A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict
296
A Half Century of Occupation: Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict
296Hardcover(First Edition)
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520293502 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/25/2017 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Sales rank: | 818,814 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Half Century of Occupation
Israel, Palestine, and the World's Most Intractable Conflict
By Gershon Shafir
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2017 Gershon ShafirAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-29350-2
CHAPTER 1
What Is the Occupation?
Military occupation is a rare phenomenon in today's world. In recent US memory, Iraq was occupied, but the US military left in 2011, eight years after the invasion of Iraq. An ongoing, decades-long occupation is even rarer. We are, in short, not accustomed to the term and its practical and political significance. Its importance and the high stakes associated with its use are made amply clear by the Democratic Party's refusal to include the term in its 2016 presidential election platform when describing Israel's presence in the West Bank. The Republicans, realizing that they could not simply bypass the term, went even further in declaring, "We reject the false notion that Israel is an occupier." Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government ministers have been particularly vociferous in their denunciations of the term. Not surprisingly, in a May 2016 survey of the Israeli Democracy Institute, as many as 72 percent of Jewish Israelis answered that Israel does not occupy the Palestinian territories outside the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 boundary with the West Bank). Apparently not satisfied, even with these results, the deputy minister of defense from the religious Zionist Jewish Home Party called on educators to teach their students that "there is no occupation." I reject these clumsy attempts to define out of existence what we can plainly see.
My task in this essay is to unpack the term occupation by recovering the phenomenon's often-obscured features and highlighting the reasons for its persistence.
The occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (since 2005 from its outer perimeter) — the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)-by Israeli armed forces remains a legal category and an everyday experience for the Palestinian populations of these territories, making them an occupied population. Like other occupied peoples, the Palestinian population give the impression of obeying the Israeli military government while also avoiding compliance as much as possible. The denial of national freedom and the indignities of everyday life under occupation inevitably lead to resistance, which comes in many forms. Nonviolent forms of resistance allow more democratic organization, mobilize greater worldwide sympathy, and leave less of a legacy of fear and bitterness among their opponents than violent ones, especially when the violence does not discriminate between combatants and civilians. The First Intifada (1987-93), mostly nonviolent, the Second Intifada (2000-2005), in which violence was pervasive, and the al-habbah alsha'biyya (the youth outburst; a series of violent confrontations characterized by the near-daily individual knife attacks that started in September 2015) have themselves shaped the occupation. It was resistance that initially led to the diplomatic process, the Oslo negotiations between Israel and Palestinian leadership in 1993. Resistance to occupation, therefore, is an integral and unavoidable part of the occupation.
The fourth facet of the occupation, added to the legal framework, the everyday experience of the occupied Palestinians, and their resistance, is the ongoing colonization of the OPT, the occupation's driving force and possibly its most distinct hallmark. Examination of each of these four facets provides a distinct perspective on the occupation. The interaction of these four aspects makes the occupation what it is and affords us as complete a picture as possible of its characteristics.
Israel's post-1967 dilemma was captured as soon as the hostilities were over in a folksy metaphor provided by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. The trouble, he suggested was that "we won the war and received a nice dowry of territory, but the dowry came with a bride whom we don't like": that is, Israel wanted the just-conquered territory but without its sizable Palestinian population. Eshkol's attempted quip makes abundantly clear that the territory and its population can be separated only in wishful thinking: not only is the land taken in 1967 occupied, but so is the population residing on it. Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (as well as the Druze on the Golan) are an occupied people.
Israel was then, and is now, caught on the horns of the classic colonial dilemma: the extension of its sovereignty to the OPT would confer citizenship on, or at least provide the choice of citizenship to, its Palestinian population and thus would diminish the Jewish majority of Israel, but withdrawal would mark the abandonment of its territorial aspirations. This conundrum has landed all Israeli governments to date in an endless interregnum that encourages a focus on land while discounting the land's population. Israeli governments have dealt with this challenge by manipulating the international legal framework and, in general, miring the country in ever-deeper denial of the causes for the untenable situation wrought by continued occupation and the resistance it generates.
We commonly think of denial as a defense mechanism used to shield our inner selves from painful knowledge. In her massive study of Ottoman and Turkish approaches toward centuries of violence aimed at Armenians and the ultimate genocide committed against them, Fatma Muge Gopek distinguishes three components of denial: (1) silence — censoring oneself; (2) secrecy — concealing information from others; and (3) subversion — corrupting the truth. "Denial," as observed by Eva Illouz, "is ... not a lack of knowledge, but a complex form of knowledge." A measure of deliberateness lurks at the bottom of every denial, whether one denies the health consequences of smoking or the psychological consequences of sexual abuse. What we choose not to recognize remains an open secret (a combination of silence and secrecy). Living with such open secrets promotes numbness and indifference among the bystanders and, simultaneously, avoidance of witnesses and human rights organizations — "the eyes that see."
