Taken together, the charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent
and are plainly in tended to beenterprise. In almost every particular, they are also grossly false.IN I948,
no Palestinian state was invaded or destroyed to make way for the
establishment of Israel. From biblical times, when this territory was the
state of the Jews, to its occupation by the British army at the end of World
War I, Palestine had never existed as a distinct political entity but was
rather part of one empire after another, from the Romans, to the Arabs, to
the Ottomans. When the British arrived in 1917, the immediate loyalties of
the area's inhabitants were parochialreligious sectas the religious and temporal head of the world Muslim community.Under a
League of Nations mandate explicitly meant to pave the way for the creation
of a Jewish national home, the British established the notion of an
independent Palestine for the first time and delineated its boundaries. In
1947, confronted with a determined Jewish struggle for independence, Britain
returned the mandate to the League's successor, the United Nations, which in
turn decided on November 29, 1947, to partition mandatory Palestine into two
states: one Jewish, the other Arab.The state of Israel was thus created by an
inter nationally recognized act of national self-determinationmoreover, undertaken by an ancient people in its own homeland. In accordance
with common democratic practice, the Arab population in the new state's midst
was immediately recognized as a legitimate ethnic and religious minority. As
for the prospective Arab state, its designated territory was slated to
include, among other areas, the two regions under contest todayand the West Bank (with the exception of Jerusalem, which was to be placed
under international control).As is well known, the implementation of the UN's
partition plan was aborted by the effort of the Palestinians and of the
surrounding Arab states to destroy the Jewish state at birth. What is less
well known is that even if the Jews had lost the war, their territory would
not have been handed over to the Palestinians. Rather, it would have been
divided among the invading Arab forces, for the simple reason that none of
the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. As
the eminent Arab-American historian Philip Hitti described the common Arab
view to an Anglo-American commission of inquiry in 1946, "There is no such
thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not."This fact was keenly
recognized by the British authorities on the eve of their departure. As one
official observed in mid-December 1947, "it does not appear that Arab
Palestine will be an entity, but rather that the Arab countries will each
claim a portion in return for their assistance [in the war against Israel],
unless [Transjordan's] King Abdallah takes rapid and firm action as soon as
the British withdrawal is completed." A couple of months later, the British
high commissioner for Palestine, General Sir Alan Cunningham, informed the
colonial secretary, Arthur Creech Jones, that "the most likely arrangement
seems to be Eastern Galilee to Syria, Samaria and Hebron to Abdullah, and the
south to Egypt."THE BRITISH proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan
ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in Gaza and the West Bankwere, respectively, the parts of Palestine conquered by them during the
1948-49 war. Indeed, even UN Security Council Resolution 242, which after the
Six-Day war of 1967 established the principle of "land for peace" as the
cornerstone of future Arab-Israeli peace negotiations, did not envisage the
creation of a Palestinian state. To the contrary: since the Palestinians were
still not viewed as a distinct nation, it was assumed that any territories
evacuated by Israel would be returned to their pre-1967 Arab occupiersto Egypt, and the West Bank to Jordan. The resolution did not even mention
the Palestinians by name, affirming instead the necessity "for achieving a
just settlement of the refugee problem"Palestinians but to the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab
states following the 1948 war.At this timePalestinian nationhood was rejected by the entire international community,
including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost sup porter
of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. "Moderate" Arab rulers like
the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent Palestinian state as a moral
threat to their own kingdom, while the Saudis saw it as a potential source of
extremism and instability. Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly
opposed, having their own purposes in mind for the region. As late as 1974,
Syrian President Hafez al Assad openly referred to Palestine as "not only a
part of the Arab homeland but a basic part of southern Syria"; there is no
reason to think he had changed his mind by the time of his death in 2000.Nor,
for that matter, did the populace of the West Bank and Gaza regard itself as
a distinct nation. The collapse and dispersion of Palestinian society
following the 1948 defeat had shattered an always fragile communal fabric,
and the subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the
Palestinian diaspora prevented the crystallisation of a national identity.
