Occupied Palestine: A Primer

May 22, 2024

"The world has visited many terrible things upon the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity." - Anthony Bourdain

The War on Gaza has been called "the moral issue of this student generation." While the horrors inflicted on the Palestinians over the last seven months are more than enough to outrage almost anyone, the young have led the way - showing up in numbers and questioning the dominant narrative about Israel and Palestine accepted so unthinkingly in America. These young men and women have put their elders to shame - to say nothing of the disgraceful, morally bankrupt, at times almost inhuman, positions taken and statements given by most of our political leaders and media outlets.

Understanding the history of the fraught relationship between Israel and Occupied Palestine over the decades (Many terrible things...sidebar) will serve as a corrective to the bias present in the American press and and as an antidote to the money flooding the halls of Congress and our political campaigns from one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington.

To grasp the true nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the full extent of Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, we must go back to the Nakba ("catastrophe") of the late 1940s.

But first, some historical context.

World War I

The Mandate for Palestine was a League of Nations mandate for British administration of the territories of Palestine and Transjordan, both of which had been conceded by the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I in 1918. The Mandate was the outcome of several factors: the British occupation of territories previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire, the peace treaties that brought the First World War to an end, and the principle of self-determination that emerged after the war. The British had made several conflicting agreements during the war to gain support from various groups in the Middle East including recognizing Arab independence, the division of the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence, and a "national home" for the Jewish people. In Palestine, the Mandate required Britain to put into effect the Balfour Declaration's "national home for the Jewish people" alongside the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population; this requirement and others, however, would not apply to the separate Arab emirate to be established in Transjordan. Before the Mandate could be implemented, the world would suffer the horrors of a second world war.

World War II

As the Second World War ended, a new world order guided by international law was coming into being. The United Nations came into existence in 1945 with the stated purposes of maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations, and achieving international cooperation. The last of the Geneva Conventions, intended to ameliorate the effects of war on soldiers and civilians, were agreed in 1949. The concepts of human rights and national self-determination were gaining widespread agreement, and the colonial/imperialist era that had defined Europe's relationship to much of the world was ending. It would be up to the United Nations to sort out the conflicting areas of the British Mandate for Palestine.

In November 1947, the UN General Assembly approved Resolution 181, which recommends the creation of independent Arab and Jewish States and the Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The recommendations for partition were rejected by Arab representatives but accepted for the most part by Jewish representatives to the talks. Arab rejection was based to a considerable extent on the ceding to Israel of 55% of Mandate Palestine when the Jewish population was 32% of the total. Fighting breaks out between Arab and Jewish militias, and the UN mediator for the conflict, Folke Bernadotte, is assassinated by Zionist extremists. Bernadotte had proposed a two-state solution for the region, with boundaries drawn by the UN if the combatants could not agree, and the refugees' right of return.

The Nakba

Each year on May 15, Palestinians around the world mark the Nakba, referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the near-total destruction of Palestinian society in 1948. On that day, the State of Israel came into being. The creation of Israel was a violent process that entailed the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland to establish a Jewish-majority state.

Between 1947 and 1949, at least 750,000 Palestinians from a 1.9 million population were made refugees beyond the borders of the state. Zionist forces had taken more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, ethnically cleansed and destroyed about 530 villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in a series of mass atrocities, including more than 70 massacres. [Al Jazeera, May 2017 link in sidebar]

The Nakba, the violent forced displacement of Palestinians, did not end in 1948. Through the decades, in violation of UN resolutions and international law, Israel absorbed more and more of Palestine, subjugated Palestinians by an apartheid system of governance and the longest military occupation of the modern era (1967-present), and maintained a brutal and illegal land-sea-and-air blockade of Gaza ( 2007-present).

