Originally published under the title “It Is Not the ‘Occupation’.”
As the blood dried at the scene of the latest Tel Aviv massacre, the city’s mayor rushed to empathize with the terrorists’ motives. “We might be the only country in the world where another nation is under occupation without civil rights,” he claimed. “You can’t hold people in a situation of occupation and hope they’ll reach the conclusion everything is alright.”
This prognosis was quickly followed by the usual Israeli “hope” peddlers. “The terror will continue as long as the Palestinian people have no hope on the horizon,” argued a Haaretz editorial. “The only way to deal with terrorism is by freeing the Palestinian people from the occupation.”
But this precisely what Israel did 20 years ago.
The declaration of principles (DOP, or Oslo I) signed on the White House lawn in September 1993 by the PLO and the Israeli government provided for Palestinian self-rule in the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, during which Israel and the Palestinians would negotiate a permanent peace settlement.
Israel relinquished control over virtually all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza many years ago.
By May 1994, Israel had completed its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip (apart from a small stretch of territory containing a small number of Israeli settlements that “occupied” not a single Palestinian and were subsequently evacuated in 2005) and the Jericho area of the West Bank. On July 1, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat made his triumphant entry into Gaza, and shortly afterward a newly- established Palestinian Authority (PA) under his leadership took control of this territory.
On September 28, 1995, despite the PA ‘s abysmal failure to clamp down on terrorist activities in the territories under its control, the two parties signed an interim agreement, and by the end of the year Israeli forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank’s populated areas with the exception of Hebron (where redeployment was completed in early 1997).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.
“What happened... in the territories is the Palestinian state,” gushed environment minister Yossi Sarid. “The Palestinian state has already been established.”
This euphoric assertion was prescient. While the geographical scope of the Israeli withdrawals was relatively limited (the surrendered land amounted to some 30 percent of the West Bank’s overall territory), its impact on the Palestinian population was nothing short of revolutionary.
The vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank live under PA jurisdiction. |
In one fell swoop, Israel relinquished control over virtually all of the West Bank’s 1.4 million residents. Since that time, nearly 60% of them have lived entirely under Palestinian jurisdiction (Area A). Another 40% live in towns, villages, refugee camps and hamlets where the PA exercises civil authority but, in line with the Oslo accords, Israel has maintained “overriding responsibility for security” (Area B). Some 2% 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 PA maintains “functional jurisdiction” (Area C).
In short, since the beginning of 1996, and certainly following the completion of the redeployment from Hebron in January 1997, 99% of the Palestinian population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has not lived under Israeli occupation. As the virulent anti-Israel and anti-Jewish media, school system and religious incitement can attest to, during these years, any presence of a foreign occupation has been virtually non-existent.
This in turn means that the presentation of terrorism as a natural response to the so-called occupation is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth.
In the two-and-a-half years from the signing of the DOP to the fall of the Labor government in May 1996, 210 Israelis were murdered – nearly three times the average death toll of the previous 26 years, when only a small fraction of the fatalities had been caused by West Bank- and/or Gaza-originated attacks due to Israel’s effective counterinsurgency measures, the low level of national consciousness among the Palestinians and the vast improvement in their standard of living under Israel’s control.
The claim that Palestinian terrorism is a response to the so-called ‘occupation’ is a lie.
Moreover, nearly two thirds of the 1994-96 victims were murdered in Israeli territory inside the “Green Line” – nearly 10 times the average fatality toll in Israel in the preceding six violent years of the Palestinian uprising (intifada).
In September 1996 another escalatory threshold was crossed when Arafat reverted to direct violence by exploiting the opening of a new exit to an archaeological tunnel under the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, to unleash widespread riots in which 17 Israelis and some 80 Palestinians were killed. And while the PA quickly dropped the tunnel issue from its agenda once it had outlived its usefulness, Arafat was to repeat this precedent on several occasions, most notably by launching the September 2000 terrorist war (euphemized as the “al-Aksa intifada” after the Jerusalem mosque) – a short time after being offered Palestinian statehood by prime minister Ehud Barak.
By the time of Arafat’s death four years later, his war – the bloodiest and most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians since 1948 – had exacted 1,028 Israeli lives in some 5,760 attacks: nine times the average death toll of the pre-Oslo era. Of these, about 450 people (or 44% of victims) were killed in suicide bombings – a practically unheard of tactic in the Palestinian-Israeli context prior to Oslo. All in all, more than 1,600 Israelis were murdered and another 9,000 wounded since the signing of the DOP – nearly three times the average death toll of the preceding 26 years.
Palestinian terrorism was comparatively sparse during the years of actual occupation.
And this without mentioning the unreconstructed terrorist entity established in the Gaza Strip, whose clear and present danger to the vast majority of Israel’s population can be contained through repeated military campaigns but not eradicated altogether.
If occupation was indeed 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; just as it was the partial restoration of security measures in the West Bank during the 2002 Operation Defensive Shield and its aftermath (albeit without reassuming control over the daily lives of the Palestinian population there) that brought the Palestinian war of terror to an end.
It is not “occupation” that underlies the lack of “hope on the horizon” but the century-long Palestinian rejection of the Jewish right to statehood, as expressed in the 1922 League of Nations’ Palestine mandate and the 1947 UN Partition Resolution. So long as that disposition is tolerated, let alone encouraged, the idea of Palestinian-Israeli peace will remain a chimera.
The author is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings College London, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum.
