The Biggest Prison on Earth

A History of the Occupied Territories

Ilan Pappe

• Éditeur: Oneworld Publications
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781780744339
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Middle Eastern History

Shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2017 A powerful, groundbreaking history of the Occupied Territories from one of Israel's most influential historians From the author of the bestselling study of the 1948 War of Independence comes an incisive look at the Occupied Territories, picking up the story where The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine left off.In this comprehensive exploration of one of the world's most prolonged and tragic conflicts, Pappe uses recently declassified archival material to analyse the motivations and strategies of the generals and politicians – and the decision-making process itself – that laid the foundation of the occupation. From a survey of the legal and bureaucratic infrastructures that were put in place to control the population of over one million Palestinians, to the security mechanisms that vigorously enforced that control, Pappe paints a picture of what is to all intents and purposes the world's largest 'open prison'.

Chapter One

The War of Choice

1948 and the Missed Opportunity

One afternoon, on 10 March 1948, the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, together with their military commanders, took the decision to occupy 78 per cent of the country. Since 1917 Palestine had been under British Mandatory rule. At the time one million Palestinians were living in that 78 per cent of the country (which equates to Israel today without the Occupied Territories). The leadership decided to expel most of the population. That evening, orders were despatched to the forces on the ground to prepare for a systematic eviction of the Palestinians from large areas of the country. The orders specified how the expulsion would take place: large-scale intimidation, laying siege to villages, bombing neighbourhoods, setting fire to houses and fields, forced expulsion and, finally, the planting of TNT in the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each military unit received a list of villages and neighbourhoods to be demolished and its inhabitants to be expelled. The plan and the means by which it was to be carried out were included in a clutch of documents called Plan Dalet, or Plan D, which followed Plans A, B and C, all prepared by the Zionist leadership from 1937 onwards, and which first broached the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestine.1

This historical decision by the leaders of the Jewish community was the inevitable result of the ideological Zionist impetus to achieve an exclusive Jewish presence in Palestine. Zionism emerged as a movement seeking a safe haven from European anti-Semitism and looking for a territory where it could redefine Judaism as a nationality. Since the choice was an inhabited country it became a settler colonialist project, and since the movement’s founding fathers wished to create a democratic state they were preoccupied with the question of the demographic balance, a preoccupation that led to the decision taken in March 1948. In other settler colonial projects, such as in the Americas and Australia, such a demographic concern led to genocides of the indigenous population; in Palestine it triggered a never-ending process of ethnic cleansing.

The month of March 1948, or so it seems in hindsight, was deemed by the Zionist leadership as the best time to implement their strategy of Judaizing Palestine. Several developments led to this ‘ideal’ historical junction. The first was the British decision to leave Palestine and entrust its future to the United Nations. The second was the pro-Zionist constellation in the UN, which reflected the international balance of power. The Western political elites were hostile towards the Palestinian community and in particular shunned its leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, whom they regarded as an ally of the Nazis during the Second World War. More importantly, they wished to bury the genocidal chapter of the Nazi extermination of the Jews by allowing the Zionist movement to dispossess Palestine. As a result, the UN rejected out of hand the Palestinian leadership’s demand for a democratic process for determining the future of the country (the Palestinians constituted 66 per cent of the overall population) and instead endorsed a Zionist solution for partitioning Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. Partition was rejected by the Palestinians and the neighbouring Arab states. The Arab states threatened to foil the plan by force, while the Palestinians went on strike, wrote petitions and for a week or so randomly attacked Jewish settlements and convoys.2

Six months later, the coveted 78 per cent of Palestine became Israel, built on the ruins of hundreds of destroyed villages, demolished towns and expropriated cultivated land. The land and real estate were expropriated after hostilities ended as part of a special legislation initiated by the state in order to take over the property, first, of those expelled and, second, of those Palestinians who were allowed to stay (although the latter in some cases were offered compensation or alternative land and in other cases were allowed to purchase their original land for a much higher price). The remaining 22 per cent was made up of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The West Bank was not occupied thanks to a tacit understanding with the Hashemite Kingdom in Jordan, which annexed the region in return for a limited Jordanian intervention in the 1948 war.3

