There. Is. No. Occupation.
“Occupation” is a hoax and a tool in the anti-Israel smearing campaign.
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This is a guest essay written by Masha Kleiner, a Canadian Zionist writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is no occupation.
Here, I said it.
There. Is. No. Occupation.
“Occupation” is a legal term that is misapplied to Israel, like many other punchy labels. For a more striking PR effect, occupation is often accompanied with the adjective “illegal.” Illegal occupation is a pretend legal term and an oxymoron, because occupation cannot possibly be legal.
The term occupation is usually applied to the status of Judea and Samaria or, what people often call “the West Bank.” Prior to the founding of the State of Israel, the entire territory of today’s Israel, plus Judea and Samaria, were part of British Mandatory Palestine. According to the “Uti possidetis juris” principle of the international law, newly formed sovereign states retain the borders of the entities preceding their independence.
Israel was the only new state founded in 1948 because Arabs refused the proposed United Nations Partition Plan and launched a war instead. Hence, according to international law, Israel inherited the original borders of Mandatory Palestine, including Judea and Samaria.
During the War of Independence of 1948, Jordan conquered and occupied Judea and Samaria. Jordanians introduced the name “West Bank,” because the area is on the West side of the Jordan River. Jordan occupied the territory (illegally occupied!) from 1948 to 1967.
During the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel liberated Judea and Samaria from Jordan. In 1994 a peace treaty was signed between Israel and Jordan where Jordan affirmed that it had no territorial disputes with Israel whatsoever. Looking centuries back, prior to Jordan, the British and the Ottoman empires controlled Judea and Samaria, and none of them have territorial claims either.
The appropriate legal term to describe the status of Judea and Samaria is disputed territory. “Occupation” is a hoax and a tool in the anti-Israel smearing campaign.
In the 1930s, when Jews were desperately trying to flee the unfolding horrors of the Holocaust, Mufti Amin al-Husseini, the ideological founding father of the Palestinian terrorism and Yasser Arafat’s1 mentor, said: “Not even the size of a postage stamp.” He was describing the potential size of a Jewish state he was willing to consider.
In 1947, Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, who cannot be suspected of sympathizing with Jews and/or Zionism, addressed the British Parliament, describing the Jewish-Arab conflict as unsolvable:
“For the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish state. For the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine.”
Nothing has changed since. Palestinian Arabs rejected numerous partition plan proposals on a single sticking point: They refused to declare an end to the conflict. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, three years before Israel reclaimed Judea and Samaria; the Palestinian vision of “liberation” included the full territory of Israel.
The Jewish anti-occupation, pro-peace camp holds profound nostalgic feelings towards the Oslo Accords2. To this day, they continue to insist that the safe road to peace was only thwarted by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. As horrific as the assassination was, its alleged destructive implications on the peace process are utterly exaggerated.
In the 1990s, from one side of his mouth Arafat told Westerners and hopeful Israelis some politically correct things in English while, from the other side of his mouth, he explained to his listeners in Arabic that the Oslo Accords were just a stepping stone to the complete defeat of Zionism.
He continued supporting and orchestrating terrorism; the Martyr Fund (a.k.a “pay-for-slay” policy) was set up in the early 1990s. The Oslo Accords failed, and only a complete hypocrite can ignore the role of the massive wave of suicide bombings and other deadly terror attacks in this failure.
The Oslo Accords failed, but the entrenched illusion of the possibility to trade land for peace persisted. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, only for the most radical faction, Hamas, to win the elections, subsequently carry out a violent takeover, subject Israel’s south to 18 years of rocket barrages, and perpetrate October 7th.
Hamas didn’t name October 7th “the West Bank flood”; they named it “Al-Aqsa3 Flood.” They wanted to conquer the entire State of Israel and its capital, Jerusalem. Hamas did not massacre the “aggressive settlers” in Judea and Samaria; they targeted peace activists living on the Israel-Gaza border.
“Aggressive settlers” is yet another fundamental and multifaceted libel.
Aggressive people definitely exist in Judea and Samaria. Just like there are aggressive people in the United Kingdom or Australia, and — excuse me for being Islamophobic — in Pakistan and Gaza too. How often do we hear “these aggressive Brits” or “these aggressive Aussies”? Even less so do we hear “these aggressive Pakistanis” or “these aggressive Palestinians.”
The October 7th massacre, or the recent exposés on the decades-long activity of Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK, for example, could have served as reasonable excuses. Yet, we avoid generalizing the flaws of some, no matter how numerous, onto an entire population. So why do we extrapolate the violent behaviour of a few hundred individuals to the half million peaceful Jews in Judea and Samaria, predominantly pairing “settler” with “aggressive”?
Moreover, this alleged aggressiveness of the few hundred is egregiously overstated. UN statistics count every Jew setting foot on the Temple Mount as an act of aggression. Jewish successful self-defence against a Palestinian Arab terror attack is counted as “settler aggression” too. If the attacking terrorist is wounded and succumbs to his wounds on a later day, he is counted as a victim twice.
