It has been more than four months that the Palestinian people in Gaza have been holding out under the shelling of the Israeli army, shelling that has already left nearly 30,000 dead, after Hamas militants crossed the Gaza border and killed 1,200 Israelis and captured 240 hostages (at least 130 are still in Gaza).
Meanwhile, more than one million Palestinian refugees are concentrated in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, subjected to continuous air strikes. On February 18, the Israeli army announced an impending military ground operation if the hostages are not freed by the beginning of Ramadan (around March 10).
The implicit goal of the operation would seem to be to push the population to cross the border into Egypt.
The case against Israel’s military occupation
On Feb. 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice ( ICJ ) initiated another public proceeding in which 52 countries will take a position regarding the military occupation of the Palestinian territories (Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem) that has been going on since 1967.
The hearing that began two weeks ago concerns a legal opinion requested by the UN General Assembly as early as December 2022, so it has no direct connection to the current situation. On the other hand, a trial related to the military occupation is as relevant today as ever to understanding the origins of the massacre taking place in Gaza in these hours.
But before going into the merits of the process, we must answer a question necessary to understanding it.
What does the occupation of the Palestinian territories consist of?
The West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip are territories that, according to the UN partition plan accepted by Israel in 1948, belong to the Palestinian Arab population. This partition plan called for the creation of two states of similar territorial extent, even though the Palestinian population constituted more than 70 percent of the population. (read here )
During the so-called Second Arab-Israeli War in 1967, Israel occupied these territories by establishing a military regime. To this day, Palestinians are subjected to that regime, which allows Israeli security forces to operate constant control over the population (read more), imprisoning and detaining anyone indefinitely.
Today there are more than 9,000 Palestinian political prisoners, 3,400 of whom are in administrative detention (i.e., held without charge or trial), according to the human rights organization Addameer.
The permanent military occupation allows Israel to control the Palestinian territory and population, without recognizing their rights, both as a people and on an individual level. The result is that the Palestinian population, while inhabiting the same territories, does not enjoy the same civil rights as the Israeli population, and is subject to “discriminatory restrictions on access to and use of agricultural land, water, gas and oil among other natural resources, as well as restrictions on the provision of health, education and basic services” (read Amnesty’s report here ).
The result of the permanent military occupation is a state of apartheid in which ethnicity, Israeli or Palestinian, determines which rights can be accessed and which cannot.
Why does Israel continue to maintain the military occupation?
The permanent occupation is considered a de facto annexation of the occupied territories. But it is to avoid losing the ethno-religious character of Israel as a Jewish state that the Zionist government so fiercely opposes ending the occupation.
Indeed, ending the occupation can have two consequences:
- The granting of Israeli citizenship to Palestinians, and thus the creation of a single, ethnically plural, democratic state.
- The creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and the removal of Israeli settlements from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Both options would mean giving up the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel.
Understanding the consequences of ending the 57-year military occupation helps us understand the opportunities, but also the resistance, to creating a dialogue that can lead to permanent peace.
There are two fundamental issues that the discussion of the end of the permanent military occupation puts back into focus, issues that go beyond the immediate ‘ceasefire’ and that invite reflection on how to build a permanent peace.
The right of return
Millions of Palestinians claim the right to return to their original places of residence and to see their national belonging recognized and respected. However, this right is contested by Israel, which claims that they left Palestine voluntarily and that, as a result, refugees have no right of return.
Since 1948, i.e., since the conflict erupted which resulted in the creation of the State of Israel, during which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were, directly or indirectly, expelled from Israeli-occupied territories, they and their descendants (now estimated at more than 5 million) constitute a group of stateless refugees, i.e., without citizenship.
Since a Palestinian state does not exist, the only documents Palestinians expelled in ’48 have are those of refugee status, which is thus passed down from parents to children now for more than three generations.
It is paradoxical that the right of Jews to return to Israel, the land from which they were expelled more than 2,000 years ago, is enshrined in the Law of Return of 1950. The same right that allows citizens of any country, as long as they have one or more Jewish grandparents, the right to obtain Israeli citizenship.
The right to self-determination
In 2017, Hamas finally accepted the 1967 borders suggesting the creation of a Palestinian state within those borders (at para. 20). By giving up, in Israel’s favour, a large part of the territory originally allocated to the Palestinians (an immense part if one thinks of the territory of historic Palestine before 1948), even the most conservative Palestinian political groups seemed to be more ready than the Israeli government to compromise the dream of an entirely free Palestine in favour of a pragmatic solution.
In response, in 2018, Netanyahu’s Israeli government passed a law stating that only Jewish people have the right to self-determination in the State of Israel. As has been the case in recent weeks, Netanyahu continues to deny the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to establish a sovereign state in the territory of Israel/Palestine.
If the political will to end the occupation seems to be lacking, ending the occupation also presents serious practical problems.
The relocation of a huge part of the Israeli population within the militarily occupied territories effectively makes the occupation permanent and difficult to remove. The settlement issue today represents the biggest problem for the political solution of the Palestinian question.
The same law passed in 2018 in Israel considers settlements in the occupied territories of “national value” and makes the State of Israel responsible for the continued development of settlements in the occupied territories. According to the human rights organization and legal center Adalah, this aspect of the law is particularly problematic because it makes the colonization of the West Bank legal from the perspective of Israeli national law. From the standpoint of international law, on the other hand, settlements of the occupying state in the militarily occupied territories are illegal, even more so it is prohibited to subject the occupied population to racial segregation.
One of the main obstacles to peace is that, to date, there is no consensus even in international society on the illegitimacy of settlements and the need to end military occupation so that peace can be built.
Why do the settlements result in an apartheid regime?
The problem is not only that illegal settlements take land and resources away from the Palestinian population, but they do so with the unconditional support of the state and with overtly violent methods. The construction of infrastructure – such as roads and aqueducts for the exclusive use of the Israeli population – and of a shameful separation wall (the more than 700-kilometer-long separation barrier, which isolates settlement territories and their resources, making them inaccessible to the Palestinian population), is the most visible expression of a regime of racial segregation.
According to Amnesty International, “Ending the occupation would mean restoring the rights of Palestinians (…) Ending the occupation would also mean addressing one of the underlying causes of recurrent violence and war crimes against Israelis, thereby helping to improve human rights protections and ensure justice and reparation for victims on all sides.”
Ending the occupation is necessary for peacebuilding.
The longer the occupation lasts, the more Israel can avoid any kind of sanction from the international community, the less likely it is that the situation can change toward peaceful coexistence.
Under international law, military occupation cannot constitute a permanent method of administering a territory, a unilateral annexation of a territory by the occupier is illegal.
The proceedings taking place at the ICJ these days have the potential to change this, provided the international community can unite politically for the possible ruling to be implemented.
After four months of indiscriminate bombardment, it is clear that Israel will not succeed in destroying Hamas militarily, just as it is clear that even if it succeeds, the Palestinian resistance will not stop with the demise of Hamas. A ceasefire is a first step and would save an enormous number of lives, Palestinian as well as Israeli hostages.
However, even a ceasefire, without a political solution to the issue of illegal occupation, will not lead to peace, and there can be no peace until the Palestinian people are free to exist and self-determine.
For further reading
The Iron Wall (documentary, 2006) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwuU_MXXdBI
Apartheid according to Israeli NGO Bt’selem https://thisisapartheid.btselem.org/eng/index.html#1
