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What Occupation?

Article in Commentary (New York, N.Y.) · July 2002

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What Occupation?
By Efraim Karsh

Commentary Magazine
July/Aug 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 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 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.

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."

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.

[Footnote]
*For further details, see Menahem Milson, "How Not to Occupy the West Bank,"
COMMENTARY, April 1986.

EFRAIM KARSH is head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings

College, University of London. His articles in COMMENTARY include "Israel's
War" (April 2002) and "The Palestinians and the `Right of Return"' (May 2001).

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