Sparked by a surprise attack on military and civilian targets within Israel and the taking of hostages, the current war is a continuation of the never-ending Nakba. Straight from the mouths of Netanyahu's extremist cabinet:

“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” trumpeted an October tweet by Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s Knesset within Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party. In November, Avi Dichter, Netanyahu’s agriculture minister and a member of his security Cabinet, proudly said Israel was “rolling out” what he called “Nakba 2023.” Netanyahu’s most radical Cabinet ministers have openly called for mass Israeli settlement of the Gaza Strip...

"Israel's leaders say they are fighting Hamas by bombing hospitals and universities, shooting at bread lines and journalists, and firing rockets into vans of aid workers and a civilian population that’s 50 percent children. The Western press reports this as a crisis in Gaza even as it acknowledges an uptick of Israeli mob violence against Palestinians in the West Bank too...The reality is that Israel is fighting what it has always fought: Palestinian existence**. [Slate link in sidebar]

Israel's land grabs have made a viable Palestinian state less and less likely [Al Jazeera, November 2023 link in sidebar], and its apartheid policies magnify the suffering of the Palestinian people. As often happens with stateless people, Palestinians are among the most marginalized, impoverished and oppressed peoples of the world.

Along the way to the human catastrophe occurring in Gaza today, there have been several inflection points, each leading to a greater level of oppression and suffering. Besides the Nakba, several events stand out.

The Six-Day War

After years of tension because of Egyptian-aided fedayeen attacks, the "Six Day War" began on June 5, 1967, with Israel launching surprise strikes against Egyptian airfields in response to the mobilization of Egyptian forces on the Israeli border.

Israel took control of the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan; and the Golan Heights from Syria.
An estimated 300,000 Palestinians left the West Bank and Gaza, most of whom settled in Jordan. Minority Jews living across the Arab world faced persecution and expulsion following the war.
Israel having thus captured the rest of Mandate Palestine from Jordan and Egypt began a policy of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories and initiated the military occupation that has become the longest in the modern era.

For more on the settlements, a major obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state, see "Who are the Israeli settlers, and why do they live on Palestinian land?" The international community considers Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestine to be illegal because they violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention [sidebar] and other international declarations. The UN Security Council has passed resolutions in 1979, 1980, and 2016 that indicate that Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank violate international law.

The Assassination of Itzhak Rabin and the End of the Peace Process

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered on November 4, 1995, by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist, who was opposed to the Oslo Accords and to the return of parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians as a part of a landmark peace agreement. The Oslo Accords were the one bright spot in the decades-long American-led peace process. The Accords were considered a major diplomatic breakthrough in the entrenched Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Yasser Arafat of Palestine and Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 'for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East'.

After the death of Rabin until today, the Labor Party that he had led has held power for just 7 years, with right-wing parties ruling for 22 years. Israel drifted further to the right, culminating in today's extreme right government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been both a major concern of American diplomacy since 1967 and an arena of persistent failure. Given the enormous power difference between the Palestinians and the Israelis, only a third party could bring the Israelis to the table. Since Rabin's death, the US has utterly failed in its role as the peace broker...arming Israel unconditionally, saying nothing about their violations of international law and their human rights abuses, and vetoing any Security Council resolution criticizing Israel's behavior. The result: an Israel that acts with impunity, knowing there are no consequences for any of its actions - even when it engages in genocide.

Palestinian elections of 2006 and the aftermath

The years 2006 - 2007 were critical to the Palestinian-Israeli relationship and to the fate of Gaza. Briefly (additional detail is in the sidebar):

Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian legislative elections.
Fatah, the rival party supported by the United States and Israel, controlled the executive branch and refused to cooperate with Hamas.
Israel, the US and the EU imposed sanctions on the Hamas-led government.
Israel and the Bush administration contrived with the Fatah-led secular Palestine Liberation Organization to overthrow the Hamas government in the West Bank, in which they succeeded.
A similar attempt in the Gaza Strip failed, when Hamas defeated Fatah in the Battle of Gaza (June 2007), resulting in the de facto partition of Occupied Palestine into two entities - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Israel and the United States announced plans to blockade the Gaza Strip.