There is an even deeper layer to denial — denialism, the subversion of truth. Mark Hoofnagle, author of the environmentalist Denialism Blog, explains that denialism is a system of employing "rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of argument or legitimate debate, when in actuality there is none," in an attempt to support a viewpoint against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The practitioners of denialism, including climate change and Holocaust deniers, go beyond individual denial, fabricating, to use Illouz's term, a "pact of ignorance." Denialism is both more deliberate and collective than mere denial and, consequently, fosters a politics of denial. It expresses not just an inability but a refusal to recognize the responsibility for causal chains of actions. The practice of denialism frequently displaces guilt from the perpetrators of wrongdoing onto the victims.
Occupations are riven by many smaller and bigger denials but ultimately they are the story of a people denied. Keeping a people under occupation means subjecting them to rule by foreigners and denying them political freedom and free expression of national identity. Nowhere is this clearer than in the unique manipulation and combination of the three types of legal protection that are available to occupied Palestinians in today's world. These are citizenship, human rights, and humanitarianism, none of which is fully available in the OPT.
In nation-states, people access rights through citizenship. Citizenship — civil, political, social, and cultural — offers the most unassailable protection available because it is both defined as a right and granted by a state, the only framework with effective enforcement capabilities. A second layer of protection in the postSecond World War era is human rights. Many human rights overlap with, though they are not fully identical to, citizenship rights. While citizenship rights are anchored in political membership, human rights are bestowed on people, not by virtue of membership in a state but because of their humanity. Human rights remain a weaker branch of the international legal order. Human rights are more fragile than citizenship rights, lack a political dimension, and have a more ambiguous and disputed scope. Notwithstanding their global reach, the practical enforcement of human rights is fragmented. Human rights abuses are monitored by NGOs and the UN (and its relevant councils), bodies that have only reporting authority, not the power to enforce. Human rights are significant because they apply to and are invoked by populations who cannot call on citizenship to claim rights and, consequently, need an alternative regime of rights.
Finally, there is a third layer, not of rights, but of humanitarian protections. This layer's most detailed component is international humanitarian law (IHL), also referred to as the law of armed conflict, particularly its subcategory of the law of belligerent occupation. IHL is a testament to humanitarian reformers' good intentions in the face of humanity's failure to abolish war. Humanitarian protections remain an expression of a limited ambition to make war less terrible once hostilities have begun. Under IHL, belligerent occupation is a temporary status of suspended sovereignty, which requires the occupying force to ensure the welfare of the occupied population while permitting steps to ensure the security of its own forces. There are two central documents of IHL: the Hague Regulation of 1907 and the 1949 Geneva Conventions relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Times of War (in particular the Fourth Convention, which regulates occupations). Compliance with IHL is monitored by the rapporteurs of international organizations: the UN and its Human Rights Council, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). None of these agencies possesses enforcement capabilities.
As part of my analysis of the legal side of the occupation, I will examine all three layers of rights and protections in Sections I to III of this essay. I will devote most of my attention to IHL because it is the controlling legal authority in the OPT. In Sections IV through VI, I will survey the everyday experience of life of Palestinian under occupation, with particular attention to the most prevalent and intrusive forms of control in the Israeli occupation tool kit. In Sections VII and VIII, I will move on to consider Palestinian resistance to the occupation and, in particular, the First Intifada and the diplomatic process it launched, as well as the Second Intifada and the changes in the mechanisms of occupation instituted in response. Sections VIII through X will include a detailed examination of the colonization project, demonstrating its many and sometimes conflicting aspects across different geographical territories and different populations, and exploring the manifold mechanisms of land seizure and the widespread illegality that upholds the transfer of land into the hands of the Israeli government and from it to settlers. Section XI will bring together the arguments and observations of the previous sections.
I
While most Palestinian became refugees during the 1948 War — the War of Independence to Israelis and the Nakba (catastrophe) to Palestinians — about 125,000 were able to remain in Israel and another 35,000 were added as part of a territorial arrangement with Jordan. They received Israeli citizenship rights as individuals — though these remain significantly less robust than those of their Jewish counterparts. In contrast, Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank who came under Israeli occupation in the wake of the 1967 War do not have citizenship rights. Citizenship was were never made available to them. Of course extending Israeli citizenship to occupied Palestinians cannot be viewed only as a matter of Israeli generosity, an expression of second thoughts about the feasibility of a state founded on jus sanguinis, or descent through blood lineage. It must be equally examined from the perspective of its potential recipients. A more general question, as to whether occupiers can enhance the liberty of people they have conquered, casts an even darker shadow on this query. Israel has not tested this proposition even in the few cases in which it was willing to provide rights to residents in the territories occupied in 1967, since these rights always fell short of citizenship.
