It’s Still the Occupation, Stupid!1
If this is the answer, what is the question? In truth, it’s the answer to any number of questions — even if it’s not the sole answer.
Above all, it’s the principal answer to the key question: why has the Palestinian-Israeli conflict not yet been resolved, despite a raft of promising signs at different times in the past? It’s also the main answer to why the Palestinians under Israeli occupation launched an intifada in 1987 and a second one in 2000 and even to why Hamas embarked on a horrendous murderous spree in southern Israel in October 2023. This is not to let off the hook the perpetrators of appalling atrocities but to keep in mind that these events did not begin when, ostensibly, they began. Both intifadas and Hamas were products of an occupation that was supposed to be temporary.
The provenance of other major developments, too, is not a mystery. Take Israel’s first “war of choice,” as it came to be known in southern Lebanon in 1982. The Israeli government, led by the hardline nationalistic Likud party since 1977, was by then ideologically committed to retaining the whole of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in perpetuity, even if this meant spurning the prospect of a future peace deal with the Palestinians (which of course it did). The Palestinians therefore had to be defeated, beginning with the elimination of the armed wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), then based in southern Lebanon.
The Israeli occupation of a large part of Lebanon that followed, including the siege of Beirut, cost many lives and stirred the creation of Hezbollah and the recruitment into its ranks of many of the previously quiescent Shia Muslim population, and transformed Lebanon — Israel’s only neighbouring state not to have participated in the 1967 Arab-Israel war — into a hostile frontline state. These seminal developments can all be traced back to Israel’s post-1977 resolve to hold on indefinitely to the Palestinian lands it had captured in 1967.
This resolve can claim credit, too, for the growth of a structural apartheid in the West Bank, an entirely foreseeable consequence of Israel’s policy to enable its citizens to settle in the occupied land while the territory’s Palestinian inhabitants were subjected to Israeli military rule. The shorter and longer term consequences of the occupation — including reducing Gaza to rubble after October 7th 2023, escalating settler violence in the West Bank abetted by senior government ministers and the Israeli military, and the reinvasion of Lebanon — are also the principal answer to why anti-Jewish sentiment has surged around the world in recent times. I realize this is a contentious assertion because it could — mistakenly - seem to be victim-blaming, but I am not a newcomer to this conversation. In a pamphlet published in January 1977 — when there were fewer than 7,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) compared with some 750,000 today — I cautioned as follows:
“While Israel continues to rule over the West Bank, there are bound to be ever more frequent and more intensive acts of resistance by a population that is … feeling encroached upon by a spreading pattern of Jewish colonization and whose yearning for independence is no less than was that of the Palestinian Jews in the early months of 1948. As long as Israel continues to govern that territory, she will have little choice but to retaliate in an increasingly oppressive fashion just to keep order. The charge of the “brutal occupier” … will eventually, through force of circumstances, come to resemble the truth. The moral appeal of Israel’s case will consequently suffer … and this will further erode her level of international support, although probably not among organized opinion within the Jewish diaspora. This sharpening polarization is bound to contribute to an upsurge in overt antisemitism …”2
The Most Effective Antidote to Rising Antisemitism
Depressingly, the fifty intervening years have played out largely in line with this warning, derided at the time as naïve and alarmist by many of Israel’s staunchest supporters. Probably the most effective antidote to the rise in anti-Jewish sentiment has been the growing number of Jews in other countries who have remained true to the values with which they were raised of social justice, peace and equality as taught by the ancient Hebrew prophets. For many young Jews, supporting the Palestinians — rather than reflex tribal affinity — is now the Jewish thing to do. In Israel, too, dissenting groups are vocally opposing Israel’s occupation and its many ruinous manifestations.
Other long-term toxic effects are the corrosion of communal relations in countries around the world and the suppression of civil liberties in the misguided belief that outlawing traditional freedoms will somehow help to combat antisemitism, when it is more likely to have the opposite effect. Moreover, researchers have noted that antisemitism, in tandem with Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment, tends to rise and fall in line with tensions in the Middle East.3 The only sure way to disrupt the pattern is not repressive legislation - nor to further disdain each other — but to end the occupation.
