Fifty years of Israel's occupation

By Amin Saikal

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Israel's defeat of the armies of three Arab countries, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, in that war constituted a watershed in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition to occupying Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and Syria's Golan Heights, Israel took over the Palestinian lands of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip. Whilst it withdrew from Sinai fifteen years later as part of a peace agreement with Egypt, it has maintained its occupation of all other territories, although without a physical presence in Gaza since 2005. All efforts at resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have so far failed. This begs the question: why?

Since the 1967 War and United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, calling on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories, there have been several attempts to make peace between Israelis and the Palestinians. Each American president, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama, has tried its hand, but to no avail. It is now Donald Trump's turn. He has declared unbound devotion and support for Israel, yet with a call for a negotiated settlement of the conflict. But his efforts may well go the same way as those of his predecessors.

It is worth noting that Israel was born in 1947 out of conflict and bloodshed. As its politics has increasingly shifted to the right, with hard-core Zionists dominating it, especially under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as the US has remained Israel's steadfast strategic partner, and as the surrounding Arab countries have been in turmoil, the scope for a negotiated settlement has increasingly diminished.

Two agreements that could have resulted in a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the Camp David Accords, signed under the auspices of President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and the Oslo Accords, concluded in 1993 and welcomed by President Bill Clinton. However, neither led to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. The prospects for the internationally backed two-state solution, premised on the creation of an independent Palestinian state along the lines of the 1967 borders, with some territorial adjustments, are also rapidly diminishing. Three factors predominantly account for these failures.

The first is the political fragmentation within the PA, and the deep running division between it and the Islamic Palestinian group (Hamas), which has since 2007 taken control of the Gaza Strip, and which Israel as well as many of its Western supporters, especially the US, have denounced as a 'terrorist organisation'. This has resulted in serious splits within the Palestinian nationalist movement, in which Israel has played a critical role to enable it to claim that there is no united Palestinian leadership with whom Israel could negotiate a final settlement. Under Netanyahu, Israel has unleashed its forces twice to destroy Hamas over the last decade, but its failure each time has empowered Hamas to tighten its hold on Gaza. Even so, Hamas has lately modified its traditional stance in treating all of old Palestine as a waqf (Islamic endowment) and therefore an obligation to liberate it in favour of accepting the formation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. This aligns Hamas's position very much with that of the PA, but Israel has rejected Hamas's new stance as nothing more than a ploy to fool the world.

The second is Israel's unwillingness to implement any deal that could require it to relinquish its occupation of the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, which it has annexed to West Jerusalem as the permanent capital of Israel. Netanyahu has argued that an independent Palestinian state would become a terrorist haven against Israel, and therefore he would never agree to it. He opposed the Oslo Accords from the beginning and has torpedoed the two-state solution by expanding Israeli colonial settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, keeping a tight control over Gaza, and adopting harsher security measures to subdue the Palestinian population. He has even rejected a one-state solution, under which the Palestinians would become Israeli citizens, for fear that it could de-legitimise the status of Israel as a Jewish state. He has made the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state a condition for negotiation with Israel's supposed 'partner in peace', the secular Palestinian Authority (PA), which is nominally in control of the West Bank.

The third is the position of the United States and a few of its allies, most importantly Australia, for pursuing a double standard attitude towards the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. On the one hand, they have said that they fully back the two-state solution; on the other, they have strictly maintained their unqualified support for Israel. In the face of a decision by President Obama, who loathed Netanyahu's intransigence, not to veto for the first time a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's settlement expansion as illegal under international law late last year, the Australian government joined the incoming politically neo-nationalist conservative President Donald Trump in denouncing the resolution. This has run contrary to the shifting international public opinion in support of the Palestinian cause: some 140 UN member states have recognised Palestine as non-member observer state in the world body, not to mention full recognition of the Palestinian state by Pope Francis and Sweden.

Whatever one's ideological and realpolitik leanings, a resolution of the Palestinian issue seriously matters. It has become a means for those extremist groups that have sought to draw on it to justify their violent actions in the region and beyond. The age of colonialism has gone; Israel will be better off to free itself from the label of being a colonialist expansionist actor.

Amin Saikal is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at The Australian National University.