The word “settler” is also weaponized against Jews. At its core, the word has a neutral meaning, describing a person who lives and works the land. “Settlers” were demonized as part of the “Woke” decolonial movement in North America and the general attack on Western history. Applying modern moral standards to colonization that took place centuries ago is ridiculous in and of itself, but irrelevant to my argument. Jews are indigenous to Judea. Indigenous people cannot colonize and be “settlers” on their ancestral homeland.
My opponents could argue that most Jewish inhabitants of Judea and Samaria just recently moved there. That’s right; indeed, all Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria moved there after 1967. That’s because, during the almost 20 years of Jordanian occupation of Judea and Samaria, between 1948 and 1967, the Jordanians killed or expelled every single Jew from the area, including the many-centuries old communities in Hebron and Gush Etzion.
Yet, ethnic cleansing of Jews isn’t unique to Jordan. During the 1948 Israeli-Arab War (also known as Israel’s War of Independence), hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs left the newly established State of Israel; some followed the orders of Arab leaders, some fled the war, some were expelled.
But the 150,000 Arabs who stayed became Israeli citizens, and today there are over two million of them. They have equal rights; work as doctors, business owners, lawyers, and judges; serve in law enforcement; and sit in the Knesset (Israeli parliament).
On the other hand, in the Arab world there are almost no Jews left. Jews were killed or expelled in all areas Arab armies conquered in the 1948 war. In the aftermath of Arab defeat in 1949, the Middle Eastern and North African countries expelled almost a million Jews, including ancient Jewish communities in Iraq and Yemen.
No Jews are allowed to live in the Palestinian Authority-governed areas of Judea and Samaria. When Palestinian Arabs were given self-governance in Gaza in 2005, almost 10,000 Jews had to be uprooted from their homes in 21 villages in the Gaza Strip. Even Jewish graves were excavated and removed.
How come apartheid is normalized, when it is apartheid against Jews?
Arabs are granted equal rights in the Jewish state, and rightly so, but Jewish population is seen as an obstacle to Palestinian self-determination. We can’t even begin to imagine Jews living under a Palestinian rule. Everyone on the political spectrum, including the so-called “pro-peace” activists, know that — but very few are willing to draw the right conclusion.
The conclusion is jarring, yet simple: The Palestinian Arabs do not only oppose Jewish sovereignty; they oppose Jewish life. This position is not predicated on land or other concessions. This is an axiomatic position.
At the “pro-Palestinian” rallies, the “End the Occupation” banner can be seen right between others saying “From the River to the Sea” and “End Zionism.” They use the same word as the Jewish/Israeli pro-peace activists — “occupation” — but they associate it with a different meaning.
The occupation, as they imply it, refers to the Jewish presence anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free!” is “From water to water, Palestine will be Arab” in Arabic. This is articulated by Palestinian Arab leaders, by ordinary people in the Palestinian-governed territories, and by “pro-Palestinian” organizations and activists in the West. Not a single prominent leader of Palestinian Arabs has ever articulated a desire to peacefully live side-by-side with the Jewish state.
For the “pro-Palestinian” activists, the end of occupation is synonymous to the end of Zionism and destruction of Israel.
“Occupation is the impediment to peace” is not just another opinion on the wide range of diverse opinions. It is a hostile political stance because it relies on a false premise that there even is an occupation to begin with. This lie is promoted by haters of Israel and legitimized by the pro-peace “progressive” Zionists.
“Occupation is the impediment to peace” presumption places exhaustive responsibility for the conflict on one side only — Israel. The terrorism among the Palestinian Arabs is systemic; it is praised by society, taught in schools, and sponsored by governing authorities. Palestinian terrorism claimed a multitude of lives, but the pro-peace activists don’t see it as an obstacle to peace. The pro-peace activists absolve Palestinian Arabs of any responsibility whatsoever.
“No need to agree with their opinions,” I’m graciously reminded, ”but we must be respectful of them.” I am respectful to the extent that I just spent about 2,000 words taking these opinions apart, and I like to think that I made a cogent argument.
Unfortunately, the respect is not reciprocated. This is not to say that coherent counter-evidence does not exist, but I have not heard one yet; instead, I have been called Far-Right, extremist, warmonger, messianic, fascist … The “pro-peace” camp does not mince words when their position is challenged.
The pro-peace activists don’t only justify October 7th as a response to “occupation,” but they subsequently appeal to the international leaders and organizations to take unilateral steps pressuring Israel — the only, according to them, party responsible for the conflict. Some go as far as demanding sanctions or arms embargoes. This is why they are not only wrong; they are dangerous, not to mention well-organized and solidly funded.
They insist on imposing their unsubstantiated utopian beliefs on us, against our will, and at the cost of the blood of all our children. They want to push us off the roof because they don’t believe in gravity. And I don’t want to jump simply to prove them wrong.
Longtime Palestinian political leader and mega-terrorist
A pair of interim agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
The compound of Islamic religious buildings that sit atop the Temple Mount
And the disputed territory in the WB is only zone C. Most of it is controlled by Palestinians. So what’s the problem?
It never was about land, but the whole annihilation of Israel.
Great article. Perfect analysis.