DISPUTED TERRITORIES NOT OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
by Efraim Karsh
Cleveland Indy Media
Thursday, Jul. 02, 2009 at 8:25 AM
Few subjects have been falsified so thoroughly as the recent history of
the West Bank and Gaza. The history of Israel’s so-called "occupation"
of Palestinian lands and the ways in which Palestinians and Arabs
have distorted Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza are discussed.
What Occupation?
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 labeled
"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"-i.e.,
the establishment of the state of 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"-a historical accounting that, going
back to 1948, calls into 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 victimization: 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"-that is, again, the creation and existence
of the state of Israel-was later extended, in Ashrawi’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
brutalization and persecution.
Taken together, the charges against Israel’s various "occupations"
represent-and are plainly intended to be-a damning indictment of the
entire Zionist enterprise. In almost every particular, they are also
grossly false.
IN 1948, 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 parochial-to clan, tribe, village, town, or religious sect-and
coexisted with their fealty to the Ottoman sultan-caliph as 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 internationally recognized
act of national self-determination-an act, moreover, 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
today-namely, Gaza and 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 Abdallah, 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 Bank–
which were, 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 occupiers-Gaza
to 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"-a clause
that applied not just to the Palestinians but to the hundreds of
thousands of Jews expelled from the Arab states following the 1948 war.
At this time-we are speaking of the late 1960’s– Palestinian
nationhood was rejected by the entire international community,
including the Western democracies, the Soviet Union (the foremost
supporter of radical Arabism), and the Arab world itself. "Moderate"
Arab rulers like the Hashemites in Jordan viewed an independent
Palestinian state as a mortal 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 alAssad 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
crystallization 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 Abdallah 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 brutalization and persecution"
ever devised by the human mind?
At the very least, such a characterization 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 Yasir 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 attempt to destroy it. Upon the outbreak of IsraeliEgyptian
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 Defense 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 textbooks filled with vile anti-Semitic and anti-Israel
propaganda.
Israel’s restraint in this sphere-which turned out to be desperately
misguided-is only 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 neighbors.
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 percent 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 world-ahead of such "wonders"
as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of
Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly,
the rate was still high by international 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 betteroff 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 percent, 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 percent 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 proPLO
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, however, 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 outside-from Jordan in the
late 1960’s, then 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 before 1967, might well have
reverted to that status. Alternatively, had Israel prevented the
spread of the PLO’s influence in the territories, a local leadership,
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 mid1970’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 mid1960’s-well
before the Six-Day war-to pursue its "revolution until victory," that
is, until the destruction of the Jewish state. Once its position was
secure, 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, Yasir
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
afterward 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 them-in the Jericho
area and in the seven main cities of Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarm, Qalqilya,
Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Hebron-have lived entirely 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
"overriding responsibility for security." Some two percent of the
West Bank’s population-tens of thousands of Palestinians-continue to
live 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 occurred-contrary to the mantra of
Palestinian spokesmen and their apologists-not at moments of breakdown
in the Oslo "peace process" but at its high 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
attacks-a third of the casualty rate during the Rabin government 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 exports 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 Yasir
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 civilians-suicide
bombings, drive-by shootings, stabbings, lynching, stonings-murdering
more than 500 and wounding some 4,000.
In the entire 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 occupation-that is, the
withdrawal of close Israeli surveillance-is precisely what facilitated
the launching of the 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 continued-and intensified-after
the occupation ended in all but name. Rather, what is at fault is the
perduring 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.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
