What Is ‘Israeli Occupation’?
By Jon Hersey
“Israeli occupation” is on the lips of everyone from Hamas militants to Harvard students, European protestors to American politicians. It is perhaps the most cited cause for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and some even consider it a moral justification for the shocking brutality that Hamas unleashed on Israeli civilians on October 7. Ten days after the attack, New York state Senator Julia Salazar wrote that “Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza jeopardizes the safety of every person in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The systematic subjugation of Palestinians is the ultimate source of the existential dread that defines daily life for Israelis and Palestinians.”1 Human Rights Watch states, “Fifty years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it controls these areas through repression, institutionalized discrimination, and systematic abuses of the Palestinian population’s rights.”2 So what exactly does “Israeli occupation” mean?
Implicit in the phrase, and often explicit in arguments that invoke it, is the idea that Palestinians have certain rights, which the Israeli government and/or Israeli civilians violate via “occupation.” Of course, Palestinians, like all human beings, have rights. The principle of individual rights holds that all people have the moral prerogative to act on their own judgment to live as they see fit, so long as they don’t violate the equal rights of others. (A person’s rights are violated when others initiate force against him, and rights are protected when a government prohibits the initiation of force against people.)
It’s also true that we should evaluate governments by the extent to which they violate or protect individual rights. To the extent that any government violates rights, it should be condemned. This goes for Israel’s government, as well as for Hamas (which governs Gaza) and the Palestinian Authority (which governs parts of the West Bank).
With this standard of individual rights in mind, we can address the question: What is “Israeli occupation” and in what way, if any, does it violate rights?
We’ll consider first the following two somewhat conflicting answers. One holds that “Israeli occupation” refers to the very fact of Israel’s existence (at least in its current location). The second holds that Israeli forces and/or civilians unjustly maintain a presence in areas Israel seized during the Six-Day War of 1967. Let’s examine each.
‘Israeli Occupation’ Equals Israel’s Existence
This is the explicit view of Hamas and of most governments in the Middle East. Hamas’s Founding Covenant states: “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine,” including the territory governed by Israel, “is an Islamic Waqf [holy land] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up.” The covenant adds, “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it.”3 Similarly, the original Palestine National Charter stated: “We. The Palestinian Arab people . . . faced the forces of evil, injustice and aggression” in the form of “International Zionism and colonialism,” which “conspired and worked to displace [us], dispossess us from our homeland.” And it cites a “right of self-defense and the complete restoration of our lost homeland” as justification for “holy war until complete and final victory has been attained.”4 Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei frequently calls for Israel’s destruction, referring to it as a “cancerous tumor.”5 Acknowledging Iran’s funding of Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist operations, he has said, “We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere who opposes and fights the Zionist regime.”6 Indeed, erasing Israel from the map is a central purpose of virtually every Islamic regime. This notion of “Israeli occupation” and its corresponding call to action are summed up by the chant now heard around the world, “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.”
