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:
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charges against Israel's various "occupations" represent a damning
indictment of the entire Zionist enterprise. They are also grossly
false. |
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"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).
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| None of the region's Arab regimes viewed the Palestinians as a distinct nation. |
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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.
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"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. |
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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 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 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.
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| During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world. |
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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 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 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 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, 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."
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| Since
January 1997, 99 percent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank
and the Gaza Strip have not lived under Israeli occupation. |
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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.