The exclusion of the West Bank from the future State of Israel was thus not the result of a military defeat but, rather, the fruit of a strategic political decision. The decision was never officially adopted as policy by the Zionist leadership because the West Bank, or Judea and Samaria in Zionist jargon, was part of ‘Eretz Israel’ (Land of Israel) as much as were the Galilee or the Negev. When the deal with the Jordanians was exposed, many officers and politicians in Israel regarded the decision as a grave national mistake. In response, very early on they introduced into the Israeli public scene the discourse of ‘the missed opportunity’, later adopted by the mainstream parties and media, and which was to play a crucial role in the subsequent support for the 1967 occupation of the West Bank. What was missed, according to those who put the idea forward, was a historical opportunity to occupy the West Bank during the 1948 war.

Motivated by a sense of urgency, a significant group of generals began searching for a pretext that would force their government to renege on its commitment to the Jordanians. They beat the war drums frequently, accusing the Hashemite Kingdom of violating the armistice agreement of 1949 that had finalized the borders between the two states. This was not an easy undertaking as the Jordanians adhered faithfully to the armistice’s principal points. It would be another eighteen years before a new golden opportunity, similar to that available in 1948, would enable the creation of the coveted Greater Israel.

The Gaza Strip was, at least until 1967, a different story. In many ways it was Egyptian steadfastness that deterred an Israeli occupation between 1948 and 1956, and the Strip, nearly 2 per cent of historical Palestine, was put under military rule after the 1948 war, which the Egyptian government assured the Arab League and the Palestinians would be terminated once Palestine was fully liberated.

But the Gaza Strip, very much like the West Bank, was traditionally deemed by mainstream Israeli leaders to be part of ancient Israel, and in the romantic vision of the protagonists of Greater Israel the Jewish State needed to possess both areas in order to thrive and prosper. Some politicians coveted these regions on strategic grounds; they regarded the 1949 armistice lines as the ‘Auschwitz borders’, as it was crudely put by Abba Eban, Israel’s Foreign Minister for most of its early years.4 This was a paranoid and alarming expression from someone who represented the liberal and moderate camp in Zionist Israel (and one, as we shall see, which in the moment of truth tried to pre-empt the Israeli aggressiveness in 1967). But most Israelis indeed felt that Israel’s cartographical shape – with a narrow corridor between the north and the south, around the greater Tel Aviv area – posed a constant threat to Israel’s existence. Any Arab army coming from the West Bank could, warned Israeli strategists, easily bisect the state.

So the focus of expansionism was on the West Bank. The expansionist group within the Israeli military and political elite consisted of some of the state’s highest profile politicians and generals. Foremost among them was David Ben-Gurion, the very man who engineered the first collusion with Jordan, but who then had second thoughts about its wisdom. He was Israel’s Prime Minister for two terms until 1963, with the exception of two years when the position was held by Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion began seriously to consider a forceful annexation of the West Bank in the early 1950s. On three different occasions his government considered the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel, but was thrice deterred by the fear of a strong British reaction that could have led to an open military confrontation with Jordan’s main ally and protector.5

The pretext in the early 1950s was Jordan’s alleged violations of the armistice agreement. Later, at the end of that decade, other reasons were put forward.6 The main argument in favour of a military invasion of the West Bank was the weakness of the Hashemite dynasty after the assassination of its founding father, King Abdullah, in July 1951. A new threat was concocted: the Arab radical threat. Its centre was Cairo where the Free Officers took power in 1952 and pursued an energetic pan-Arabist policy, encouraging the replacement of pro-Western traditional Arab monarchies and republics by their model of ruling. In hindsight this seemed a far more important pretext than that of the armistice violations. The Israeli lobby in favour of annexing the West Bank relentlessly used this new regional development as justification for a possible occupation of the West Bank. Every time it seemed that the downfall of the dynasty in Amman was imminent, this group, led quite often by the Prime Minister, would explore plans either for dividing Jordan with the sister Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq or for ceding the West Bank from a future ‘radical’ Jordan.