To be clear, there is no suggestion here that iniquitous Israeli conduct causes antisemitism — a pernicious age-old bigotry which preceded the existence of the state of Israel by centuries — but rather that repressive Israeli measures and overt support of them by some prominent Jewish voices in other countries, contribute to a rise in global anti-Jewish sentiment. In some cases, this sentiment spills into the beckoning arms of the full-blooded ideology of antisemitism, while those who already harbour antisemitic feelings believe it is now permissible to express and act on them publicly. It needs to be acknowledged, too, that other state and non-state actors, and other circumstances, have also played detrimental roles in the region over the past 60 years, of which the militant hardliners of Hamas and the despotic rulers of Iran, along with their proxies in other countries, are the current standout culprits. But none of this should detract from the essential point that conflict will continue to rage, in various guises, for as long as Israel continues to occupy the land and lives of the Palestinians and deny them independence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip alongside Israel. When, among others, I first put forward this proposal in the early 1970s, I fully expected it to materialize by the mid-1970s.4 The calamitous delay has been hugely costly to all parties.
So, what is to be done?
ban and the movement’s reluctance to confront the occupation. (Photo: Rachel Stolero, January 31, 2023)
Focus on Ending the Occupation
The straight answer is to keep the global eye — at every level — on the strategic ball of ending Israel’s occupation. Key to this goal is to stay laser-focused on the endgame and not be diverted by the contortions of people who have little understanding of the issues and the people of the region. There is a long history of spurious — usually U.S.-led — “peace plans” masquerading as serious proposals which in the end all perished under the weight of their own complexities, contradictions and conceptual errors. Their tainted agendas, drawn-out incremental steps, so-called “confidence-building” measures, the implicit assumption of basic goodwill of the main parties, the lack of a clear political horizon and the absence of effective enforcement mechanisms virtually guaranteed their collapse. If anything is to be learned from these past disasters it is not to engage with imported convoluted mechanisms and processes that throw up far more obstacles than just getting on with the task of dealing directly with the underlying problem.
President Trump’s 20-point Gaza Peace Plan — comprising several complex layers of governance, none of which is yet firmly established or functioning — is predicated on imagined “phased” mechanisms and includes the risible exhortation “that both Israel and Hamas fulfill their commitments under the agreement to end the war in Gaza.” It suffers from all the defects of previous U.S. peace plans except that it is even more top-heavy and is headed by someone with a very limited attention span and who knows not what he does. Its numerous vulnerabilities are a gift to any party that is intent on sabotaging it, for which there is no shortage of candidates. The plan is barely more coherent or credible than Trump’s first aborted offering during his first term, which I have previously reviewed in this journal.5 If the past record is a guide, any apparent advance will turn out to be a step closer to failure and complete abandonment.
Follow President Eisenhower’s Lead in 1957
It would be a lot more in character and potentially far more effective if an easily irritated President Trump discarded all the impossibly complex mechanisms and cumbersome processes and cut to the chase by simply reading the riot act to the Israeli government, as he and Vice President Vance have guardedly been doing recently over Lebanon, and as President Eisenhower decisively did in 1957 when he demanded that Israel withdraw to its international border following its swift capture of the Sinai peninsula from Egypt the previous year. A more rational post-Netanyahu Israeli government that finally saw the writing on the wall would have no need for droves of external experts or elaborate UN resolutions to tell them how to enact a timetabled withdrawal. Once forced to the choice through concerted external and internal pressure, the country’s new leaders would have enough wit and ingenuity to work it out for themselves — as their predecessors did in 1957 — while safeguarding Israel’s genuine security interests. A firm Israeli policy declaration, even prior to concrete steps being taken, would release all sorts of energy and initiatives and transform the political climate. Plans could be laid now in anticipation of a different leadership, and early spirited action could even help to catalyze the change. Israeli peace forces need to get the vote out in the forthcoming election and the Arab political parties in Israel need to come together to maximize their share of the vote. If they don’t use it to optimal effect on this occasion, they might lose it altogether.
As for the settlers, a committed government, according to serious analysts, could accommodate a clear majority of them through minor equitable land swaps.6 Generous but strictly time-limited financial compensation plus a firm deadline for the withdrawal of the protecting Israeli army back into Israel may well sway most resolute outliers. A Palestinian government could simultaneously invite the Jewish inhabitants who have a genuinely strong attachment to the land to stay and help build the Palestinian state as lawful citizens or residents, but not as armed settlers.7 Forcefully removing hundreds of thousands of settlers — often cited as an impossible barrier to Israeli withdrawal — should be quite unnecessary. It is the policy commitments, not the implementation details, that are the real impediments. So, all the pressure needs to be directed towards securing the commitments. The Israeli far right, which has its own scary version of the endgame, is going for broke while its window of opportunity is still open. The only effective response is for everyone else to go for broke in spades in the other direction. But there is no time to lose.
