The Electronic Intifada
Israels occupation was a plan fulfilled
Ilan Pappe The Electronic Intifada 6 June 2017
Palestinian refugees continued to cross into Jordan after the Allenby Bridge
between Jordan and the West Bank had been bombed on 8 June, the fourth day
of the 1967 war. (UNRWA)
In June 1967, I was 12 years old. I recall helping to fill sandbags to
fortify the entrance to our home in Haifa in preparation for war. The army
was already geared towards war and official Israel terrified its society and
supporters around the world, as Zionist leaders did in 1948, with warnings
of another Holocaust.
Just recently, I finished writing a book about this period, The Biggest
Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories.
Through the work on this book, I realized that the Israeli manipulation of
Jewish fear in 1967 was even more cynical than it was in 1948, when the
Jewish leadership genuinely could not foresee the results of its decision to
ethnically cleanse Palestine.
The cabinet meetings reveal a group of politicians and generals, who ever
since 1948 looked for a way of rectifying what they deemed was the gravest
mistake of the otherwise triumphant war of independence: the decision not
to occupy the West Bank.
In 1948, the West Bank had been left in Jordanian hands due to a tacit
understanding between the Zionist leadership and the Hashemite Kingdom so
eloquently described by historian Avi Shlaim in his book Collusion Across
the Jordan.
The occupation lobby
There was a proper lobby in Israel pushing the government at various
historical junctures to find a pretext to occupy and annex the West Bank. It
was made of ideologues who deemed the West Bank as the heart of the ancient
homeland without which it could not survive, and of strategists who firmly
believed the Jordan River was a natural bulwark in the way of invading
armies from the east.
They nearly had their way twice before 1967. In 1958, the pretext was the
possible radicalization of Jordan. The US vetoed such an act. In 1960,
Israeli threats against Syria and constant frictions in the north created a
chain of events that provided another opportunity.
The plot unfolded in 1960, as it would in 1967. The tension in the north led
Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser to react by dispatching forces to the
Sinai and closing the maritime route to Eilat, which runs up the narrow Gulf
of Aqaba.
In 1960, it was Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who prevented that
crisis from developing into a war or a pretext for occupying the West Bank;
after masterminding the 1948 expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians, he
had no desire to incorporate another million and a half into Israel.
A preventable war
Ben-Gurion was ousted from meaningful political life in 1963. In that year,
the preparations for a possible occupation of both the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip were stepped up. Over the next four years, the army prepared
detailed plans for the eventual takeover of these territories.
We have no access to the military plans, but we do have access to the legal
plans that were drafted from 1963 onwards detailing how to rule the lives of
millions of Palestinians: military judges in waiting, legal advisors,
military governors and rulers and a firm legal infrastructure to run life
from the very moment of occupation. Intelligence on possible resistance and
its leaders were properly gathered so that a swift takeover would evolve
from the outset of the occupation.
And the moment was not long in coming. The Israeli rhetoric and actions
against Syria intensified in 1966 and 1967.
The inevitable next crisis unfolded in May 1967. The Greater Israel lobby,
which included most of the army generals and the young Labor Party
ministers, was determined not to let that opportunity slip. As with any
escalating conflict, there are multiple exit points. Nasser followed in 1967
the same policy he pursued in 1960. He, as well as the Soviet Union, with
which he was allied, took seriously the Israeli threats to attack Syria and
he wished to reopen the Palestine question.
Alas, as in 1948, Egypts war rhetoric did not match its military capacity
or preparations. Worse was the situation of King Hussein of Jordan. When
Israel assaulted the Egyptian air force on the morning of 5 June 1967, he
still hoped that a symbolic retaliation (to which he was committed under his
defense agreements with Egypt and Syria) would exonerate him from the
allegation of treason and save the West Bank. He was wrong on both counts.
The war was preventable. However, the Israeli military and political elite
made sure that every exit point would be blocked and no one would stand in
the way of fulfilling the Zionist vision of Judaizing the whole of historic
Palestine.
A plan fulfilled
The total collapse of the Arab armies that enabled Israel to get as far as
the Suez Canal and nearly occupy Damascus was a bonus the Israelis did not
predict. But the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was a plan
fulfilled: it was not the freak outcome of a very successful war.
The takeover plans of previous years enabled Israel to install its military
rule over the West Bank and Gaza immediately after the war. The system was
already successfully imposed on the Palestinian minority in Israel those
Palestinians who had survived the ethnic cleansing two decades earlier and
remained inside the Jewish state.
Now the system and the people operating it were transferred to rule a new
Palestinian group. The new version was even worse: it was built on the sheer
power of the army to control every aspect of life, violating in the process
basic human and civil rights.
The means of maintaining this rule have changed, but it is still intact and
there is no intention to end its existence.
