Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 29
The phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” is an anti-Israel slogan designed to pre-empt negotiations
All branches of the UK government seem to follow a similar nomenclature. The Home Office says: The West Bank and Gaza have been ‘occupied’ by Israel since 1967. They are collectively known as the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs).
The UK is widely considered to be pro-Israel (reflected in the possibly ironic quote marks?) yet in describing the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza in this way, they (like most other countries and the UN) ignore Israeli protestations that the term is politicised, biased and prejudicial to peace. Who is right?
Let’s examine each of the three words comprising the OPT* in turn.
“Occupied?”
After the War of Independence ended in March 1949, a series of ceasefire lines were established at the Rhodes Conference [1]. These originated from a meeting in November 1948 when two commanders, Israel’s Moshe Dayan and Jordan’s Abdullah el-Tell, agreed on boundaries drawn with a green wax pencil on a map to indicate Israeli-controlled areas; Jordanian-controlled areas were marked in red. In time, the armistice line between Israel and its Arab neighbours came to be known as The Green Line.
This was never viewed – even by the UN – as an international border. The Arab world didn’t recognise it (nor were willing to accept a Jewish state behind any borders) and nor did the wider international community that viewed it as a temporary staging post on the road to peace talks (that the Arab states tragically refused to contemplate). So when Israel crossed the Green Line into the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, she neither crossed an international border nor took control of the sovereign territory of another state. In other words, Israel’s “occupation” didn’t meet, on prima facie grounds, the legal criteria set out in the Hague and Geneva conventions. Nevertheless, Israel accepted the de facto humanitarian responsibilities of an occupying power under the conventions and fulfilled that role with considerable (though rarely acknowledged) success until 1995 [see blog 6].
Even if the term “occupation” is deemed to apply to the period 1967-1993, that status ended with the internationally endorsed Oslo Accords (1993-95) when Israel’s authority over 98% of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza was transferred to the newly created Palestinian Authority (PA) – note the name. The Accords made no mention of a continuing occupation. That should have put paid to the matter. Yet the widespread assertion that the Israeli occupation continues as though Oslo never happened is false. It also displays a breathtaking double standard.
Consider a case in which both the UK and US were closely involved. Iraq was occupied by the Coalition forces from early 2003 until June 2004 when all authority other than security was handed to the Iraqis. At that point, Coalition forces remained in Iraq but the country was no longer deemed occupied. “If handing over authority to a Coalition-appointed interim government ended the occupation of Iraq, would the same not hold true for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority?” asks Israeli lawyer Avinoam Sharon [2]. A fair question.
In the absence of a final peace agreement between Israel and the PA, there are unresolved competing claims to the same territory. The Oslo Accords recognised that and specified that the outstanding differences (including about borders) must be settled by direct negotiations between the parties. Until that endpoint is reached, the areas in question are clearly disputed rather than occupied. Reflecting this, and notwithstanding the UN’s (and most countries’) insistence on deploying either the OPT or “Palestine” descriptor, all key UN resolutions have called for the status of these territories to be resolved peacefully, a demand that only one party (Israel) has consistently respected by seeking a Palestinian negotiating partner and offering (in, for example, 2000, 2001 and 2008) generous terms – including full Palestinian sovereignty – in the process.
“Palestinian”?
In 1922, 78% of the British Mandate was hived off from the Jewish National Home (that had been provisionally delineated by the international community in 1920 at San Remo) and handed to the Hashemite dynasty of Mecca. They have ruled over what was effectively a Palestinian Arab state, comprising all the Mandate territory east of the Jordan river, ever since. Today that state is known as Jordan. Of the remaining 22% of Mandatory territory, still more land was offered to the Palestine Arabs in 1947 by the UN partition resolution 181, but their leaders violently rejected that offer, unlike the Jewish leadership who accepted it. Consequently, that resolution – that would have created a second Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel – was never implemented.
In 1948, Jordanian forces illegally entered the eastern section of the Mandate and within a couple of years annexed eastern Jerusalem along with a district known for millennia as Judea and Samaria (that Jordan promptly renamed “the West Bank”) but that land grab was never recognised internationally. (Incidentally, the Jordanians renounced all claims to the area, excluding the Islamic holy sites, in 1988). Simultaneously, Egypt entered Gaza but didn’t annexe it, merely keeping it under military rule until Israel won control of the Strip in 1967.