Host Arab regimes actively colluded in discouraging any such sense from
arising. Upon occupying the West Bank during the 1948 war, King Abdullah had
moved quickly to erase all traces of corporate Palestinian identity. On April
4,1950, the territory was formally annexed to Jordan, its residents became
Jordanian citizens, and they were increasingly integrated into the kingdom's
economic, political, and social structures.For its part, the Egyptian
government showed no desire to annex the Gaza Strip but had instead ruled the
newly acquired area as an occupied military zone. This did not imply support
of Palestinian nationalism, however, or of any sort of collective political
awareness among the Palestinians. The local population was kept under tight
control, was denied Egyptian citizenship, and was subjected to severe
restrictions on travel.WHAT, THEN, of the period after 1967, when these
territories passed into the hands of Israel? Is it the case that Palestinians
in the West Bank and Gaza have been the victims of the most "varied, diverse,
and comprehensive means of wholesale brutalisation and persecution" ever
devised by the human mind? At the very least, such a characterisation would
require a rather drastic downgrading of certain other well-documented
20th-century phenomena, from the slaughter of Armenians during World War I
and onward through a grisly chronicle of tens upon tens of millions murdered,
driven out, crushed under the heels of despots. By stark contrast, during the
three decades of Israel's control, far fewer Palestinians were killed at
Jewish hands than by King Hussein of Jordan in the single month of September
1970 when, fighting off an attempt by Yasser Arafat's PLO to destroy his
monarchy, he dispatched (according to the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh)
between 3,000 and 5,000 Palestinians, among them anywhere from 1,500 to 3,500
civilians. Similarly, the number of innocent Palestinians killed by their
Kuwaiti hosts in the winter of 1991, in revenge for the PLO's support for
Saddam Hussein's brutal occupation of Kuwait, far exceeds the number of
Palestinian rioters and terrorists who lost their lives in the first intifada
against Israel during the late 1980's.Such crude comparisons aside, to
present the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as "systematic
oppression" is itself the inverse of the truth. It should be recalled, first
of all, that this occupation did not come about as a consequence of some
grand expansionist design, but rather was incidental to Israel's success
against a pan-Arab at tempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of Israeli
Egyptian hostilities on June 5, 1967, the Israeli government secretly pleaded
with King Hussein of Jordan, the de-facto ruler of the West Bank, to forgo
any military action; the plea was rebuffed by the Jordanian monarch, who was
loathe to lose the anticipated spoils of what was to be the Arabs' "final
round" with Israel.Thus it happened that, at the end of the conflict, Israel
unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with
no definite idea about their future status and lacking any concrete policy
for their administration. In the wake of the war, the only objective adopted
by then-Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan was to preserve normalcy in the
territories through a mixture of economic inducements and a minimum of
Israeli intervention. The idea was that the local populace would be given the
freedom to administer itself as it wished, and would be able to maintain
regular contact with the Arab world via the Jordan River bridges. In sharp
contrast with, for example, the U.S. occupation of postwar Japan, which saw a
general censorship of all Japanese media and a comprehensive revision of
school curricula, Israel made no attempt to reshape Palestinian culture. It
limited its oversight of the Arabic press in the territories to military and
security matters, and allowed the continued use in local schools of Jordanian
text books filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda.Israel's
restraint in this sphereonly part of the story. The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is
of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs
under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in
the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition,
infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of
education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all
male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as
high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation
had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the
population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbours.In the
economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far
larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working
in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986,
accounting for 35 per cent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45
percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of
the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.During
the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing
economy in the worldKorea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew
some what more slowly, the rate was still high by inter national standards,
with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $ 165 to
$1,715 (compared with Jordan's $1,050, Egypt's $600, Turkey's $1,630, and
Tunisia's $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double
Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's
(one of the better off Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and
Lebanon were more affluent.Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made
vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates
in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990,
while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with
an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North
Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per
1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in
Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of
inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and
measles were eradicated.No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians'
standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank
and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in
1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in
1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4
percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.Finally,
and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of
the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102
percent, and the number of classes by 99 per cent, though the population
itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in
higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West
Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early
1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students.
Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with
69 per cent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44
percent in Syria.All THIS as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of
Israel's hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres.
Indeed, even as the PLO (until 1982 headquartered in Lebanon and thereafter
in Tunisia) proclaimed its ongoing commitment to the destruction of the
Jewish state, the Israelis did surprisingly little to limit its political
influence in the territories. The publication of pro PLO editorials was
permitted in the local press, and anti-Israel activities by PLO supporters
were tolerated so long as they did not involve overt incitements to violence.