This year, yet another generation of this evil bureaucracy begins its term
in office in operating the system. It has been resisted by the Palestinians,
including in the form of the uprisings, or intifadas, that began in 1987 and
2000, and will still be resisted. But the international system has not
condemned the occupation sufficiently to bring it to an end.
Joining in the occupation
Immediately after the war, Moshe Dayan, the defense minister, opened the
West Bank to Israelis.
We joined in as a family. Our guides were from the Israel Exploration
Society, founded in 1913 in an attempt to substantiate the Zionist claim
for Palestine with archaeological finds.
With such tour guides, you see what allegedly had been there thousands of
years ago, but you do not see the present. You gaze at ancient ruins while
ignoring the humanity around them. The early Zionists, pre-state, were taken
on a similar tour upon their arrival to the land without people.
The year 1967 became the closure for 1882, the date of the first Zionist
colony in Palestine. But now it was colonization de luxe done by a rich and
powerful Jewish state.
The destruction of Qalqilya, the expulsion of the refugees from destroyed
camps near Jericho and the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem were events I only
read about later on, although they were visible to us when we marched
through the West Bank as an army of tourists redeeming our ancient
homeland.
The military and political elite in Israel already in June 1967, whether on
the left or the right, regarded the West Bank and some even the Gaza Strip
as an integral part of future Israel. The debate was how to achieve it
without incurring international, and in particular American, rebuke, and
without granting citizenship to the millions of Palestinians living there.
This is why colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip began very
early on, allowing Israel to annex de facto any part of the territories it
desired. This annexation was carried out through the confiscation of
Palestinian land and, where necessary, expulsions.
Israels charades
Two charades unfolded which helped to mesmerize the world and overlook the
Israeli strategy on the ground. As a teenager, I partook in the first one
and as a young student played an active role in the second.
The first was the charade of an internal debate in Israel between so-called
redeemers and custodians, otherwise known as the divide between the
right and the left in Israeli society. The right asserted that the West Bank
and Gaza Strip were redeemed and should be annexed, the left that they
should be in custody until peace is concluded.
Until then, both camps agreed on the unification of Jerusalem a city
whose boundaries Israel expanded deep into the West Bank as it settled more
territory as well as on the need to settle the Jordan Valley and to keep
the Palestinians under military rule.
As a youngster, like so many in the world who should have known better, I
believed genuinely this was an ideological debate on war and peace.
I also bought into the second charade that was manipulated from above: the
peace process. The main message from Israel was that its actions were
temporary, even when it was settling vast areas of the occupied territories,
and that its violations of basic human rights were short-term necessities
that would stop once peace came.
The process moved nowhere, and when it moved as we saw in 1993 with the
breakthrough of the Oslo accords between Israel and the Palestine
Liberation Organization it really moved backwards.
However, it provided time and immunity to solidify the strategy of deepening
the colonization with irreversible facts on the ground.
Naïve custodians like myself were the ones sent abroad to sell the
process. I was even ready to represent Peace Now, the main
extra-parliamentary custodian movement of the left, while pursuing my
doctoral studies in the UK (although I was dismissed from the group very
early on for meeting openly with PLO representatives in London at a time
when it was forbidden).
In fact, these meetings helped me to wake up to the wider historical and
ideological contexts of Israels actions in 1967 and after.
From abroad, ironically, it was much easier to look directly at the
inhumanity and suffering Zionism caused in its century in Palestine. It was
a farewell from me to the Israeli Zionist left.
Gentle question
Fifty years on, the Zionist left is unfortunately the force the official
international community relies on to bring peace. However, most Israelis
have stopped playing the first charade of left and right each with their
own excuse or explanation.
Many of them also believe there is no need anymore to play the second
charade. Official Israel is no longer worried about how to avoid
international rebuke.
Implementing incremental genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza did not
move the powers that be, and the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and
the siege of Gaza remain Israels best means of fulfilling the vision of a
Greater Israel. As long as Israeli leaders face no consequences, they will
continue to pursue their vision of a Greater Israel.
If this vision can be implemented through a partition of the West Bank into
bantustans apartheid South Africa-style enclaves where Palestinians are
given nominal autonomy but no real control this is also fine in the eyes
of most of the Jewish electorate. (This is why optimistic two-staters can
quote again and again the high figure for those in Israel who say they
believe in a two-state solution and yet vote mainly for parties that oppose
it.)
So why is the world still playing the charade? For regular readers of this
publication, the answers are clear and there is no need to repeat them.
But at this moment of commemoration, let us approach those who we deem
decent and knowledgeable as friends of ours those friends and comrades who
still talk about the two-state solution, the Israeli peace camp and the
peace of the brave and gently ask them how long will they play a
charade, while the reality of colonization and oppression becomes harsher by
the day and can only be stopped when as many people as possible give power
to the truth.
The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and
director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of
Exeter.
