Israel’s false excuse for not ending occupation

One of the standard excuses Israeli officials use when asked to end their occupation of Arab territories occupied in 1967 is that their previous withdrawals, from Lebanon and Gaza for example, ended up exposing Israel to renewed dangers.

“Hardly anybody in Israel thinks that if we give territories now, we will get peace in return. We left Lebanon and Hizbollah grew stronger, ending in a war. We left Gaza and received a stronger Hamas and Kassam rockets. Israel is not suicidal and we are unlikely to try this strategy again in another place”.

This is a quote from a paper by Maj. Gen. Uzi Dayan, (February 13, 2007), titled “Israel’s deterrence after the second Lebanon war”.

But that has been a typical Israeli response, though devoid of any validity, to any demand that the occupation of the West Bank — assuming Gaza is liberated — is a basic requirement for settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict peacefully.

In reviewing the recent past, one finds, deeply buried under layers of propaganda and fact distortion, the bitter reality that Israel did not voluntarily leave Gaza and Lebanon.

The Israeli occupation of Gaza, which lasted from 1967 until 2005, turned unbearably burdensome. The Israeli prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, decided to withdraw the Gaza settlers and, rather than end the occupation, change its nature to make it more caustic and punitive to the occupied, but at a lower cost to the occupier. 

The Gaza Strip was one of the many other Arab territories Israeli forces occupied in the 1967 war. It was targeted for Israeli colonial expansion in the same manner as the West Bank, Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights. Israel started building Jewish settlements in all those occupied areas in full defiance of international law. 

The Sharon “disengagement plan”, which was supported, and indeed rewarded, by US president George Bush, was deemed inevitable by Sharon because it became rather impossible to sustain the existence of about 7,500 Jewish settlers in 21 highly guarded Jewish settlements, surrounded by a hostile population of about 1.5 million Palestinians, most of them refugees from other parts of occupied Palestine, in a narrow, 140-square-mile strip of land.

Although the settlers had a large occupation army to protect them, they barely felt secure. And in comparison with the wretched life of the Arab natives in the most densely populated spot on earth around them, their luxurious lifestyle was an additional cause of acrimony. 

Because the Israelis were forced to abandon that precious coastal strip under pressure from the local population, the last thing Sharon wanted to do was to make the disengagement a gift for the Palestinians.

He did indeed intend to rescue the settlers, but at the same time, he wanted to punish the Palestinians for not making the life of the Gaza Jewish colonists and of the occupation forces protecting them tenable.

The settlers were withdrawn and compensated generously. To appease the Zionist settler community, Sharon promised that the territory abandoned in Gaza would be compensated by expansion in the West Bank.

The evacuated settlements in Gaza were all destroyed, leaving their debris for the Palestinians to clear. 

Israel preferred to pay the cost of destruction rather than leave the evacuated homes for the Palestinians to use. That was one form of punishment.

The greater punishment, though, was in putting Gaza under a tight siege from the sea, air and land, not only from the Israeli side, but also from the Egyptian side, where Israel actually had no right to impose similar closure on the only land border separating Gaza from Egypt, in Rafah.

But Israel insisted that the Rafah crossing should be placed under its control by remote surveillance cameras and with the help of European monitors who were placed at that crossing point to implement defined crossing rules and report to the Israeli authorities.

Only subsistence-level supplies were allowed into Gaza. The siege was routinely tightened to harden the punishment every time the occupier deemed the behaviour of the besieged unruly. 

Since then, Gaza has not only been under siege, but under attack as well. It is hard to find a precedent in recent history for what has been happening to Gaza and its people.

In 2008-2009, Israel waged a massive invasion on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, where life was returned to the Stone Age through vast, indiscriminate destruction and where there was great loss of innocent life.

Yes, from Gaza they did fire rockets at Israel, rockets that rarely caused casualties, and the resistance did once capture an Israeli soldier from among those who were manning the siege, but that was part of the Gazans’ response to constant attack and permanent siege.

The self-defence instinct is a feature of every living creature, including the inhabitants of Gaza. 

Are they required to just submit to the cruel and the unjust punishment and do nothing, or maybe send their occupiers flowers, expressing appreciation for what befell them?

And even if the Israeli claim that Gaza was evacuated can be taken at face value, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were still under occupation.

The Palestinians, therefore, in Gaza or elsewhere were not to be expected to consider the withdrawal from Gaza as the end of the story. 

For a state of total peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis to prevail, the entire dispute should be resolved and the entire occupation should end.

The same can be said about south Lebanon.

In May 2000, Israel was forced, under the pressure from Lebanese resistance, to abandon in haste a 12-mile strip along the entire southern Lebanese border that it had kept under its army control since 1982.

But, again, some Lebanese territory has remained in Israeli hands and it still is today. That was enough reason to keep the dispute with Lebanon unresolved.

Israel renewed the attack on Lebanon in 2006, causing massive death and destruction. The border remains tense with threats, skirmishes and unresolved territorial issues.  

Lebanon insists on liberating land in Kfar Shuba, Shebaa Farms and the Ghajar village from Israeli occupation. 

Until that happens, and until Israel agrees to end its occupation of Lebanese land as well, it will be hard to expect peace there.

Since it was created, Israel was never attacked by Lebanon. Only when Israel waged total war on that peaceful neighbouring country, in 1982, and its invading forces marched as far north as the Lebanese capital Beirut, was the Lebanese resistance started. 

Israel cannot sow the seeds of war and perpetual conflict and expect to harvest peace.

That is exactly what has been happening all along. The rockets Israel keeps complaining about are part of a dangerous game that Israel insists on playing. There would be no rockets or other forms of hostility if Israel agreed to end its occupation and recognise the rights of its neighbours.

Peace breeds peace, war breeds war.