A favorite talking point among defenders of Israel is the claim that Israel has always done everything in its power to achieve peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors [You can read more about this here]. They will point to supposed “sacrifices” Israel has made for this noble goal. Perhaps the most frequent example given is the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, naturally, this always comes with the addendum claiming that such an approach did not work, and that Palestinians cannot be pleased.
Overlooking the fact that complying with international law is not a compromise, there is a major flaw in this argument: The Gaza strip is still occupied.
While it is true that Israeli forces and settlers withdrew from within Gaza in 2005 due to Palestinian resistance, this does not mean that all manifestations of the occupation were ended. How is this possible?
There is a general misconception regarding what constitutes a military occupation. Many believe that it takes boots on the ground to consider an area occupied, but today this is no longer the case. For an area to be considered occupied the occupying state must exercise “effective control” over the occupied area. This idea becomes even more clear when we consider Israeli surveillance and monitoring technology that allow for greater control of an area through controlling select key positions without the necessity of a full occupation force in the territory.
It is without a doubt that Israel holds effective control over the Gaza strip, Israeli law experts would naturally beg to differ, but these same experts argued that Gaza was unoccupied even before Israel withdrew its forces and settlers anyway. Israel controls virtually every aspect of life in Gaza. Israel maintains control of Gaza’s airspace, its territorial waters, no-go zones within the strip and even the population registry, meaning Israel even gets to determine who is a Palestinian and who isn’t inside the Gaza strip. What kind of sovereign, non-occupied entity can’t even determine who its citizens are?
This is not conjecture, but the opinion of the United Nations, Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, and countless other international organizations specialized in human rights and international humanitarian law.
However, we must situate the Israeli claims that Gaza is not occupied within its correct historical context. As mentioned above, even prior to 2005, Israel always argued that the Gaza strip was unoccupied, even with its troops and settlements and military bases. As a matter of fact, Israel even claims the same about the West Bank to this day. The argument being that for an occupation to exist, a territory must be part of a sovereign state, which the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were not, even though they were controlled by other sovereign states. This same justification is used to argue that the Geneva conventions, and international and humanitarian law in general, don’t apply to Palestinians. Of course, this argument was never accepted by the world community which still maintains that these areas are occupied.
The lesson here is that Israeli legal claims have never been in good faith. If Israel could legally claim that an area with thousands of soldiers and dozens of bases and settlements is not occupied, then of course it would argue the same for Gaza today.
But this claim that Gaza is unoccupied has been very useful for Israel, as it plays into the propaganda that Israel has sacrificed immensely for peace, a talking point unsubstantiated by actual history, and also erases the valiant efforts of Palestinian resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip who played a critical role in making the maintenance of a physical military presence inside the strip very costly to Israel to the point it had to retreat.
As noble as Israelis make it sound, there were other less altruistic intentions regarding the retreat from Gaza, articulated by Dov Weisglas, top aide to Ariel Sharon who was Prime Minister at the time:
“The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process, and when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
He continued:
“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde, it supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.”
And he was right. For example, whenever the Palestinian Authority criticized Israel for its intransigence or its new settlement and colonization projects in the West bank, Israel would retort that they gave up Gaza and sacrificed immensely for peace. This was an effective way for Israel to circumvent criticism of its violations of international law and shift the onus of compromise onto Palestinians. In this context, “compromise” came to mean acquiescence to the brazen colonization of the vast majority of the West Bank. Weisglas bragged that:
“That is exactly what happened, you know, the term `peace process’ is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen…. what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did.”
Furthermore, Israel knew it was not really relinquishing control of the Gaza strip, but rather reconfiguring how the occupation looked and functioned. They knew that the occupation, despite being in a new form, would still illicit resistance from those inside the strip. Israel could then use this resistance as proof that “relinquishing” land in return for peace with the Palestinians was an impossible task, because Palestinians would continue to attack it no matter what. This has served as a major argument for why Israel should not withdraw from any inch of the West Bank to this very day.
So, as you can see, the withdrawal from Gaza did not really end the occupation, and it certainly was not a compromise out of a desire for peace with the Palestinians. This is not speculation, this is not a conspiratorial reading or analysis of the policy; we have a complete candid confession from the architect of this plan, it is all documented and easily accessible and we encourage you to read the full interview for context.
Gaza today remains as a staunch reminder of Israel’s birth: A small strip of land filled to the brim with refugees whose houses have been seized by foreign colonists. Israel can occupy, besiege and bomb the strip, but it will never beak the spirit of those yearning for freedom and a return to their stolen homes. It is our duty to help them in any way we can, even if by simply not allowing Israel to create its own false narrative and pass it off as the indisputable truth.
- Erakat, Noura. Justice for some: Law and the question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019.
- Darcy, Shane, and John Reynolds. “An enduring occupation: the status of the Gaza Strip from the perspective of international humanitarian law.” Journal of Conflict & Security Law 15.2, 2010: 211-243.
- Shehadeh, Raja. “Occupier’s Law and the Uprising.” Journal of Palestine Studies 17.3, 1988: 24-37.