Some hold this view because they allege that Israel was founded on stolen land. As one writer put it, “since 1948, Israel has done nothing but encroach upon and steal land that belongs to the Palestinians while quietly or . . . not so quietly . . . ethnically cleansing the land of the people who once lived there.”7 It is a well-documented fact, however, that over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the area that became Israel, Arabs freely sold massive amounts of land to Jews.8 Referencing reports conducted by the British Royal Commission in 1930 and 1936, Jordanian founder King Abdullah acknowledged, “It is made quite clear to all, both by the map drawn up by the Simpson Commission and by another compiled by the Peel Commission, that the Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in useless wailing and weeping” (emphasis original).9 Regarding the largest Israeli land purchase during the period of early Jewish settlement, the Sursock Purchase, Sir John Hope Simpson (author of the Simpson Report), wrote:
The Jewish authorities have nothing with which to reproach themselves in the matter of the Sursock lands. They paid high prices for the land, and in addition they paid to certain of the occupants of those lands a considerable amount of money which they were not legally bound to pay.10
This was characteristic of such sales, which were both legal and rights respecting. The headline on one Wall Street Journal article aptly summarizes the truth of the matter: “Israel Is the Least-Stolen Land.”11
What about the creation of the state of Israel? Did the nascent Israeli government violate the rights of Palestinians by declaring its jurisdiction over the area? Consider some relevant facts. Israel’s Declaration of Independence (modeled on the American Declaration) states that Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions.”12 As the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, explained, in Israel, “there will be non-Jews as well [as Jews]—and all of them will be equal citizens; equal in everything without any exception; that is: the state will be their state as well.”13
By and large, Israel has made good on these promises, instituting a government that protects the rights of all Israeli citizens, regardless of race, creed, sex, or sexual orientation. Israel’s Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty states:
Fundamental human rights in Israel are founded upon recognition of the value of the human being, the sanctity of human life, and the principle that all persons are free; these rights shall be upheld in the spirit of the principles set forth in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel.14
In keeping with this, Israel’s supreme court has overturned various rights-violating laws and policies—including those that unfairly burden Palestinians and other Arabs while privileging Jews. For instance, in 2006, it voided a law that exempted the Israel Defense Forces from paying damages to Palestinians it wrongly injured. And in 2020, it declared unconstitutional a law that retroactively would have legalized the seizure of private property from Palestinians.15
In sum, just as Jews settled the region in a rights-respecting manner, so they established the state of Israel with the explicit goal of protecting the rights of everyone within its territory—and they’ve largely achieved it.
But what about Palestinians’ so-called “right to self-determination”? Even if Jews established a rights-protecting government, one might wonder, didn’t they nonetheless violate the rights of Palestinians to determine their own form of government? As the Palestinian National Charter put it, “The Palestinian Arab people possess the legal right to their homeland and have the right to determine their destiny after achieving the liberation of their country in accordance with their wishes and entirely of their own accord and will.”16
Relevant here is the fact that every Palestinian regime that has ever existed has violated rights en masse, including the rights of Palestinians themselves. This includes the PLO’s quasi-state in the West Bank (1968–1970), which threatened, harassed, and warred with the very Jordanians who gave the regime refuge, even plotting to overthrow the Jordanian government. It includes the PLO’s successor state in Lebanon (1970–1982), whose factions robbed, raped, murdered, and fanned the flames of that country’s civil war. It includes the Palestinian Authority (1994–present), whose first “president,” Yasser Arafat—a blood-lusting terrorist—ruled as dictator over Gaza and the West Bank, censoring the press, expropriating bank accounts for his personal use, quashing his rivals, and funding terrorism against Israel. And of course, it includes Hamas (2007–present), the Muslim Brotherhood faction that launched a civil war against the Palestinian Authority, took control of Gaza, and established an Islamic theocracy based on sharia law and the goal of obliterating Israel.17
Is it true that any popularly elected government is legitimate because it is popularly elected (and thus “self-determined”)? Hitler was elected. So was the government of the Confederate States of America. So was Hamas. That a government is popularly elected does not make it legitimate. The only thing that does is its protection of individual rights. Palestinians have no “right to self-determination” insofar as that means instituting rights-violating government. There is no such thing as a right to violate rights.
But rights-violating governments are the only kind that Palestinian self-determination has led to, the most timely and egregious example obviously being Hamas. Of course, Hamas is explicitly dedicated to murdering Jews and obliterating Israel. But it’s worth stressing that it also has zero respect for—and regularly violates—the rights of its own citizens. It uses them as human shields. It recruits children to blow themselves up. It tortures and kills gay men (including members of its own military). It treats women as the property of their families and/or husbands, who may rape and abuse even young girls at will—and kill them with Hamas’s tacit consent and, at most, three years in jail.18
This notion of “Israeli occupation” and the consequent aim of destroying Israel is not a just response to a legitimate grievance—much less to any Israeli rights violations. It is not motivated by concern for anyone’s rights but by allegiance to the irrationalities of Islam, particularly the nonsense that “Allah” gave land to Palestinians.19 And what the slogan “Palestine must be free” means is that the region must be free of Israel’s rights-respecting government—“freed” for the purpose of establishing an Islamic theocracy based on rights-violating sharia law. In other words, “Palestine must be free” ultimately means that the region must be “free” of freedom itself.