In three cases Israel has extended rights that resemble but do not amount to full citizenship. Under prime ministers Golda Meir and Shimon Peres, Israel permitted Palestinians in the West Bank to conduct municipal elections. In 1972, elections were held under the constraining Jordanian franchise, but in 1976 Israel enfranchised women and tripled the electoral roster. The first local elections returned the traditional elites, but in 1976 PLO-sponsored nationalist candidates took power. The golem had risen on its master: the mayors of Nablus, Hebron, and the other towns led protests and demonstrations and won several concessions. Subsequently, they banded together under a National Guidance Committee and expanded their demands. By the early 1980s, Israel had deported several mayors and dismissed the rest, replacing them with military officers. Clearly, the experiment of placing democracy in the service of the occupation had failed, as local empowerment was overshadowed by dissatisfaction with continued national disenfranchisement. Democratization from above was not an effective option for a long-term occupying regime.
Two zones of the occupied territories — the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem — were annexed by Israel and potentially could have been made the sites of Israeli citizenship as a means of eliciting loyalty from their residents. But their residents — the roughly 20,000 Druze and 66,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and villages annexed to it (a number that by 2015 had risen to 300,200) — were not given automatic citizenship. After all, Israel did not wish to increase the size of its Palestinian Arab population. Rather, it extended to these non-Jewish populations only the status of permanent residence. Palestinian permanent residents are eligible to participate in Jerusalem's municipal elections as voters and candidates, though very few choose to exercise this right because it could amount to legitimizing Israel's occupation and the annexation of their villages and neighborhoods. The Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the Druze of the Golan can convert their permanent resident status into citizenship — in a process that takes about two years — upon the fulfillment of several conditions: (1) they cannot be citizens of another country, (2) they must have a working knowledge of Hebrew, and (3) they must be willing to take an oath of allegiance to the state of Israel. Most do not wish to travel this route, and only about 10 percent of East Jerusalem Palestinians or Golan Druze have chosen to do so. In these cases, their most common justification for acquiring citizenship is to avoid the possibility of having their reentry refused.
Ironically, by making only permanent residency status available to Palestinians, the invader furnished the erstwhile residents with rights commonly provided to immigrants. But this irony had tragic consequences for Palestinian permanent residents. Palestinians living in Jerusalem, who possess only a locally valid "Jerusalem residence," are in danger of losing their legal right to reside in their home city if they move out of town, for example, to marry someone from another West Bank town or to study abroad for a higher degree. Permanent Jerusalem residents must be able to bring documentary evidence from their employer, school, or health care provider that their "center of life" remains Jerusalem. Between 1967 and 2015, 14,416 Palestinians from East Jerusalem had their residency revoked, and even today approximately another 25,000 Palestinians who have never been able to get residency in the first place because they cannot prove that Jerusalem is the material center of their life reside in their birth city illegally. Though East Jerusalem's Palestinian villages and neighborhoods fall under Israeli jurisdiction, most of their residents have in effect been neglected, receiving only a fraction of the municipal services enjoyed by their Jewish neighbors. The residents of Kfar 'Aqab, Shu'afat, and part of the Qalandia refugee camps fared even worse when the Separation Wall disconnected them from East Jerusalem, leaving them to languish in a no-man's-land without services or police protection. In stark contrast to the Palestinians' situation, Jewish residents of East and West Jerusalem are citizens of Israel and are the beneficiaries of the full range of municipal services; they would not lose their ability to return to and live in Jerusalem if they switched their "center of life" temporarily elsewhere. This disparity in legal rights is a direct reflection of the 1970s demographic plan to limit the percentage of Arabs within the municipal boundaries of unified Jerusalem to 28.8 percent. Even though by 2015 this percentage had risen to 36.8 percent, there has been no attempt to revisit their legal situation with the intent to reduce tensions in the city. Israel created an irregular and arbitrary legal regime in the Syrian Golan Heights and East Jerusalem, the two territories it annexed. It placed these areas under Israeli sovereignty without extending citizenship to their inhabitants. Residents instead received a status that is inferior to citizenship. Even this limited option does not exist for the rest of the occupied Palestinians (in the West Bank and Gaza). Their status in the eyes of the Israeli state is forever temporary. All Israel desires of Palestinians is acquiescence to the occupation; in the opinion of the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, Israel displays virtually no ambition to create a common identity or even, at a minimum, a civic value system that would legitimize its presence. In the absence of citizenship, Palestinians in the OPT are a superfluous people, orphans of the international order, whose denial of political rights leaves them in legal limbo.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Half Century of Occupation by Gershon Shafir. Copyright © 2017 Gershon Shafir. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.