Indeed, the government and army in Israel as a whole took a deep interest in the political affairs of Jordan after the rise to power in Egypt of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1954 and of similar ‘radical’ leaders in other parts of the Arab world. The emergence of this new brand of Arab nationalism, with branches in Jordan, generated a more active, and at times aggressive, Israeli involvement in the politics of the neighbouring states. The policy and orientation of those who were regarded as spokesmen for Arab nationalism, however, never warranted such a combative Israeli attitude. In the early 1950s, the acknowledged leader of this movement of change, Nasser, was willing to investigate the possibility of peace with Israel. Whether the chances for peace were real or not depended in part on Israeli domestic politics, more specifically on the outcome of the rivalry between David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett, the two leaders of the ruling Mapai party, which represented the Zionist Labour movement.7

During Sharett’s term in office as Prime Minister (1953–1955), these opportunities for an alternative history seemed more genuine. Sharett, unlike Ben-Gurion, was keen to establish a substantial dialogue with Nasser. Unfortunately, the Egyptian side’s most significant peace gambit came before Sharett was appointed Prime Minister and while he was still Foreign Minister. In mid-May 1953 Nasser wrote to Abdel-Rahman Sadiq, the Press Attaché at the Egyptian embassy in Paris, indicating that he was willing to reach an agreement with the Jewish State. Sadiq had conducted secret talks with his counterpart in the Israeli embassy over the previous two years. Nasser addressed his letter to Sadiq but directed it to the Israeli government. In it he asked for Israeli understanding of his position in the area as a whole but particularly in Egypt. He stressed his commitment to peace negotiations between the two states, but asked for time. As a first step he was willing to refrain from making any aggressive declarations, and he asked the Israeli government to exercise its influence in Washington in Egypt’s favour, particularly to persuade Washington to support the Egyptian demand for a total British withdrawal from his country. Whereas Sharett, as Foreign Minister, was willing to use the new channel, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, as before at such historical junctures, showed no enthusiasm, and nothing came out of this initiative.8

It seems that during those same months Ben-Gurion formulated his uncompromising attitude towards Arab ‘radicalism’, which he now saw as Communism in disguise, or more accurately as an anti-Israeli and anti-Western version of Communism. He feared its ideological orientation, but, more importantly, he was alarmed by the military capability that the USSR could offer the ‘radical’ regimes. In early 1953 he was in favour of a pre-emptive Israeli action against these regimes.9 He regarded them as more committed to the armed struggle against Israel than the ‘inefficient’ traditional regimes, and believed the former would perform better on the battlefield, unless defeated by a pre-emptive Israeli attack.

Unexpectedly, Sharett became Prime Minister in December 1953, and soon resumed negotiations with Nasser. Talks progressed from vague promises to concrete details. Egypt wanted part of the Negev in return for peace and asked Israel to acknowledge its principal role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. But at this stage the peace process came to a halt. In February 1955 the Israeli army struck an Egyptian base in Gaza. Sharett was led by the army generals to believe that this would be a limited retaliatory action against continued Palestinian guerrilla infiltration from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. In the event, it proved to have been devised in such a manner that it could only harm Nasser’s prestige rather than reduce the Palestinian guerrilla effort. Not surprisingly, Nasser abandoned his peaceful intentions and moved to a more aggressive policy towards the Jewish State.10

While Sharett was Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion conducted an ‘alternative’ government from a place he named ‘my voluntary exile’, a kibbutz in the south of the country called Sdeh Boker. From this desert location he preached an active Israeli policy, singling out as a crucial goal the need to contain the improvement of Egyptian–American relations, which he saw as a most harmful development. He was confident that such a relationship would impair Israel’s ability to influence American politics.11

Sharett had very little control over the military policies in Israel even before Ben-Gurion deposed him in 1955. It was Moshe Dayan who took most of the important decisions in this area and he would remain a crucial figure in Israeli policymaking in the 1960s, pushing the state into the 1967 war. In Moshe Sharett’s personal diaries there is an entry from May 1955 in which he quotes Moshe Dayan:

We do not need a security pact with the U.S.A; such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at al...