Israel also allowed the free flow of PLO-controlled funds, a policy justified
by Minister of Defense Ezer Weizmann in 1978 in these (deluded) words: "It
does not matter that they get money from the PLO, as long as they don't build
arms factories with it." Nor, with very few exceptions, did Israel encourage
the formation of Palestinian political institutions that might serve as a
counterweight to the PLO. As a result, the PLO gradually established itself
as the predominant force in the territories, relegating the pragmatic
traditional leadership to the fringes of the political system.Given the
extreme and even self-destructive leniency of Israel's administrative
policies, what seems remarkable is that it took as long as it did for the PLO
to entice the residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a popular struggle
against the Jewish state. Here Israel's counterinsurgency measures must be
given their due, as well as the low level of national consciousness among the
Palestinians and the sheer rapidity and scope of the improvements in their
standard of living. The fact remains, how ever, that during the
two-and-a-half decades from the occupation of the territories to the onset of
the Oslo peace process in 1993, there was very little "armed resistance," and
most terrorist attacks emanated from outsidethen from Lebanon.In an effort to cover up this embarrassing circumstance,
Fatah, the PLO's largest constituent organization, adopted the slogan that
"there is no difference between inside and outside." But there was a
difference, and a rather fundamental one. By and large, the residents of the
territories wished to get on with their lives and take advantage of the
opportunities afforded by Israeli rule. Had the West Bank eventually been
returned to Jordan, its residents, all of whom had been Jordanian citizens be
fore 1967, might well have reverted to that status. Alternatively, had Israel
prevented the spread of the PLO's influence in the territories, a local
leader ship, better attuned to the real interests and desires of the people
and more amenable to peaceful coexistence with Israel, might have emerged.But
these things were not to be. By the mid 1970's, the PLO had made itself into
the "sole representative of the Palestinian people," and in short order
Jordan and Egypt washed their hands of the West Bank and Gaza. Whatever the
desires of the people living in the territories, the PLO had vowed from the
moment of its founding in the mid 1960'spursue its "revolution until victory," that is, until the destruction of the
Jewish state. Once its position was se cure, it proceeded to do precisely
that.BY THE mid-1990's, thanks to Oslo, the PLO had achieved a firm foothold
in the West Bank and Gaza. Its announced purpose was to lay the groundwork
for Palestinian statehood but its real purpose was to do what it knew best
namely, create an extensive terrorist infrastructure and use it against its
Israeli "peace partner." At first it did this tacitly, giving a green light
to other terrorist organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; then it
operated openly and directly.But what did all this have to do with Israel's
"occupation"? The declaration signed on the White House lawn in 1993 by the
PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the
entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed
five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a
permanent peace settlement. During this interim period the territories would
be administered by a Palestinian Council, to be freely and democratically
elected after the withdrawal of Israeli military forces both from the Gaza
Strip and from the populated areas of the West Bank.By May 1994, Israel had
completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of
territory containing Israeli settlements) and the Jericho area of the West
Bank. On July 1, Yasser Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza. On
September 28, 1995, despite Arafat's' abysmal failure to clamp down on
terrorist activities in the territories now under his control, the two
parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli
forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas with the
exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997). On
January 20, 1996, elections to the Palestinian Council were held, and shortly
after ward both the Israeli civil administration and military government were
dissolved.The geographical scope of these Israeli withdrawals was relatively
limited; the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank's
overall territory. But its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing
short of revolutionary. At one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over
virtually all of the West Bank's 1.4 million residents. Since that time,
nearly 60 percent of themJenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebronentirely under Palestinian jurisdiction. Another 40 percent live in towns,
villages, refugee camps, and hamlets where the Palestinian Authority
exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has
maintained "over riding responsibility for security." Some two per cent of
the West Bank's populationlive in areas where Israel has complete control, but even there the
Palestinian Authority maintains "functional jurisdiction."In short, since the
beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment
from Hebron in January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. By no
conceivable stretching of words can the anti-Israel violence emanating from