If the land Israel “occupied” in 1967 wasn’t Jordanian or Egyptian, what was it? It certainly wasn’t Palestinian as no such entity as Palestine existed, nor was it regarded as such by the UN. The phrase “occupied Palestinian territory” was never mentioned, even as a whisper, when Jordan and Egypt ruled the areas from 1948 to 1967, nor did it appear in UN resolutions referring to the Six Day War, but was conjured out of thin air only some years after Israel became the controlling power.
“Territories”?
Today Israel exerts control of about 60% of the West Bank, the so-called Oslo Area C; this contains a small minority of the West Bank Palestinian population but a large majority of the (mainly, but not exclusively, Jewish) Israelis (“settlers”) living there.
The great majority of West Bank Palestinians live in Area A, ruled by the PA (where, incidentally, not a single Jew is permitted to reside). Area A originally included Gaza but it has been ruled by Hamas since 2007, who snatched the Strip from PA control in a bloody coup. Despite a full Israeli withdrawal in 2005, the PA, UN and others claim Gaza remains “Israeli occupied” on two specious grounds: first, that Israel controls Gaza border crossing points, and second, that Israel runs everyday life in the Strip indirectly through an “invisible hand” or “remote control.” The first doesn’t bear scrutiny as the Egyptian military also controls a border with Gaza yet that country is never said to occupy the Strip, while the second is a form of magical thinking that should have no place in international relations. Neither of these criteria for occupation has ever been applied elsewhere. At most, therefore, the term “occupation” should apply to one territory (the West Bank) not two.
To summarise the evidence relating to the so-called “Occupied Palestinian Territories”:
1. Prior to 1967, no sovereign Palestine entity existed anywhere, ever, and no amount of historical revisionism can change this reality.
2. Even if an Israeli occupation, either in the full or partial meaning of the term, existed post-1967, it unequivocally ended in 1995 with the Oslo Accords that made no reference to continuing occupation.
3. Following Israel’s withdrawal of all her remaining troops and civilians from Gaza in 2005, one territory (the West Bank including parts of Jerusalem) rather than two remained at issue, in Oslo terms, between Israel and the Palestinians pending a final status agreement.
The continued and repeated use of the phrase “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (or the even more contentious term “Palestine”) is thus not only devoid of evidential logic but also cynically pre-empts the negotiated disposition of these territories between the parties, as demanded by Oslo (and the earlier Security Council resolutions 242 and 338), to the disadvantage of Israel. That seriously undermines Israeli trust in the Oslo process and is thus an obstacle to peace.
All of the arguments presented here are based on verifiable information that is in the public domain. Yet most of the world is determined to avoid engaging with them. Why is Israel subjected to uniquely stringent – and often fictional – historical, political and legal standards by the international community?
On my next trip, I may take a look at Morocco. Wait – doesn’t Morocco occupy Western Sahara despite this having been deplored by the UN [3] since 1977? Isn’t Western Sahara one of the UN-designated “non-self-governing territories” (of which Britain still holds over a dozen) whose future is supposed to be settled by negotiations? Let’s see what the UK Foreign Office [4] says: Western Sahara is a disputed territory and the UK regards its status as undetermined.
I rest my case.
1. UK Government (2022). Foreign Travel Advice, Israel https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/israel
2. Sharon A. Why Is Israel’s Presence in the Territories Still Called “Occupation”? Jerusalem, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2009 https://studylib.net/doc/13465055/why-is-israel’s-presence-in-the-territories-still-called-...
3. UN General Assembly Resolution 34/37, 1977 https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/A_RES_34_37.pdf
4. UK Government (2022). Foreign Travel Advice, Morocco https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice/western-sahara#Political-situation
*A note on terminology
In this and succeeding blogs, I am conscious of entering a terminological minefield. Language is often weaponised to discredit political opponents: for example, right wingers talk of “Judea and Samaria” or “Greater Israel” while left wingers talk of “the West Bank” or “Palestine.” Because I use language pragmatically, leftists dismiss me as a right-wing reactionary while rightists damn me as a pie-in-the-sky liberal. They are both wrong. As a committed moderate, I subscribe to neither of these warring tribes and avoid linguistic shouting matches. My concern is solely to analyse the evidence. I express no political preference for any of the options available to Israeli politicians – that is a matter for them and their electorate.
