Israeli Occupation

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Louis Rene Beres is par­tially cor­rect on a con­tro­ver­sial topic:

A sov­er­eign state of Pales­tine did not exist before 1967 or 1948. Nor was a state of Pales­tine ever promised by UN Secu­rity Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 242. Con­trary to pop­u­lar under­stand­ing, a state of Pales­tine has never existed.

Even as a non­state legal entity, “Pales­tine” ceased to exist in 1948, when Great Britain relin­quished its League of Nations man­date. Dur­ing the 1948–49 Israeli War of Inde­pen­dence (a war of sur­vival fought because the entire Arab world had rejected the author­i­ta­tive United Nations res­o­lu­tion cre­at­ing a Jew­ish state), the West Bank and Gaza came under the ille­gal con­trol of Jor­dan and Egypt respec­tively. These Arab con­quests did not put an end to an already-existing state or to an ongo­ing trust ter­ri­tory. What these aggres­sions did accom­plish was the effec­tive pre­ven­tion, sui generis, of a state of Pales­tine. The orig­i­nal hopes for Pales­tine were dashed, there­fore, not by the new Jew­ish state or by its sup­port­ers, but by the Arab states, espe­cially Jor­dan and Egypt.

Both right-wing pun­dits, like Beres, and many left-wing crit­ics of Israel, includ­ing many mod­ern anti-Semites, only tell half of the story.

Indeed, there has never been a State of Pales­tine. The land in ques­tion was occu­pied by the British after the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) had con­trolled it for cen­turies after the Arab Empire and Chris­t­ian cru­saders had fought over it after the Roman Empire had con­quered after destroy­ing ancient Judea. (Whew.) Through­out the cen­turies, the word “Pales­tine” had been a gen­eral term to refer to that spe­cific part of the Mid­dle East. How­ever, just because a State of Pales­tine had never existed does not mean that no Arabs – among oth­ers includ­ing Jews and Chris­tians – had ever lived there for the past 2,000 years. Of course they did. And this is where the term “occup­tion” becomes con­fus­ing and polit­i­cally charged.

Israel, of course, is cur­rently occu­py­ing some­thing. But what, exactly? The early Zion­ists did not invade a coun­try and force its inhab­i­tants to leave. While the Ottoman Empire was con­trol­ling the region, many Arabs — again, among other peo­ple — had owned land. Most of the time, the early Zion­ists pur­chased land from Arabs and cul­ti­vated bar­ren pieces of desert. How­ever, con­flicted erupted when the British left, the local Arabs rejected a two-state solu­tion pro­posed by the United Nations, and then the Jews declared in 1948 that the State of Israel now existed in the land that they owned.

In the ensu­ing war between Israel and the sur­round­ing Arab coun­tries, some of the local Arabs fled while oth­ers were kicked out. (It is hard to esti­mate the pro­por­tion between the two.) In either case, those Arabs went to the part of Jor­dan now called the West Bank and the part of Egypt now termed Gaza. Later, in the 1967 war, Israel took con­trol of those two areas — and the Arabs who lived there — after Jor­dan and Egypt had attacked the Jew­ish state from those loca­tions. (Nei­ther of those two coun­tries, for the record, offered to give the Pales­tini­ans their own state.)

Israel is not an occu­py­ing power in the land between Gaza and the West Bank. But it is an occu­py­ing power in the West Bank and Gaza. Still, when peo­ple refer to “the Occu­pa­tion,” it is dif­fi­cult to deter­mine what exactly they mean. If one pushes hard-left crit­ics of Israel hard enough, many of them will admit that they think the entire coun­try of Israel is occu­py­ing Arab land or even a for­mer State of Pales­tine. How­ever, many hard-right advo­cates take it to the other extreme. To say that Israel is not an occu­py­ing power in the West Bank and Gaza is nonsense.