the territories during these years be made to qualify as resistance to
foreign occupation. In these years there has been no such occupation.IF THE
stubborn persistence of Palestinian terrorism is not attributable to the
continuing occupation, many of the worst outrages against Israeli civilians
likewise occurredapologistshigh points, when the prospect of Israeli withdrawal appeared brightest and
most imminent.Suicide bombings, for example, were introduced in the
atmosphere of euphoria only a few months after the historic Rabin-Arafat
handshake on the White House lawn: eight people were murdered in April 1994
while riding a bus in the town of Afula. Six months later, 21 Israelis were
murdered on a bus in Tel Aviv. In the following year, five bombings took the
lives of a further 38 Israelis. During the short-lived government of the
dovish Shimon Peres (November 1995-May 1996), after the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin, 58 Israelis were murdered within the span of one week in three
suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.Further disproving the standard
view is the fact that terrorism was largely curtailed following Benjamin
Netanyahu's election in May 1996 and the consequent slowdown in the Oslo
process. During Netanyahu's three years in power, some 50 Israelis were
murdered in terrorist attacksgovernment and a sixth of the casualty rate during Peres's term.There was a
material side to this downturn in terrorism as well. Between 1994 and 1996,
the Rabin and Peres governments had imposed repeated closures on the
territories in order to stem the tidal wave of terrorism in the wake of the
Oslo accords. This had led to a steep drop in the Palestinian economy. With
workers unable to get into Israel, unemployment rose sharply, reaching as
high as 50 percent in Gaza. The movement of goods between Israel and the
territories, as well as between the West Bank and Gaza, was seriously
disrupted, slowing ex ports and discouraging potential private investment.The
economic situation in the territories began to improve during the term of the
Netanyahu government, as the steep fall in terrorist attacks led to a
corresponding decrease in closures. Real GNP per capita grew by 3.5 percent
in 1997, 7.7 percent in 1998, and 3.5 percent in 1999, while unemployment was
more than halved. By the beginning of 1999, according to the World Bank, the
West Bank and Gaza had fully recovered from the economic decline of the
previous years.Then, in still another turnabout, came Ehud Barak, who in the
course of a dizzying six months in late 2000 and early 2001 offered Yasser
Arafat a complete end to the Israeli presence, ceding virtually the entire
West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the nascent Palestinian state together with
some Israeli territory, and making breathtaking concessions over Israel's
capital city of Jerusalem. To this, however, Arafat's response was war. Since
its launch, the Palestinian campaign has inflicted thousands of brutal
attacks on Israeli civilianslynching, stoningsentire two decades of Israeli occupation preceding the Oslo accords, some 400
Israelis were murdered; since the conclusion of that "peace" agreement, twice
as many have lost their lives in terrorist attacks. If the occupation was the
cause of terrorism, why was terrorism sparse during the years of actual
occupation, why did it increase dramatically with the prospect of the end of
the occupation, and why did it escalate into open war upon Israel's most
far-reaching concessions ever? To the contrary, one might argue with far
greater plausibility that the absence of occupationof close Israeli surveillancethe terrorist war in the first place.There are limits to Israel's ability to
transform a virulent enemy into a peace partner, and those limits have long
since been reached. To borrow from Baruch Spinoza, peace is not the absence
of war but rather a state of mind: a disposition to benevolence, confidence,
and justice. From the birth of the Zionist movement until today, that
disposition has remained conspicuously absent from the mind of the
Palestinian leadership.It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the
Palestinians' rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of
violence. Palestinian terrorism started well before 1967, and continuedintensifiedfault is the enduring Arab view that the creation of the Jewish state was
itself an original act of "inhuman occupation" with which compromise of any
final kind is beyond the realm of the possible. Until that disposition
changes, which is to say until a different leadership arises, the idea of
peace in the context of the Arab Middle East will continue to mean little
more than the continuation of war by other means.
Prof. EFRAIM KARSH is head of Mediterranean studies at King's College,
University of London. His articles in COMMENTARY include "Israel's War"
(April 2002) and "The Palestinians and the 'Right of Return"' (May 2001).
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is dedicated to combating the
increasing mis and disinformation about the Middle East situation and
addressing the increasing number of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents on
colleage campuses and is dedicated advocating that Israel has the right to
live within safe and secure borders at peace with her neighbors.
Contributions can be made through to the Susquehanna Institute, 624 Sandra
Avenue, Harrisburg, PA 17109-5818. For more information go to
http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/SPME.














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