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No,
Palestinian Terrorism Isn't a Response to 'Occupation'
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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.
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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forces had been withdrawn from the West Bank's populated areas with the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.
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The
vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank live under PA
jurisdiction.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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