Every Actor Has a Role to Play
While the need for an overarching goal is imperative, there is no need for one overarching international strategy. Indeed, it could be a straitjacket, whereby probably one party — and most likely a discredited one at that - pulls the strings while everyone else again takes a back seat. Rather, every actor — whether a state or non-state party — needs to determine what useful role they could each play, whether on their own or in concert with others, to impress upon the Israeli people and their government as well as on spoilers on either side, that the international community, at every level, is not prepared to countenance a future that does not include an authentic Palestinian state alongside Israel (albeit possibly in the form of a confederation,8 preferably to include Jordan), no matter what physical changes Israel meanwhile makes, or has already made, on the ground or in their own laws. Global recognition of a Palestinian state would be one way of affirming this intent, although it needs to be followed through by every country with meaningful action.
Escalating pressure — comprising strong incentives as well as sturdy penalties - by all parties will of course be critical. But the pressure will need to be targeted smartly — aimed at achieving concrete results — rather than scattergun and punitive, which might well be counterproductive. This said, an urgent warning to Israel that it would face severe sanctions in the event of a mass flight of Palestinians or the brazen seizure of more Palestinian land or an attempt to overthrow the institutions of the Palestinian Authority is an immediate imperative. In general, however, the universal battle cry needs to be a simple “end the occupation!” It is important that forwardlooking Israelis and Palestinians drop any inhibitions about working closely together to this end and that other parties give them every encouragement and support to do this.
The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative is an Important Tool
Another essential element — around which most of the international community can unite - is reviving and refreshing the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API), which called for comprehensive peace between Israel and all Arab states, contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state and an agreed upon solution to the refugee problem. Unlike most other peace plans, it was not about process but was a vision of the endgame, leaving the parties to work out the implementation logistics and vital safeguards. To avoid having to engage with it, the initiative was cynically dismissed by Israeli governments as a diktat, which it was not. But its main flaw was that it neglected Israeli public opinion, in sharp contrast with the Egyptian President Sadat’s 1977 initiative which won over the Israeli public when he appealed to them directly, over the heads of the Israeli government, by flying to Israel and assuring them in person that their future would be more secure by withdrawing from, rather than retaining, the Egyptian Sinai desert captured in the 1967 war, an area of strategic importance nearly three times the size of Israel. In positing that 70 percent of the Arab-Israeli conflict was psychological, he astonishingly overcame their fears of annihilation or expulsion — themes that had run deeply through Jewish history and that were abruptly revived by Hamas’s massacre on October 7th 2023 which traumatized an entire nation and temporarily anaesthetized it to the extreme
brutality of their state’s response.
Mutual Empathy, Not Mutual Dehumanization
Demonizing the whole Israeli people is as monstrous as dehumanizing the whole Palestinian people. These attitudes feed only hatred and bury any hope for future peace and reconciliation. The capacity for mutual empathy, currently in abeyance, was witnessed at an individual level not just during the upbeat phase of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, which was marked by mutual respect, cooperation and budding personal friendships, but on other past occasions too, such as when some 400,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest Israel’s enabling role in the massacres by a Lebanese Christian Phalange militia in 1982 at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and when Palestinian civil society more than once openly protested terrorist attacks by armed Palestinian groups against Israeli civilians.
A New Security Architecture is Needed
At a time when a new security architecture is urgently needed in the Middle East following the loss of confidence in the U.S. security blanket, the whole Arab world needs to come together to drive forward a peace effort between Israelis and Palestinians as an integral part of a new security paradigm for the region. Such an initiative might well have the advantage of chiming with President Trump’s own inclinations. While it may seem far-fetched at present, there may need to be space for Iran potentially to be included in this paradigm too. For Israel, its best protection during the global turmoil that may lie ahead as the post-second-world-war international order breaks down, is to be in harmony with its immediate neighbors, even if its current leaders are unable to see this or don’t care. Israel’s authentic defenders who are genuinely concerned about Israel’s future and its secure place in the region, and who are serious about winding back global antisemitism, need, too, to demand of the Israeli government that it sincerely, publicly and promptly commits to ending the occupation. This is the foremost imperative - as it has always been, stupid!