What Occupation?????
by Efraim Karsh

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, 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. 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 is shown by the routine insistence on a Palestinian "right of return" that is meant to reverse the effects of the "1948 occupation".

Palestinian intellectuals routinely blur any distinction between Israel’s actions before and after 1967. Hanan Ashrawi, the most articulate exponent of the Palestinian cause, has been 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"–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 colonisation, 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 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. 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 to partition mandatory Palestine into two states: one Jewish, the other Arab.

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 recognised 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]."

The British proved to be prescient. Neither Egypt nor Jordan ever allowed Palestinian self-determination in 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.

At this time–the late 1960s– 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 moral threat to their own kingdom, while Pan-Arab nationalists were no less adamantly opposed. 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".

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.

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, 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.

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. Israel unexpectedly found itself in control of some one million Palestinians, with no 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 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. 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 sphere is only part of the story. The larger part 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. Fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed. Within a brief period Israeli occupation 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.

During the 1970s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world–ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea. 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 US$ 165 to US$1,715 (compared with Jordan’s US$1,050, Egypt’s US$600, Turkey’s US$1,630, and Tunisia’s US$1,440).
Israel's medical programs in the Palestinian territories greatly improved longevity and infant mortality rates

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.

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.

Perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 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 1990s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults, compared with 69 per cent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, and 44 percent in Syria.

All this 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. 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. 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 mid-1970s, the PLO had made itself into the "sole representative of the Palestinian people," and 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 1960s–well before the Six-Day war–to pursue its "revolution until victory," that is, until the destruction of the Jewish state.

By the mid-1990s, 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."

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 from the populated areas.

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).

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–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."

In short, since 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.

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.

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. 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 suicide bombings.

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.

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 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?

It is not the 1967 occupation that led to the Palestinians’ rejection of peaceful coexistence and their pursuit of violence. Rather, what is at fault 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.