The Scarecrow of "Occupation".

 

 

 

by Raphael Israeli

 

 

“Occupation” has become the key word in any discourse about the Middle East Conflict. Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims believe, or at least state, that all their grievances against Israel hinge on that concept, and in consequence all other nations, including those most friendly to Israel,  conclude that only the end to occupation could put an end to the dispute. Pending that result, which no one knows how to achieve, Israel has been sanctioned by everyone for “altering the status quo” in the “occupied lands” by building settlements or even maintaining the existing ones. By doing that,  Israel’s rivals are reinforced in their belief that they can oust Israel from those territories without incurring any cost themselves, and this illusion makes  a solution much more difficult to attain.

 

When things are stated in those simplistic terms, the uninformed observer would think that one day in June 1967, bored Israelis had nothing to do, and like Germans in World War II who invaded  Europe, simply marched into the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan and Sinai, to achieve their expansionist and aggressive designs. People ignore, or are ignorant of the circumstances which triggered that war which was of aggression all right, but by Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who vowed to strangulate Israel and wipe it out, and took the necessary measures and deployments of forces to bring that about. During all the previous 19 years since its independence, Israel has been on record as begging for recognition by its neighbors of the armistice borders, as the permanent  and final ones, but was utterly refused, pointing to the, in their minds, temporariness of Israel and certainly of its boundaries. The West Bank and Gaza were then under Jordanian and Egyptian rule, respectively; the Golan was undisputedly Syrian; and the Sinai Egyptian. No Israeli conquest had been made, and no territorial claim had been advanced by Israel.

 

However, the very existence of Israel was considered illegitimate by the Arabs, and it was always referred to as “Occupied Palestine”, or the “Government of Tel-Aviv”, or the “Zionist Entity”, or  “So-called Israel”. These appellations are still preserved to this day by the Hamas, which won a clear majority among the Palestinians and has now taken control of all of Gaza; the Hizbullah, who has been encroaching, with Iranian backing, on the Lebanese fragile state structure; the Syrians , who insist on  a guaranteed withdrawal  of Israel from the Golan before they have even opened any negotiations; and any other Arab or Muslim monarch or tyrant, who themselves lack  legitimacy for their  dictatorial rule. All this means that “occupation” was never invoked when the West Bank was occupied by Jordan, or Gaza by the Egyptians, or various Arab and Muslim territories  by a variety of illegitimate rulers that no one chose. This also means, that “occupation” has been no more than a weapon of propaganda against Israel, and a whip in the hands of other nations to castigate Israel and pressure it to ply to their interest.

 

“Occupation” needs to be put between quotation marks, at least as regards the West Bank, because on that day of June 1967 it was Jordan who joined the Egyptians and Syrians and opened up with its artillery on its entire 700-mile border with Israel. In Jerusalem, which was divided between Israel and Jordan, King Hussein’s Arab Legion launched an infantry and armor attack on  Government House, the HQ of the UN in Jerusalem which lay in the Demilitarized zone between the parties. In reaction, Israel pleaded with the UN for the respect of the armistice, pledging that it had no design against Jordanian territory. When in answer Jordanian artillery intensified its cataract of shells along the entire West side of Jerusalem, including the Israeli Parliament, the order was sent to the IDF to neutralize that fire. It could only be done by moving into Arab territory and taking positions in it, to ensure that no hostile fire could  originate from there. What else could be done? After that war, and when  the Arab Khartum Conference in 1968 vowed that it would neither talk to Israel nor recognize it nor make peace with it, it sounded off a declaration of continued hostility, hence the necessity for Israel to maintain its domination of the territory until a permanent peaceful arrangement is found.

Since then, not much has changed. Those who made peace with Israel, like Egypt (1979), got their territory back to the last inch. Jordan, who also made peace (1994), had renounced it’s claim to the West Bank (1988), something which left Israel alone to deal  the Palestinians, who had no initial claim to that land since they had never maintained any sovereignty there. To this day, they have refused to assure Israel of their peaceful intents: in the Oslo Accords (1993) they pledged to put an end to terrorism, but they waged a more intense wave of terror against Israel  than ever before; in 2000, Arafat refused to sign the finality of the conflict with Israel even as Israel was prepared to evacuate 97% of the West Bank; in 2005 Israel unilaterally (and foolishly) evacuated the entire Gaza Strip, including its two-score settlements and 8,000 productive farmers, which the Palestinians turned into a wasteland and a base for their rocket and missile bombardment of Israel. “Moderate” Abu Mazan, who lost his grip in Gaza to the Hamas, and without Israeli protection would have similarly failed in the West Bank, is assuring Israel and his constituency that he will never recognize the Jewishness of Israel, nor would he abandon the “right of return” for his perennial refugees. This puts in doubt his peaceful intentions, totters the link between “occupation” and the lack of peace; and gives no incentive to the Israelis to relinquish their hold on the territories, even if it is dubbed “occupation” by others.

 

Yes, there is the issue of Israeli settlements in those territories. Had the Arabs agreed to make peace during the initial years after 1967, there would have been no Israeli settlements anywhere. But the negative reactions Israel got in those years on the one hand, and its demographic inability to maintain a large military presence on a permanent basis in those territories on the other, produced the necessity of applying there the long-tested model of military outposts, where young people settled and defended their new villages, eventually establishing family and becoming regular settlements. That had happened in Sinai and the Gaza Strip too, before the ideology of “settling the land of Israel” took over. Yet, if those areas had remained unsettled, what incentive would the Arabs have to deviate from the Khartum negativism, knowing that sooner or later Israel would withdraw? In both cases, it was the recognition by Sadat and Arafat  that if they waited much longer their territories would be lost for ever, which brought them to the negotiating table. But while Sadat followed the demarche through, Arafat stalled and his successors do not seem to do much better.

 

Thus, besides the legal question, which is still disputed, regarding the respective rights of the Palestinians and the Israelis on the West Bank (about Gaza it is now too late to haggle, except in a theoretical context); and the moral question of whether an aggressor (Jordanians  and Palestinians in 1967) should be rewarded by emerging unscathed from the war and the losses  it occasioned; if they should retrieve all their claimed  territory, the implications of an Israeli end to “occupation” should be put on the international agenda. The foremost lesson Israel has learned is that any territory it evacuated so far has became a base of terror against it;  secondly that the Palestinians are unable to govern themselves for now, therefore unable (even if willing) to gain legitimacy in a single elected government, to clean up bases of terror, to monopolize arms by one central government and to put an end to propaganda and education to hatred; and thirdly to accept to renounce their illusive “right of return” and recognize Israel as Jewish. All the rest is negotiable, but until there is an agreement, the claim of “occupation” remains redundant, irrelevant and counter productive. In Oslo II, Arafat himself recognized that situation when he agreed that area C would remain under  total Israeli control until a final status is  consented by the parties.

 

 

Raphael Israeli is a professor of Islamic history at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

 

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.