And so Gaza was blockaded, leading to enormous suffering among the inhabitants of what has been called the world's "largest open air prison."

The Gaza blockade

Fifteen years into the blockade, in 2022, UNRWA* summarized the effect of fifteen years of the brutal land, sea and air blockade and the repeated cycles of violence" of Israeli assaults against the besieged enclave.

"Gaza has experienced momentous de-development, severely impacting normal daily life for all residents and restricting their basic human rights."

UNRWA cited these statistics:

- 81.5 per cent of individuals in Gaza live below the national poverty line.

- 64 per cent are food insecure.

- The unemployment rate stood at 47 per cent, with the overall youth unemployment rate at 64 per cent.

-The per capita GDP stood at US$ 1,049, which is four times lower than in the West Bank and Jordan.

-80 per cent of the population depends on humanitarian assistance.

-1.1 million Palestine refugees receive food assistance from UNRWA

-Between 2007 and 2022, 292 of the water wells in Gaza used for both domestic consumption and farmlands were damaged or destroyed by Israeli Security Forces and eighty-one percent of water extracted from Gaza aquifers does not meet WHO water quality.

There is also a tremendous societal cost that has seen the social fabric of Palestinians' lives in Gaza unravel and the mental health of its residents, particularly children and youth, decline at an alarming rate. In the sidebar is a reflection on life in Gaza from an American physician who lived there and volunteered "in various clinics throughout Gaza offering medical education, mental health care and yoga classes for trauma survivors (everyone in Gaza is a trauma survivor)."

And all this was life in Gaza years before the current war.

2014: Sabotaging the Peace Process, "Mowing the Grass" in Gaza

The year 2014 was a telling one for US-Israel relations. As President Obama and the P5+1 (the permanent UN Security Council Members plus Germany) sought to limit Iran's nuclear capabilities, Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to revive the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process. Israel, meanwhile, was opposing anything that would normalize the world's relations with Iran and simultaneously sabotaging Kerry's peace initiative.

While Israel would have to wait until Donald Trump became president to see their plan to thwart the Iran Nuclear Deal come to fruition, it was successful in preventing the Kerry talks from progressing. This last effort by the United States to be an "honest broker" for peace ended for good when Israel walked away from the table a week before the talks were scheduled to end.

The reason that the Israelis gave for abandoning the talks early was the reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Palestinian Authority. After continuing to build illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the midst of the peace talks, after demanding that the Palestinian authority abandon the Palestinian right of return and acknowledge Israel as a "Jewish state", and after reneging on the fourth and final round of freeing Palestinian prisoners, the Israelis just walked out.

A month later, the Palestinian unity government was sworn in on June 2, 2014. Both Hamas and the PLO backed the government, ending several years of division. The US expressed support but some of Netanyahu's cabinet were outraged, even calling for Israel to annex the illegal West Bank settlements.

The stage was now set for the greatest assault against the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip until that time.

In early July, Israel assassinated seven Hamas members after declaring Hamas responsible for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers. The fact that Hamas had nothing to do with the incident and that another group claimed credit for it apparently meant nothing to the self-appointed judge, jury and executioner.

Hamas responded to these killings and the Israeli airstrike by launching their ineffective homemade rockets into Israel, giving Israel the excuse to overreact and begin the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

The IDF launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July 2014, in response to the Hamas rocket attacks. On 17 July 2014, Israel troops entered the Gaza Strip. For the third time in five years, Israel would invade the Gaza Strip. This time, as the world stood and watched [sidebar "Where is the Outrage?"], the devastation would be enormous.

When the war finally came to an end in late August, more than 2100 Palestinians were dead and 10,890 wounded - at least 70% of them civilians. The civilian infrastructure, Gaza's water and electricity, was severely damaged, and more than 100,000 Palestinians were left homeless.