The ‘Pre-1967’ Conception of ‘Israeli Occupation’
Let’s turn to the claim that Israel unjustly maintains a presence on lands taken in the Six-Day War. This was the second war against Israel initiated by its Arab and Muslim neighbors. Israel took control of key militarily strategic areas to create buffer zones between the tiny country and its enemies on all sides. In the years since, Israel has ceded these lands back to its attackers, with two exceptions. It annexed the Golan Heights from Syria. And under the Oslo Accords (a peace deal brokered in 1994–1995), to which the PLO consented, Israel retained some administrative and security responsibilities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The reason for Israel’s presence in the Golan Heights is straightforward: The area is the perfect place from which to launch rockets into Israel, which is of course precisely what the country’s enemies intend to do should they ever retake it. If the Israeli government were to cede the Golan Heights back to Syria, or to a Palestinian faction, it would thereby sentence thousands of its own citizens to death. If the standard for evaluating governments is the extent to which they protect their citizens’ rights, then such a territorial concession would constitute a moral crime. Israel morally must keep the Golan Heights for the purpose of protecting its citizens’ rights, which is why the country justly annexed this relatively small strip of land in 1981.
What about the West Bank? Similarly, Israel maintains a military presence in the West Bank as a peacekeeping force. It does so to uphold its responsibilities under the Oslo Accords and, more importantly, to secure its citizens’ rights. The requirements of maintaining security do cause some inconveniences for Palestinians there. They can’t use certain roads, and if they can get permission to enter Israel, they must go through security checkpoints, which makes working in Israel or trying to purchase goods or services there impractical for many. Also, in what’s known as Area C of the West Bank, Palestinians face more scrutiny for getting building permits, which isn’t surprising given that terrorists commonly use all manner of buildings—homes, hospitals, businesses, mosques—to shelter their operations.
But the inconveniences necessitated by Israeli security and protection of its citizens’ rights are the fault of those who attack Israel. If Palestinians would simply live in peace with their neighbors, the added security measures could be removed. But they don’t, so those measures must remain. It’s unfortunate that innocent Palestinians also suffer consequences necessitated by jihadists among them. But until they institute a rights-protecting government and remove the threat, these inconveniences are about as benign a consequence as they can hope for.
Another common grievance is the establishment of Israeli settlements. The Israeli government uses its citizens’ tax shekels to subsidize housing for Israelis in Area C on land that the Israeli government owns.20 It thus lures thousands of Israeli families into territory that, feasibly, it may one day cede to a Palestinian government (as happened in Gaza). In sum, it takes from some Israelis to give to others while potentially putting those others in harm’s way. This is an egregious rights violation—against its own citizens, not Palestinians. If, as some claim, Israel also establishes settlements on land that Palestinians own, that certainly violates their rights as well. To the extent that this happens, it is immoral, properly illegal, and should be condemned and corrected. But it is not the norm.
Indeed, wherever we look for evidence of Israel’s supposed widespread and systematic rights violations, we do not find it. Even single instances of Israel violating the rights of Palestinians are rare and typically are corrected after legal scrutiny. The same cannot be said of any Palestinian regime, past or present, all of which have violated rights as a matter of policy and daily practice.
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What then is the true meaning of “Israeli occupation”? The phrase, in both of its variants, packages together the fact of an Israeli presence—either the country’s very existence or that of its security forces in strategic areas—with the fiction of supposed rights violations. In either case, therefore, the phrase involves what Ayn Rand called the fallacy of package dealing, which “consists of treating together, as parts of a single conceptual whole or ‘package,’ elements which differ essentially in nature, truth-status, importance or value.”21 And this is a particularly pernicious package deal. Its purpose is to dissolve in people’s minds the truth that Israel is a substantially rights-protecting and thus legitimate nation, and to confer moral legitimacy on jihadists who seek to end Israel and kill Jews. Don’t fall for it.