An Israeli strategist, whose name has been lost to history, compared the killing of Palestinians in the occasional assaults on Gaza to "mowing the grass." The seven-week war of 2014 was just the latest and worst "lawn mowing". Obama's dumbfounded silence gave Israel an indication of how far it could go violating international law and committing war crimes without incurring the displeasure of their sponsor, the United States.

Today and Tomorrow

The devastation of the current War on Gaza is orders of magnitude greater than what the people of Gaza suffered in 2014. That we do not condemn the Israeli excesses and war crimes shows how far down the path of total impunity the apartheid state has come. The decades old narrative of a small defenseless Israel surrounded by Arab neighbors made hostile by the Nakba is long dead. With one of the most powerful militaries in the world and with the US "unconditional support", they appear free to inflict whatever level of suffering they want on the Palestinians. Links to several WITW posts are in the sidebar.

Even when this war is over, a just and lasting peace is attainable only if Israel commits to follow international law, stops and reverses the building of settlements, releases the Palestinians held illegally in their jails, and ends its system of apartheid. Gaza will need to be rebuilt from the ground up. War criminals on both sides of the conflict need to held accountable.

There are other issues that need to be resolved that will take some time. These include the Palestinian Right of Return*** and how to build a viable Palestinian state given the current balkanization.

Much has been made of Hamas' refusal to accept the existence of the state of Israel, but little has been said about Israel's denial of the existence of a Palestinian people. Once Israel recognizes the Palestinians' right to statehood, something they have not done since the days of the Nakba, Hamas will recognize the state of Israel. The long nightmare of cyclical violence will be over.

Notes

*UNRWA is the United Nations Aid Agency that has been the lifeline for Palestinians since the Nakba. In January, President Biden cut off funding to this vital agency when Israel alleged that 12 of the 13,000 UNRWA employees had, in some way, been involved in the attack of October 7. As of May 20, Israel has yet to provide any evidence to back up their allegations.

**"There was no such thing as Palestinians" is part of a widely repeated statement by Golda Meir, the then Israeli Prime Minister, in an interview with The Sunday Times on June 15, 1969, to mark the second anniversary of the Six-Day War. It is considered to be the most famous example of Israeli denial of a distinct Palestinian identity.

***The right of return was initially formulated in June 1948 by United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte. Proponents of the right of return hold that it is a human right, whose applicability both generally and specifically to the Palestinians is protected under international law

Many terrible things...

The West's duplicity towards the Palestinians goes back to World War I and the imperialist/colonial era then in full swing. A series of posts on The Left Bank Cafe traces that history from World War I until 2012.

Sunday Round-Up Jun. 29, 2014 - Part 1: World War I - 1950

Sunday Round-Up Jul. 6, 2014 - Part 2: 1950-2000

Sunday Round-Up Jul. 13, 2014 - Part 3: 2000-2012

Geneva Conventions

Article 49 - Deportations, transfers, evacuations

"Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive."

2006-2007

Palestinian legislative election took place on January 25 ,2006 and was judged to be free and fair by international observers. It resulted in a Hamas victory, surprising Israel and the United States, which had expected their favored partner, Fatah, to retain power.
Fatah refused to cooperate with Hamas. The Fatah-backed President Mahmoud Abbas was supported by the international community and Israel.
On February 18, 2006, Israel imposed sanctions on the the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority, including the suspension of transfers to the PA of customs revenues Israel collected on the PA's behalf.
After the Hamas-led First Haniyeh Government was sworn in on March 29, 2006, both the US and EU cut aid to the Palestinian Authority. The US sanctions prohibited all Hamas-related financial transactions with international financial aid rendered via Abbas, bypassing the Palestinian Government.
The Battle of Gaza was a military conflict between Fatah and Hamas that took place in the Gaza Strip from 10 to 15 June 2007. The battle resulted in the dissolution of the unity government and the de facto division of the Palestinian territories into two entities: the West Bank governed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), and the Gaza Strip governed by Hamas.
Following Hamas' defense of Gaza in June 2007, Israel and the United States announced plans to blockade the Gaza Strip.